Madmartigan, 2 Years Old | one day, you'll be looking out your window when something wonderful comes your way

About Mads, 2 Years 11 Months Old:

• Wolfman's mama taught Mads how to give a thumbs up. It's so dorky and so adorable.
• When Mads and Ella find poop in the back yard, they stop everything and announce the fact until an adult scoops it.
• Mads reads along to Little Blue Truck with me at bed time; he's memorized nearly the entire thing.
• Everything in his hands is a potential grappling hook or "bat line"--it's the Batman effect.
• He plays at going pee on the toilet, sitting and making a "pssss" sound with his mouth, but at this point he does not actually use the potty.
• Mads is becoming more engaged than ever at the public library preschool story time (to which we go once a week), but he still will not participate in the songs and dances (though he'll sing the songs at home).
• Mads says, "Do you guys smell that? It smells like Joker."
• Mads pantomimes fighting the Joker.
• Mads and Ella are very color aware. Everything they experience, they describe by its placement on the rainbow. Ella, however, is more insistent on the gender specifications of certain colors; specifically, she insists, pink and purple are girl's colors. (And she continues to insist this fact no matter how many times Wolfman and I tell her, "all colors belong to all people; there's no such thing as a girl's color or a boy's color.") When Ella's not around, Mads might tell me, "Oh, no, that's Ella's" if I pull the purple plate out of the cabinet at lunch time, but he's more willing to "bend the rules" than Ella.
• Mads says, "I got to drive my wife."
• He calls all spiders "Itsy Bitsy."
• He wants me to join him in all things--eating cookies, taking vitamins, watching Scooby Doo.
• Whereas Ella takes after me (and, I know, her mother, and so probably, our mother) and needs time in the mornings to wake (in which she sits on the sofa quietly and only grumpily if bothered, wrapped in a blanket), Mads wakes in the morning WIDE OPEN--with noise and energy.
• Favorite shows and movies: Cars, Tarzan
• Favorite books: Can I Come Too?, Your Alien