20 Months Old!

He actually smiled for me when I said, "smile!"

Today Caden is 20 months old.  He continues to grow and learn on a daily basis.  I think we are going to have a young reader on our hands.  The first exciting thing is Caden can spell his name!  A few weeks ago he started taking puzzle pieces and spelling his name.  I would ask him what it said and he'd say, "Caden."  Then I would ask him, "how do you spell Caden?"  He will say, "C-A-D-E-N."  So a little over a week ago I thought I would start putting a few letters together and teach him words.  He seems to love putting three letters together so I thought I would start there.  The first word he knew was "zoo."  Besides Caden and zoo, he can spell CAT, AT, and DOG.  I am amazed.  I know it is most likely just rote memorization but I am amazed how easily he memorizes things.  The alphabet puzzle has been a huge educational tool.  As he is able to put letters together to spell words and show me what he knows.  I finally bought another alphabet puzzle with upper and lower case letters so he could learn lower case letters too.  When I gave it to him he was busy with it for a good 20 minutes.  Then we had to leave or he probably would have played with it longer.  We have been so busy this last week we have not had time to work on many new words.  Plus I don't want to push reading.  It has also been pretty nice outside, by that I mean the sun is out and it's in the 40s, so we go to the park and take walks.  He always wants to be outside and once we're outside he usually has a fit on our way back inside.  Those 2s are coming early.

Caden's vocabulary continues to grow.  He is putting together short sentences and vocalizing his wants and needs.  He also has quite the appetite.  Almost every morning I hear him wake up and say, "Mommy, eat!  Eat, eat....Mommy?"  Then when I open his door he says, "Hi!  Mommy, good morning!  Open window. Eat!"  This happens pretty much everyday.  He knows up from down and will say, "go upstairs, go downstairs."  He will also squat and say, "down" then push himself up and say, "up."  He loves going around labeling everything in our house.  He also seems to "talk" nonstop in the car.  He looks for birds, dogs, trees, cars, trucks, horses, letters, shapes, colors, and other things he knows. 

Physically he still loves to dance, run, and can now jump without holding onto anything.  He used to jump in his jumper as a baby but once he started walking I didn't let him jump in it anymore. Also he went through a stage of constantly wanting to jump on his bed.  But jumping freely is new.

Socially Caden is one of the happiest kids I know. When ever Caden sees another young kid he typically squeals really loud, runs over to them smiling, and laughing. It is fun to watch him look for other young kids when we go places. We went to France yesterday and were exploring a castle. When we finally ran into some kids, he was so happy and ran over to them. They were speaking French to him and he loved it. Not even language gets in his way from wanting to be around other kids. He is a social butterfly just like his mom and dad.

He can now distinguish several colors.  He recognizes blue, green, white, gray, purple, black, brown, yellow, orange, and red about 85% of the time.  Meaning he recognizes most shades of those colors.  He calls a light pink, pink, but a dark pink still looks red to him until I point out the color red in something else to him.  I honestly was worried about him being color blind because a few months ago when I would ask him what color something was he always said, "blue."  Then when I was researching color recognition I read somewhere that most kids can't distinguish colors until they are 3.  I'm not sure if that is true or people just don't teach them.  My Slovakian neighbor said she never even thought to teach her daughter at this age the things I teach Caden.  So I'm not sure which it is.

Another pretty cool thing he does is tell us what color the light is.  I probably read WAY too many parenting books and so therefore I am always talking to him and labeling things like many books recommend.  Anyway, he knows red light from green light.  He loves to tell us "red light" and when it turns to green he says, "greeeen!"  He also will say, "red light, stop" and "green light, gooooo."

Caden also loves to color. He colors almost everyday. The first two crayons he picks up are the blue and white crayon. I'm not sure why he likes drawing with the white one because he's drawing on white paper and it barely shows up. But he immediately grabs those two crayons first and says, "white, blue" and then colors.

His pronounciation is pretty clear.  He mispronounces some words but once you say it right he quickly repeats it.  Some German words are a little difficult for him to say but I think in a year he will speak German a lot more clearly than I do.  Collin has been teaching him Spanish too.  Some of his favorite books are picture dictionaries.  We have them in English, German, Spanish, and French.  Honestly those are my least favorite books to read to him. 

Caden is definitely a thinker.  He likes to get things right.  We have several shape sorters and he will only put the shapes in the correct slot.  One of his friends was over the other day.  He put a rectangle block through the square slot.  Caden removed the lid, took out the block, and put it through the rectangle slot.  I think he takes after his dad on being very detail-oriented.

Caden's brain is a sponge, he remembers people's names, will tell me what he wants to eat and does not want to eat.  We are working on consequences.  For example, the other day he decided to throw his peas on the floor.  So I asked him to pick up all his peas.  I had a bowl for him to put the peas in and he did it.  Sadly I think he enjoyed his consequence. 

Another new thing we are sort of working on is potty training.  He has peed in the potty a few times, yay! Last week he went and sat on his little potty with his diaper on and pooped.  I was so proud and part of me sadly was relieved he had a diaper on so it made clean up easy.  We are slowly transitioning to potty training.  It seems like many Europeans think we are not quick enough but I think the average age for American kids is now 3.5 years.  So I think we're doing pretty good.  I would love for him to be day time trained by his 2nd birthday, but I'm not going to be real pushy if he's not.

Overall he is still a pretty easy going and happy guy.  As long as he's not too hungry, tired, and his diaper is not dirty.  He also is back to taking and needing a daily nap, usually he'll nap for about 2 hours which is a much needed break for his mommy.