Typical Teddy

Yesterday was one of those days where I was able to see how much progress Teddy has made. It's not that he did anything astonishing for the first time. It's that I was able to take in the full picture of all the little things that even three or six months ago weren't in his skill set.

He spoon fed himself a bowl of applesauce at breakfast, making it more than halfway through the bowl on his own. He holds the spoon, uses the right end and understands the motions. And he never gets frustrated because there's food on the other end of the activity. He also used his fork last night to eat a piece of cake mostly independently. (I still lick my plate if it's really good frosting, so I'm not going to fault him for that.)

We're in the midst of a really fun landscaping project where we dig out all the slate rocks surrounding our house, move them to our driveway to clean them and then add black dirt to slope away from our house. Then we'll get to place landscaping fabric and top with the cleaned slate, but we haven't gotten that far. Both AJ and Teddy are in heaven that we have a dirt pile in our driveway, plus rocks to play with and all sorts of shovels out for use (and play obviously).

Bliss is found between a rock pile and a dirt pile.

Teddy loves being outside and spent many hours there the past two days. He'll climb in the dirt pile, dig in it with a small shovel, bear crawl up the dirt pile and try to move around the big shovels. Then he'll take a break by pushing or climbing a wagon, climbing onto a tricycle for a while or splashing in our "swimming pool," which is really just a giant tote that AJ fills with water. Teddy's already figured out how to drink from the garden hose, which is absolutely awesome.

He loves to climb!

He's been doing quite a bit of bear crawling lately, especially while outside to give his knees a break from crawling and hopping unprotected on the driveway. He bear crawled the 5-foot section between the rock pile and dirt pile yesterday afternoon. Then last night he was very determined to get into our neighbor's driveway to explore the vehicle with the open back hatch. He tried to cross the yard and got redirected to our driveway, so then he bear crawled and crawled down our driveway and started up the neighbor's. His sheer determination and problem-solving skills amazed me ... but he still wasn't allowed to climb in their vehicle, especially covered in a mix of mud, dirt and water.

Check out that bear crawl action!

I'm not sure the boys have ever been as dirty as they have the past couple days, but it's hard earned dirt. The smiles and the memories will last longer than the dirt streaks on my kitchen floor ... hopefully.