A quick update

I know, I know... I'm a slacker blogger. At first I had a good excuse (working on my dissertation), but now my reasons for not blogging are not quite as convincing (watching SYTYCD, reading the Twilight series of book at any free moment, sleeping, etc.). Anyways, since Hudson is upstairs screaming his lungs out with Ryan, I thought I would try to do a quick update. (BTW - the screaming is due to our second round of sleep training. You may have followed our experience with the first round. We made progress, but then plateaued, and ultimately, regressed back to our starting point. This time around Hudson is on to us and REFUSES to go to sleep without us and continues to wake all through the night.)

So, before I get into the update, I just wanted to give another excuse (I know, I'm full of them!) for my lack of blogging. I guess I don't fully understand what the best blogging etiquette is. I know that I enjoy reading blogs when the updates include pictures, but uploading and adding pictures is the time consuming part that I dread. So I end up putting off posts (like Hudson's first airplane trip that was almost a month ago!). If blogging without pictures is appropriate, I'm sure I would do it more often. That said, I have absolutely no idea who reads this blog. My guess is that it is mainly just Hudson's grandparents, a few girls from the Nest with toddlers, and a few friends from high school and/or college. And since our parents and most of my friends receive monthly pictures (which I'm also slacking on...I promise that I'll be better once Edward and Bella are out of my life!), maybe pictures aren't necessary?

Anyways, I wanted to give a quick update about our crazy little monkey. Everyday I am just shocked by the things that he is doing. He pretty much will repeat any word you say to him and most of them sound like they should. I would try to post some the words that he actually knows, but there are just way too many now. There must be at least 100! It seemed to happen overnight! Some of my favorites are "sit" and "ice" which sound JUST like "shit" and "ass". He's obsessed with the color purple - you can point to any color and he'll say it's purple. But yet when he is pointing things out in his books, he'll point to something that's actually purple and say it correctly. So I think he knows his colors, but is just playing with us. Similarly, he's obsessed with the number 8...he treats it the same as purple. But yet if you count and pause between numbers he can sometimes fill in with the correct number. He knows a bunch of animal noises (our favorite is cat because he says "meeee" in a really high pitched voice), but over the last few days everything says "MOOOOOO!" because he knows you'll tickle him and say "nooooo!" He's started saying and signing "please" and "thank you" a bunch. He usually says it when prompting like "How do you ask?" or "What do you say now?", but just today he started to say thank you without a prompt. And, my favorite current trick, if you ask him where the baby is, he picks up my shirt and knocks on my stomach and says "Knock, knock baby".

And here's a runway pose in case posting pictures is a must.....

More updates

Since I was in catch-up mode for my last post, I knew that I would forget tons of adorable things that Hudson does. So, here's a post of things I forgot....

• More words: After listening to Hudson this weekend, I realized I forgot a ton of words. Gone (like if his juice box is empty or if a helicopter flies out of sight), cheese, cracker (which might also mean cookie), blocks, hat, help, bird, duck, eyes, nose, mouth, dog....I'm sure there are even more that I'm forgetting right now.
  
• In addition to those words, he also signs: all done, more, car, train, cracker, grapes, bath, banana, cheese, bird, and sorry (but he only does that one if prompted)
  
• He gives kisses and it's the cutest thing ever. You just ask for a kiss and he delivers!
• He knows alot of his body parts. He'll point to: nose, eyes, ears, head, tongue (he sticks it out), belly, and knees (if he has long pants on, he has to pull them up in order to show you his knees).
  
• If he hears people on TV clapping or cheering, he starts to clap too.
• He REALLY wants to be able to jump. He keeps trying and trying, but his feet have yet to come off of the ground.
  

I'm sure there will be many follow-up posts to this since I can't keep up with his development!

I'm baa-aack....

Yes, so I took an extended blogging leave. It really wasn't by choice. One of my dissertation committee members agreed to be on my committee only if I could set my proposal meeting before the end of May. So you know what that means? Non-stop dissertating! I worked my butt off and now I'm happy to say that my baby has been handed over to the committee. My presentation was on May 22nd and I could have never anticipated it going so well! YAY!

In addition to dissertation bootcamp, I also was on a wedding marathon. Two weddings in two weeks in Long Island? Sure, no problem! We drove up to NJ on April 24th and then headed up to LI on the 25th for Abhisek and Sujata's wedding (college friends) while Ryan's parents watched Hudson. Our blind faith in technology had us trust the GPS to get us to the wedding. Apparently, Onyx (the car/GPS) decided that we should see the Lincoln Tunnel and midtown Manhattan on that beautiful sunny afternoon. Needless to say, we got to the wedding an hour late and missed the entire ceremony. We did, however, get to catch up with a bunch of Ryan's fratenity brothers (including 3 of his little brothers) which was wonderful. After the wedding, we made the trek back to NJ. Our return trip took less than 2 hours, compared to the 3+ it took us to get there.

Less than a week later, we headed to NJ on Thursday April 30th. We headed to LI on Friday afternoon for Jade and Jerrol's wedding (grad school friends). Since we learned from our mistakes, we took a new route (Oynx was not in control this time). Unfortunately, that didn't help. It took us over 3 hours to get there again thanks to Friday afternoon traffic and rain. Again, we missed the ceremony. Despite of bad luck with driving, we had a wonderful time at the wedding and a much easier return trip that evening.

The following day, May 2, we celebrated Ryan's birthday (which is May 4) in NJ with his family and our good friends, Megan, Jay, and Alex. Meg and Jay brought their adorable little girl, Izabella, too. We had a great time catching up and eating TONS of food (including Ryan's Dad's famous lasagna and sangria and a delicious ice cream cake).

So, two weekends packed with travel and one dissertation proposal have affected my ability to blog. But now I'm back and have updates on Hudson....

• Well, he gets cuter by the minute (seriously).
• He's (finally) starting to grow some hair, albeit more in the back in the form of a curly rat tail.
• He's starting to pick up words. Right now he says: car, cat, ball (although this sometimes means "grapes" if he's also signing grapes), juice, Mom, Da, Pop Pop, on, up, down, shoe, owl, out, puff, banana, and apple. I was SO happy to finally hear MOM!!! For the longest time both Ryan and I were "Da".
  
• His cognitive development has been blowing us away too. He's been doing puzzles for a while now. I still have no idea how he learned that. He also can point out a bunch of things in his books (i.e. if you ask where the butterfly is on a certain page, he'll point to it). Again, I have no idea how he learned some of these random words like bumblebee, owl, and butterfly. Just the other day, Joyce (our nanny) told me that he was pointing out red and blue blocks when she asked. He's our little genius!! CMU, here he comes! :)
• He LOVES to kick his ball around. We're convinced that he's going to take right to soccer, although we'll probably push him to go the Jeff Reed route instead (sans the crazy hair and penchant for hoochie mamas).
  
• One of his favorite games is when Daddy throws him high into the air (much to Mommy's dismay as she prays to Jesus that Daddy catches him and doesn't break his back). As soon as Ryan catches him, he immediately says "UP!!" and is ready to go again.
  
• He's starting to want to do grown up things. I've given him a little responsibility by letting him feed the cats each morning. He LOVES it! He runs to get the scoop, puts some food in their dishes and then runs back for more. If he spills any, he picks them up and puts them in the dish (although sometimes he chooses to put them in the WATER dish). He seems so proud of his little chore.
  
• He's still 100% obsessed with vacuums. Thanks to my Mom, he has two loud play vacuums that he pushes around all day. But as soon as he spots one of the real vacuums he comes running and just wants to push it all over the place. He even knows that our small Dyson is for cleaning the couch, so he grabs it off of the charger and takes it over to the couch. Hopefully his desire to clean lasts through his teenage years!
• He's getting really good at going down the stairs. We tried to teach him to sit on his bum and "scooch" down. As soon as we say "scoochie", he starts to go. Unfortunately, he's getting a little too brave and is starting to go without Mommy or Daddy there to supervise or he tries to walk down. For those of you who have been to our house, you know that there are 50 stairs (literally, we counted), so this gets to be difficult.
• He loves to empty Daddy's wallet (Mommy taught him well!). He'll sit there forever just taking credit cards in and out.
• As for his sleep, I wish I could say it's great, but sadly, it's not. We did make alot of progess with our sleep training (see previous sleep posts), but we kinda plateaued and didn't move forward. In fact, it seems that we're actually regressing at this point :(
• On a better note, he is eating MUCH better. He's finally eating real food and not just crackers! Still not drinking milk, but he LOVES cheerios in milk, so we're getting some in. I think the kid could eat 2 adult sized bowls of cheerios in one sitting!
• He's mildly obsessed with dandelions. If he sees them in the grass, he will stand there and yell and point at them until you pick them. Every. Last. One. Of. Them. He's getting brave and beginning to touch them himself.

• He just had his 18 month doctor visit. He was in the 70th percentile for height, but only 20th for weight. We so glad that the summer is here so that he can wear shorts and stop rocking the floods!

I hope to find some time soon to post more pictures. I just need to download them from the camera. I haven't even sent out his monthly batch....I know, I'm slacking....