Car Sounds

Today I taught Luc about car sounds. These are the sounds every kid should make when pushing a toy car around the house. Heretofore he has been pushing around a variety of toy trucks and cars but without any sound -- so I showed him. To me making car sounds was always half the fun of playing with cars so it was a no-brainer sharing that experience. I started up his green pick-up truck with a roar, then I started making all kinds of sounds: the different tones for shifting gears, the screeching around a corner sound and, of course, the squealing brakes sound -- each of which was well received with laughter and wonder. What were these weird sounds, he must have thought. But then no sooner was he making them too, maybe not so much because they made the play driving experience more authentic but more because they were something Daddy did.

These are those kinds of times -- times when Luc is a vacuum cleaner with information, picking up on everything he sees. He is a quick study too, learning what will get him a "good boy" and what will get him a "bad boy" label right away. And, fortunately, he seems to prefer the former, though on occasion he does test the rules. But even then it seems like he is more curious about our boundaries then he is trying to break them. For example, he is only allowed to touch some things in the kitchen (like the fridge) but not other things (like the oven). So when in the kitchen the first thing he will do is walk around holding his hand near various stuff and looking over to us to see if it is ok. He'll walk around put his hand near a half dozen things, even obscure stuff, like the leg of a table off in the corner that he really has no interest in touching, he just wants to know in theory if it is a good or bad thing to do.

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• A couple weeks ago Luc moved to a new day care building. The day care he has been going to expanded and now they have a new building that is just for kids under 2. Luc is in that building now and is the second oldest child there. This seems to be a good experience for him as he seems to like being one of the "big kids". Plus he gets to spend all day with Meghan (his favorite person there). When I drop him off in the morning he reaches out with his open arms for Meghan which is something he rarely does for anyone other than Diane or I.

• New words in the Luc vocabularly: "up" (which actually means "open"), "all gone" (which can mean "all gone" or "I don't want anymore"), "byes" (an inexplicable plural version of "bye"), "again" and "wow". Add this to his existing vocabulary of "there", "Dada" and "Mama", "bye" and the fact that he understands more then he can say and we now actually have the ability to communicate. This morning, for example, he gave me a cookie and I said "are you a good boy?" and when he shook his head "yes" he looked so earnestly at me it was as if he said "you know, I guess I really am a good boy".

• Luc likes music (always has) and when a singer is performing on TV he will often stop whatever he is doing, stand and then watch until the song is over. This is especially true of American Idol. Today, however, Robert Plant (ex Led Zeppelin) was performing some rocking numbers and it really captured his attention. In fact, he jumped up on the sofa and begin dancing around and waving his arms almost like he was playing air guitar. This was a bit of a surprise, usually kids are in high school before they get the heavy metal bug but Luc seems to have acquired the taste at 18 months.

That's all for now. Hope you had a great Memorial Day Weekend!