My photoshop skills are really lacking, but I guess I’ll get better over time. Scott tried to help me with this picture of Tru jumping off the deck, but I had to go and mess it up a bit further. Anyway, you get the idea!

Tru learned how to jump off of things this weekend. Actually, he’s been jumping off of things into my arms for a while. This weekend he learned how to jump onto his own feet. I spliced together some footage for your review! The quality isn’t the best, but it’s a small file size (2.3mb). If you really dig it and want to see it clearer/bigger let me know and I’ll send you a better file. Also, sorry for saying ‘good one’ over and over…

Tru’s getting pretty good at identifying colors. He’s got ‘lellow’ down cold. He’s at about 90% on green and about 80% on blue and purple. He won’t say red, though. Most of the time he shouts the name of the colors–not sure why. Lately he’s been doing the dramatic pause and ‘ummm’:

Me: “Hey Tru, what color is that tractor?”
Tru: Ummm…(pause)”LELLOOOWWW!!”

He likes working too…I mowed and edged the lawn yesterday, and he was gung-ho to help pick up the debris. He gets mad at you if you don’t leave something for him to do!

He’s doing better on the skateboard. He usually sits or lays down on it and occasionally runs over his own hand. That hurts! We’re working on standing up on it–he holds my hand and I pull or push him along. Yes, grammy, he wears his helmet. Good thing too–the other day he took a digger in the driveway and the helmet visor kept his face from smacking the cement…

I don’t know how many different bodily fluids Tru has in him. I do know that within a 30 minute time span today, he deposited two of them onto the floor.

We went out to dinner at Burgerville, but Tru didn’t want to eat anything. He just drank milk, milkshake and a couple slugs of Coke. Then we went grocery shopping. Things were fine until about halfway through the checkout. Amy was doing the checkout duty and I was keeping Tru occupied. You know, the usual grandstanding routine–balancing on my hand and watching the old ladies gasp. That kind of stuff. Tru starts drooling, which is pretty unusual for him. He’s pretty fastidious for a little kid. He doesn’t like stuff on his face, chews with his mouth closed and rarely drools. So Tru’s balancing on my hand and I notice him drooling. I bring him down to me so that I can wipe off the drool, when he turns on the puke faucet! A full-force stream of white projectile vomit bounces off my jacket and sprays the supermarket floor. I look up at Amy and she’s laughing her head off… I stand there stupidly, not knowing what to do next and stinking like sour milk. The cashier calls for a clean up and Amy catches her breath between guffaws to tell me to go to the bathroom and clean him up. Which I dutifully do. We stunk.

Once clean-up is accomplished, we all march back to the car (Amy’s still giggling), load up the groceries and strip Tru of his nasty, stinky, puke-clothes. One of the items that we bought today was a little kid potty thingy. Tru’s been acting pretty interested in the toilet, so we decided to take advantage of the situation. When we got home, Tru wanted to check out his new potty before he took a bath. Amy set it all up for him, but he wouldn’t let her put the boy-guard on because it obstructed his view of his penis. For those of you that don’t know, the “boy-guard” thing is just a shield that bounces the pee back into the toilet, rather than letting it go all over the floor. Like it did at our house. We were pretty stoked that Tru sat right down and went to town, but our joy was a bit dampened by all the pee on the floor for lack of the guard. Bodily fluid number two.

My hands are kinda dry right now from washing them so many times.

UPDATE: Tru ended up puking four times–twice on papa. Not sure what his problem was, but he didn’t have a fever and he was pretty energetic when he woke up the next day…

It’s been a while since Bren listed words that Tru says with definitions… as of a couple weeks ago he has ventured into sentences. “I want more soup” was the first official 4 word sentence.

Language acquisition is truly an amazing feat to watch! I can’t believe all the new things he says every day. Today we were playing with a bat and ball and he said, “My turn” when he wanted to play. He’s added “I love you” to his repertoire, but he’s also into saying colors so it tends to sound like, “I lellow.”

On to more tao…

We drive through the country every day to get to school/daycare. We pass several people that have cows, calves and/or horses on their property. I slow the car down so he can see them and say, “Moooo!” (one even Moo’ed back! Oh! What a day that was!!!). Sometimes when we start to leave he even says, “Bye bye mama tao. Bye Bye baby tao.” As soon as we speed up he says to me, “More tao mama, more tao.”

It’s super cute as long as the people who own the cows and (neigh neighs) don’t get suspicious of the white Subaru that stops in front of their house every day.

Tru is speaking better these days…”ball” is unmistakeable. We’re still working on other words. Here’s a quick translation guide.

Known
Eg doh = Let’s go
Noke = Milk
Epeep = Open
Nine = Come on

Unknown
Al-banyay

Understandable
Mama
Papa
Pappy/Happy (these sound kind of the same)
Baby
Ball
Eat
Quack
Moo
Neigh
Cluck cluck
snoring noise (pretending to sleep)
Book
Read
Cracker
Cookie
Kitty
Stinky

I’m sure there’s more, but that’s what comes to mind. Amy will have to fill in the blanks…

Here’s the newest diaper song…to the tune of “Play That Funky Music”…

Change that stinky diaper, Truman
Change that stinky diaper nooow
Change that stinky diaper, Truman
Lay down the freshy
And change that stinky diaper right away!

What has become of me…

The name of Tru’s imaginary friend is Endicott. We don’t know why. He said it in the car the other day, and whenever we ask questions about Endicott, Tru always responds like he knows what we’re talking about…”Tru, where’s Endicott”? Tru will point to the corner. “Is he just hanging out”? Tru says, “Uh huh”. Endicott isn’t very active these days, but I’m sure that will change…

Tru is learning some new tricks. He’s getting pretty good at balancing on one leg on my hand–I’ll have to get some pictures of that. Also, lately he’s been grabbing our pants or shirt and dragging us to where he wants us to be. If he’s hollering in the kitchen and we ignore him, he’ll come find one of us and drag us in there and then say something like “noke” (milk) or “nana” (banana). He’ll do the same thing if he’s tired of playing by himself–he’ll find one of us and drag us over to where he’s playing and start to engage us in whatever he’s doing. Yesterday I showed him how to grab my hand instead of my pants or shirt when he wants me to come with him.

I love that he does that. I just need to remember that whatever I’m doing at the time isn’t (usually) as important as letting Tru invite me into his world. It really is cool to get an invitation to play with him–even when it comes out as a demand to read him a book! Sometimes I have to consciously remind myself that I’d rather be playing blocks with Tru than reading whatever book or webpage I was just pulled away from.

Last Saturday I had to wake up early to take Erinn and Ron to the airport to go to Korea. Amy was teaching a class that day, so I had to take Tru with me. He’s been talking a lot lately and one of the things he says is “let’s go!”, except that when he says it, it sounds more like “eg doh!” So, I was in his room at 5am, getting ready to move him from his crib to the carseat. He was out cold and I figured that the move wouldn’t wake him up. I picked him up out of the crib, and just as I got him to my shoulder, he snapped awake, pointed to the sky and hollered “Eg Doh!” Then he laid his head back down on my shoulder… Amy and I couldn’t stop laughing…