watching the Hawkee-guys and playing with Cate

Last weekend we went to visit Will's girlfriend Cate, daughter of Carrie & Jason, outside of Chicago. We have been visiting every couple months or so and Will and Cate seem to really like seeing each other and get along really well. This time we also met our friends Jon & Bri and Kristin & Mike as well, and enjoyed watching our Iowa Hawkeyes whoop up on Wisconsin (sorry Grandma Brenda and Grandpa Paul). Throughout the trip, Will announced to everyone that his favorite football team was the "Hawkee-guys". See his sweet Hawkeye bomber jacket in the picture below, where he and Cate are enjoying the tailgating food.



Since our last visit, Cate has a new baby sister, Claire. Will got lots of opportunities to play with Baby Claire - really liked holding her and tickling her tummy - and we reminded him he was going to get his own baby brother or sister soon. Won't that be fun?



Will got some nice presents from our friends for his birthday. Cate gave him a "Rocket" toy from Little Einsteins - his favorite tv show. Cate had the same toy and they played with them together a lot, including in the bath! Also Kristin & Mike remembered that Will likes choo-choos and got him a sweet Thomas the Train outfit, which we'll include in the Halloween collection to be worn next week.


They also got him a Thomas toy set, so Will and Cate set up the track and pushed the choo-choos around on it, good times.



Cate was once again a very sweet host and willingly shared all of her toys with Will. But this time Will was much more able to play with her I think - it was great because we didn't really have to worry about watching the kids all the time - they entertained themselves. There was a lot of running around in circles chasing each other, but a lot of other game playing which was very cute.



Cate was also nice enough to share her bath toys with Will.



One of the games they played a lot on the morning we had to leave was hide-and-seek. Except both of them kept hiding in the same place - behind the curtain. After they hid and found each other for awhile, the game became that I had to find both of them. I captured a video of this game in action - I'll post soon.

a fun trip to Cate's house

This past weekend we took a quick overnight trip to Chicago for a get-together with Jon & Bri, Kristin & Mike, Carrie & Jason, and Will's girlfriend Cate. It was great to see our friends and we had a lot of fun, we wished it could have been a longer trip.



Last time we visited Cate, Will was much littler. Cate has always played very nicely with Will, but I think this time they could interact a little more. Here they're making sweet music together. In the picture on the right, Will is singing to Cate. It sounded a lot like the "dada" song.



Carrie and Jason made some fantastic fajitas for dinner, and we had margaritas. So the party had a bit of a Mexican fiesta theme, and Will dressed for the part (or at least Kristin helped him with his sombrero for long enough to get a picture). He did not let me put a little Mexican mustache on him though.



Some amount of time after Cate and Will went to bed, the following pictures were taken with my camera. This must have been when Jon and I were putting the hurt on Jason in Wii tennis.



We had to leave after breakfast the next morning to time the drive within Will's nap schedule, so it was a short trip but we had a great time. I hope we can get together with everyone again in the near future!



P.S. - Kristin, since we never opened those Harry Potter beans, I'll save them for your wedding.

weekend at Cate & Claire's

Last weekend we went to visit our old friends Cate and Claire in Chicagoland. Their parents Carrie and Jason, as well as our friends Jon, Bri, Mike, Kristin, Beth, & Ed were all there too. Also Cate & Claire have a new dog named Cooper, who added much fun to the trip. It was just a short overnight visit, but we had a great time. We got there early enough on Saturday that we got to start by playing outside for awhile.

Will had been talking about blowing bubbles with Cate and Claire all week, and they got to do it while we grilled dinner. Cooper played too.

Jon and the other children played really well together.

Jason has Beatles: Rockband. It's awesome - kind of like Guitar Hero but with additional instruments and vocals. And Jason had pretty much every Beatles hit song so we played lots. Will tried each instrument (I think he preferred being Ringo), and also tried some vocals.

After a late and very fun night, we were all a little... slow... the next morning. Here Hallie is just waking up from a night's sleep in her cage.

Just kidding of course, but she was proud that she managed to get herself into Cooper's cage. Hallie stayed with Erin and Will and I and was that one kid at the sleepover that keeps waking everyone up to keep playing and won't let anyone sleep, how sweet. Fortunately, Carrie had some coffee going and prepared a delicious breakfast to get the morning started right.

After breakfast Will and Cate kicked back to read a little of the Sunday paper, like an old married couple.

Shortly afterward we had to say goodbye and hit the road for home. The kids agreed to all sit together for one more round of pictures, though getting them all to look at the camera and smile at the same time proved virtually impossible. This one is still very cute.

One very neat thing we did on this trip was to go to a nearby park so Carrie could take some pictures of our kids with her very nice camera (and do some photo editing to make them extra pretty). Here are just a few of my favorites, but you can see more at my picasa site. Thanks Carrie, these are really great!

bath pictures: 18 months

Will is one-and-a-half! And he is a ton of fun. Everything we do with him has an element of a game to it now. You can see this at bath time - for Easter he got these pills which grow into little foam dinosaurs in warm water, which he absolutely loves to play with in the bath. And put in his mouth. Between playing with the dinosaurs, reading books, and splashing, it's hard to get Will to agree to get out of the bath anymore - only the prospect of eating a bunch of cookies has him considering getting out willingly. Most nights go about like the video below.



As the video shows, Will really uses the word "no" a lot now. He can get on a roll - you can keep asking him questions and he will answer "NO" more and more emphatically, it's very funny. He's also using more signs (his newest ones being "please" and "thank you", what good manners), and makes more connections with them. For example, he uses the "done" sign reliably to let us know he's done eating and wants to get down, but he also uses "done" whenever he wants to be done doing whatever we're doing. So when Erin takes him shopping and he wants to leave, he starts signing "done" frantically, even as he starts to cry. He also signs "more" (as in, "I want more food") when he wants us to repeat things, like songs we'll sing to him, or games we'll play. In the picture below, he's signing "more" so Erin would keep playing peekaboo with him, which she was doing to try to get him to smile for the bath pictures.



This past month Will had fun with Grandma Brenda and some things she brought for Will. The new red chair has been especially fun for Will to have. It was good that Grandma visited so Will could work on his kissing (he's also practicing with mom and dad and other things) because we're going to visit his girlfriend Cate in a couple weeks. We're going to Chicago for a "welcome back" party for our friends Jon and Briana, who are back in the midwest after a couple years in boring California, and we'll be staying with Carrie, Jason, and Cate. Cate should be really impressed - Will's much older than the last time we visited, and cooler. He also knows how to be silly and make a girl laugh. But the real kicker, Will is working on a special dance move that he's going to perform for her, and one which Jon will especially like. PS - It's much more advanced than these and these and these moves.



As of this posting, there have been 3232 visits to Will's page.

Will's first kiss

Well, he kisses his mom and dad all the time (or more accurately, gets kissed - reference the "Dad rule" for dad-kissing requirements) but this is the story of his first girl kiss.

This is Cate Nadziejko. She's a very sweet little girl. Smart too - she knows Erin and I by name (it helps that I have the same name as Thomas the Train). We went to visit her parents, Carrie and Jason, last weekend for the Hawkeye game in Chicago. Cate was a very gracious host, sharing her room and toys with Will. She also let Erin and I eat her fruit snacks when we used the bathroom.

Will has many girlfriends and chick babies are always giving him the 'eye', but ever since he was born he has had a special crush on Cate. Here is a picture of when I caught Will practicing kisses on a picture of her. Then here he's deeply engrossed in a love note from her.

This was so sweet - here is a little hug.

And a couple of smooches!

Thanks Cate for my new Thomas (the Train, not the dad) book!

Will's girlfriend Cate got him a sweet book for his birthday featuring Thomas the Train and friends. Will LOVES this book. I hear from Cate's parents Carrie and Jason that she also was a little upset she had to give the book away :)

It's a singalong book, which means there's a panel on the side with buttons to press which play different songs. Great songs, trust me. Also, you can't stop the song from playing until completion, which means mom and dad get all kinds of great songs stuck in their heads.

It took Will a little while to figure out how it worked (see the video below, he had to figure out how hard to press the buttons to make them go) but he's a pro at it now. I took him disc golfing with me on Monday and we took the Thomas book and I think he literally pressed one button after the other for an hour and was perfectly content to sit back and "dance" to the music (see the head-bobbing in the video).

baby sittserr.

The three of us - Erin, Will, and myself - went yesterday morning for the 5-month ultrasound for the baby in mama's tummy. We had been asking Will for the last week or so if he wanted a baby brother, or sister, and he pretty consistently told us he wanted a "baybee sittser". This could have been influenced by recent visits to Cate's house, where he got to play with and hold Cate's baby sister, Claire. Then he changed his mind a couple days ago and started saying he wanted a baby Elmo. So when we went into the ultrasound, we were hoping to just have a healthy version of one of those three types of baby.

The baby is a girl. This is good because Erin has an excuse to fill our house with pink stuff. Also, figure maybe there can be tradeoffs between Will and his sister for what they play together - maybe they'll play a little baseball, then do some ballet. He has promised me he'll help teach her to brush her teeth. Also, he thinks she should be named "Claire".

hide-and-seek

Wrapping up our trip to visit Cate a couple weekends ago, here's a video I captured of Cate and Will playing hide-and-seek. Neither of these two is a very good hider - they didn't have a very hard time finding each other. Also in the video you can hear Will trying out his new phrase: "my turn" - which he repeats over and over, whether it really should be his turn or not.



Will is just starting to get this game, and will hide in various places around our house. He especially likes to hide after running away buck-naked when we're trying to get him to take his bath. Also, a big part of hide-and-seek is counting to ten with your eyes shut. We're working on this, Will is getting pretty good at it, but he needs help after about "sic" [six].

daddy's little ballerina

When we visited Cate a couple weekends ago, she had to go to ballet lessons before the Hawkee-guy game. When she got home she taught Will a couple moves and they had several impromptu dance sessions. Also Will does these pirouettes around the house with some of his toys that play music.

eightnineTEN!

Will has a good sense for numbers, as Grandma Susan says - he thinks about math a lot. But even up until about a month ago, he struggled with the numbers 1 - 3, and any other numbers might as well have been a zillion. In fact, he still gets those three confused a bit - when it's about time to get out of the bath but he wants to stay in, I'll tell him he has three minutes, and he'll argue back: "no, TWO!".
When we went to visit Cate last month, all of a sudden he was counting much higher. I don't know what happened, but I heard him count to six at the beginning of a race he was running against himself, when as far as I had heard before he could only reliably count to two. Turns out he could count even higher than that, just can't pronounce "seven".



Since this video, he can kind of say "seven" but usually just pauses and waits for Erin or I to fill in for him. But he also tries to count even higher than ten - usually goes a bit like this though: ...eightnineTEN!!! sicteen, farrteen, TEN!!

bath pictures: 12 months

Wiggly Willy is one! I can't believe it. One year ago today, we took these pictures, but I remember it like it was only yesterday.
Sorry for the late post everyone - it's been a very busy week for dad. I left my conference on time to get home and kiss sleeping Will on his birthday, and then the three of us celebrated today. There are some new toy playing and birthday cake pictures to be posted soon.

What an eventful month! Will has been adding new tricks to his repertoire on nearly a daily basis. Arguably the biggest accomplishment is that Will can now say "mama" and does so regularly, especially when he's distressed (like when mean ol' dad tries to change his diaper). However "dada" is still the preferred utterance.

Will has now completely adapted to the full-on-his-knees crawl, and he also can climb stairs and pull himself up on most things, which allows him to reach a whole new world of things that are ok (like the piano keys) or not ok (like glasses of drink on the coffee table - which he now likes to tip over) to grab. He is a mobile little monkey, my guess is only a few weeks away from being able to walk on his own.

Since tailgating season has started, Will and I have been able to spend a lot of party saturdays together (at least before the afternoon nap). It was on our tailgating trip to Chicago to visit our friends Carrie, Jason, and Cate that Will experienced his first kiss (from a non-mom/grandma/aunt girl).

Will's starting to be able to make connections between things he or Erin or I say and the meanings behind those things. For example, we have been trying to teach him how to put away his toys at the end of the night. Just today I think he figured it out (video coming soon) - when we pointed to a toy and then to the bucket he would pick it up and put it in. Also, he has discovered the ability to clap - it's the cutest thing. He does it when he's excited about something. I think he learned this because whenever he would finish all his food during a meal Erin and I would clap our hands and give him high-fives. This led to another connection he made with clapping - when he wants to be done eating, in addition to whining and trying to slap the spoonful of food away, he claps his hands (as in, "I'm done!").

The voters have spoken - we're not cutting his hair any time soon!

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first bath

a potty pee-pee PS

Will peed in his potty for the first time on Sunday. But I missed it (I was playing video games with my friend Dan). So last night I got Will ready for bath, he sat on the potty for awhile, did the tuck, and ordered me to leave (he insists on privacy when he's in the bathroom, even though he does not give it when the roles are reversed). I peeked in on him several times to encourage him, and each time he ordered me out of the room. But after several tries, running out of and back to the bathroom a few times and then resetting and re-tucking, he couldn't do it. Eventually I had to give him his bath, so even though he wanted to keep trying, I had to take him off of his seat on the potty, and he was not happy about that.

After his bath, I had him wrapped in his bath towel and he again insisted on sitting on the toilet. After an argument in which I told him he either had to take his towel off and sit on the toilet buck-naked or go and get ready for bed, he took it off, sat and tucked, and ordered me out of the bathroom.

I went into our room to tell Erin about this situation, and the next thing I know, I hear excited footsteps, and Will runs out of the bathroom with a huge grin on his face, and literally does a Tiger Woods fist pump and yells "YEAH!" Sure enough, I checked and there was pee in the potty. We were very excited. Will got a gummy dinosaur (he gets a treat after every successful use of the potty - a trick we learned from Cate's parents), and he just beamed for the remainder of getting him ready for bed. So we'll see if he can do it again tonight!

bath pictures: 19 months

Wow, this is the 20th installment of Will's bath pictures (since I include his first bath). The past month has been the best for Erin and I because the weather has been nice enough to play outside with Will and he LOVES playing outside. We have spent much of the last two weekends working on our yard and landscaping, so while we work Will gets to help by pushing the wheelbarrow, running around chasing the cats, kicking his soccer ball and riding his tractor. Last week we found him a used play-structure thing that has a slide on it, it's been a big hit (look for a blog post on this soon).

We've been going on a lot of walks and have even played a few rounds of disc golf. Also we make lots of trips to the park, where we swing and go down big slides. Bike rides are in now, too - sometimes we go on bike rides that end up at a park for a quick slide-break. A couple weeks ago Will and I went on a bikeride park-crawl when mom had to work late - we hit all the slides at 4 parks in one trip. When we're riding together, Will likes big bumps for some reason, probably because he can yell "buhp buhp!" after we go over them. He definitely likes bike riding much more than he did last year. He at least likes his bike helmet more, wears it around the house even - also, like the Tigers caps, he prefers to wear my giant helmet.

Will has been playing very well with his friends lately. He got to hang out with his buddy Gabe a few times, and has gotten lots of time to play with our next-door neighbors Hannah and Ambrose when we were working outside. And of course, Will got to visit his best girl, Cate. When he decides he just wants to hang out with mom and dad, we do a lot of singing and dancing, and we talk about animals and the noises they make. Will is also getting very good at identifying things - buses, trucks, trees, doggies and kitties, balloons, and many different kinds of balls (he can sort of reliably distinguish basketball, baseball, tennis ball, soccer ball).

He is becoming something of a disobedient little monkey, which is funny but we have to try to stay serious about it. He has a very predictable tendency to tell us "no!" to basically anything we ask him to do. Here's a good way to sum up his general attitude about obeying his parents: we'll be walking somewhere like a store or something, he'll start to wander away. Then we ask him to stop, or come back, and he immediately starts squealing and cackling hysterically while he runs away. So we have to keep a good grip on him in most places.

As you'll see in the next blog post, this running-away-squealing behavior is something we deal with nightly when we get ready for his bath. He also really fights us when we try to brush his teeth now (he used to love brushing!).

Number of visits to Will's page as of this post: 4039

bath pictures: 27 months

We decided that since Will didn't look all that different anymore on a month-to-month basis that we would do at least a few more bath pictures, but spread them out a bit more. So we took some pictures last night.

Since the last bath pictures post, which was on his second birthday, Will has grown up quite a bit. I hope you all can get a sense for this with the blog posts of late, but here are a few short examples from recent weeks on how he is developing.

Will usually listens to his mommy and daddy and responds well to our instructions: Following our (mostly mom's) instructions, he asks nicely when he wants something ("peese?"), excuses himself when he burps or has a "duck butt", and smiles for the camera when instructed. Although, his posing smile always looks like the picture above. (here's another one). He can also follow complex instructions like "take off your socks before you climb in the bath", "close your eyes, don't peek, and hold your arms over your head" or "go downstairs, wake up your daddy, and tell him to change your diaper"

Will wants to do a lot of things by himself, without help from mom or dad. If you insist on doing something for him (because, for example, he cannot possibly put his boots on by himself or figure out the complex button combination required on the Wii remote for the game he's "playing"), this can very quickly turn into a devastating, bawling face-down in the carpet situation. Don't even think about offering to help him put his coat on.

His vocabulary is growing exponentially. The most fun about this is he's starting to be able to sing entire songs, which is really funny because he consistently pronounces some song phrases incorrectly (like how he pronounces "l-m-n-o-p" in the alphabet song). He will spontaneously initiate conversations with people all the time, some of them are already all-timers that we'll retell for years. Another classic came when we were at a Christmas party a few weeks ago in Madison at our friends the Hyer's house. Someone was outside on the porch carrying inside a handful of beverages and dropped one when fumbling with the door. Will, who was standing right on the other side of the door, announced to everyone there: "Oh no, drop a beer!"

Will's memory is outstanding - he must get this from his mama. Some of you know about Erin's uncanny ability to remember what clothes she was wearing at various events in her life, even back to early childhood. While the full potential of this skill as a practical skill is yet to be realized, Will seems to have inherited this skill. For example, several weeks after Will's last visit to Cate's house, we were looking at the blog post for that trip together. When we came to this picture of Will with baby Claire, which shows him wearing a nondescript gray shirt like many he has in his wardrobe, he announced: "Will hawkee-guys shirt!"
You had better not promise him anything he wants for "later" or "tomorrow" and assume he'll forget about it (like a hotdog or pretzels for lunch), because he won't ever forget it. This is especially true if you promise him you'll play something with him later if you're trying to get some work done. He and I play the Wii a lot together - his favorite game is Mariokart (a go-kart racing game) which he calls "Marr race". I think Will would rather "pay marr race" than anything else we do for fun. So he talks about it all the time and sometimes I'll tell him something like we can play Mario race tomorrow morning if he's a good boy and eats his dinner. Sure enough, 7:15 the next morning I will be awoken to Will yelling "DADDY! I PAY MARR RACE!"

When he's not playing Marr race, his playing is very energetic and creative. In addition to loving to play sports in which he barely understands the concept, he has invented several games we play around the house. Some of my favorites include "baby rarr-daddy rarr", in which he and I pretend we're lions and the baby is scared by the daddy's loud and ferocious roar and runs away, being chased by the daddy. Eventually this game ends in tickling. Guess who plays which roles in this game - here's a hint: the daddy lion is much smaller than the yelping baby lion.
My other favorite is one he just invented last week but which we have been playing quite a bit. Basically it involves two pom-poms that Uncle Jeff gave Will which were fan swag from the Packers game we went to last week, and the beanbag chair that Santa brought Will for Christmas. The game starts by one of us holds the pom-poms and chases the other around and around for awhile, shaking the pom-poms at them. Then the chasee eventually jumps on the beanbag chair and screams. Then the chaser catches up, tickles the chasee in the armpits, and performs either a "daddy smoosh" or a "Will smoosh", by laying on the chasee for a few seconds. Then the roles switch and repeat over and over and over.

In his playing, Will is quite brave: he likes to play in the dark for some reason, and will often shut a door for one of the rooms with the light off and then talk about how dark it is. He also likes the Marr race levels with scary ghosts and monsters. Sometimes he will give me a hug when we play these levels because I get scared. He also fearlessly attacks the cats to let them know who runs the house, and has no second thoughts about racing down a mountain on a rocket, even all by himself.

Finally, I am of course a proud parent but I sincerely think Will is a smarter than average little boy. In addition to all the songs he knows and sings, he knows all the letters of the alphabet and can (usually) identify and recite them all. He also knows all the numbers up to twenty (even if he can't quite consistently count in order). Erin tells a story about when he was with her at Story Time at our library and they were reading "Ten in the Bed", where the story counts backward from ten as the little one rolls over or something. Somehow he always knew the next number and would shout it out as all the other kids his age and the other mothers could only look at him in awed silence. For another example, last weekend Erin and I were at Mike & Kristin's wedding and Will got to stay with Grandma & Grandpa Mueller in Madison. One night Will went with Grandma Brenda to wert at the hospital and as always, got to push the buttons on the elevator. Brenda told him to push the button for floor 3, and he had no problem identifying the number amongst all the buttons and pressed it. A nurse who was sharing the elevator with them was very surprised to see him do this and asked him a few questions about how old he was and I guess he responded to all of her questions. I can only assume the whole hospital staff knows about Brenda's brilliant grandson by now.

10881 visits to Will's page as of this post.

bath pictures: 22 months

Hello everyone. Reporting in from Madison, where we're visiting Rah-rah and Grandma. We had a good month - Will got to go to his first baseball game, and we went on some fun trips to Anne & Sean's wedding and to the Lodge, where he did a lot of relaxing, fishing, and swimming in the lake (still at least one more post coming from that trip).

Will is quite the animated little guy now - he is quite wiggly (living up to his nickname), but affectionate - he gives us lots of hugs and kisses. He likes to clap and dance and sing and whine and just generally be silly. He has his favorite TV shows which we watch every morning together which help him with a few moves, like the one below (blastoff).



He's very interested in baseball, busses, and choo-choos. Our friends Mike and Kristin got Will these three bath-toy trains the last time we got together at Cate's house. He wasn't too into them at the time, but now they are one of his favorite toys. They're each named, also - I won't spoil the upcoming blog post too much, but one of the trains is named "dada".



Another thing we do a lot lately is TICKLE. Sometimes I'll give him a good tummy-tickling session to the point where he is laughing so hard he can hardly breathe, but he will continually sign "more" until I am worn out from tickling. He also will sneak up and tickle me a lot.



6334 visits to Will's page as of this posting.