Here’s a couple picture’s taken at the park.

This month he’s really learned the power of “please.” When grunting and pointing doesn’t get him what he wants, he very quickly switches to “pea? pea?” (which is how he says please, not pee).

He’s starting to mimic some two-words phrases like “hey you,” “in there,” “up here,” “down there,” “I got you,” “broke it,” “help you,” and “show me.” These phrases usually sound like one word when he says them. The other day he was playing with my blush compact and kept saying “bruck-it”. I thought he was saying bucket, but then realized that he had actually broke the cover. I couldn’t be mad because I was so impressed that he actually knew what he did. When he says “help you,” he actually means help me. And when he says show me (which sounds like “owe-me”), he really means “I want to show you something.” He picked up “show me” because when we can’t understand what he’s saying, we say, “Can you show me what you want?”

He loves helping me put the clothes in the washer and taking it out. He also loves pushing the washer buttons and watching the clothes go around. He also likes to try to carry the basket.

We’ve made no progress on the potty front. If anything, he seems less interested now than he was before. All he wants to do now is flush.

My mom got him a big blue ceramic piggy bank at a garage sale, and Chris taught him that money goes in there. So several times a day, he wants to get his “piggy” and put money in it. We don’t always have coins laying around for him to put in there, so sometimes we just take him up to his room and get his piggy down from it’s shelf. Gabriel will give it a few pats and then say “back, back.” So we put it back on the shelf and that seems to satisfy him.

Some of his favorite words this month include cover (“uh-VAH”), back, bagel, off (he learned how to turn the TV on and off), flush, careful (we tell him to be careful when he’s handling something that can spill or break), and outside (“tata”).

Some things he likes:

• Pushing around a little shovel we got at a garage sale.
• Pushing his Fisher Price corn popper toy.
• Turning on the music (“kick”) on his crib aquarium.
• Taking apart daddy’s wallet.
• “Blowing” his nose and putting the tissue in the garbage.
• Playing his toy drums.
• Going to the park.

(Here’s a video of him going down his favorite slide at the park:)

It’s been nearly impossible to get him to eat anything lately – what he tolerates changes from one moment to the next. There’s not one thing that I can always count on him to eat anymore. We introduced him to mac ‘n’ cheese out of desperation. He’ll usually eat that, but not always. He sometimes enjoys bagels. We can usually get him to eat some kind of fruit; he enjoyed peaches a few times in the last couple of weeks. I feel a tremendous amount of relief whenever we can get him to eat more than a few bites of something. The last week or so he’s been waking up anywhere between 3 and 6am saying “eat, eat.” I feel like it’s a bad habit to get into if we feed him that early in the morning, but at the same time, I don’t want to make him go back to sleep when he’s starving. Advice anyone?

• He has twelve teeth (the last three of his molars came in this month – that was a fun week)
• He wears size three diapers, size 6-7 shoes, and 12-18 month clothes
• Sleeping has been kind of strange lately. He often wants to take two naps, but if he takes a second one, it’s usually not until 2:30 or 3 and then he will sleep until 5 or 5:30. The problem with that is then he doesn’t go to sleep for the night until around 9. It’s nice for Chris during the day when he has two long naps, but it’s hard when he stays up so late at night because we don’t get very much time to ourselves before we go to bed. So, I’m torn about making him drop one nap in order to get him to go to bed earlier.

Here are a few pictures of him playing ball and blowing bubbles:

]]> http://family.efinke.com/2010/08/30/seventeen-months-old/feed/ 2 http://family.efinke.com/2010/08/29/snapshot-sunday-8/ http://family.efinke.com/2010/08/29/snapshot-sunday-8/#comments Sun, 29 Aug 2010 17:21:55 +0000 Christina http://family.efinke.com/?p=1935

Chris also made me these lovely cards. (There are five of them because it was our fifth anniversary. He is now worried that he set a dangerous precedent.)

My parents took Gabriel for the night, so we had the whole evening to ourselves. We didn’t have anything planned, so at the last minute, we decided to go to the Apple Store and get new iPhones. My old one was cracked (thanks to Gabriel), and Chris’s hadn’t worked properly in quite some time. (If anyone is interested in one or two sort-of still working iPhones, let us know). Chris had been looking online for a used older version of the iPhone so we could continue to stick with T-mobile as our service provider. He probably followed up on 20 or more Craigslist posts and only got a handful of people to call him back, and the cheapest he could find was $300 for the year-old version. So, we decided to bite the bullet and get AT&T contracts. It actually ended up being a pretty good deal because Chris found out he gets a 30% discount through his job, plus AOL pays for his portion of the bill. (And as an added bonus, I now have internet on my phone as well!)

In exchange for signing a two-year contract, we got the phones for $200 each. A month or so ago, Chris sold his Nokia N900 phone that he won in a Mozilla Add-on contest for $350. So, in the end, it’s like we paid $50 for two new iPhones. And theoretically, we should be able to sell our phones for $300-$400 on craigslist in a year or two and make a nice profit!

Our new phones

Before stopping at the Apple store, we ate at Five Guys Burgers and Fries. Chris was super-excited to find out they had opened a new location in Edina. He had only eaten at this chain in Virginia in the past. They have free peanuts sitting out for anyone to take, and apparently, they encourage patrons to leave their shells lying on the floor.

After getting our phones, we stopped at Starbucks and got Frappuccinos and then rented the movie “When in Rome” which was a cute romantic comedy that I think we’d both recommend.

Hanging with daddy.

Trying to pull his pants off.

This picture was taken moments before I walked into the room where Chris was waiting to see me for the first time.

I’m so blessed to be a part of your family (which I think is probably twice as big as when this picture was taken).

And I know my family was super excited to welcome you as well (even though they “forgot” to include you in the family picture at the wedding, and you had to photoshop yourself in).

You are a better husband and father than I ever could have dreamed up. I can’t wait to see where the next five years take us.