Asher

Where do I even start?

Asher is the most mischievous, adorable, disastrous, sweetest, funniest, craziest child on the planet.  I really believe this might be a true statement.  If by planet, I really mean in my house.  But totally true.

We thought we were good parents.  We were so good at training kids to sleep through the night, we were pros at getting kids to eat all kinds of foods, and we are so good at not responding to whining and fit throwing.   Until there was Asher.

Getting him to hold still for a haircut was just one battle too many.  So we kind of stopped cutting his hair.  Most days, he looks like the wild ragamuffin he truly is.  But after a day on the beach in Hawaii or right after a nice warm bath, his hair looks like this.

Check out those curls!  Who could resist?!  The headband was his addition by the way.

But then he takes a nap, and the curls are usually replaced with an unruly mop.  Or, if I'm lucky, a peacock fan.

He is fully potty trained and can even take himself to the bathroom.  His method involves stripping entirely from the waist down and then climbing on the toilet backwards.  It is extremely handy since he has not mastered, the 'holding it down' process yet.  And while he is great at stripping, the redressing is still a lacking skill.  So when mom is otherwise occupied (i.e. all of the time) he just hangs out half naked until I track down the discarded bottoms.  

This picture is from our Hawaii trip after his unexpected jump in the ocean.  No clothes, but my backpack and I are ready to hit the road.

Asher is that kid that you can't leave alone for any length of time.  Quiet = disaster in the making about 99.8% of the time.  His favorite deconstruction zone: the bathroom.

He also taught himself how to turn large wads of toilet paper into toilet-dipped spit wads that have clung to my bathroom walls on more than one occasion.   The kid cannot have a writing utensil without finding a wall to write on with it.  I really can't even count how many surfaces of our house now feature his artwork.  On a positive note, he is a great colorer in nursery.

One of Asher's strangest quirks is his inability to sleep through the night.  Not even at 2 1/2 years old.  More often than not, he will wake up at least once in the night crying.  Jon and I have tried everything and finally decided he was having night terrors, as most of the time he is not even really awake but screaming anyway.  I was feeling all kinds of remorse for those episodes of Power Rangers and Justice League he had watched, of course then remembering that I wasn't the one who let him watch them...

But as his vocabulary has increased, the source of his night interrupting dreams have become a little more apparent.  Here are a few of the latest phrases he has been known to scream out in the middle of the night:

"It's my sword!  Give it back Rhode!"

"I just want a cookie!  Just one cookie!"

"We can't go to the park!"

My child is haunted by his extremely normal life.  May he please grow out of this as quickly as possible.

This kid is obsessed with sucking on his index finger.  This habit is going nowhere anytime soon but we are slowly breaking him of sticking his other index finger in his nose.  I took this picture at Rhode's basketball practice.  Sitting on a ball, gripping a sword with a finger in his mouth.  This is the epitome of 2 year old Asher.

He love shows, and since the majority of our TV watching happens in the car, he frequently refuses to leave the car.  For a while, when running errands, he would say "Mom, I just want to go home."  And the minute we would get inside the house, he would say, "No mom!  Not here, I want to go home!"  It took a while to figure out he thought the car was "home" as I would say, "Let's go home" before we hopped in the car.

His favorite shows are Leapfrog, which is awesome because the kid already knows all of his letters and most of their sounds.  I am so okay with television teaching my kids to read.

After begging and begging to wear his brother's cowboy boots, I finally remembered I had a pair in storage that were about his size that we inherited from the Stouts.  I pulled them out and made his day.

Rhode and Asher spend a lot of time together these days while Scarlet is at school.  He is more and more transforming into a fun playmate for his older brother and a nicer sibling to his younger brother.  And really, he is just hard to resist.

Asher buddy, you are just one of a kind.  And I am so glad there is only one of you.  :)