Staying inside

We've been seeing a lot of this lately:

And look how tall he's getting - he can easily reach the doorknob now, but he can't turn it.

TongJie really wants to go outside, but the air quality is so bad right now (actually considered hazardous) from the nearby fires that we have to stay inside.  It's too bad that I just put up his new swing and now he can't use it.  He sometimes stands at the door doing the sign language for "outside" and "swing," looking longingly at his swing hanging enticingly from the tree limb, and he doesn't understand why we can't go out.  So, we've been doing some fun things inside instead.  Today we went to a thrift store and found a little car and a cool ramp for marbles and stuff.  We got both of them for a dollar.  The ramp kept TongJie entertained for a long, long time.  He was having so much fun putting large marbles down it and then going to chase them.

He also continues to love playing with his cars (of course!) and blocks.  He can stack blocks all by himself now.  When he first got his wooden blocks for his birthday, he had kind of a hard time stacking them because he kept trying to push on them to make them stick together like his interlocking Mega Blocks do, but he's figured out the difference now and he's getting quite good at making little towers.  I tried to get a video, but once he sees the camera out, he gets too distracted to keep doing whatever he was doing before.  However, you can still see his tower that's a few blocks high.  He wouldn't have been able to do that just a couple of months ago.

Speaking of being able to do new things, TongJie now has a sign language vocabulary of over 40 words!  And that's just counting the words that he uses correctly on his own, not the signs that he simply copies when we model them for him.  It's so nice to be able to communicate with him that way, and we're anticipating him picking up a lot more before he starts speaking.  It really keeps us on our toes with learning new signs to teach him all the time!

And here's a little video clip of TongJie eating oatmeal all by himself today at lunch.  He's getting pretty good with a spoon, huh?