Liam: January 2012

Tonight Liam picked a piece of wooden railroad track out of the toy box and began "playing" it like a harmonica. As I tucked him in bed, he was happily sawing it back and forth across his lips while singing a tuneless, wordless song. That's a fun change I've observed in my littlest guy over the past couple of months: he has become very imaginative. He'll eat pretend food and make little chewing noises, saying "mmm!"while appreciatively nodding his head; he'll put on his lion mask and follow me around, grinning and gently saying "rawwwr! rawwwr! rawwwwr!"; he'll touch a picture of fire in a book and quickly pull back his finger, exclaiming, "Hot! Ouch!" One of his favorite things to do is stand in front of the couch, wave his arms around like he's losing his balance, say, "Woah...woah...woah!" and fling himself backwards onto the cushions.

The world's most adorable lion.

Liam loves to cook. He especially loves to stir things around in the electric skillet. He'll happily saute onions and garlic, brown beef, or stir together a sauce for me. When we bake bread and cookies, he helps by liberally sampling the dough.

When Liam wants a kiss he'll make smacking noises with his lips, then kind of suck them in and lean forward. It ends up being a lipless kiss, but he always makes a big popping noise and grins broadly afterwards. I love it. I'm sure the girls will too.

The child still can't consistently differentiate between "Mommy" and "Daddy" (I imagine him waving a dismissive hand in his mind, saying, "'Mommy,' 'Daddy,' whatever. They're just those big people who are here to make me happy.") but--as Soren has pointed out--he definitely knows who his brother is. It's so cute to hear him call out, "Sonin!' and have Soren answer, "What, Neeum?" and watch Liam pad off in the direction of his brother's voice. (Incidentally, Liam currently weighs just 2 pounds less than Soren.)

Today while Daddy walked the half block and back to pick up Soren from preschool, Liam (who, just for visualization's sake, was wearing nothing but a diaper) snuck into the kitchen, swiped a hunk of cheese, and took it to the front room, where he climbed up on the couch to savor his illicit treat in comfort. Then Daddy came home. Knowing he was in all kinds of forbidden territory, Liam tried to hide the cheese under his chubby little body where Daddy wouldn't see it.

Recently Soren bumped his head on a doorknob and was screaming loudly about the pain. Liam followed him around, repeating, "Sowwy. Sowwy. Sowwy." Finally Soren turned to Liam and solemnly said, "It wasn't you, Neeum. It was the doorknob."

If is not uncommon for the little Bubba to fall asleep while eating. He's such a Skousen.

He loves books, of course. Here he's reading Kevin Henkes' Birds.

Last month Liam randomly started having some foot/ankle pain in his right foot. We weren't ever sure what happened, but he stopped putting weight on it and crawled everywhere he wanted to go. It would get better, then worse, so it took us a while to take him to the doctor. The doctor sent us to a radiologist, who--while Liam screamed directly into my ear as though we were extracting his toenails without anesthesia--took an x-ray and sent it back to the doctor, who said, "Looks like he might have had a fracture that's healing. But it's hard to say. That might be how his foot always looks. But I don't think we need to do anything about it." A few days later Liam was walking on the foot like nothing had ever happened. Sigh. Another wasted co-pay.

Liam is a creature of comfort. You'll put him in bed and he'll nestle down under the covers, grinning with sparkly Disney eyes. He loves to snuggle under blankets, he loves to cuddle, he loves to be hugged and squeezed and kissed and adored. He is my little cuddlebucket of love and it totally blows my mind that the little pootums is going to be three next month. 'taint natural.

'Taint.