Hey everyone, it's been a very busy couple of weeks for dada, but we're getting some good pictures here in Madison so I wanted to be sure to wrap up our trip to the Lodge a few weeks ago so we can post those next week.
Will spent a lot of time playing on the porch area - you can see he has his shark tent set up here, and he also spent a lot of time playing with a wooden choo-choo that my dad and grandpa made for me when I was his age. Also, on this day someone gave him a roll of choo-choo wrapping paper and he made short work of it.
My dad was painting one of the doors a bright Cornhusker red, and he has this thing about painting noses. When we were young, and even not-so-young, he would always do this, kind of a running family gag. So Will got to have a red nose for a day.
When we aren't playing in the lake or fishing, there was lots of relaxing to do. Here Will's enjoying a book with Unky Grant.
Taking a snooze with Grandma.
Here he's rocking Guitar Hero with mom. I got this game and two guitars for my birthday, it's been a big hit.
Since Will showed he was kind of afraid of the water (or at least the mucky sand) this year, the girls got him a couple of things to encourage more fun in the water. The boat thing was pretty fun but I think Uncle Adam got more fun out of it than Will did. He did like the seahorse-innertube thing though, as long as his piggies didn't have to touch the ground.
We had so much fun that we stayed up late often and skipped a lot of baths, but when we did give Will a bath, it was a sink splashin' good time!
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.
My extended family, most notably my grandfathers and dad and brother Grant, are avid fishermen. When we're together at the Lodge it is common for us to get up at the crack of dawn (well, maybe not that early) and get a few hours of fishing in before the rest of the group even rolls out of bed. Well, since Grandpa and Will are best buddies and were usually the first two people awake when we were up at the Lodge, on several mornings they went fishing together.
Will has been excited about fishing with Grandpa, and has talked with him about it on the phone, since our most recent trip to Lincoln - the two of them watched a few fishing shows together, and Will still holds his arms out as wide as he can (as in "this big") to describe the fish that they saw caught. So it was very fun for him to go with Grandpa and catch fish. At first Will was a bit scared of the fish, but eventually, with help and encouragement from Grandpa, he got brave enough to touch them. By the end of the trip, before we would throw any fish back, it became a requirement that Will touch them first.
It helped Will's interest in fishing to be able to do some himself, so one day Uncle Grant and Grandpa went into town and bought Will his own little fishing pole. He had a great time carrying and casting it in the water and around the house. A couple times when we went fishing, he insisted that I fish with his pole instead of a real one...
Obviously I don't have any pictures from when just the two of them (Gramps and Will) went out in the morning because I was taking full advantage of the sleep-in opportunities. But a few times we went out together later in the day, as did Erin (who by the way, despite her crippling fear of fish is a very good sport about fishing, as long as she doesn't have to touch the fish).
In the above pictures, Will's doing "blastoff" from Little Einsteins (like he did to help the plane take off), which helps the boat go faster.
Speaking of the boat, Will had an ongoing joke with Grandpa and whoever else wanted to play throughout the trip. Just a few weeks prior, he had learned how to pronounce the consonant 's', by learning what sound a snake makes at the library. So he worked on that for awhile, and on this trip, he discovered that he could pronounce the full word "bus", including the 's' on the end - instead of the previous pronunciation: "buh!". Anyway, he was particularly pleased with himself and repeated "a bussss" a lot on this trip, so inevitably we heard a lot of "busssses" on our boat rides together. Well, at some point we tried to teach him how to say "boat", and eventually a situation came up where we pointed to a boat and asked him what it was, and he responded "a busss!"
Thus began the joke. Even though he could sort of pronounce "boat" (more like "buht!"), he thought it was funny to argue with all of us - whenever we would see a boat Will would point at it and say "a Buss!" and laugh hysterically. We'd say "no, silly, that's a boat!" and he would say "naooo, a Buss!". More laughter, on and on.
Eventually, we got Will to say his version of "fish" too - which sounds kind of like "buss" - so he could recant his fishing stories to everyone else at the Lodge. It happens that Grandpa's fishing cap has a fish on it, and Will happily pointed this out fairly often. Like he often does with my Tigers cap, several times he insisted that he get to wear Grandpa's hat with the fish on it. Then of course Grandpa has to wear Will's hat in order for everything to be just right.
This is the second summer my parents have owned a cabin up in the North Woods of Wisconsin, and since we had so much fun there all together last summer (here's a quick link guide to our trip there last summer: arriving, grandpa, waving, clothesline, swimming, bye-bye, back), we made plans early this year for my side of the family to meet up there again for a week. We drove straight to the Lodge from Anne & Sean's wedding in Galena, IL. We weren't there 15 minutes before Will had latched on to his Grandpa (his other "Rah-rah"), and they were pretty much inseparable for the week we were there.
Here they're sharing a snack together. Also putting their piggies in the water - Will wasn't really liking walking in the lake because the sand weirded him out for some reason. But dippin' piggies is pretty fun. Also note the blue crocs (the plastic shoe things) he has on - they're the same as Grandpa's, which made them something Will very much wanted to wear.
After Anne & Sean's wedding, we were feeling good and ready to party. The music (which Paul, Sara, Erin, and I played/sang - here and here) sounded great (if I may say so) and the ceremony was beautiful. The reception party was top-notch, great food and drink, and a nice atmosphere.
We were lucky enough to get seated at a table with our friends the Ridgely's, and a lot of the other "camping family" members were at the tables around us. Carolyn Ridgely (on the right in the picture above) never fails to bring some hilarious props to weddings and other events where this group gets together, and always brings enough for all of us.
This time she brought rockstar glitter glasses.
Will had a great time trying on glasses, playing with his bus and a beanbag baseball Grandma got him, running around with his Grandpa, and generally trying to create mischief.
But he also found time to pick up chicks. This is Tayah (sorry if the spelling is wrong), a member of the camping family, just a year older than Will. Tayah really likes being barefoot and she helped Will take his shoes off too.
Once dinner was finished and we hit the dance floor Will really cut loose. Carolyn also brought a bunch of glow sticks, which were just the right size for necklaces, and also in Will's case, a fashionable glow-belt.
At this point it was already past Will's bedtime but we decided we'd let him party with us as long as he was having a good time. And he did, he was laughing and dancing and yelling. My favorite part was when he was doing all the dance moves he does to "Wheels on the Bus" (go round and round...) to some hip-hop song.
About the time we were thinking about getting Will to bed, it was time for the bridal bouquet and garter-throwings. Uncle Jeff took Will for the garter thing, because he was an eligible bachelor.
But he got a little confused when the girls went out to catch the bouquet and followed them. Either that or he was going out to hit on them.
Our friend Al in the white dress: "Ok Will, you get the next dance"
So we took him home after that, what a great time for the little party animal. He was a very good boy too, went right to bed and woke up at his usual early time the next morning. We had saved some of the party props and he insisted on putting them back on right away in the morning, which made our ride up to the Lodge (coming in the next blog post) that much more fun!
Will got to see both Grandpas over the last week, and he really likes his Grandpas. For whatever reason, probably because they're fun, Will wanted to do nothing if it wasn't with a Grandpa. Soon after we got to the resort for Anne and Sean's wedding, Will was insisting that Grandpa Paul play with all of his buses and choo-choos with him.
When we were practicing the music for the wedding at the wedding-tent, Will tagged along to listen. Paul played for one of the songs, then he and Will explored the area together while Erin, Sara, and I practiced the other songs. For a couple hours Will wanted to hang out only with his Grandpa - we heard lots of enthusiastic yells of "Bwa-Bwa", or "Vwa-Vwa", or "Rah-Rah" - the various pronunciations he tried for "grandpa". The funny thing was he didn't want anyone else to join them, just wanted Grandpa all to himself. He would actually get mad if anyone else approached the two of them, so we had to take pictures from a distance.
These are some pics that are pretty representative of what he did if anyone other than Grandpa tried to hold him or get a picture taken with him. In the shot on the right, he's about to slap the camera away. This is what he would do to me and others if we got too close to the Will-Grandpa space - run up and push us away, with accompanying whining. As in, "go away, I'm playing with my Rah-rah over here." I'm not bitter or anything - it was kind of cute. And he really had a great time playing with his Rah-rahs. He eventually let other people play with him/them, but there were several periods of time where he decided everyone else except Grandpa had to go away.
The only family picture arrangement that was acceptable to Will
Hey everyone, we just got back this evening from a blogless vacation - we left on Thursday the 17th for Anne and Sean's wedding (it was great), then spent a week at the Lodge in Wisconsin. LOTS of pictures to post over the next few weeks from those trips, so I thought I'd catch up with some pictures from earlier this month.
First we have Will and Erin playing airplane - since Will knows about airplanes now it's fun to pretend to be one and fly around.
Below Will is wearing the outfit Erin got him for the 4th of July and playing outside like an all-American boy - patriotic little guy. On the right he's working on his sneer.
Here we have Will hiding in the bushes during a round of disc golf with mom and dad. He always likes to go disc golfing, and will walk and hold/throw his discs for much of it. But inevitably he gets bored with being obedient and starts running off, cackling as we chase and scold him. Here he tried to hide from us after being chased around a bush.
These next pictures are very special and I wish I had enough of them to warrant a full blog post. Will was getting undressed for his bath, but as his shirt got stuck when I tried to take it off, he thought it was very funny to remain in this stage of undress, and posed to make his mom laugh. He's actually flexing his muscles, pro-wrestling style. I am trying to get pictures of more muscle poses.
