Outside

Joaquin's first real word was 'outside' - pronounced 'ouwsssside!!' Unless you count uh-oh, which was really his first word. I only count words once he is able to use them in context, unprompted. So even Mama and Dada have just recently made the list, because for a long time it was just 'mamamamamama' when ever he needed something, no matter who was around. But outside came pretty early --Joaquin will stand at the door, reach up for the knob and say 'ouwssside!!' like 18 times a day. He always wants to go outside, and when it rains, we've even let him play in the garage with the cars backed out for a while. Now that it's cold, we're having lots of fun discussions about why we can't go outside all the time. And it's not easy to reason with Joaquin, or any 18 month old I'm sure. Like today, he found bag of decorative rocks in a cupboard and was trying to feed them to me over and over. I kept saying - 'Joaquin, I don't eat rocks', 'Joaquin, No thank you, I don't eat rocks.' And he whined and tried to shove them right into my mouth and didn't understand why I wouldn't give them a try. Anyway.....so Joaquin likes to be outside and we had some great November weather and could spend lots of time outside. On this day, we were raking leaves and Joaquin enjoyed that a lot. We were still able to get the raking done (but Art did fill 15 bags to my 1 bag, so I didn't get THAT much done). He really enjoyed playing in the piles and trying to help rake. He picked up little handfuls of leaves and put them in the bags. Such a good helper, and I don't think he tried to make me eat any leaves.