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Mason is now 15 months old! He’s as cute as a button and keeps us chuckling all day long. He is also saying lots of new words. In fact, if you work with him, he’ll say just about anything just to get a laugh, which the big kids think makes him a great parlor trick.You might recall that we started out teaching him sign language. He understood several signs but only made (and still makes) the sign for “poo poo” on a regular basis. Now he warns us with sign language when he’s about to stink up the place.

Did you see the movie Meet the Fockers? Remember the bad word the baby says? Well, Mason’s male siblings (ahem) have taught him how to say that word exactly the same way. Ali was making Mason get out of her bedroom the other night and he called her that word. She said, “Did you hear what he just called me?!” The rest of us roared.

Despite our efforts to teach him to sign, Mason seemed much more interested in actual speech very early on so we encouraged that. He started talking really early and, when he wasn’t saying intelligible words, he was still talking and babbling continuously to himself, pretending to talk on our cell phones, talking on the “hand phone” (he puts his hand to his ear and calls “Pop pop” (Richard’s dad), and carrying on long conversations with himself and us, and very accurately imitating just about any sound, from a deep laugh to a high-pitched harmonica.

One funny thing Mason does is offer instant replays of his boo boos, after he’s collected lots of hugs and kisses, of course. When he gets hurt, he’ll run to one of us for a hug and kiss. We’ll sweep him off the floor and smother him with kisses and rub the boo boo and say, “Oh no! Boo boo! Boo boo!” Mason will then start saying, “Uh oh! Ooh ooh! Ooh ooh!”

It’s quite a big production and it ends up making Mason laugh. He’ll then crawl off our lap and replay the boo boo. If he fell and hit his head on the rug, he’ll get down on his hands and knees and bump his head against the floor to show us what happened. The other day, Max threw a large Lego and it hit Mason in the head. After hugs and kisses, he toddled over to the big lego, picked it up, hit himself on the head with it and said, “Ooh Ooh!”

It’s really quite hilarious…except when he re-injures himself during the instant replay.

Anyway, last night, Mason got a boo boo that was too bad for an instant replay. He can run quite quickly now and he was racing through the kitchen, trying to catch Max. He ran smack into the corner of the refrigerator and screamed. I was there within seconds and his forehead had already begun to swell. After half an hour of ice, it still looked like THIS.

Poor baby. He got a similar goose-egg on our last trip so he’s definitely a “sweller.”

He was just fine and was smiling within minutes…as soon as we turned on Blues Clues and gave him a popsicle.

This week’s Maxism:

“Wouldn’t it be neat if we had a balloon and we put a box on it and we let it go up into space and it caught a star in the box and it came back down the next morning and we could keep the star?”

Hugs to all!
Ang

We’ve had a really unusual winter this year. As I am writing this, there is no snow on the ground. Yes, that’s right. It’s supposed to be the coldest, nastiest time of the year for Mainers. But, it was in the 50’s last weekend, sunny, breezy, and downrights Springish! I ran errands on Saturday and didn’t even need a sweater. It’s been like this all winter, too. Sure, we’ve had a few snow showers but we haven’t needed the snow blower yet and we haven’t even needed to shovel. Just a quick sweep of the steps with the broom is enough to take care of any lingering snow from the night before. What’s perhaps the most astounding oddity is that the river isn’t frozen over. The river is always completely frozen over by this time of year, and should have been for weeks now.

We’re thinking about taking a short RV trip for Spring Break. The RV show was last weekend and we picked up brochures from several campgrounds in Maine that now offer wifi (wireless Internet access) and some of them are open year-round. Yea!

Unfortunately, instead of snow, we’ve had rain, and now have tons of mud. Zach got his car stuck in the mud just yesterday. Boy, he was grumbling about that.

Hugs to everybody!

Ang

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