Here are some of his recent utterances and activities that stand out in my memory - more recent first (the rest becomes a blur and these would too if I didn’t write it down). He’ll be two years old in a week and a half.
This morning he wandered off down the hall babbling; we didn’t know where he went. After a while I went and saw him descending back down the stair he had gone up; he had gone up and accross the dining room and into the kitchen, and reached high onto the counter to fetch the big tupperware tub of cookies he was now holding in his arms. When he saw me he explained: “I’m bringing a present to mommy.” I went and told Tia this before he arrived. When he gave it to her he said “I’m Santa Claus.”
The other day he sat with Tia and had her read through five children’s books in a row - he devours them.
We give him a sticker (right now they are little smily faces) and place it on the side of his book shelf every time he sleeps through the night without us tending to him. For his nap this past Saturday he wasn’t staying in his bed, so I told him he’d have to go to bed himself, and I left the room. He wasn’t sad about this, and was playing with the stickers on the bookshelf beside his bed. I never heard anything after this, and came back after a while to find him curled up on the arm of the armchair, his arm over the side, fast asleep without any blanket. I put blankets on him and he slept that way for an hour or so.
When he woke up we noticed after a while that he’d taken the smily face stickers off the bookshelf and stuck them all over the chest of his shirt.
We went to Cabella’s in Lehi because they have a lot of large trophy wildlife which he loves to see - deer, bears, foxes, wolves, moose, marsupials and birds of all kinds. In a display in a north room they also had an odd animatronic wildlife expert/sportsman extrapolating on the wildlife in an appropriate mountain man hick voice. Mago watched this for a while and then gave a short laugh, saying: “Huh, that’s kinda funny.”
He loves sunglasses, and mangled a pair into ruin though we fix it again and again (although he seems to be taking much better care of three newer ones he has). Tia doesn’t know how he ended up doing this, and thinks she must have shown him - he’ll put the sunglasses on, then raise them to his forehead and say:
‘Sup?
We went to the Thanksgiving Point Museum of Ancient Life (he loved this and talked about it for days - note: the Supersaurus hip they found and the approximation of the full animal’s indicated size, rendered with a full diplodocus skeleton - is overwhelming. I am glad dinoasaurs are not alive anymore). I read and told Mago the names of many things (and apparently so did Tia). When we drove away from the museum he looked at the very large Tyrannosaurus Rex painted relief on the side of the building and said “Goodbye, Ty-rann-a-saurus-ruckus!”