Tickle Monster!

For some reason, Jude has recently decided that he should "tickle" Ben and me when we crawl on the floor to clean up around his chair at dinner or snack time. We have no idea what prompted him to decide that this was a good time to tickle us. While we certainly have a fair amount of tickling in our household, it's not like we do any tickling at the table. Jude's been doing the occasional "tick-uh, tick-uh," since April (he first "tickled" me on a Sunday afternoon when Jonah and I were laid up sick on the couch), but recent weeks feature regular tickling sessions like this one:

He so thoroughly enjoys himself when he does this to us and his laughter and his pleasure in it is infectious. We love playing up our reaction to encourage the fun. Now if only we could keep him from pulling my hair in conjunction with the tickling...

Pour Some Water on Me!

It's been over a year since we've taken the time to blog. Yikes! I guess life just got busy and priorities changed. Finding time to blog didn't take precedence, even though we've been documenting the kids by taking lots of photos and videos and posting the sweet, silly, and insane little comments they make on Facebook. But as Jude's been getting bigger, I find myself looking back more and more to remember where Jonah was at this stage or what he enjoyed doing, etc. Not so much to compare them directly, but more for reference points. And it's nice to read back through some longer pieces to remember what we were doing and feeling at particular points in time. So my hope is to try to do a bit more blogging in the coming weeks and months, even if they aren't particularly long posts.

So... to get things started, I thought I'd share this video taken on Monday. We pulled out the water table and set it up on the front yard in the hopes that it would entertain the boys for a while and I could do some weeding in one of the flower beds nearby and Ben could till the garden out back. This was the first time that Jude really was able to play at the water table as a water table. He was too little to use it last summer (not standing at all), and we pulled it out once over the winter and filled it with birdseed in the house so he could just have some tactile play when we couldn't get outside.

Needless to say, he LOVED it and enjoyed pouring the water on himself just as much as anything else (well, he did also like to drink the water out of the cup).

Between the water table and the sandbox, we had four (if not more) outfit changes over the course of the day. I think we need to get this little guy to the pool!