Wednesday, February 25, 2009

Two more days...

Jon's new job requires him to travel quite a bit and this week he is gone on his first trip. He left last Tuesday and will be back Friday. Being apart for 10 days is a long time. We expect that a lot of the trips will be even longer. Jonah and I have been doing fine on our own, but we certainly miss Daddy. He's been putting in 12- and 16-hour days and we've had a hard time catching each other to talk on the phone. When we do talk either he's tired, or I'm tired, there are jets and helicopters taking off in the background on his side, or Jonah is being totally distracting on my side. I'll be so happy when he is back and we can just share life together again.

Yesterday was my birthday, so rather than sit around feeling sad that Jon wasn't here to make me feel special, I decided to make my own special day by throwing a birthday brunch. I invited four moms and associated toddlers and we had a wonderful time! I made an egg/sausage/cheese/potato casserole, my mom's homemade cinnamon rolls, heart-shaped brownies and fruit salad. All the food turned out fantastic (if I do say so myself) even though I had never made any of the recipes before. I served sparkling grape juice and raspberries and cream-flavored coffee. I used my nice table cloth and matching cloth napkins. I think the ladies appreciated the grown-up time together in spite of toddlers spilling cups of pretzels in the living room and fighting over my birthday balloon. I had an Elmo DVD from the library that seemed to help keep the kids from "bothering" us too much. It turned out to be a fabulous birthday.

Jonah is of course learning more every day and keeping me totally entertained. I've felt bad for him since Jon's been gone so we've been doing more wrestling and chasing around the house than usual. It's actually been very fun to bond that way. We have our little games we play and Jonah just revels in the anticipation of knowing that I'm going to tackle him or throw him on the couch. I love seeing him laugh and have so much fun. One of our favorite games is for him to pretend to walk away and I say, "Bye bye, Jonah. See you later." Then I grab him and pull him back before he can get anywhere. This is great because he loves it and thinks it's so funny and I can sit in the same place and I don't have to stand up or run around.

Today I discovered a new way to make him laugh. We have a GPS in our car and it talks when it's giving directions. We got annoyed with the lady's voice and Jon discovered that you can set it to different accents. So now we have an Australian gentleman directing us around town. Today I imitated the Aussie voice and Jonah thought it was hilarious! It added new joy to our car ride!

Jonah loves playing with friends and if I tell him we're going to see friends he gets very excited about "friendies". He seems to pick up on things and know we're going to see friendies even when I haven't told him. Tonight we were invited to dinner a the home of a young couple from church who don't have kids yet. Jonah thought we were going to see friendies so I told him that yes, we were seeing friendies. Just a few minutes after entering their apartment Jonah got this confused look on his face. He started walking around asking, "Friendies? Friendies?" Apparently grown-ups do not qualify as friendies in his mind. I got the feeling he felt betrayed. "Mom! You said there would be friendies and they aren't here!" It took me a while to convince him that big people are friendies too.

I used to always know what Jonah was saying because there was definite context. He was either talking about something right in front of him or copying something he just heard. As his verbal abilities increase he's starting to talk about whatever pops into his head. This requires a little more effort on my part to discern what he's saying. It's particularly frustrating in the car because he just jabbers on totally randomly. I finally realized that for the most part he's just exercising his vocabulary and doesn't require much of a response from me. At lunch today I gave him a few tortilla chips. He held out his chip to me and said, "Sosa! Sosa!" I couldn't figure out what he was saying, but he wouldn't quit. He picked up another chip, "Sosa!" Finally I realized he wanted salsa on his chips. Quite the working little mind!

Sorry the last few posts have been long and without pictures, but Jon took the camera with him on his trip. My friend got some hilarious pictures of Jonah and her little boy at a play-date on Monday. I asked her to email them to me so I'll put them up when I get them. Stay tuned!

2 comments:

Leslie said...

When your next baby is Jonah's age, you'll find Jonah interpreting he or she for you. The other night Chris was putting Naomi to bed and she was very adamant about something like: "I ont seepersonmefeet." After listening to Naomi say it about 10 times, Chris finally turned to Abigail and said, "What is she saying?" Abigail immediately said, "She's saying she wants slippers on her feet." Sure enough, that was it.
This is such a cute age they're in!

Anonymous said...

Cute stories! I am really enjoying your accounts of Jonah, because even though I'm not far out of that stage with Whitney, I already miss it. :-)

I'm totally with you on the vocab thing, too! Just wait till it gets to the point where he starts yelling about something OUTside the car, you have no idea what it is, he keeps demanding you look at it, and while you try to explain that you just can't turn around while you're driving, you pass whatever it was and he gets mad that you couldn't explain it to him. :-D