Brought to you by the letter "B"

Andrew's language acquisition skills continue on apace. This week's sound of choice seems to be "ba." However, because of an unfortunate tendency to drop the latter syllables of most words, this means that this same useful sound appears to be applied indiscriminately to indicate "ball" "bottle" (sippy cup), "bath," "bye," (although here he sometimes supplies "ba ba") instead, and "baby." Context generally helps here, but not always.

And, in the spirit of Valentine's Day, Andrew seems to have fallen in love. Not with some dark-eyed, curly-haired damsel of his own tender years, but with that perennial favorite of little boys everywhere: ball. We unearthed a garage sale purchase that lets him pound four different balls into a little maze, from whence they drop out of an opening in the bottle of the box. He has spent most of the last couple of days carrying anywhere from one to three of these balls around the house with him. I'm sure he'd carry all four, if he could only handle the logistics of that. And of course, he continues to love his basketball, soccer ball, bowling ball. You'd think that, with all these balls around, he wouldn't need any more. But no. Yesterday, at Walmart, we passed a number of carts with giant soft balls in them. Andrew stared hard at the first, and then announced delightedly, "ba. ba. ba." Of course, what could a doting mother do when we passed the giant stack of balls but pull one out? (They were quite cheap, too.) Andrew spent the rest of the time halfway swivelled around so that he could pat his new acquisition and announce to anyone in earshot that this, indeed, was a "ba." This fascination is quite useful in distracting him, too. If he's heading towards danger (he likes to try to unplug one of the lamps from the wall), I can often head him off by asking him to find his ball. Sometimes, of course, this doesn't come across so well. Earlier this week, when he was trundling around with three little balls tucked under his arms, I asked him, "Andrew, can you show me your balls?" Almost as soon as I'd uttered the words I realized that they didn't sound quite right. Dan looked at me for a moment and then said, "Please don't ever say that again."

This week has been marked by singularly cold weather--cold enough that several of the area school districts closed on Tuesday this week (there was a wind chill warning in effect) and others were on two hour delays--apparently because it was too cold for the buses to run at their appointed times. At any rate, it meant that we didn't go out of the house more often than strictly necessary, and when we did, we bundled up! I think the reality of how cold it was finally hit me when, as the high temperatures finally edged up into the high teens, low twenties, it actually felt warm.

As you can perhaps tell, this was not a very exciting week for us. Dan spent some extra time at work, which meant I spent some extra time with Andrew: Wednesday night Dan stayed at lab until nearly four in the morning to try and finish a project, and Friday night he had to go schmooze with the potential lab manager who will take over after Andy leaves. The most exciting thing we did as a group was go out to eat at Hoss's--sort of the local equivalent of Sizzler's. I don't think it would have occurred to us to go on our own, but a generous client at the Writing Center chose to express her gratitude for my help in getting her to graduate (I don't know how many hours we spent on her master's paper!) by buying us gift cards. It turned out to be pretty perfect for Andrew--the salad bar was free for children under five, so he chowed down on macaroni and cheese, cottage cheese, fruit, ham, eggs, etc. If the food itself wasn't gourmet, it was reasonably good, and it meant that neither of us had to cook!

Our other excitement of the week came from Andrew's doctor's appointment on Friday. Every couple of weeks the Children's Heart Group in Hershey sends a doctor up to Boalsburg (near State College) for rotating appointments, so we took Andrew in to get his heart checked out. (This was a follow-up visit to his visit to Hershey in August). He had to have another echocardiogram (an ultrasound of his heart), which sorely tried his patience--the only time Andrew voluntarily stays in one spot for more than a minute or two is when he's asleep. The doctor tried to distract him with a portable DVD player with an Elmo video, which, while doubtless enthralling to his more discerning cousin Julia, held no such interest for Andrew. At last, however, they succeeded in getting the information that they needed, which was basically that there's been no change since our last visit--Andrew still has a mild case of pulmonic stenosis (which means a slight narrowing of his pulmonary valve), but the doctor said that, unless it gets worse, it shouldn't hinder him from any of the normal activities of boys (little and not so little). Even if it does get worse, there's apparently a fairly straightforward balloon procedure that they perform that will correct the problem. So it seems that's he's doing fine. They want to see him again in six-months, as a follow-up. Andrew also charmed the nursing staff by wandering into their on-call area (anywhere he could get to, as a matter of fact), a procedure that his mother found more exasperating than charming. (He'd already managed to try to empty all of the kleenex boxes in the waiting room, try to empty the garbage can, and push around the wheelchair they kept in the corner for patients). I'm just glad that we don't have to spend more time in the doctor's office!

One more note on the Andrew front: for some reason our house seems to have shifted (we're not sure if it's the cold weather, or what). This means, among other things, that the only indoor door that seems to latch properly is the bathroom door. Our bedroom door, in particularly, does not! Andrew has since discovered that this previously forbidden zone (it's the least baby-proof of all the areas in the house) is now his at the push of his hand. So, we spend an obscene amount of time chasing him down the hallway and out of our room. One of his favorites is to wait just inside the doorway until he's sure we've seen him, and then with an impish giggle he'll shut the door (where he proceeds to either pull our phone off the hook, strew Dan's ties around his closet, or commit some other form of mayhem, if we don't catch him quickly enough).

As usual, we'll close with a few shots of Andrew, including a close-up that only a mother could love. (And even then, maybe not always her!).