See Buckle. Must Fasten.

Luke is 16 months old.  He seems to love two activities more than anything else: climbing and fastening buckles.  He fastens any buckle he can.  He had to fasten the buckle on his stroller before he went to play at the play place the other day.  He fastened the buckle in the shopping cart at Target.  He always wants to fasten the buckles in his feeding chair as soon as we get him out of the chair after meal times.  And if we unfasten them and he sees us, he will refasten them.  He has even crawled into his chair and buckled himself for no reason at all.  (I wondered if he was preparing for a future sit-in, at a time when hes able to chant:  NO MORE GREEN BEANS!  NO MORE GREEN BEANS!)  He would like to fasten the buckles on his car seat but this is both safety- and time-prohibitive, so we usually scoop him out of the car as fast as we can and hope he doesn't have too much of a fit.

As far as climbing goes, he's become quite the handful in the kitchen.  He always wants to be on the table or on the island, to the extent that we've resorted to removing all of the chairs and stools so that our kitchen often looks like this:

And yes, it's always that clean.  ;-)  We move the chairs to the exterior of the fireplace in an attempt to keep him from climbing up there and pulling out the gravelly stuff inside.  The stools get turned upside down and block our bedroom door, where Luke loves to go and hunt for Stuff He Shouldn't Put In His Mouth But Does Anyway.  It usually works pretty well.  We are a mess, aren't we?

Luke still isn't using words, though he talks all the time and has plenty to say.  He has really gotten the hang of the "more" sign and uses it whenever there's something around that he wants.  I'm trying to teach him "please," "thank you," and "all done" and he's used them each once or twice but that's it.  My favorite gesture he's shown lately is that he folded his arms when we said the blessing on our dinner the other night.  I'm hoping he does that one again soon.

Luke is officially a one-nap kid these days and it works out very well every day except Sunday, when we are in church from 11-2.  But he still does okay and whenever he does have a hard time in church we are able to shrug, smile, and say "He's missing his nap."  But he'll be in nursery at the end of October so he will probably be so happily occupied that he won't have any trouble at all.  Hopefully.

Luke still sees eating as a sensory experience, though he's beginning to use utensils.

Thank goodness pizza doesn't require utensils.