20 Months!!

Wow…I mean seriously…where has the time gone?  We are very quickly approaching Ryder’s 2nd Birthday!  Seeing his age in months reach the 20’s has now made that a reality.

Here’s what Ryder is up to this month:

• He is very small for his age, only weighing in at 22 pounds.  He wears mostly 12 month pants and 18 month tops.
• He has a great appetite, but Mommy had to make a new “no snacking before dinner” rule because he has started to ask for things like donuts and gummy worms for dinner! 
• He has started to recognize things that are similar.  For example, he will go in his room and bring us all of his monster trucks, or all of his dirtbikes, or in the waiting room at therapy he will go through the crayon box and pick out all of the green crayons.
• He is putting so many words together now and forming sentences, and it shocks me when I tell him something like “Daddy’s not home, he went hunting this morning” and he repeats the whole thing back to me “Daddy not home, Daddy went hunting!”  It amazes me the things that come out of his mouth and how he understands everything that we tell him.  He has some really BIG words he says too, like another, different, calculator, and microwave!
• He’s soooooo sweet!  I love when he says “Mommy I NEED you” and when he asks for kisses all the time.  And my favorite is when we say goodbye and he says “miss you”. 
• He is testing us and himself a lot lately…doing things he knows he’s not allowed just to see our reaction, or jumping really close to the edge of the bed to see what will happen.  The other night I put him to bed and noticed a few minutes later that the light in his room was on!  I opened the door and caught him playing, but when he saw me he dove into his pillow and pretended to be sleeping!!!  Now every night I have to be on light duty for a few minutes to make sure he goes to sleep, if his light flicks on, I open the door, and he looks so shocked like “how does she always know?!”.  One night he heard me coming and turned it off and laid down!  He is SO the quiet mischievous type just like his Daddy!
• We have been asking him about the new baby lately, if he wants a boy baby or a girl baby.  He always changes his answer, so we never know what we’re going to get.
• We had lots of Doctor appointments and Therapy appointments this month, all of which are helping us move forward on his road to recovery!
• He talks about Team Ryder and the Kidney Walk ALL the time!  Any time he sees someone in their Team Ryder shirt he knows exactly what it says and gets so excited.  We raised a total of $2,823 this year for the National Kidney Foundation and had over 50 people on Team Ryder, so that was such a huge blessing for us!

This month has been fun and exciting and exhausting and has flown by sooooo fast!  Ryder is the best source of joy and entertainment that ever could have been brought into our lives and we are so very thankful for him.  Love this boy!