Tuesday, November 24, 2009

Maybe those toy manufacturers do know a thing or two...


Like most parents, when purchasing toys for our little guy we tend to purchase ones that are past his age bracket--for example, this Christmas Dashiell is getting a number of toys intended for 2-year-olds, even though he won't be 2 until April. Mostly we want to get the greatest amount of use out of a toy, and want D to do activities that challenge him so he doesn't get bored. Well it turns out that sometime the toy manufacturers are right when they recommend an age group for a toy! Let's take Dashiell's backyard slide. The recommended age for this toy is 18 months to 3 years old. He received this as a gift for his 1st birthday from his Nana and Grandpa Hanson and Auntie Elizabeth. We set it up for him about 2 months later, so he was able to play with it when he was about 14 months old. Now, he did play with it a little, and he enjoyed it when he did, but it involved getting lots of help from mom and dad to get on it so he could actually slide, and despite my best efforts to show him how the periscope worked he just didn't care about it at all. So most of the summer I was feeling a little like it might have been a waste of money--yes I took lots of pictures on it and have posted many of them here, but that was mostly to compensate for the lack of actual interest D had in it. I was the one who suggested this toy, after all, so I had to make sure it at least looked like he really liked it!
4 months later--when Dashiell was right around 18 months old--he realized that he could climb up the ladder all by himself, which made this toy much more fun than it was when I had to help him up. Then last week he "discovered" the periscope and thought it was the best thing EVER, especially when I looked at him through the other end. So go figure--he's at the recommended age for this toy, and now he loves it! I'm not sure that he'll love it until he's 3 years old, especially since he's already too tall for it, but at least I no longer feel like like a heal for suggesting it to the grandparents as his birthday present last year!

Thursday, November 19, 2009

The fine line between loving a book and destroying it



Our boy is a book-lover, and that is something I couldn't be happier about. He loves it when we read to him, he loves flipping through books on his own, he just loves books. However, sometimes love comes at a cost. Take the book that he's reading in the above photo, "Tails". It's a fun book with fold-out flaps, fuzzy and shiny bits, and things that move. Everything you could ever want in a book. Now take a look at the next picture of this poor book:


The spine is completely destroyed. He loves this book so much that he felt the need to rip it apart. And this, of course, is not the only book he feels so strongly about. Pop-up books get it the worst. This morning he was so sad that the duck in one of his books had no head. I tried to remind him of how it happened, just yesterday, which is why he needed to remember to be gentle with his books. That didn't help. He was still sad about the headless duck. The wingless rooster he could care less about, and the lamb that no longer leaps through the field, well, that's kind of sad, but not as sad as headless ducky.

Some day when he's old enough to take care of his books better, we may have to repurchase a number of these for him. But for now we just need to break out the tape and the glue and hope for the best.

We bought new phones this weekend and I've been playing with the camera a lot the past few days. I think Dashiell wanted to play with my camera, too...

The verdict on the phone camera is that it's not as good as it could be. It's difficult to take a picture that's not blurry. But then again, it could just be my constantly-moving subject matter that's causing the blurry problem. :)

Friday, November 13, 2009

So innocent...


...or at least that's what he wants you to think!
Our guy has been into EVERYTHING lately! Climbing on the dining room table, trying to hang from an overhead lamp in the living room, grabbing steak knives out of the dishwasher, running up the stairs without us when we accidentally leave the gate open, pulling things down off the kitchen counter and various tall shelves, breaking the door off of the entertainment center...yeah, we've got a toddler on our hands! My favorite is when we tell him he shouldn't do something, and then he does it anyway all while looking at us and saying "no?" This ranges from jumping on chairs to trying to eat the wrong end of a banana (as in, the end that hasn't been peeled yet). He loves to test us! I predict many future battles of wills. :)

Thursday, November 5, 2009

More Halloween Pictures

Almost forgot that I promised more Halloween pix! It was a fun day, and I really think Halloween should be on a Saturday every year! I'll save any other happenings for another post, this one's mostly pictures.

Here we are at the Great-Grandparents' house. Not sure why we're all leaning to the right. Was there a strong wind blowing through the living room?


Here's D right after he received his axe, completing his lumberjack costume:
And here he's trying to figure out what to do with it:

Ah-ha! It's used for chopping the floor!

The library had a special Halloween story time, which Rick and Dashiell went to while I was at work on Friday. Pictured is the lovely Ms. Trish dressed as Dorothy, reading a Halloween-themed book. Yes, Dashiell does have a little crush on her: