"no, no, no"

a couple of weeks ago boden started shaking his head no. it is actually pretty cute, even when you are sternly telling him "no" and he starts to shake his head no (very hard to keep a straight face). shortly after that he started going around saying "no, no, no" repeatedly while he was playing. wasn't sure if it was legit or not, but it seems like he is doing it fairly consistently and somewhat in context. "no, no, no" to the balls rolling around the room, "no, no, no" as he pushes food away from him....

"done." have been wondering about this word for a while now too. sometimes it seems very clear that he is saying it after we ask him if he is done, but he doesn't necessarily initiate it to tell us he is done (wouldn't that be helpful???). well, this morning at breakfast, he was fussing and fussing and finally i firmly asked him if he was done. if he was, i would take him out and put him down on the floor. if he wanted 'more' (we have really been trying to get this word out of him as well. ball and car do not help us much on a daily basis with communicating our needs :) ), i would get him more to eat. he sat still and you could see him thinking, and then he said very clearly - "done." so, we whipped him out of there as quick as we could to hopefully reinforce the meaning of that word!

boden's hair was getting long (mommy and daddy's too). we want to have auntie liz take some family portraits soon for greeting cards and we had a tiemeyer christmas party in the afternoon (more later), so, we wanted him to look shipshape. haircuts thus far have required some creativity, but have been manageable. well, it seems like haircuts and doctor visits now fall into the same category for us - boden does not like it and he is sure to let you know that he doesn't! after about 3 laborious snips of the scissors and daddy dancing around to music, family pictures on the computer, and yo gabba gabba party in my tummy, i was ready to throw down the scissors in frustration. (later when we were relaying the story to papa and grammy on our ride to great grandma tiemeyer's house, grammy said, so this is probably about the age parents start letting their kids' hair grow long? -said with a smile. i laughed and said, yes! at the moment above that i was about to throw in the scissors, i told eric, we shouldn't have even started, now he has big ol' chunks out of his hair! eric said, well, what would we do instead? i said, let it grow long!!!) eric said, let me do it then. i was like, no way. so, i tried a couple more times and gave him the scissors..... at first eric went about it gingerly as i gave him a few instructions. before long, he was going at boden like i'd seen him cut cow tales in the barn :) leaning all into him with commanding authority. for the most part, thru lots of tears, boden bent to his will. we laughed at different points today as we see a couple spots that are tell tales of daddy's first haircut, but i must admit, he didn't do all that bad a job. so now daddy has two more jobs - cutting boden's hair and cutting boden's fingernails (also a very similar story to the one described above that took place about a month ago ....).