I said NO!!!

Jaren is stubborn. I believe I've mentioned that a time or twelve on this blog. Brian and I can't understand where he got it... must be from the mailman. Anyway... here's a recent example of his strong desire to get his own way.

Jaren has a blankie. It's one of those minky soft blankets with Winnie the Pooh on it. He HAS to have it when he sleeps. Once I thought I had left it in his crib for the babysitter. When we came home and asked how it went she said that Jaren had a really hard time falling asleep and cried for quite a while. We go upstairs and while I am turning off the light in the toyroom I see his blanket on the floor. I had another blanket thrown over the side of the crib and the sitter thought that must be the blanket I had left for Jaren. Poor kid was probably totally freaking out. But I digress.

This blanket is the ONLY blanket that Jaren will now permit to be in his crib. If it is cold and we try to cover him up with something else, he will gingerly pick up the blanket by the corners, as if it were some diseased slab of road kill that we had dared place on top of him, and move it to the side. Sometimes we will try to cover him up with something else while he is asleep and his blanket radar goes off and he will sit up, gingerly remove the offending foreign blanket, then lay back down and go to sleep. And he always lays ON his Winnie the Pooh blanket, so we can't usually access it.

Last night I thought I had won. I covered him up with a nice warm blanket before I went to bed. He was out cold and didn't wake up to move the covers (and his in footie jammies so he can't FEEL the blanket on his skin or anything). I went to bed confident that he would be warm for at least a few hours.

Fast forward to this morning. I go in there to wake him up so we can bring Jillise to school. He is sound asleep. The minute he pops his eyes open, he jumps to his feet and starts pointing to the ground and babbling about SOMETHING. I look on the floor and there is the other blanket I had used last night. At some point in the middle of the night, he woke up, realized what I had done, stood up, and threw the blanket out of his crib. And he had to make sure to tell me about it first thing, too. ExCUUUUUUUUUSE me.

In other news, Jaren is finally making animal sounds. He loves to sit and look at books with us, but it seems to be below him to make strange animal noises. He just looks at us and laughs when we moo like a cow or crow like a rooster. But today he was walking around with a picture of a monkey saying, "Eeeee Eeeee." Then he turned the page to the lion and started roaring. Thank goodness. Both girls could hold full conversations at this age (no, I am not exaggerating) and I am pretty confident that Jaren's brain is just fine but his darn stubbornness keeps him from showing us what he knows. Sigh. Boys.