My little Tobin,

Here we are, in your last month of your second year.  Your dad and have been marveling about how fast it’s gone.  It seems like you were just a tiny newborn. When I carry you now, you usually wrap your legs around my waist, but sometimes you don’t, especially when you’re sleepy.  When I’m holding you that way, you take up so much of me:  your head is on my shoulder, your arms around my ribs, and your legs trailing down my legs.  Can you possibly be the baby I used to carry in one arm?

You’ve always been a sweetie, and you still mostly are, but you’re becoming more opinionated lately.  I think you’re realizing that not everything in the world is a foregone conclusion.  People make choices, and you’re a person, and you have preferences.  When the way things are doesn’t match up with the way you’d like things to be, you can express your frustration pretty noisily.  Often it’s genuine anger, but other times it seems like you’re practicing the expression more than feeling the true emotion.  You’ll stomp your foot and say, “I’m so mad!”  If you happen to be near a mirror (which is a lot of the time, since there’s a full-length mirror on your brother’s door, and his room is your favorite place in the house), you watch yourself make angry faces.

Not only is your brother’s room your favorite, anything he has or does is also your favorite.  Today you came around the corner wearing his sandals and his blue beaded necklace.  “These are my favorite shoes,” you said.

In Miles’s old Halloween costume

You’ve been working on some subtleties of language.  Beyond your usual verbosity, you’ve been noticeably turning sentences into questions, with an exaggerated upward lilt at the end.  You’ve been working the wordalsointo conversation.  When someone suggests something out of the ordinary, you say, “That could be funny” or “That could be silly.”  I appreciate your use of the conditional tense.

You’ve also been into substituting different words into “Elmo’s Song,” to suit whatever is on your mind at the moment.  Your current favorite toy is a John Deere bulldozer we serendipitously found in the back of a closet somewhere, and you’ve been cramming that whole phrase into the song.

La la la  (only you say it more like ya ya ya)
John Deere Bulldozer puzzle song!
He wrote music, he wrote words.
That John Deere bulldozer puzzle sooooooong!

You love to play outside, and the heat has abated enough in recent days that you’ve been able to again.  As soon as we get anywhere close to done with dinner, you start asking, “We play outside?  You done yet, Daddy?  We play outside now?” You love the water, too.  The downtown fountain is always a big hit, and when we went swimming with your cousins last week, you would have marched right into the deep end if we hadn’t stopped you.  You are sometimes too brave for your own good.  We wash our hands a lot around here, due largely to a gross habit you’ve developed that involves personal exploration of the excretory kind, and you love splashing around in the sink.  I turn on the water a tiny trickle (though you usually request “too much”) plug the sink, and let you fill cups and dribble water from your fingers.  It’s nice that you’re tall enough to reach the sink now, with the help of a stool.  It does make for a lot more wet towels on the floor in your wake, though.

Photo by Gary Clarke

You are crazy for Popsicles, sprinkle cheese, and garden carrots.  You think it’s the coolest thing ever to pull a carrot from the ground, wash it off with the hose, and eat it outside.  You enjoy broccoli, asparagus, raspberries (ideally from the garden, but from Hy-Vee is acceptable, too), and strawberries.  You love it when your brother tickles your legs with his face and hair, and when he does something strange, you frown and say, “Brother’s unusual.”

Nana and Papa got you an early birthday present of a Strider bike, which is a little bike with no pedals that you scoot around on with your feet.  The idea is that you get used to the feeling of balancing on the bike, and when it’s time to upgrade to a big one, you won’t need training wheels.  You’re still getting the hang of it, but you definitely think it’s cool to go out biking with Miles, especially since you get to wear a helmet just like him.

Photo by Gary Clarke

On some of the really hot days, we stayed inside and did craft activities.  You don’t always do things exactly the way we plan, but you have fun.  A hint to parents out there:  never have any art supplies in your home that are not washable.  Maintaining that rule has saved us a lot of stress, especially after you decided you needed red hair.

This morning you very proudly gave me a picture you’d drawn for me.  Whenever I tried to set it down, you pressed it back into my hands.  I may just have to find some place special for that one.

You can still be my baby for another month, right?

And probably a lot longer than that.

Love,

Mommy