This quarter he had a momentous trip to Tennessee, which he handled with admirable aplomb. We didn't even need the secret weapon (a portable DVD player) until the return trip. He warmed up to his maternal grandparents quickly, and got to meet our great friends back home who, tragically, have not yet seen the light and moved to Texas. We don't blame them for the state they're in, but we hope they seek help soon, such as from U-Haul.
While eclipsed by later progress in verbal communication, he has hardly abandoned signing, and in this quarter invented his own signs for words like "cut up" and "wash". He's abstracting and empathizing more, putting down toys for naps (close the door and be quiet!), making multi-sign sequences for new concepts like "we need to go inside so I can get a tissue for my nose", counting on his fingers, and providing his Woody toy with a limitless supply of invisible snakes for his boots (it makes some sense if you've seen the movie). Recently, he's discovered that tape fixes things; not "some" things, things! Such as dead batteries.
After several doctors hemmed and hawed, there's finally a consensus that, yes, he needs his frenulum snipped before he'll be able to speak fully, and that should happen in a few more weeks. With a little professional coaching, he's begun expanding his library of spoken words almost every day. Early words included "mamma" and "daddy" of course, and his most recent addition is "juice," which could perhaps be Anglicized as "djhoof."
Pictures of Tristan asleep in his carseat will continue unrelentingly because (A) it's one of the few times he's motionless for any span of time and (B) it provides a consistent scale for estimating his growth. This may be of value to future paleoanthopologists.
We have out first ultrasounds of his future little brother, tentatively named Austen! They don't look like much to me, but I'm not a cetacean, it's not my most natural sense. We'll have much better pics in about two and a half months.
