New swing!

I finally put up our baby swing yesterday.  It's a hand-me-down from my sister, and we've been wanting to put it up for awhile because we have a great tree for it in our backyard.  There has been a different swing there, from before we moved in, so I just cut the rope and attached strong s-hooks so now it will be easy to change back to a regular swing when TongJie outgrows the baby one.  Anyway, he's been having a great time with it, and once he gets in his swing he does NOT want to get out.  I pushed him in it for probably almost an hour this morning, and every time I asked him if he wanted to get down, he would sign "more" because he wanted to keep swinging.  When it was finally time to go inside, there were tears.

What else have we been up to lately?  Well, TongJie is slowly adjusting to having Daddy gone all day during the week, but he's still not happy about it.  Whenever he hears a car outside our house, he signs "daddy" and opens his mouth wide in excitement, hoping it's Daddy coming home from school - even if it's only 8:00 in the morning!  It makes the weekends all the more special when TongJie and Jeff get to play together all day.

 
We're still getting lots of good use out of the wagon, as you can see!

We recently moved up the seat of TongJie's highchair to make it like a booster seat so he can actually eat at the table.  He thinks that's pretty neat, except now he can grab more stuff so we have to keep everything far out of his reach.  Our friends the Weldys gave TongJie a really cool plate and utensil set a couple months ago that we've been waiting to use.  The plate was too big to fit on TongJie's highchair tray, but now that he's sitting at the table, the plate works well.  Also, now he's more interested in using utensils to feed himself, so he's a lot more motivated to use it.  As you can see from the picture, the utensils look like construction machinery, and they include a spoon, a fork, and a "pusher".  TongJie has not attempted the pusher yet, but he likes to use the spoon.

Oh yeah, you may have noticed that it looks like TongJie has a black eye, and that is correct.  He hit his face on the corner of the sound booth at Jeff's music rehearsal at church on Thursday evening, and it swelled up and was a shiner the next morning.  It's looking better every day, so he should be back to normal soon.  That is, until he gets his next injury.  He's one tough little kid.

My aunt and uncle gave TongJie an outfit for his birthday and I had to take a picture of it because it's so cute - there's a monkey on the seat of the pants.  We were happy that they gave us something in size 12 months, because that's the size he actually wears right now but we're too cheap to buy him 12 month clothing ourselves because we keep thinking he'll be outgrowing it anytime.  We do have other 12 month articles from hand-me-downs and yard sales, and he actually fits into 18 month shirts now, so it's not like we don't have any clothing for our child - it's just fun to have something new in his size!  Once he gets a little bigger, he's going to have a lot of brand-new outfits that we got as gifts when we first came back from China.

I had some bags lying around that I made, so TongJie picked all four of them up, plus his own green bag that I previously made for him, and walked around the house carrying all five of them and waving goodbye.  He knows that when he gets his green bag we're usually going somewhere, so I guess he was trying to tell me he was ready to leave.