sleepy boy

Dennis spent most of his day recovering from his busy weekend. He slept almost 13 hours last night, and he wasn't awake more than an hour and a half this morning before he went in to get his pacifier and frog and brought them over to me and laid his head on my leg. I put him down for a nap, and he slept for an hour, and then I heard him talking, saying "up up". I went in and asked him if he'd like to get up, and he replied "up!" So I got him up, and set him down, and after a couple of tries, he got his footing, ran into the living room, and said "yaaaay".

He played independently today. I was so sore from all the water sports that I spent a good bit of today on the couch, so I was pleased that he was so happy to entertain himself. The nice thing about being at the lake house is that he can explore without getting into anything that will hurt him. We've pretty well baby-proofed the place. He played with Noah's ark a good bit, and he talked on his cell phones some, and he even held the tv remote up to his ear and talked to it like it was a phone. He took a LONG nap after his snack. He had been up a little less than 2 hours when he started falling a good bit and whining some. He walked into the room and pointed to his pod and started to climb in, so I fetched his pacifier and frog, and he was asleep before I closed the door. He slept close to two hours this time, and that's a long nap for him. I decided to go in and check on him after 2 hours, and he was just waking up when I walked in. He slept so soundly last night that we had to check on him this morning when he didn't wake up until after 9. He was just extra tired, we think.

He certainly was cute when he was awake, though. He helped me clean the cabin by dismantling everything I had straightened. He repeatedly pulled the dvds off the shelf and spread them around, and while I had my back turned, he unpacked his toy bag that I had just packed. And his newest fun trick is climbing into the refrigerator whenever it's open. He runs over to the fridge as soon as someone heads over there to open it, and then he steps up onto the bottom shelf and touches whatever he can reach. The first time he did this, he made off with a bottle of Dale's marinade, but we managed to extricate it from his grasp and wash his hands.

He's been saying things that sound like sentences. If we say a simple sentence, he'll babble the same number of syllables and what he says sounds remarkably like what we said. Tonight he repeated something that sounded an awful lot like "Thank you for dinner, Pop!" as we were leaving Shoney's and thanking Dad for buying our supper. And when he 'reads' his books, he babbles entire phrases. I love watching his language development. It's absolutely fascinating. We played a little bit with his Leap Pad today, letting him touch the pictures and seeing what noises things make. He really liked the one with pictures of babies. He liked pointing out the eyes, nose, mouth, and ears. I would really like to get him a book of activities like snapping and zipping and buttoning, and I probably should have thought of ordering this before now, because that sounds like a nifty airplane diversion activity. I've already informed Dad that he will be carrying on a bag of toys! Just a little over a week left until we travel.