the puppeteer

After my second attempt to put a sleepy little man down for his nap, I decided to go into his room and play with him. He likes to play in the dark when he get out of bed. Sometimes he'll pull the blinds aside, and I've put a footstool in there now so that he can reach the light switch, but he still gets up and plays in the dark. Maybe it's because he knows that he is supposed to be napping.

Today he brought me his Ernie and Bert puppets (from my childhood, actually), and I put on a puppet show for him while he sat on the footstool that he had dragged to the center of his rug to plop down on and watch me. After a while, he took the Ernie puppet from me and we made Ernie and Bert converse with each other. He thought it was hysterical when I covered Bert's mouth and nose with his hand and made him sneeze, but then he did me one better: he covered Ernie's mouth with Ernie's hand and made Ernie say "oh my gosh!". Then he made Ernie blow kisses, complete with the "mmwaah" sound. I was very impressed with his skill!

We went to the playground today and lots of little girls asked what his name was and played with him on the play structures. He didn't do much sliding down today but enjoyed climbing a good bit. I managed to snap a picture of him hanging from the rings (with my camera phone--I've got to get a better one of those when I switch to Verizon). We had a great day, and tonight we learned that Dennis doesn't care for pork chops and still won't eat broccoli. I tried ketchup for the pork chops, but he just dipped the same piece in over and over and licked the ketcup off until he decided that the pork was ruining the flavor of his ketchup and began dipping his finger instead. Maybe I can use cheese sauce on the broccoli next time. The vitamin absolutely tore up his system and we dealt with vicious diaper rash all week, so bad that he'd run from us when it was time for a diaper change and scream while it was going on. He'd scream like we were killing him, say "no, want pants ON!" and "no diaper off, want diaper ON!". He started that this morning only to realize that the rash is mostly cured and the diaper change didn't hurt. So he sang a happy song instead, and this is much preferable. Thank goodness it's cured!