Before I forget

Dean does some really funny things and my best journal of him is on the blogs. I just wanted to write down some of the things he's done lately that have had me laughing:

I love it when he is proud of himself. He screams, smiles, and claps. At home I try to be very loose and let him explore. There are only a few things I don't let him play with. One of those is the toilet and another is toilet paper. I generally keep the bathroom door shut to save myself the trouble, but yesterday he managed to get in there and unroll quite a bit of toilet paper. I was only a dozen steps away, but I didn't hear him. After a few minutes, I knew he was up to something and so I asked him to come out. He walked out with a huge proud grin on his face, his hands full of toilet paper (that had been taste-tested), and some toilet paper stuck to his foot. When I laugh at him, he only gets prouder. I guess he just isn't going to feel guilty about disobeying me for a while yet.

Dean is not a big talker. He likes to make noise and he listens, but he doesn't jabber words at me like some children his age. He can say "mama", "dada", "wheel", and "no". He may have even said "bye" and "all done" before. He never performs when I ask him to and he just uses ooooh's, whines and hand waves to indicate his wants. This happened before Christmas, but I don't think I ever wrote it down. I asked Dean "Can you say 'wheel'?" and he looks at me and says "no".

Dean is very social and particularly wants to connect to his father. He's always thrilled when James gets home and sometimes will try to join our conversation by walking up to James and laughing (a pretty fake laugh) and putting his cheek on James knee. I'm impressed that Dean's figured out the way to make a friend is to laugh and smile with them.

We have our engagement picture framed and sitting on the bar near Dean's high chair. Dean likes all pictures of people smiling, but one day he just couldn't get enough of that photo. He laughed and laughed to see his mom and dad on paper like that.

Dean is a little dancer. He likes to bounce and sway whenever James whistles, I sing, or there's music anywhere. Yesterday at church he was bouncing to the closing hymn. James was tapping a foot to the beat. Dean was walking right in front of us and he stopped and very carefully started tapping his foot, too.

I love my little Dean. I love being a Mom.