Daniel Turns Two

Our district Youth Conference was from December 28-30. I was chaperoning the youth at a military retreat center for part of Daniel's birthday and the two days before. Most of the conference, I was cold and tired and eating yucky food. Serving with the youth of my church often makes me think of the youth leaders I had when I was young. They did so much for me and I was pretty much an unthankful youth with tunnel vision. As always, experience is the best teacher of all.
At 3 a.m. on Daniel's birthday, Jim called me at youth conference to tell me that Daniel was throwing up and had terrible diarreah. What a bummer, it was his birthday. As soon as the sun was up, I raced home. Daniel seemed fine but we just mosied around the house for most of the day. It turns out that the night before, Daniel had eaten five (or more--the eye witnesses just aren't sure) oranges. I think that's what made him sick. Hmmm.
Thanks to Miriam (our official ice cream cake maker), Daniel had a cute cake. It was so nice to be home with him and the family. We played games and opened presents. The best part of all was watching him blow out the candles. We had so much fun watching him do this that we just kept lighting them and singing. It made us all feel two again.

Daniel's favorites:

1. Daniel loves t-shirts with "things" on them, like Thomas-the-Tank or a dinosaur growling. I honestly cannot get him to put on a nice striped shirt. He strongly prefers to have something scary or cool on it. When it comes to dressing, he is very independent and likes to pick out his clothes.

2. He says "Mo" instead of "No" and he says this often.

3. He is really good at making sounds. He makes lots of animal sounds and is adding in other sounds like, "vroom". Miriam made him this "Vroom Plate" for his birthday. He loves it and will not eat on anything else.

4. Daniel is constantly messing around with our DVDs and CDs. It makes me crazy. During the holidays, Daniel made sure that I would not be listening to Christmas music. Everytime I would put it on, he would run over to the player and take out the CD. Grrrrr. That made me mad. One of Daniel's favorite DVDs is Max and Ruby and Little Einsteins

5. Daniel loves lining up his toys.

6. Daniel loves puzzles.

7. Daniel loves books. His favorite book is this huge encylopedia-like book about animals. It is called, "Five Hundred Things You Should Know About Animals".

8. Daniel loves Margaret and always wants to be doing or playing with whatever she is playing with (much to Margaret's sorrow). One day they were spatting and Margaret's finger got slammed in the door. Daniel was so sad and hugged her and tried to comfort her. She turned to me and said, "I'm okay, now. Daniel apologized to me". After all the drama, that statement made me smile because I didn't know he knew how to apologize and I didn't know she knew the word for it.