Arden Weekly – Sloshin’

Hello again!  It’s nice to be back among the living and able to catch up.  As you saw last week, I had been feeling pretty run down (read: over) and wasn’t able to drag my body over to the blogosphere to get you your last week’s Arden-fix.  Hope a couple of videos help mend some of your craving sores.  Thanks again for your patience and for all the well wishers checking in.  As you can probably tell by the non-zombie tone thus far I’m feeling much better.  Arden didn’t show more than a couple drips from the nose, and Arijem pulled me through the whole ordeal with nary a sniffle.  I’m glad for that!

So, since last time what has happened?  That tooth I warned you was starting is now almost halfway through and seems to be treating him quite nicely.  Oh!  The BIG news…Arden has slept through the night!  (finally)  He went until 6:30 without Mom last Sunday out of the blue.  Arijem and I were both up at 4 concerned about him, and couldn’t sleep again until he finally stirred around 6:15.  I think we checked on him every 5 minutes to make sure everything was okay, which, of course it was.  He pulled the same trick on us Monday and Tuesday nights, but has shied away from it since.  We surely didn’t handle it as well as he did though, but that’s okay, we’re big kids now.  😀  I’m not sure if he’s sprouting a few more teeth now and that’s why he’s not sleeping through or if the time change has screwed enough with the light out during bedtime that it’s put him off kilter or what.  At any rate, he hasn’t had a repeat performance of that hardcore sleep mode.  I’m sort of expecting it tonight since we played hard for almost 2 hours outside today, but you never can tell.

Arden has been especially fond of playing piano lately.  He’ll run over to it, hammer out a tune, sometimes a single note; sometimes a dozen chords, and run to the middle of the hallway and posture whilst waiting for applause.  Once we clap a while we must say ‘more’ lest we get a pretty dirty sneer.  Once the encore is called he’ll run back to the piano, play movement n+1 and the process invariably repeats itself until our little composer finds himself simply bored with us common folk.

Speaking of us common folk we’ve had tons of visitors lately.  We had a nice visit from gMa and gPa, Bonnie and Link stopped in for a bit one day and last weekend Uncle Kyle brought his girl friend down for a day.  Arden had such a blast keeping every entertained and showing off all his new tricks.  You should see Kyle and ‘Zelle cut a rug to Arden’s favorite tune ‘Popcorn’.  ‘Popcorn’ is an older children’s song that Arijem has on a record (apparently those things still exist), and has a very danceable tune…not that I’ll ever admit dancing like a clown to it…for Arden’s entertainment sake, naturally.  There are some other really fun songs on those records that Arden enjoys, we’ll have to get a video of him dancing to them one of these days, or you could just join the menagerie of visitors and show off your moves in person!  We promise it won’t hit youTube until long after you leave…maybe even minutes!

Our little buddy is starting to get much more expressive about letting us know what he wants.  He’s sort of a little passive-aggressive about it too though.  Say, for instance Mom’s reading the book that she picked out and not the one he chose.  His most recent tactic would be to try to take her glasses so she would have to stop reading that book and pick up his.  Or if we had the TV on and he was ready for it to be off, he’ll either stand in front of it, start closing the armoire doors or just turn it off himself!  Probably the most entertaining pushiness comes when Mom’s trying to get an email out to her clique or check the weather on her computer.  In these situations he’ll look at her computer, get her attention and then make his snoring sound, letting her know it’s time to put the computer to sleep.  He’s usually pretty good about giving us a second or two to finish up what we’ve been doing, but we have to watch it too.  I know I, and definitely Arijem, really appreciate him letting us know when he’s ready for one-on-one attention again, he’s always been very good about reducing the amount of guesswork we have to do.

As you can see from the video we took today, we’ve finally had nice enough weather to get out of the house and check out the world.  Arden really loves it outside and is very good at identifying the different birds we have around here.  There’s a pond just down the road that’s been a popular haunt for the geese (hereby known by their distinctive call), we set out the wonderful bird feeder gMa and gPa got us for Christmas and have been visited daily by thrushes, sparrows and a few other birds specie of that size (hereby known as ‘tweets’).  From a discernable distance Arden lets us know when he sees honks or tweets, and if we missed them will drag us to the window and point at where the honk or tweet used to be, usually also giving the ASL sign for bird (though sometimes it’s backwards, with the fingers pointing toward the mouth).  We’ve also had a couple quack-qua’s hanging around, but not like we’ve seen geese.  It’s really fun to experience his excitement for wildlife, and we’re quite proud that he’s able to tell that they’re not just all birds.

Alright!  Until next time, hope you all feel great and the weather keeps being so shiny!

Love, Dad.