Avery's questionable taste

Avery has picked out his own outfit twice now. Both times, he has chosen outfits for their comfort value, not their stylishness. He looks like a little baby in a big toddler body!:






His current favorite book is, of all things, a Cheerio's promotional book for Halloween. You are supposed to read it with cheerios to fill in the pictures with, but we just read it. For some reason he LOVES it and wants to read it over and over again. It's the strangest thing. I'm not even sure why we own this book, but it is his favorite right now:

Indoor Activities

We're working on the potty training. He's still young, but he has been sitting on his Elmo potty like a big boy, and even peed in it once! We have potty books and we ordered a bunch of potty DVDs from Amazon.com (including one featuring Elmo, so that is sure to be a big hit). After his one success, Avery strutted around very proud of himself.

This morning, when Carolyn got up, she peeked into Avery's room and found him reading books in bed. He had thrown his blankets and pillows and stuffed animals out of the crib, and pulled books off the bookcase to read. When Carolyn came in, she asked him if he wanted to get out of his crib but he said no and asked for a book that had fallen to the ground (well, he pointed and grunted at it).





Uh oh, we discovered the Sesame Street website. Avery LOVES Sesame Street and knows all the characters. He especially loves Grover, Elmo, and Cookie Monster! We are figuring out a weekend to take a trip to Sesame Place in New Jersey this summer. Avery (and we) will LOVE it!

Outdoor Activities

On Saturday, we had no plans and ended up being very relaxed at home. We kept half-heartedly suggesting going somewhere but instead we kept taking catnaps and dozing and watching TV. Finally around 5:00 we decided to get outside while it was still sunny and went to one of the nearby playgrounds that is particularly toddler-friendly. The parks, pools, and playgrounds are absolutely my favorite thing about living in Westchester.





Peek-a-boo! Avery's new word is "Ding-Dong!" and he said it about 100 times this weekend!


We FINALLY made it to Greenburgh Nature Center which is only a 10-minute drive away from home! It is lovely: there are large grounds with some outdoor animals and hiking trails, picnic areas, and grassy areas for kids to run around, as well as an "Animal Museum" which has a couple of small rooms with animals: birds, snakes, ferrets, turtles, tarantulas, etc. The employees will take out the animals for you to touch if you want, and Avery got to pet a snake and a turtle! It's a great place, and I'm so glad we finally made it there:

Happy Saint Patrick's Day!

At daycare today most of the kids were wearing green, and their arts and crafts project was making green hats (which Avery wore all the way home, all the way during our post-daycare stroll outside, and upstairs into our apartment, but as soon as I grabbed the camera, Avery tore it off his head!). When I went to pick him up this afternoon, Avery was literally running laps around the living room with two of his friends there, Armani and Cameron, and Belen said that it's been hard with the weather so cold because the kids want to go outside to run around! She said since tomorrow is supposed to be warm (in the 60's!), they'll take the kids for a "safari walk" in the backyard to look for animals. Cute! She also observed that Avery loves eating vegetables: broccoli, spinach, peppers, carrots . . . he loves them all! The other night, we had a nice dinner at home that I made (and am very proud of -- it actually turned out great): lemon-rosemary baked chicken, herbed goat cheese-mashed potatoes, and sliced steamed carrots. The carrots, potatoes, and goat cheese were all from the farmer's market. Avery only ate the carrots. Then he stole the rest of the carrots off of my plate and ate those as well! We are very happy that he loves his fruits and vegetables so much and hope that his healthy eating preferences will last!

Since we have a toddler, we opted for a family-friendly St. Paddy's day celebration: a walk in the park to look at ducks. No green beer for us this year, although Avery did find an empty bottle at home from the night before (we were doing our taxes and needed a drink!). No judgement please, it's empty! And SophisticatedBrew, no judgement about our crappy Beck's beer please! It's pretty bad, but it's only 68 calories a bottle!




We walked along the trail following the Bronx River Parkway. It's beautiful, with wooden bridges crossing the river, waterfalls, and lots of people walking dogs and jogging. There are LOTS of geese and ducks, and they are bold: they walk right up to you! We were tempted to feed them bread, but you're not supposed to do that anymore, so we just looked at them. Avery LOVED seeing the ducks!





Finally, some cutie-patootie pictures of Avery wearing his new (for him) Bart Simpson pjs that Carolyn (Mom) bought at (what else) a consignment sale. Mama has Homer Simpson pjs, so now we just need to get Mom some and we can match!

Our son has some interesting habits:

a. Sweeping AND Swiffering at the same time. In a diaper. I guess we don't keep our apartment clean enough for him:





b. Choosing his own shoes to match his pajamas. Apparently, Mama's high heeled work shoe goes perfectly with Spiderman pajamas. Who knew? Avery didn't make it too far down the hallway. He has big feet, but Mama's are bigger!

Dancing Boy

Avery LOVES to dance. Whenever he hears music, he starts wiggling his hips and shaking his head. The other day at daycare, I proudly informed Miss Belen that Avery knew a lot of the parts of his body (he had surprised us the night before by accurately pointing out his eyes, head, hair, tummy and toes -- we didn't know he had mastered anything besides his nose). She said yes, of course, they learn that at school. Then she looked concerned and said "You know that Avery love dance right?" I guess she wanted to make sure we knew this about him. I said yes, of course, he loves to dance! We might need to enroll him in some music and movement classes or something because he is a great dancer!

Here he is dancing at home to his "Dance Along" Sesame Street DVD. It's the "Stop . . . Now Dance!" freeze-dance song. He loves it and does a great job of freezing!







Avery gets cabin fever a lot. Yesterday we went for a long walk in the morning but when his diarrhea returned, we stayed in the rest of the day. Avery kept wanting to escape, and he went out into the hallway wearing just a shirt and a diaper (so I got him dressed and we took the dog for a walk):





Eating a waffle and choosing toys:





A few days ago when Avery was healthy: