2 Years & 11 Months

  Ryan is having fun getting into the busy Fall routine. He now goes to daycare Monday-Thursday and spends Friday with my mom. It's been hot lately but he's still played football and baseball a lot at daycare. He is also very interested in collecting bugs. He loves looking for moths, ants and will pick up live ones with his bare hands. At grandma's, he spent an afternoon collecting dead bugs with his tweezers, including a dragonfly, cricket, grasshopper and June Bug. This is why it's so odd that he's still terribly afraid of flies!

Ryan is telling longer and more detailed stories now--he can tell one story about his day all the way from Alton to Orange City. He is also more tuned in to conversations around him. If something peaks his interest, he'll ask,"What are you talking about?" to get more info. He also notices if we're talking about him at all. This gets confusing if we ever talk about anyone else named Ryan. This week he was in the car with his daycare family and the radio announcer was talking about Paul Ryan's speech at the RNC and Ryan asked, "Are they talking about ME?"

Inside, his favorite things are tackling with Daddy, setting up his farm animals, and building Lego zoos. He enjoys helping me cook (especially washing grapes so he can snitch about 20 of them before dinner) and loves the new mini-carts at Fareway.

I have a feeling we'll attend our fair share of football games this fall. We went to a tailgate and the first Dutch football game and NWC's first game of the season.  He likes cheering for his teams and watching them tackle, but even with popcorn or fruit snacks, I'm not sure he'll last beyond the first half.

He's doing great in his new room and has only fallen out of bed twice. Otherwise, he does a great job staying in bed at night.  Potty training has still been a bit frustrating as he'll do great for a while, then have a few accidents in a row, announcing at the time exactly what he did and what he was supposed to do.

Ryan likes to keep people entertained with his stories and anecdotes (some of which are true, some are complete imagination) and he especially likes talking about animals. He will explain how elephants have long trunks that they use to spray water on themselves like a bath, how chameleons change colors, how pigs roll in the mud to stay cool, how cows eat silage, etc. He is very curious about where all kinds of animals live and what they eat. He is also quite honest, so when I pick him up from daycare, he'll immediately launch into a story of what he did if he got in trouble that day (usually involving fighting with T, the other boy about his age, or getting upset over losing a game).