Just being a toddler...

So, this weekend we had a few funny moments with John. (sorry for the blurry pictures...again, it's hard to capture a toddler on the go these days! Anyway, John thought it would be really fun to see how the puppies spend the day while he's at daycare, so he proceeded to crawl in Vito's crate. He thought it was quite hilarious...he ended up shutting himself entirely in the crate. I shouldn't let Barry see these pictures or he'll use this tactic to leave John at home and go on a bike ride or run...LOL! The other cute thing was John getting into my purse and pulling out my sunglasses. I must say, there aren't many "pimpin" toddlers, but he looks mighty good! The second picture he was doing his infamous "cheese" face...it was quite hysterical in person to see him doing that while wearing my sunglasses. I must say, I have one "cool" toddler! :)

John's first crush

So, last weekend, John did the cutest thing. I'm not biased in being his mommy, it really was the cutest thing! :) Here's a quick background to help the story...Lily (who I've mentioned before) is 4 months older than John and we know her parents really well...we try to get the kids together for play dates and have already arranged their marriage. Anyway, Leah (Lily's mom) and I tend to make little Valentine's and Easter baskets for each child and Leah made an adorable Easter one this year that had Lily's Easter picture in it. Well, this picture was sitting in the basket in his room and John all the sudden started saying Lily and went up and grabbed that picture. He then proceeded to walk everywhere with it, and anytime I would ask if he wanted mommy to hold the picture, he would say "no mommy, no." So I decided I would keep my hands off the treasured picture. He even wanted to keep it up near him when he ate breakfast....we had to convince him to put it on the table in front of his chair so that he wouldn't keep it on his tray and bury it with scrambled eggs...so he allowed us to move the picture a few inches away, but not too far of course. I captured a few pictures of him carrying around that picture...sorry they aren't very good...he's a fast little guy these days and pictures are harder to get! :) Enjoy!

New Vocabulary at 21 Months

I thought it was time to do another vocabulary update so everyone can enjoy the new words coming out of John's mouth. :) He is just exploding with new words everyday and I am able to communicate with him easily on most every topic. Although, for some reason, when I ask him if he's ready to go to bed I get more of a blank stare...hmmmm..I wonder why! Actually, sometimes, I will ask "are you ready to go night night?" and he'll point blank say: "no mommy." :) He knows what he wants (and doesn't want!).


1) Mommy - He now says mommy VERY clearly. I've been getting the "no, mommy, no" a lot lately when I try to clean out his nose or wipe his face down after eating...quite funny!

2) Daddy - this is quite adorable...he tends to hold out the "y" part so that it sounds like "dadeeeeeeeeee", love it!


3) Mop - This is milk for some reason...not sure why, maybe because he spills it a lot at school and they clean it up with a mop? :)


4) Meece - My favorite one by far! This means kiss and he will show me a "boo boo" and say "mommy meece" and hold it out for me....totally melts my heart!


5) Dink - This is drink...he's been very creative lately on this one...we will get in his room, turn on his music for bedtime, get ready to say prayers and he'll pop up and say "dink?" because he wants a drink before bedtime. Who knew a 21 month old would learn this stalling technique so early!


6) Katchup - This is ketchup which he loves on most anything he eats!


7) Chockate - This is chocolate...he learned this first from Mawmaw feeding him double dark chocolate ice cream with heath bar from Cold Stone...not a bad way to learn about chocolate. :)


8) Shoos - This is shoes...he just holds the "o" sound a little longer than normal.


9) Sawy - This is actually sorry which he uses if I say "be gentle" about something...he'll give you a hug and say "sawy."


10) Wawa - This is the name for his friend Owen at school.


11) Cencent - This is the name for his friend Vincent at school.


12) Nonnie - This is the name for his teacher Ms. Tonnie at school.


13) Queaky - This is squeaky which refers to the squeaky shoes Mamwmaw and Daddy John bought him...one if his friends at school, Owen, has these, so John will say "queaky, Wawa (see above)"...so funny!

14) Backberries - This is his term for blackberries, which he LOVES! It's also used for blueberries too....another favorite.

15) Seep - This is used for the word sleep which mommy uses often to get him deterred from playing with something. "the dancing puppy needs to go to sleep now, so let's quit playing with him for awhile." When John goes to bed, he will point at the dancing puppy and dancing bunny he has (yes, we have a lot of dancing animals!) and say "puppy seep, bunny seep"...I love that they can still be fooled...this will run out soon I'm sure. Darn!

16) Ous-side - This is usually followed by many exclamation points since it's his word for outside...and since he loves going outside and playing on the "side" which is slide, he tends to yell it out.

17) No mommy no - This is exactly what it says. Ususally is stated when I'm trying to wipe something off his face, get out an eye booger, or asking him if he's ready to go night-night. :)

18) Gaggy - This is a new one as of this week....Barry's dad is called Daddy John for his grandparent name. This is a longstanding tradition for any of the John Miller's to be called Daddy John as a grandparent. Well since John can say Daddy and John so clearly, we didn't think it would be a problem. But, for some reason, this combination of words seems to confuse him and it comes out Gaggy. It's actually quite funny and we are loving giving Daddy John a hard time about it....I'm thinking of getting them something to set out in the house with Mawmaw and Gaggy written on it...heh! heh!

19) Mawmaw, Gaggy, Nana, Papa - These are all the grandparent names that he says so clearly. It's so cute to hear him say their names in his sweet little voice (again, not biased!) :)

20) Dance - Well he has this word right on...several of his elmo videos have the characters dancing, so he'll say "dance" and then shake his little booty back and forth.


21) Lilyee - This the name of John's future wife, oops, I mean friend, Lily at school. :) He holds out the "ee" sound at the end and says it so proudly.

22) Melmo - This is elmo...John's favorite character of all time! He gets home and starts saying "elmo cd" so that mommy will put in his elmo cartoon.

23) Choo-choo - This is how John refers to a train...good enough for me. :)

24) Eh-eh - This is actually supposed the spelled out sound a monkey makes...he references monkeys by making the sound...again, good enough for mommy. :)

25) Fiiiive, sisxth, seVen, eight, non, ten - This is John counting from 5 to 10...he's been doing 5 & 6, then 5, 6, & 7, then he busted into 5,6,7,8,9,10 just last weekend...we are so proud! The seven has a capital V because he pronounces the "v" really hard when he says it. I guess 1-4 are just too boring, no need to count starting from the beginning...5 and above is the coolest!

Well, that's the newest update on words, I'm sure I'm missing quite a few, but these are some of the fun ones that come to mind. I plan to try and video some of these cute words in action, so stay tuned!

Easter Pictures

Here are John's Easter pictures. These were the ones they took at his school and I was thrilled with how they turned out. I love the backdrop and the live bunny.
I love this pose...it's kind of a "hey, how you doin?" kind of pose. Although, we won't teach him why you would ever say that to a girl. :)
Nice bunny. He seems to like it...probably because it's about the size of our yorkies. :)
This one makes me laugh...he looks like he's in trouble or something. Who me??

John & Elmo

John was playing with his Elmo this morning. Before I go on, for those of you who don't know, John has become obsessed with Elmo (a.k.a. Melmo) right now. He has a couple of Elmo movies that he begs to watch everyday (thanks Amanda!) and he has an Elmo doll from Valentine's that he's recently gotten attached to. Well, the funny thing is that this morning he was actually kicking Elmo around like a soccer ball. Barry and I were laughing because John thought this was funny, then he would pick up Elmo and hug him really tight like he felt bad for "hurting" him. He was just goofing off and I don't think he realized what he was doing until I said "don't hurt Elmo." From that point on he just hugged and kissed on him. So, I had to capture some photos of this precious moment, the kiss is so cute!! When we left for his school, he gave him a kiss and then said bye-bye while mommy put Elmo in his bed (putting Elmo in his "bed" consisted of me shoving him down in one of John's toy baskets, but don't tell John...for all he knows, Elmo is snuggled up in a muppet size bed!)

I LOVE CANTON!

Ok, so maybe the title of this blog is more of mommy's thought than John's thought, but I still think he really likes Canton. For those of you who don't know, Canton is this wonderful monthly occurrence where vendors come and sell awesome stuff for us to look at and buy. Now, if you ask Barry about Canton, he'll just say it's a glorified flea market....but I don't care, fleas or no fleas, it rocks! My parents and sister came in town and we enjoyed heading to Canton on a Friday to beat the rush of people that come on Saturday and Sunday (see...it rocks to a lot of people. :)) Anyway, my dad was the designated babysitter that day (by his choosing) and John had so much fun watching all the people and smiling at everyone. Of course, having the grandparents around means he is spoiled just a little bit more than normal, so he spent about 10 minutes of the four hours in his actual stroller, the rest of the time Papa, Nana or Aunt Shauna was carrying him. All in all it was a wonderful day, and there's nothing like ending the day with a piece of homemade pecan pie which is what the pictures show. :)

This is the bench we were sitting on while eating the pie...John thought it was fun to run between the benches, but for some reason the photo I got seems to show the "am I in trouble?" face. Oh well, mommy think the "am I in trouble" face is quite adorable too!
Hmmm...can you tell whether or not John liked the pie??? :)

Playing at the park

We had our Sunday School class Easter outing a few weekends ago and John had so much fun! The outing was at a local park and John enjoyed being outside. I just love this first picture....John wanted to go down the slide so bad, but it was too tall to send him on his own, so daddy climbed up with him and helped him down...this of course happened SEVERAL times, because nothing is ever done only once. :)
They had a kickball game going on at the park, so John watched intently for quite awhile and even picked up and started playing with one of the extra balls. Watch out David Beckham, we have a new soccer cutie! :)

John just LOVES the swings now! What an expression. :)

More fun photos!

This was John playing in the front yard with his new spiderman sticker. He was so proud of it. Here he is posing by the tree...what a professional looking photo, right? Except for the chunk of snack on his face...that boy loves to eat! heh! heh!

This is John sleeping when we drove back from Houston...he slept for over 3 hours!!! He was so worn out from having fun all weekend. :) Thanks to Jaxson and Miranda! :)

Random Photos of Fun

Well, this first picture isn't exactly "fun." This was John getting his second haircut. He got a little freaked out at first, but then did great after a few minutes.

So, when mommy drove home one day, John started wiggling out of his seat when I unbuckled him so I decided to see what he would do. He started crawling all over the car and went up to the driver's seat and started driving, it was so funny! I think he's ready to take the Tahoe out for a spin!

This was John on the way to Houston a few weeks ago...he totally conked out!

More random photos

John playing with Daddy's glasses. :)

Just being cute!

This is the hoop thing on his basketball goal

that helps make the basketball go in easier.

John thought it was better suited as a hula hoop!

Fun Random Photos

I went in and cleaned out the pictures from my Blackberry and there were several cute ones I wanted to share. Some are old, but they're still cute! :)

This is John playing with the airplane that Beth and Fred bought for him at Christmas. He LOVES this airplane! And, what makes it even cuter is that Fred is a fighter pilot in the Navy so John can pretend he's one too...but with a Mickey Plane. I think our Navy should use Mickey logos!! :)

Here is John with Daddy at the Turkey Trot last year. So cute!!

This is the shirt Mawmaw made for John to wear at the Turkey Trot.