Long overdue Walter update

This post brought to you between bites of my dinner. Tonight is my favorite dinner night: Make your own salad night. It's relatively easy, chopping veggies and cooking some chicken. Then we both get to have what we want on ours. I have lots of veggies to use up from last week's spring roll disaster. I bought the Gyoza sauce that Aunt Beverly introduced me to that I love, and tried to make the spring rolls but they ended up big floppy blobs of veggies and tofu in rice paper. Half way through the ingredients I realized I never cut the tofu, so half did not have tofu. Then a few more later I remembered the rice noodles in the pot that didn't get included, so only half had the rice noodles. I forgot to mark which ones had cilantro so Evan didn't eat many. Walter, though, had fun playing with them, when we tried to feed the left over to him :)
So as I was driving home tonight in my exceptional long drive (thanks to the pass getting closed again at mile 20 which is just 7 miles from our house, and evacuation being ordered down south, I assume) I was thinking how much I have been enjoying the last few weeks of Walters life, watching him grow each day and add new things to his life. I haven't done a very good job of sharing that with you all, so here goes.

Yesterday I had the bitter sweet fortune of staying home with Walter, because he has been sick this week. He had a fever Monday and we kept him home Tuesday and Wednesday so he could heal. He's better today and will return to day care tomorrow. But yesterday, with our 1 on 1 time i enjoyed him so much. I will get better of capturing more vidoe of him being cute and growing into his personality, I promise.

So, here is what he's up to: He has fallen in love with the phone. He gets a hold of a phone and walks around the house with it on his ear, tilts his head to the side and jabbers. He'll say "Hi" too. My cell phone beeps when it needs charged and yesterday he heard it beep picked it up and said "Hi". He loves to listen to the phone too. When I was talking to my mom yesterday I put the phone to his ear and he loved it. Today Evan called me at work and gave W the phone and he loved listening to me talk to him.

He has so many more words now. He can say: Dog, Duck, Dad, Mom, Hi, Bath, Book, No (this is one of his favorite words), go, bye. Maybe more than that I can't think of now. Thanks to the See N Say and the natavitiy set, he can name animal noises: Baaa, Mooo, Bark Bark, ooo ooo (monkey). He can identify by picture monkey, duck, dog, sheep, anything with 4 legs that is big is a mooo (cow), and himself. I can't wait to help him explore all sorts of new things this year!
It's time to watch the news and hear about the skiiers trapped at Stevens because the passes are closed and to hear if anyone got injured in the avalanches. We have only lived here a short time so I have no idea if this is normal but the last 2 years there seems to be some aweful weather situations that make headlines nightly. More from us later this week.