Andy drew this at daycare today: it’s a map to Grandma Cheryl’s house. He is more prepared for our summer road trip than Jay and I are! The yellow and green patches are the Good Monster Swamp and the Bad Monster Swamp, respectively. Also watch out for the Green (i.e., Bad) Monster in the northwest quadrant. The Yellow Monster is just to the northwest of his swamp, but you don’t have to watch out for him, because he’s good.

Number of directions Andy claimed he could see without turning his head: all of them

Number of fingers I held up behind his head to test his vision in that direction: 2

Number of fingers Andy “saw” behind his head: 17

Number of his own steps that Andy counted while walking: 39

Number of times Andy has seen, read, or heard of the novel or film The Thirty-nine Steps, to my knowledge: 0

Number of integers that Andy skipped in his counting, to my knowledge: 2

Estimated probability that he skipped some others while I wasn’t paying attention: 40%

Number of popsicles Andy consumed: 0

Minimum number of popsicles Andy would have consumed if the ECFE ice cream social had not been postponed due to rain (wimps)!: 1

How glad I am I hadn’t told Andy about the ice cream social in advance, on a scale from 1 to 10: 11

Andy hates having his hair washed, but tonight it was at the point where we really couldn’t delay it any longer. Luckily, Andy loves looking at himself in the mirror, so the horror of hairwashing was mitigated by getting to create and observe hairstyles in a hand-held mirror. He created a hairstyle called The Hill (surprisingly not that tall) and one called The Three-Horned Bunny (with two horns, that I could count anyway) and some others I’ve forgotten. He even announced plans to start his own barbershop with “every hairstyle in the world.” I’m getting The Hill, he informed me.

He found some other uses for the mirror as well, including watching his mouth as he recited the alphabet. I haven’t been able to resist sharing some of my limited knowledge of phonology with him, such as the fact that the “p” and “b” sounds are formed with the mouth in the same position and that the only difference between the two sounds is that the “b” is voiced. (I refrained from mentioning that “p” is also sometimes aspirated in English but that this difference is barely even noticeable to English speakers.) Tonight was the first time I’ve seen him watching the shape of his mouth when he speaks, but I do sometimes hear him muttering to himself, “Puh, buh. Puh, buh. Puh, buh….”

It wasn’t my intention to fill the blog with embarrassing pictures, but when we were all laughing at the crazy outfit this morning, it was Andy who declared: “This has got to go on the blog!” So here he is: Crazy Boy.

Andy: Hey mom, what’s catch-down?

Me: What? What’s a touchdown?

Andy: No, what’s catch-down?

Me: I don’t know. What is catch-down?

Andy: The opposite of ketchup!

Andy trying to shake out his sillies! (The lyrics: “I don’t wanna be a chicken, I don’t wanna be a duck, so I shake my butt!”)
Shaking out the sillies

Still trying to shake out the sillies!

Number of people Andy chatted with at Noodles tonight: 13

Number of babies whose feet he tickled:1

Number of conversations he opened with: “My name is Andy. This is Sarah. Jay has to work late. I used to have a dog named Rasputin, but he died from eating garbage.”: 4

Number of conversations that started with the above, but with the correct cause of Rasputin’s death: 1

Time that has passed since Rasputin died, expressed in months: 18

Time that has passed since Rasputin died, expressed as a percentage of the time Andy has been alive: 31

Time that has passed since Rasputin died, expressed as a percentage of the the time Andy has shown any indication of having memory of the past*: 47

Number of people to whom Andy claimed to know the French word for “butt,” Kippe: 2

Number of non-family members we told Andy he was allowed to say the word Kippe to: 0

Language of the word Kippe: German

*The first indication he gave of remembering something occurred in April 2005 during a visit from Grandma Cheryl. We told Andy he could play with a certain toy after we went for a walk, and when we returned home he immediately asked for the toy.

Andy’s rendition of “I can’t pay the rent.”
I can’t pay the rent

Lots of the funny things Andy does and says are unintentional, but he enjoys making us laugh on purpose too. A couple night ago, I was reading him a Simpsons comic book at bedtime (I know, I know) and I got the giggles over the general absurdity of one of the stories (a manga-style Simpsons, with dialog that sounded badly dubbed). I found it too difficult to try to explain precisely why I was laughing so hard, so I let Andy believe it was solely because of the phrase “snow monkeys.” Andy cracked up right along with me (though I’m sure he didn’t get it)–so hard that he snorted, which of course made us both laugh even harder.

The next day as we were walking home, Andy kept saying, “Snow monkeys!” to make me laugh. And it worked…even though I have no recollection what the snow monkeys had to do with anything. When that started to wear thin, he started snorting. Kept me in stitches for a good ten minutes.

P.S. When I told him, “Andy, you’re a card” he didn’t answer right away, but after a minute or so he said, “Why did you call me a birthday card?”

We had an unprecedented three-board-game night:

Sorry! This was the first one we played, and he gets it reasonably well, although we have yet to finish a game. Andy was playing along fine, following the rules perfectly, until I drew a “Sorry!” card. (For those of you who haven’t played in a while, that’s the card that allows you to move one of your guys out of your Start, take the place of one of your opponent’s guys, and send the opponent’s guy back to his/her Start.) I think it was just a coincidence — mainly because I don’t think he saw what I’d drawn — but at that point he decided to move all the guys on the board to the (not in use) yellow player’s Start “for a visit.” (“Hi guys!” he exclaimed, just as he often does when he enters a room full of strangers.) We got all the pieces back to their proper spots eventually, and then I broke the news to him about my Sorry! card. “That’s okay,” he told me, “my guy was lonely for his family.” He had one guy safe at Home, but he revealed that the Home was actually the guy’s bedroom, and that he’d been banished there “for jogging at daycare.” I didn’t ask what that was all about.

Candy Land: This game was pretty uneventful. Andy won, as he usually does — which is a little weird, because we really don’t “let” him win. (But then, it might be possible to demonstrate that he’s more likely to abandon a game in progress when he’s losing — if you were to pay attention to such things.) He did a typical little victory dance (Kippe shaking, index fingers rhythmically poking the air), but what was perhaps not so typical was the chant that went along with it: “Yeah, this is my good day! This is my very, very, very good day! This is my very, very, very, very, very … [etc.] good day!”

Chutes and Ladders: For some reason when we play this game, Andy is always Timmy, I’m Vicky, and Jay is Tootie. Tootie is a girl, by the way; Jay is the only one who has to be a character of the opposite gender. We’re not allowed to break character, so it’s not “Your turn, Andy,” but “Your turn, Timmy.” Andy didn’t win this one; I did — because of my “good karma.”