Cheerio!

Teo is doing about 500 cute things a day right now. One of his new tricks is undressing. The other night Tina went up to check on him about a half an hour after bedtime. He was completely naked in his crib, having taken off his foot pajamas and his diaper and thrown them "overboard." Then this morning while I was dropping off Luke and Max at school, Tina heard him in her bedroom saying "Na, Naaaaa," the noise he makes when he's pretending to be a superhero. She went to investigate and found him completely naked except for two socks he'd pulled out of the laundry; one of the socks was his and one was Tina's.

He has discovered that he can get at virtually anything in the kitchen by dragging a kitchen chair over and climbing up on it. The other day Tina found him bouncing on the chair in her office eating a piece of Amy's pizza that had been left over from our supper, sitting on the cooling pizza stone. Apparently he decided "If they're not going to share any of that with me (he's allergic to cheese), I'm going to have to take matters into my own hands."

A few weeks ago I had just gotten the kids up on a weekday morning and was getting Teo dressed in his bedroom. When I was finished, I lifted him back onto his feet and he walked purposefully over to the toy closet, opened it up, and helped himself to a stash of "Mighty Bites" cereal he had inside. Then we went down to the kitchen fr breakfast, and while I was investigating the cabinets to see what we had, he went over to the "fridge" in the play ktichen that we have, opened it up and helped himself to a stash of oat squares, a completely different kind of cereal he had squirreled away in this locale.

It seems like he is always up to something, and when he's quiet for more than a few minutes, either Tina or I will get this panicked looks and ask, "Where's Teo?!" I call him the "Demolition Man" and I've actually gotten the pack-and-play out again recently so I can contain him in one place while I clean the house. Otherwise, any cleaning is a complete waste of time because he can wreck three rooms while I'm cleaning one.

Tina and I have started to wonder if we should have put him into preschool this year. It's such a tough call. I am so happy for this time we have together, but I have to admit that now that the weather is cold and we are pretty much staying inside every day, he is entertaining himself more and more. I have at least stopped letting Tina put him in front of that terrible "Wee Sing Sillyville" tape from the eighties because I was afraid it was having deleterious effects on his IQ. We've switched to morning PBS shows like Sesame Street, which I at least can feel good about because of all the kids who learned to read watching this show. It's just so damn hard to play with an almost-two-year-old. I really think you have to be some kind of saint. I can only do it for about 10 minutes.

Anyway, this morning I played with Teo with his Leap Pad for a while, and then decided to design a little craft project connected to his interests, so we made a cereal necklace out of dental floss and honey-nut cheerios. He was delighted when I tied it on him and he realized that he was wearing his morning snack. See the slide show of him attacking the poor unsuspecting cheerios on my flickr account by clicking here.