According to Felix (and some other stuff)

Felix is a smart little kid. He's finally starting to string words together in semi-sentences and we're understanding him almost as much as he's understanding us. It's been lots of fun to see all this progress.

As I mentioned in the last post, his favorite thing in the whole world is his batuum. He carries it around with him everywhere. Because it's just a little bit heavier and more awkward than a small child can handle, he asks us to carry it upstairs for him: "up wi da batuum!"

His second favorite thing ever is baths. I blame this on his grandpa. I don't know if it's because my dad doesn't like to wipe him completely when he has a stinky diaper, but almost every single time Felix is stinky, his grandpa will give him a bath. If we give him a bath downstairs, we use a kiddie bath and just set it in the shower so he can splash. He loves it, and we don't have to freak out about any tiny spills.

Felix has figured out the stinky/bath connection, of course, so now (according to Felix anyway) there is a direct correlation between a messy diaper and a bath: "peuuu... ba?!" He also loves giving kisses and shaking his head back and forth vigorously as he says "no" over and over. Pretty typical toddler stuff. And his favorite people (other than "mom" and "daddy", of course) are "uke" (Luke) and "Becca" - probably because he can say their names (cousins).

He is saying more and more - like "wa-uh" (water) and "taw-uh" (towel) and lots of body parts. His favorite body part is the "but-tee", which is a hybrid of belly and button.

Felix is a great little kid. He makes us laugh regularly and loves to hear us sing for him (usually when we're trying to get him to sleep): "more!" This is all very good, because he's still pretty darn high maintenance. He demands lots of attention, is a master at creating chaos and deconstructing anything even related to "clean" and still sleeps way less than we would like. We can't get him to bed before about 10:30 unless we want him up at 4 or 5, but on special occasions he skips his afternoon nap and will crash by about 9:30. If we try to get him down earlier he will scream so hard he makes himself throw up. (Amelia and her much larger cousin Ammon, who is just a month older)

Our house is still in depressing disarray. I won't lie and say that I'm not completely overwhelmed and frustrated by the mess. I can't stand it. But I can't fix it because I don't have place to put everything and because I'm so exhausted that I often can barely move. Sigh.

One bright ray of light is Brent, who is finally painting cabinets today. Once they're painted and dry we can get all our kitchen stuff out of the living room and maybe start getting that room back in order.

Oh, the leak in the kitchen came back. Thank goodness for mom and dad's shop vac, or we'd be swimming in that corner of the house and all the lower cabinets would be totally ruined.

Ups and downs, and they're not hormonal. I just want a week off to catch up on sleep.