Growth spurt

Rye has been going through a growth spurt, with all of the trimmings: sleeplessness, hearty appetite and new tricks! Some mornings he snacks for two hours or so and he never really finishes eating so much as he gets interested in his play and forgets to eat some more.

• While wrangling him to go to bed the other night, he lay on his side, curved into a C, and said: "I'm a rainbow with my feet on the ground."

• He pulled a cork and a chopstick out of the play-dough kit, and put the chopstick into the hole on the cork. "Look, Mommy! It's a marshmallow!" I laughed and said, Are you going to toast it? And he immediately held it up to the lightbulb of a nearby lamp, waited, then pulled it out and pretended to snack on it.

• "Mommy, singing is just telling a story."

It is, Rye! How did you know that? Who told you that?

"Nobody told me. I told me that. Rye said it."

• Speaking of singing, heard loosely to the tune of "baa baa black sheep":

"Dump truck, Dump truck, Dump truck....have you dumped your load?

yessir, yessir, yessir.....mini-loaderrrrr......"

and

"Miniloader takes the dirt to Dump truck......Dump truck drives to the factoryyyyyy."

and

"Twin-tle, Twin-tle, little star. How I wonder what you are. (Cuts to speaking voice) The star says: 'I'm a star!'" ....

• He whined the other night about wanting some medicine. He's been fighting a series of colds for about a month. The homeopathic remedies we give him are sweet, and he doesn't mind taking them. When I explained (again) that "medicine" is for correcting a problem you are having, like a stuffy nose, or a cough, he spent the next five minutes offering weak, forced coughs, and looking at me with Puss-in-Boots eyes.

• He sat at his high chair and swung his feet forward and back, forward and back, scuffing the foot platform like the Flintstones driving their car, saying, "LOOK! It looks like I'm running, but I'm not going anywhere!"

• He is working on his 1:1 correspondence with counting. He counted mommy's fingers: 1, 2, 3, which represented three cars. He counts on his own to six, using pictures in magazines to count birds, flowers and animals in the pictures, and somehow knows that sixteen comes after fifteen and fifteen after fourteen.