A Little Bit of Bragging

I don't spend a lot of time bragging about my kids' accomplishments. This might because they are one and three years old and don't have a lot of accomplishments, per se. This might also be because Moe's accomplishments, though huge to us, are more like baby steps to others with kids his age. And Jelly's feats are, by now, old news to those who have already gone through them with an older child. But this is my blog and I can do what I want to, so I'm going to brag about a couple of very cool things that happened in the past few days.

As you can imagine, I tell Moe "I love you" about a thousand times a day. I want him not just to hear it but to know it in his bones. I used to be able to kind of sing "I....looove..." and he'd fill in "yoooou." But those fill-in days are long behind us. So the other day, he was sitting on my lap. You might say he was "cuddly." I'd call it "sensory seeking." But either way, we were at the table and he started to squirm like he wanted to get down. As I was putting him down, I said "I love you!" And then, Moe said "love you!" Let me repeat,

MOE SAID "LOVE YOU!"

Then walked away like it was no big thing. Jeff and I couldn't believe it (and I was so glad he was there to hear it too). It was truly one of the highlights of my entire life. I don't know if he was just repeating back what I said (which isn't something he usually does), or if he's starting to learn the response, but I don't flippin' care. It was awesome.

Then, there's this:

This is Jelly's work. We were at our mommy & me class. On one side of the dance studio where the class is held, there were a bunch of vehicle toys, like cars, airplanes and boats. All the way on the other side of the room, there were these two bumpy logs. I don't know what they were for, other than looking and feeling interesting. Jelly played with the cars for a while. Then she explored and found these logs, and looked and felt them for a bit. Then she got up, walked across the room and picked up two boats. She carried them all the way back across the room and put them down as shown: the blue boat on the blue log and the red boat on the red log.

I have no idea why she did this or how she thought of it. This certainly wasn't imitation of any sort. I don't know what it means (and when you have a special needs kid, of course everything has to mean something). Color matching could be a totally age-appropriate developmental step right now. I have no idea. But clearly, she's a genius.