Dylan at 17 months

I realized today that I haven't written much about Dylan lately. It's been ME, ME, ME, blah, blah, blah. Gosh, I'm annoying. Dylan turned 17 months this weekend. The main theme of Dylan at 17 months is apparently this...Dylan outdoors=happy child, Dylan indoors=very unhappy child wailing and making noise that neighbors down the street can possibly hear. Seriously, if we allowed him to spend the entire day outside, he would. He even chooses that over watching his signing video, and EATING. Eating! Now, that's serious. Maybe if I dangled a chunk of cheese in front of his face he'd come in. I haven't tried that yet.

He spends his time outdoors collecting sticks and arranging and rearranging pinecones. When we come inside and I try to pry the sticks from his grubby hands, he cries as if I dropped a boulder on his toes. He went through our back yard, and collected each and every pinecone, and placed them one by one in a pile, because I guess he likes a neat yard. Jim is happy because it is less work for him to do when he has to cut the grass. Now if I could just get him to straighten things up inside the house!

He wants the cat to be with us when we are outside, not because he wants to pet her, or play with her, just because he likes every member of the family to be together at all times. If the cat wanders away, he follows her, "Mow? Mow?"

At 17 months, he has grown out of his size 5 shoes. He has two size 5 shoes that he has worn for quite a while, and he has apparently grown VERY attached to them. The velcro straps are flying in the wind, because his chubby little foot is popping out of the shoe, but Dylan refuses to even consider wearing another pair of shoes. We took him to a shoe store in the mall this weekend to buy a pair of sandals and another pair of tennis shoes. There was much thrashing and screaming. Then, the nice lady, (the manager, I presume), came over to get us the hell out of the store before we scared away all the other customers, err, I mean "see if there was anything she could help us with". We quickly grabbed the sandals and tennis shoes and hightailed it out of there. They are sitting in the boxes with the lids off in our living room until he "acclimates to them". In the meantime, he's working on developing a blister on his big toe.

After the shoe store, we went to Babies R Us to try and buy him some pajamas with feet. He needs those so that he can't pull up his pajama bottoms and scratch the ezcema on his legs until he makes them bleed, the poor kid. He was NOT in the mood to shop. He was in the mood to make a very large scene. Yep, we are THAT family. The ones in Babies R Us, for goodness sakes, that everyone else is staring at. Hello! Yep, my kid. So, now I'm going to do what every mom does in this sort of situation...make excuses. He has a sinus infection (so do I), and I think the medication makes him jittery, or you know, crazy.
Also, if you've ever had ezcema all over your body, (I have), it makes you very miserable. Miserable to the point that you just want to spread the misery around, so I totally understand. He's still an angel. Just look at these pictures if you don't believe me.