18 MONTHS AND GROWING!

Isak turned 18 months today and started nursery. He is getting so big! This was him before church this morning, he actually stood still without grabbing the camera. He is such a nice little boy (most of the time) and since most of my blog is about him anyway, I will indulge myself and share a few things that I love about this kid.

1. He loves to play with his stuffed animals. His crib has about 10 animals in it on any given day and he will sit and chat with them when he wakes up and before he goes to sleep. If he finds anything furry or soft, he will rub his face on it like he has feelers.

2. He is very sensitive, if you raise your voice, even if its not at him, his face will crumple because he thinks he is in trouble. He is also very loving and will randomly kiss (lick) your face and give hugs which is my favorite.

3. He goes to bed and takes naps like a champ. We just lay him down and within a few minutes he is quiet and asleep. He put himself on a schedule and we just enforce it and it works really well. Unless of course he is teething then he wakes up randomly at multiple times during the night but luckily that doesn't happen very often.

4.His favorite activity is to look at pictures and videos of himself on the computer. He is kind of a narcissist.We go through this at least twice a day and usually he recognizes something on one of the videos and tries to either reenact it or starts laughing at it again. He really likes to watch videos of kevin when he is at work, he'll point at the screen and go, "dad!".
5. I love his gallop walk that he does when he is excited and how he thinks he his jumping when really he is just raising his leg with his hands up in the air. Its so fun to watch him learn new things, he is constantly suprising us.

This is a video of isak naming his body parts. We tried doing this multiple times over the past few days and I think he was getting sick of it so he is not very enthusiastic. It took some prodding and its sideways so I apologize but you get the idea, my child is a genius!

Fire

We turned on our fireplace this week, much to isak's delight. He loves the pilot light and the fire and makes lots of "ohhh" sounds when its on. He's also constantly asking us, "what's that?"so it has sparked his curiousity. He now knows what fire is and so we hope we never have a fire or else he will run right towards it rather than away. He is 18 months this week on sunday and starts nursery. I plan to do a post here in a little bit on all of the things he can do now, including a video of him naming all of various body parts. Everything else is going well, we are gearing up for thanksgiving next week at our house and I am very excited to get going with christmas decorating. This will be short as I agreed to go into work tonight at a last minutes notice because on call pay is just too tempting to pass up. I must be crazy from the pregnancy hormones because I haven't figured out when I'm going to sleep tomorrow. Perhaps when Isak takes his nap? Anyway, wish me luck!

A long day

I was upstairs cleaning this morning and I heard Isak playing in the laundry room. He plays in there a lot but this was the first time he had done this....

Yes, he had climbed into the dryer and was sitting there staring at me. He fit pretty well and had some room to spare. Luckily he can't shut the door on himself. I''ll have to remember this if I ever run out of towels.
Today was kind of a long day. It was rainy and cold so we couldn't go outside much and Isak was off his rocker. So we, (I), made cupcakes and Isak ran around like a crazy man and probably watched way too much pbs television. This was taken after his bath at the end of the day when he had covered himself in red jello and chocolate frosting. We are making progress with our "art" time, Isak now will color for a solid minute on the actual paper before coloring my carpet, throwing the crayons in all directions and yelling, and trying to color my fireplace screen. I think we will wait on the markers and watercolors.

McCall

Kevin has been traveling the past couple weeks for work and Isak and I decided to tag along this past week when he went up to McCall. We've never been and have heard about what a fun place it is to visit, lots of mountains and stuff to do. I came up on Tuesday after work and as luck would have it, hit a storm coming through the mountains. It was a little 2 lane road and covered with slush, ice and it was snowing. Luckily I had our jeep but since I put it in 4 wheel drive once a year I always forget how to do it correctly. We went about 25 miles an hour and with a lot of prayer and probably some divine intervetion, we made it out okay. It was very scary and of course when we came back and kevin was driving, the roads were dry.

Isak got his first real experience with snow and I think he liked it, he kept pointing and going "ohhhh". Sadly my camera is also broken so while it still takes pictures, I can't see them on my screen while I'm taking them so I have to use the little view finder and half the time I cut off half the picture. very frustrating.

The guy that was working with kevin grew up going to McCall all the time and was nice enough to give us a tour of the area. We even went and checked out the tamarack resort and saw what apparently a billion dollars can buy you. Apparently Andre Agassi is also building a house up there and we saw the beginnings of it which was pretty neat. Its a beautiful area, lots of moutains, trees, and a lake and many, many expensive cabins that are all currently for sale. There's a huge winter festival in january where people carve these ice sculptures that stay up for weeks on display. Anyway, maybe if we stick around boise and in many years if we have any extra money we'll get a cabin up there or con someone we know to buy one...

We had a pool and hot tub where we stayed and it was incredibly warm, it was like a big bath tub and Isak had a ton of fun. However, we've learned traveling with a toddler is much different than traveling with a baby. They don't sleep nearly as well. Isak is usually a great sleeper and can sleep just about anywhere. However, for some reason the pack in play in a dark bathroom didn't seem to cut it for the kid and he ended up sleeping with us for the night which was new experience. I think Isak slept great, kevin and I were both tired from getting rolled on and kicked every hour. And kevin awoke to Isak hugging and patting his head..at 630 am. So we decided to head back a little early so he could sleep the next night in his own bed.