Sorry!

It was brought to my attention last night that I hadn't posted in nine days (though really it was still eight at the time--ha!), so to avoid disappointing my avid readers any further, here is the latest on Dominick.

First, for those of you who knew he was sick yesterday, I am happy to report that he is much better now. The fever is gone, the cough is still here but not as frequent, and he seems to be acting normally.

Last Tuesday morning, Jacqui arrived with a Hunt's pudding cup in her hand. It turns out she wanted Dominick to paint with pudding. We set him up at the table and gave him a small paintbrush and several pieces of paper. Dom took to the painting pretty well, so then Jacqui took his finger and tried to dip it into the pudding. He resisted and went back to using the brush, but then he eventually allowed Jacqui to show him how to finger paint. Jacqui also painted his hand and made handprints on the paper (see photo). We worked up to bigger blobs of pudding, and Dom actually put his hand in it and squished it around. Throughout, he kept asking for more. I was fairly surprised, considering how he'd reacted the last time we tried something similar (mayonnaise). By the way, I did take a picture of Dominick pudding-painting, but it's currently imprisoned in my film camera, so I'll have to upload it after I've finished the roll and developed the pictures.

Dom keeps using new words all the time. The most interesting one lately was dust jacket. (For the record, he doesn't like them.) He also repeated "more wrath" when he and Mike were horsing around and Mike (playfully, of course) threatened him. For some reason, he calls the computer "bee-uh bee-uh." And when he's playing with a balloon, Dom always asks to "bop it."

I've also noticed that Dom's words are getting clearer. For example, instead of saying "a-bet" for airplane and open, he's saying "a-ben." Train, which used to be "choo-choo," is now sometimes "too-rain," and truck ("guck") is becoming "too-ruck." Stop sign has evolved from "saw-tuh sign" to "bop sign" to "sot sign." He's getting there.

Dominick can pretty much recite "Goodnight Moon" as I read it to him. We must have read it hundreds of times, so he should have it memorized by now. I'll leave out certain words, and he fills them in, but he can do the last lines ("Goodnight stars, goodnight air, goodnight noises everywhere") by himself.

This boy is so smart it's scary. He has mastered a set of four jigsaw puzzles--train, truck, boat, and airplane, each having 12 pieces--which he always works in that order. He stacks and puts the pieces away in reverse order. This morning, we were putting the train together, but most of the pieces were upside down on the floor. If I pointed to a piece, he could name the puzzle just based on the shape. He was right every time. Then, when we needed another piece for the train, I asked him to find it from among a stack of several upside-down pieces, and he immediately pulled out the right one. It really was amazing.