This week with Mason

It's been really hard to keep up with this the past few weeks....October and November are always really crazy months for me with work. It's good to be busy....but crazy insanity too. :) You'll notice two themes running throughout this set of pictures... (a) our house is a complete disaster and (b) half of these were taken minutes before Mason headed to bed...I kept on almost forgetting....which means that they were taken in awful light and I am glad that these are small pictures. :)

Playing outside these days is so much fun. Mason is getting to where he really loves to just run around and explore and play his little heart out. He is so cute when he gets down on the ground and pushes his car around ... complete with little boy sound affects.


We usually keep our bedroom door closed to keep little boys and kitties out. One day they pounced on a cracked door of opportunity and in seconds the room looked like this. I suspect that the emptying of the drawers was the kitty's idea, but that the little boy was coerced into action.


We drove up to Grandmama & Granddaddy's (Mason's great-grandparents) house one day and played with Ella in the leaves. I have lots of cute pictures of them from this day, so it will have to get a post of its own soon.


One of Mason's favorite books right now is "Commotion in the Ocean", a book that cousins Joss & Emit sent to Mason for his birthday....it is also one of their favorites. He will get it from his basket of books in the living room and bring it to me, saying "buh-buhs!" (bubbles) A few things he likes to point out in the book are buh-buhs, fish, mouth (the shark), babies (the octopus page), and tuh-tuhs (turtles).


Mason had his 18 month checkup last week and we had tons of fun in our 75 minute wait...why is it always so long? Anyways, we played peek-a-boo for a while (isn't that a precious face!!!!) and he has a BIG thing for "trash" right now. He is always coming to me and asking me for "trash" and I have to look around for something that he can wad up and go throw away. I usually rip one piece of paper into little pieces and he will take trips back and forth to the trash can throwing each piece away. At the doctor's office, he loved wadding up the crinkly paper from the patient table.


Nana (Jeremy's mom) came up to see us for a few days. She was making a trip up to the States to pick up a standard poodle from a breeder 2 hours north of here to take back to some family friends in the Bahamas. So we got to have a fun weekend with Nana and Griffin (the dog). Mason loved having his very own dog for the weekend, but the cats were relieved to see Griffin leave on Sunday.


Nana's visit might just get its on blog post too (if I can ever catch up). Since the dog was here, we spent a lot of time outside playing in the amazing weather. The picture on the left cracks me up....this little part of his playset that you are supposed to look through.....he has put every part of his face up to it except his eyes. He was doing his ears for a while, and now he has moved on to mouth. I'm sure he's thinking "What is this stupid thing for?" One day he'll look through it and figure it out. :)


I brought ALL of Mason's toys into the living room one day to go through them and clean things out. It was nice to sort through everything and put things back in sets, and then rotate toys from the living room to the bedroom, and then just get rid of a bunch of stuff. I had piles for each thing (bedroom toys, living room toys, trash, donate) and of course the piles he was most interested in was the trash and donate pile! He kept on pulling toys out of those and taking it back to his shelf in the living room to play with.


Mason loves little word books that have one picture per page and the word in print at the bottom. He has several and we will sit and go through them learning new words. I just got him a new one the other day that has some words that he didn't know so we've been reading it a lot. Then the other night I was cooking dinner and he pointed to the timer and said "clock"....he had not repeated that one yet while we were reading so I didn't know he had picked up on it. He is always surprising us with the things he knows....this age is really neat!


Mason has had this plastic flute for quite a while and plays it all the time but it has been quite the challenge to ever get a picture of him playing it. I think he loves it so much because it combines his two biggest interests.... moving + being loud.


We went to the library Monday morning for a little while. The first 5 minutes or so he was pretty interested in all of the "booksh", but then he spotted something else......


Toys!!! And toys win every time. We had fun playing. There was this precious little girl there and they had a great time playing together.....but it was kind of weird to go to the library to play with toys. oh well....baby steps! :)


Mason already has little things that he likes to do like "dada". Whenever he has the opportunity he gets so squealy excited about carrying around Jeremy's lunchbox. He was prancing around this night and just talking and talking saying who knows what. But it included lots of squeals, giggles, and "dada".


There is a cute little "Cat in the Hat" cartoon that comes on PBS and Mason has fallen in love with it. He is really into hats so I think that is the main attraction. Whenever he sees a picture of Cat in the Hat he says "eee hat!!"....followed by "dho dho dho dho" (go go go go) which is part of the theme song. He cracks me up when he gets settled down in some random position watching tv. I learned this summer that Joss & Emit both do this sort of thing to, so maybe this is just how little boys watch tv.....their bodies have to be moving and doing something interesting at all times.


Mason is still a really good eater. His favorite food right now is peanut butter....which he has a very interesting way of pronouncing....I'll have to share a video of that soon. ;) He usually just joins in with whatever we are eating which happens to be a lot of rosemary triscuits and hummus for snacks here lately. It's a little hard to believe that he eats things like this....he took triscuits as a snack to the church nursery on Sunday and they thought it was hilarious that he loves them so much. He just loves to eat.