Put Your Hands Together Now

Bry's been adding steadily to his bag of tricks over the past few weeks. He waves goodbye and hello, and sometimes just for the fun of it. And when he waves, it's no meager side-to-side swipe of his hand or the cute hand opening and closing thing that some kids do. Bry gets into it, waving from the shoulder and emphatically pumping his whole arm up and down. It's not subtle.

His other new skill is clapping his hands. After about 400,000 rounds of "patty cake," Bry will sometimes clap along to his own little rhythm. Most of the time he claps his closed fists, rather than his hands. This is endearingly cute. Trust me. He is also very picky about when he will clap and when he won't. He is certain to send us the message that he is not a trick pony and he will clap when he is moved to do so, thank you very much, not just because mama or daddy is grinning at him like a fool, urging him to do it.

But when Bry wants to clap, there is apparently nothing that will stop him from fulfilling the urge, not even say, the fact that it is 5:00 am and anyone with any sense at all is still SLEEPING. Ahem. Steve and I groggily awoke this morning to Bry sitting in the middle of our bed (after we had, in desperation, brought him there at 3:30 am), wide awake and cheerfully clapping his hands as if to say, let's get moving people! There is much to be done today! He was giggling too, at some private joke that neither Steve nor I had been invited in on. The cuteness of all of this just barely canceled out the fact that it was happening in the middle of the night, as far as I was concerned.