The miscellaneous joys of life with Amos...

Amos, as he gets older, is becoming more and more creative. He picks up new favorite interests, and sometimes can be quite obsessed about things (Clifford, anyone?!). He is also one to make up a scenario on the spot, or get whatever stuffed animal that's around in on the action.

TRASH!!

His latest creative endeavor is his love of pretending to be a garbage man. And yes, he is still obsessed with garbage trucks...

So it all began with his Little Tikes car acting as his garbage truck. He collected random boxes and trash and would dump it all into the car. But the car was too small, and it didn't have an "arm" to pickup the garbage cans. So he moved on to the futon, which has a place for him to sit and drive and has space to pretend that it has an arm. I also added to collection of trash, giving him "bathroom tubes" and egg cartons. This became a favorite past time.

Lately, he has two trash sites going in the house. The first is downstairs in the living room, using his legos as trash (much to his father's dismay--simply because he's not building with them yet!) and his dumptruck, bulldozer and garbage truck to do the various jobs. There's even a GI Joe guy holding onto the bulldozer like it's a garbage truck...too funny!

The second site is upstairs, in our third bedroom. This bedroom right now, has the crib and changing table and hopefully someday, will be Baby Sister's bedroom. There's also a futon, perfect for acting as....a garbage truck! When we moved the changing table into the room, we took the small top side drawer out to move it. Amos discovered that the opening made a nice trash can, and thus, a new garbage site was born. He takes all of his toys, random boxes and other things he asks to use as trash and puts them in a huge pile on the floor. And then puts them up on the futon and drives it. Yes, there's pretty much always a mess in his room or Baby's room, but it doesn't matter to me...he would play this game, by himself, for hours, if we let him!! So for now, we have a changing table with no top side drawer and huge piles of toys and trash all over. But Amos loves it, and I guess that's what matters!!

PUPPETS!!

One night, before bedtime, I got out some puppets that I found once in the Target dollar section. Amos loved them so much, that he put them on his hands and they read a few Bible stories with us. They meowed and ruffed in participation and Amos thoroughly enjoyed it!

NESTING!!
The first time I visited Amos in the hospital, after he was born, the nurse kindly explained the best way to touch him and give affection to him, since we couldn't hold him. They called it 'nesting', which was basically a way for us to cup our hands around him and make him feel like he was still in the womb. So we were to cup our hands around his head and his feet and "hold" him that way. It was not how I expected to love on my newborn preemie, but it became a way for us to bond with him, especially since he would grip our finger with his tiny hand (as seen in the photo below.).
Lately, Amos has begun nesting again, finding little nooks and crannies to snuggle into. It began in our bed, actually, in the mornings when he would wake up before us, and we would let him sit in our bed and watch a morning show while we dozed a bit more. He would sit between us, down by our legs and would exclaim, "I found a nest!" Since then, we sometimes will say to him, if he's too wiggly, "Amos, go sit in your nest!" and he will, taking with him whichever stuffed animal made it to our bed with him.
One day, when he wasn't feeling well, he asked me to make him a nest downstairs with the Sesame Street blanket. Add a big stuffed dog and a green fleecey blankie and you've got yourself a comfy little nest for vegging out! Amos sat in there for a little while, totally enjoying it!
It wasn't until last week that I put two and two together and realized that he was going back to finding these small secure spaces. I have no idea if there's any correlation, I just find it interesting that he loves to cuddle up to small cozy spots, and yes, to us. He is such a cuddler (maybe due to the constant cuddling in his early days?!?!) and that makes us so happy!!