Kisses

Abe has a couple of new things he's really into these days. The toilet is still a continuous source of fascination and wonder, as is now the bottom drawer in our cabinets where we keep our extra toothbrushes and floss. Letting him pull all of that out every day (sometimes several times a day) does two things: it keeps him away from the toilet and gives me time to brush my teeth.

He's also moved on from the thousand times a day saying "wow" to now saying "mom." I think it's that he's brilliantly figured out that turning the w's upside down in "wow" created a whole new word. I sort of liked being called "Ma" but it seems that Abe has chosen "Mom" as what he wants to call me. Our conversations throughout the day often go something like this:

Abe: Mom?
Lori: Yes?
Mom?
Mm hmm?
Mom!
Abe!
Mom!?
Yes, Abe?
Woooow.

This is deep stuff, people, real deep.

Thirdly, Abe has discovered kissing. Yeah, he may start off coming at you the normal, decent way that young boys should kiss: But as is true for most one-year-olds, it quickly turns to this slobbery mess: He now kisses every page in his favorite animal book that we read most nights, especially the dog page for some reason. He has this Baby Einstein book with a mirror on each page that he's supposed to use for doing things like making funny faces and "puff and blow" and touch his nose, etc. All Abe want to do though is kiss himself in the mirror.

He's pretty indiscriminate when it comes to who he will kiss. If he has known you more than a couple of hours and you say "Abe, kiss?" with an accompanying kissy-sound, he'll probably grace you with one. For a while there, I thought that I was the only one whose face he'd place both his chubby hands on before coming in for a kiss, but this weekend I caught him kissing his cousin Ezra this way. Oh well, for the time being, at least I'm the only one follows the kiss with by patting the shoulder and saying, "Mom."

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Now this is in response to Courtney's post this week. Ted was working out of town on our anniversary (boo), so this is what I did in the afternoon:
I'd had this box of Trader Joe's green-tea muffins in the pantry for almost a year. I'd tasted them in the store and thought they were sort of weird, so I'm not sure why I bought them anyway. Well, I baked them and guess what? They tasted weird. So in Elaine Benes-style, I decided to forgo the stumps, going only for the muffin tops (click here if you don't know what I'm talking about).

And so as not to be wasteful, I gave the stump to Abe since he doesn't know any better right now anyway. So because even the best part, the tops, still tasted weird, I fancied them up with butter-spread and strawberry jam:

Green tea muffin stump for Abe, jammy top for Mom. Those stuffed cheeks don't lie--Abe didn't care a bit that he was just getting a stump:More weird green-tea stumps, please.