Poor Arthur! It has been so long since I have written about you and now I am forced to recollect all of the things that I should have been recording. There is a very good reason for the gap in your records; the past five months have contained some monumental changes for all of us. We packed up our house and moved at the end of June and we have been slowly unpacking and building our lives in Charlottetown. Our summer was full of trips to the beautiful spots around the island that we had missed: Bonshaw, Canoe Cove, Orwell Corner, Brackley, New Glasgow. We visited so many of the playgrounds in Charlottetown and founds some favorites like Dino Park and Tree Park. Our yard was a haven from the hot sun, so we were able to spend a lot of time under the trees playing with the water table, bubbles, trucks and cars, and you loved hanging out in the shed.
Arthur has shown his spirit of adventure and does not seem to have many reservations about new things or potentially dangerous things. He loves to climb, slide, run and is eager to be able to reach the ground on the balance bike. He loves to play chase still and shrieks and giggles, especially when Elsie runs with him. We found out that Arthur likes pushing his trucks in the sand at the beach and he seems to have learned about laying down in the sand from a fairly tame fox up on Robinson's Island. Martin and Arthur are still enjoying their morning outings and I am still enjoying sleeping in with Elsie. They go for walks mostly downtown to the harbour and then make their way back home, stopping at a park on the way. Luckily Arthur's been waking up at a decent hour (around 7:00), so they don't have too much time to kill before Elsie wakes up at 9:00. Arthur still takes a nap that was starting at around 10:30, but is starting to slowly migrate toward the early afternoon.
Tractors, lawn mowers, four wheelers, trailers, cars, bikes, and planes and helicopters (since moving back to Charlottetown) are much the focus of Arthur's interests. Anything that moves, basically. He plays with his toy cars, tractors, and a toy train that Shannon got for him. Every now and then he has been playing more imagination games and I hear him babbling away with some toy animals. In this picture below, Arthur had been lining up all of the vehicles he found. He likes to mash play-doh and drop it on the ground, press the chalk into the chalk wall and make powerful lines, cuddle with the cats and Camber (he calls her Amber), and when he was about 17-18 months old, he started really wanting to be read to. The reading thing is interesting because Martin and I had really not concentrated on reading to Arthur like we did with Elsie. We didn't make it a part of bedtime routine, we just had the books out and about. He started bringing them to us and even flipping through them on his own. His favorites right now are Danny and Debby Hide and Seek, The Big Red Barn, Goodnight Moon, and the Cat book.
Arthur can say or try to say so many words. My favorite word he says is "Elsie", because he loves her so much and I love that she is special to him. Here's my attempt at a vocabulary list: train, airport (apo), jet, helicopter (hecop), ambulance (ambeeo), boo, moo, fish, bowl, cup, juice, puppy, goat, eggie, up, "look up", moon, light, white, green, yellow, purple, brown, blue, orange, gold, cookie, cracker, jump, hop, Mama, Papa, doll, bear, boopie (he pronounces it beepie and I'm fairly sure he thinks he is saying boopie), sleep, poop, pee, shoe, coat, hat... you get the picture. There've been a couple of times that I thought he has said "I want that", but he doesn't use sentences yet really. There are currently a lot of babble stories, like when he was pointing to the spinning wheel and telling me a lot about it and I was hearing the occasional "no" and "don't don't" in his story. He had an experience recently in which I had to tell him "no" and "don't touch that" because he broke a piece of the spinning wheel. He definitely remembered it.
Martin weighed Arthur over the Thanksgiving weekend and he was 27 lbs. I don't remember how tall he is, but on the growth chart he is just a bit over the 50th percentile. He seems big to us and people tend to comment about how tall he is, but apparently he is actually average size. He had his first dentist visit about a month ago and his teeth are healthy, with only 4 more molars to come, I think.
We really appreciate Arthur's easy going nature. He laughs easily, gives great hugs, and loves to snuggle. We're so happy he's a part of our family and we're even happier that he is growing up into a little boy. He's 21 months old!
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