Nevin's first visit to the Zoo and some backyard fun

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Nevin - 23 months

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Nevin will be celebrating his second birthday next month. He has grown so much over the last few months and continues to surprise us with his antics. He is also becoming naughtier by the day, but I suspect that maybe a direct result of our collective spoiling of him :)

Nevin can now string 2-3 words together in a sentence which we can understand about 80% of the time. The rest of the time we either pretend that we understand him or go through the mutually frustrating experience of trying to figure out his 2 year old vocabulary. Some of his classic phrases are “all done” and “walk away”. “All done” could mean anything from “I have had enough of this food” to “get me out of this chair/stroller/place” and “walk away” means that wants to be left alone in his effort of doing something (usually forbidden) by himself! For some reason, Nevin chooses to stay mum in the presence of friends and/or strangers much to our chagrin ;) We are also trying, albeit in futility, to teach him Hindi. Neither one of us speak Hindi conversationally with him and I guess this will need to change if he is going to learn a second language. He does say some words in Hindi like “neeche” (which literally means “down”) when he wants to go downstairs or wants to get off his stroller/high chair. But he uses the same word when he wants to go upstairs too… to him the word just means a change in his current location/position :).

Nevin’s favorite toys remain his stuffed animals. He has a veritable menagerie in his play room and he absolutely adores playing with all the animals. He can easily identify the various animals and can also make their sounds. His pronunciation is not the best and he calls an elephant “epeechay” which we find very cute so we never bother to correct him. He always amazes us with his ability to group the animals in the same way “they came into his life”:). God help us if he sees one animal and we cannot find that animal’s friend/s i.e. the ones that we bought at the same time. He is also very particular about how they are stored and will get mad if we put the wrong animal in the wrong “barn”. The easiest way to get him to go to bed is to tell him that all the animals are doing “night night”.

His favorite food remains cheese pizza (light cheese) and pasta although he does eat rice and chicken, and some other Indian food that we prepare for him. He does not like anything sweet but has recently shown some interest in eating cookies especially oatmeal raisin and some Pepperidge Farm varieties.

Sadly for us, he has lost interest in all TV shows for the most part and will only stay engaged for a few minutes at a time. This poses a huge challenge for us when we go on long drives or take him out to restaurants where in the past we would pop in his favorite DVD and take a break while he stayed calm for 20 minutes. I know, we’re evil :).

We are looking forward to taking him to Miami over the Memorial Day weekend at the end of the month. He has flown with us a couple of times already but not in the recent past, so it should be an interesting experience. His grandparents have taught him to associate the planes flying in the sky to his Maasi (aunt) in ATL, so now whenever he sees one in the sky he says “Maasi Atlanta” .
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