vroom vroom

I noticed today that while Dennis rolls his cars along the floor (or wall or door or whatever), he makes a car noise to accompany their motion. It's like a guttural raspberry sound with some zooms thrown in from time to time plus a high pitch whine for the police car. I have attempted to capture this on video, but bringing out the video camera results in film of him approaching and trying to grab the camera. So far I have not managed to be successful.

I would like to add a line here about how much I hate this computer, because here, where this sentence is, were two entire paragraphs about Dennis that the computer took it upon itself to delete. When I pause in my typing, it moves the cursor back to some point north in the body of this document, and when I resume typing, it highlights whole sections and deletes them. I HATE THIS. I think that I will now start composing in Wordpad or on paper or something. I don't know if it's this website or my stupid touchpad mouse piece of crap or what. It's enough to make me want to quit blogging--it's very frustrating to lose everything. The Blogger site is good at autosaving every few minutes, so the last couple of nights when this happened, I quickly closed the webpage so it wouldn't save the new deletes and the reentered the blog and had only lost a couple of words. Tonight the autosave got it right after it deleted my paragraphs. So I am thinking very bad language right now.

I think I had written about how Dennis rode his bicycle again today, for 3 minutes, and he had remembered how to push down the pedals. Now, he doesn't ride independently by any means, but I am pleased that he remembers to put his feet on the pedals and push. He discovered a new feature on his bicycle that he just loves. While he's straddling the bike, whether to ride or tiptoe it along, he can lean forward and teethe on the foam pad wrapped around the bar between the handlebars. How convenient!

We were at Gran's house today, and he played for a good bit before he napped. I wish we had a pedometer or GPS unit attached to him because I would love to know his actual mileage. As soon as we set him down in the playroom, he covered the whole area and turned two toys on and off, and about 30 seconds had elapsed. He's FAST! He's everywhere all at once, and the places he walks away from bear evidence of his visit. I've said it before: he's like a tornado. He whirls in, causes destruction, and whirls away to decimate order somewhere else.

Successful parenting of a child this age? I'm just trying to keep him from hurting or killing himself and teaching him the occasional word. His talking improves every day. We are beginning to wean from the pacifier (or were until the current round of teething began). Sometimes it goes well, but other times he screams for it. It helps if he can't see it. Today, post nap, he pointed to it (because I hadn't hidden it quickly enough) and I braced myself for war. But he just pointed his finger at it and said, very clearly, "pass-fyer". Of course I let him have it. I mean, how cute is that? And when he was pushing his airplane around, he said "plane" and then repeated after the plane when he pushed the button and it said "here we go". He flew it around the room saying "here we go" over and over again. Pretty soon he'll be talking in sentences. He's trying now. He'll say a word that's real and actual English but will string along several nonsense words (maybe Greek?) before and after it. He's imitating conversation. He does this when he's alone in his room, too. It's so interesting to watch him putting it together. Sometimes it's like he's this awesome science project that we are observing and then interfering with! That's one of the fun parts of parenthood. Others are playing with toys, playing on the playground, giggling, tickling... There are so many!