2 Year Checkup

RJ is a very healthy 2 year old.

Stats:
He creeped up to the 50th percentile for weight (27.5 lbs) and stayed steady at the 90th percentile for height (36"). He's at 15 BMI. All systems are working well and Dr. Moilanen was impressed with his speech and vocabulary and his potty training. Also, now that he's two, she recommended that we switch to 2% milk from whole milk.


Conversation/Verbal Skills:
We're also pretty impressed by our precocious two year old. He can carry on whole conversations with you, which can be highly entertaining when he makes up stories. 5-6 word sentences are not at all uncommon now. He can pick up a well-read book and tell you the story. He doesn't recite verbatim or anything (except for the last word of each phrase in "The Lorax"), but he clearly gets the story across. Similarly, he learns the lyrics to songs at a remarkable rate and sings songs fairly in tune and with feeling. Hearing his super version of "Good Day Sunshine" is a great thing on the way home from work! He also is getting more specific about his music tastes - he has definite song preferences. Right now on the RJ request list are "Yellow Submarine", "Good Day Sunshine" (aka Sunshine Song), "And Your Bird Can Sing" (aka Bird Song), "Dr. Robert", "Taxman" and "With a Little Help from My Friends" (aka Friend Song). There is a clear preference for the Lennon-McCartney catalog, which a general dislike of several Harrison authored songs. For some reason, the minute he hears the sitar, he starts saying, "No like it. next song peeeze". I guess he's allowed to have his preferences and at least I'm no longer needing to listen to children's music exclusively in the car! Although it would be nice if I had an ipod so I could listen to more than one CD at a time and create a playlist of RJ-approved songs so that I don't have to play jukebox!

Play: In terms of play, he is solidly in the midst of pretend play. He makes up things all the time and has hit the milestone of turning anything into anything else. For example a piece of bread can be a bus or a train or a telephone with ease. He's no longer bound by the toys he has since his imagination is in full throttle. I love that he has turned simple blocks into "cargo" for his train.


Physical Prowess: RJ also loves climbing. Our closest playground has a little kid area (2-5 yrs) and a big kid area (5-12 yrs) and he spends all of 5 minutes at the little kid area before running over to "the other park" and scaling the climbing wall or making mommy lift him up to the monkey bars! We took him to another neighborhood park where he scaled a rope ladder pyramid and balanced across a rope bridge. All were under very close parental supervision, but still, he was very much doing the work on his own. I can't wait until I can take him to the rock gym! I'll finally have a climbing buddy again!


Sleep: He's now sleeping on a mat (instead of in his sleep tent) for his naps at Daisy's house, and we converted his crib side to the toddler guardrails at home. He's doing really well with a 2 hour afternoon nap and about 10-11 hours at night. Teacher Andrew has gotten him to relinquish his paci during naps, and we're working on removing his nightime paci. Our first step is making him listen to story time without the paci, and the next step will be taking it away entirely.

Potty: He's doing great. As you can tell from our previous posts, he's generally wearing underwear when he's not sleeping - and he frequently wakes up from nap dry. We just make sure to have the potty with us if we're going somewhere where there isn't an immediately available potty. Also, we recently found that the strap from his booster chair also doubles as a strap to keep the potty attached to the back of his stroller!


Overall, RJ is just a great kid to have around. He has his cranky and whiney days from time to time, but usually this happens when we're messing with his schedule or when he feels strongly about something. Or of course when we're in a hurry. But most of the time, he has his good listening ears on and is eager to please.