Learning new tricks

Mitch is learning new games all the time. He plays Peek-a-Boo with you by holding up a towel in front of his face and then pulling it down and he loves to knock down towers you build for him like in the pictures below.
First from across the room he sees the tower. It calls to him saying "Knock me down!"

The approach begins!

And after the fall, in the distance a boy crawls away, his work done, leaving boxes strewn in his wake


Sorry about the crappy quality of the photos. I'm a bit frustrated at the moment at the quality of the photos we can produce. The photos from the camera phone and video camera used to be good enough, but I have been wooed by what is possible using one of these or one of these. Oh well, keep dreaming with prices around the $1000 mark! Still it would be nice :) I have been using a new free image processing program which is just super and really powerful. It has most of the capabilities of ones like Photoshop, but it's free. It's called Paint.Net and you can download it from here. It uses Microsoft .Net, so you will need Windows XP (or Vista) and the download is 50Mb if you don't already have .Net installed or 5Mb if you do. It runs on our 6 and a half year old PC (P3 800 with 768Mb RAM), but not very well. Some of the effects are amazing, and you can do a lot to improve photos, although it obviously depends on the quality you start off with.

What else is news? Well Mitchy now has 7 teeth which he uses to eat all sorts of food. His favourite is still yoghurt, but he has added a number of things to his gastronomic repertoire. He has porridge with pureed apple and sultanas for breakfast along with a slice of bread with butter and vegemite. If you help him he eats it, if you don't he picks up the little squares puts them in his mouth, sucks all the vegemite off, and then spits them out. He also quite often has portions of what mummy and daddy have been eating - generally somewhat more chopped of course. He's had a couple of tasty pieces of steak recently, which he enjoyed a great deal. He even had some moussaka!

He now says "dadada", although that is pretty much directed at anything, not me specifically. We think he also said "car" the other day in reference to his "That's not my car" book, but that could have been anything. It's a bit hard to know. Meeks is sad that he still hasn't said "mama", but I'm sure that is just around the corner. He also likes to make a 'ssssss' sound.

He pulls himself up on anything and everything, including the garbage bin and toilet seat, so we have had to move the bin into the cupboard and make sure we keep the bathroom door shut. Some mornings he stands at the front window and bangs on the glass as he watches Daddy walk down the front stairs and go off to work. It's so hard to leave with this little face at the window watching. He furniture surfs around the lounge room and stands happily with one hand casually resting on the couch, but hasn't stood up without touching anything yet. Meeks thinks he'll be walking before he's one, and I guess with the amount of progress he's made in the last two months, he should be able to master walking in the next 2 and a half months before he is one.

He just loves the dishwasher for some bizarre reason. He can be in his room and if you open the dishwasher he hears it and you hear the slap, slap, slap of his little hands as he races down the hallway so he can crawl into the dishwasher. If you let him, he will crawl up onto the door when it is open, and into the dishwasher if you let him, crazy little boy.

He's brought so much joy to us over the past 9 and a half months. It's bizarre to think in a couple of months he will be one!