Exciting news from day care yesterday — Ben said three new words!

• cold
• off
• all done

I have also heard him try to say the words “pasta” and “pizza”.

Ben’s cold actually seems to be getting a little worse. Today he woke up with a 100.6 degree fever, so that meant a day at home with Daddy and the beginning of a course of antibiotics. I’m sure that the medicine will clear things up quickly. Generally Ben has been pretty cheerful for a sick little guy, although his appetite is a little off and he is much more tired. Let’s hope for a quick turnaround!

Ben had another great speech therapy appointment today. I’ve noticed recently that Ben has become much more able and willing to imitate new words that he hears — just in the past few days, I have heard him try to say “socks” and “hot dog” right after I say them. Very exciting! This week at his appointment he did some finger painting while working on his “help”.

Ben dressed up as a gorilla for Halloween this year! It was a cute hand-me-down from our neighbors who hosted a little kids Halloween party.

Ben wasn’t really thrilled to be in the gorilla suit, he really didn’t like the hood part.

We went to the party to see all the other cuties in their costumes. Here’ a photo of Lisa and her twins, you might remember them from infancy packed up in baby carriers.

Here we have a gorilla, a pink puppy, and a bumble bee.

Me and my gorilla. Maybe Ben should have just gone as “The Face” for Halloween, it’s a costume he’s comfortable with and it’s easy to capture it on film.

Like herding kittens: Our host got all the kiddies into a group shot. I have a funny video of the horde trying to assemble, it’s pure pandemonium!

Thanks to Marcie for putting up a bunch of posts lately. I’ve been really busy and haven’t put as much time into the blog lately as I would have liked. Anyway, since our last update from the speech therapist it seems like Ben’s vocabulary development is really coming along. He has a few words that he is using consistently:

• Hiya
• Ball
• Bottle
• Open
• Uh-oh
• Up

Also, there are some other words that Ben has said a few times, including hot, help, car, and strangely enough, “Edyta”, the name of the lady who takes care of him at day care. It is really fun now trying to communicate with Ben, because you can actually try to have some sort of a conversation with him, like this:

Ben: “bo-ben” (Open)
Me: “Open what?”
Ben: (signs please)
Me: “Open what please?”
Ben: (points at door)
Me: “Oh, open DOOR please. OK!”

I think that the therapy is really helping and that Ben’s pace will get faster over the next few weeks. The trick is to just keep practicing!

A typical morning around our house consist of breakfast for Ben with Mommy. He and I have culinary adventures together in the morning. Some favorites are pancakes, oatmeal, scrambled eggs, french toast (called Frenchy! in our house), PB&J, and cereal. On Tuesday Ben got really interested in my Kashi Autumn Wheat cereal and insisted on having most of my bowl – he really likes it! Too bad it has more fiber than a 27 pound human needs in a week! I’ll have to find him some baby friendly shredded wheat. Here are a couple of videos from breakfast yesterday. My favorite part of watching Ben eat is seeing how BIG he makes his mouth to get all his food in. Very cute. These are not examples of Ben at is absolute cutest, but they are real breakfast footage.

Gag me with a spoon! Some things just need to be tried, repeated!

In this video Ben shows us his two spooned eating technique for oats and yogurt, also his baby cough.

Roger, Ben and I went to the West Hartford Children’s Museum today with our friend Melissa and baby Grant. The museum had some great animal exhibits and some adequate other parts and some not-so-hot features that were new and cool about 20 years ago. Overall, the museum gets a C- rating from me. Ben enjoyed himself so that may be inflating the grade a bit. The Portland Children’s Museum still gets our vote for the most awesome museum to date. Here are some videos and photos from our day.

Mommy said: Ben, lay down so I can put your diaper on.

And Ben laid down and very nicely let me put his diaper on!

I almost fell over.

Ben and I have not enjoyed diapering time, ever. Well, that’s not really fair…about 65% of the time Ben does something that makes diapering him EXTREMELY irritating. Examples include: screaming, turning over (my least favorite and most often encountered irritation), grabbing at things on the shelf, and grabbing at the diapers or his privates when there’s poop present.

Like I said, I almost fell over, this kid is super cool.

I was so impressed with Ben today. He walked out to the car when I picked him up from day care, and he also walked almost all the way to dinner and all the way back home from dinner all by himself, with very few diversions. Then when we were getting ready for bed, I told him to “go take off your clothes” and he went into his bedroom and climbed up on his changing table to get undressed. He always seems so happy when he can figure out what you are asking him to do and actually accomplish the task!

First, Ben’s cough has improved dramatically, so it seems that the antibiotics that he was taking for the past few days have done a good job of clearing up his pneumonia. We’ll know for sure when we get his chest rechecked in a few weeks, but all signs now point up.

Ben’s speech appointment yesterday had some exciting results. Ben was able to say “ball” fairly consistently when we were playing with a giant orange fitness ball. Also, we found out that Ben really likes to dance to music, so Melissa tried to teach him the sign for “music”. It’s a hard one, though — you have to brush your hand up and down the other arm, so I think that might take Ben a while. The rest of the session was pretty typical — some playing with toys, a lot of emphasis on “open” and “closed”.

I finally got YouTube to cooperate with my new Mac so we’re back to being able to post videos! Yippy! I’ll have more posted in the future, but for now sleep.

Ben and I worked on a project for the middle schoolers today. My friend Stephen is teaching me and the kids how to juggle and found the round juggling balls I bought for the group to be too hard for beginners to catch. So Ben and I set about making some bean bags to replace the balls. We bought 15 bags of split peas and cut up some of the dozens of receiving blankets we have accumulated. The result was an activity that kept Ben from thinking about his teething pain for about 2 hours. Betsy and Piper even got a treat when Ben flung the peas over the edge of his play bucket.

Ben sat on my lap while I sewed the first two sides of each bag.

He enjoyed scooping the peas and moving them from cup to cup. He wasn’t much help with the stuffing though.

7 sets made. Not bad for juggling sewing and Benjamin at the same time!

Ben’s cold hadn’t really gotten any better by this week, so I took him back to the doctor as she had requested. The diagnosis was that Ben had picked up a very mild case of community-acquired pneumonia. Now before you all start panicking, I want to emphasis the word “mild”. The nurse who diagnosed him wasn’t especially concerned at all, and if you looked at Ben, you might not even be able to notice anything wrong, except for his occasional coughing. But it is contagious, so we have put Ben on an antibiotic that will run for two more days to clear up the infection. The cough may persist for a little while after everything clears up, but Ben should be fine in no time.

He’s been a little crankier than usual lately — we think perhaps it’s because of teething. Ben is currently getting in four (!) new teeth, all of his canines on the top and bottom. He’s pointing in his mouth from time to time, which probably means that he either picked up a sore throat from coughing or else his teeth are bothering him. Either way we hope that he feels better soon!

We had another good visit yesterday with our speech therapist, Melissa. Ben was more vocal with her this time and seemed a little more comfortable with the session. The format was pretty much the same as last time — supervised play with heavy emphasis on talking and signing. Melissa made a big effort to try to get Ben to say “help” and it seemed like he did try to say it a few times, very quietly. She also worked to teach him the sign for “open”, which is taking both your arms and spreading them apart from you (like an NFL referee signaling an incomplete pass). We played a new game this time where Melissa and I held a bed sheet up in the air like a canopy and alternated bringing it up and lowering it down while Ben was underneath. He enjoyed that game — the point, I think, was to try to reinforce the concepts of “up” and “down”. All in all, Melissa seemed pleased with Ben’s performance and gave us a few more things to work on this week.

These vegetables are the result of absolutely no effort. I planted the seeds in June, didn’t weed the garden, ever, and was rewarded yesterday with this bounty of HUGE carrots and decent beets. The beets were baked last night and turned into sweet cubes of pink veggie heaven. The carrots are freakishly big and only really suitable for carrot cake (too bad, huh?). I’m fairly sure that cream cheese frosting will make even woody carrot cake delicious. Year after year I am still amazed by the power of a tiny little seed to turn into food for me to eat, regardless of my care. It’s like plants don’t need me to survive!

Benjamin takes the Denis the Menace route to dinner most nights, resulting in Roger and I cajoling, carrying, and corralling him to and from the dining hall.

Sometimes I carry Ben to dinner, here we are in the stairwell:

Then we eat some dinner:

Ben, like every other faculty child, plays in the hallway after dinner:

Then we mosey home for bed time (some of us mosey quicker than others):

Last weekend Ben and I made playdough for school, and a little extra to keep at home. He enjoyed transferring the flour to and from bowls while I cooked batches on the stove. When the dough cooled he spent about an hour playing at the kitchen counter with forks and bowls, squishing and making snakes. This weekend he enjoyed the fruits of our labors at the coffee table, turns out it is a perfect size for him to sit at.

Our family has been incredibly busy since the school year started and we / I haven’t taken many photos of Ben or posted anything. So here’s a smattering of photos taken recently. The above photo is from The Garlic Festival Ben and I went to in Saugerties, NY. The place was packed, so much so that the only free space to move was at the kiddy playground. Ben enjoyed the swings and some stairs there. Despite being at a garlic festival, I had no garlic food, the lines were just too big.

Sorry for the lack of news from Ben Central — the cold that Ben picked up from day seems to have raced through the Wistar household like a wildfire and Mommy and Daddy were both caught up in the firestorm. Now that we are emerging from our haze, we can report a little bit on Mr. B’s week.

On Tuesday we had our first real speech therapy session for Ben. An outside observer would probably just have thought they were looking an hour of supervised play, but there were some subtle differences. (A lot of it is just play in the beginning so that Melissa and Ben can get acquainted with each other.) Melissa was looking at certain things like whether Ben could respond to simple commands, like “Can you clean up those toys, please?” Also, she tried to get him to use some more sign language commands, like pointing to himself to indicate “me”. Another sign she wants us to start using more is “please” (hand on chest making a circle). All in all, it seemed like a good first session.

Besides that Ben has just been struggling to kick this cold. The ladies at day care pushed the panic button on Wednesday, claiming they were concerned that Ben had contracted swine flu because he was coughing so much. I took Ben to see Dr. Gray-Clarke and she said that was nonsense — he just has a bad head cold.

On Saturday morning, with the weather outside very miserable, Marcie, her mother, and I decided to take Ben to Kids Time, a local fun center for children. Unfortunately, our camera battery turned out to be dead, so we don’t have any visual record of the experience, but it was an unqualified win. I’ll try to describe it.

The place consists of a huge room that has jungle-gym-like fixtures arranged around the room in various places. There are different levels of complexity for various age groups. In the toddler area, for example, they have a lot of soft obstacles for kids to walk up and down and fall over. They also have a ramp that the kids can walk up onto a second level that has slides at either end. All of the elevated areas are well-protected by netting on all sides so that the kids can’t accidentally fall off and break their necks.

The place also had some of those little plastic toddler houses that Ben also enjoyed playing in. Ben enjoyed going into the older child area too, although he was not big enough to climb up into the upper levels. Down at the bottom, they had one area with gigantic rubber balls (like fitness balls, but bigger), and another area where they had padded foam pillars hanging down from the ceiling that the kids could walk through. Ben really enjoyed both of those.

Towards the end of our two-hour stint, the guy running the place decided to turn on the crazy light scheme and play some rock music, which was neat to see but really freaked Ben out. He was pretty upset until they turned the lights back on. Fortunately it was at the end of our visit, not the beginning.

The place isn’t cheap, so we probably won’t go every week, but it was a fun way to spend a rainy Saturday.