animal sounds and an ode to a shopping cart

One of the best parts of parenthood is seeing the way your kids grow and develop from month to month.  Some of our favorites from February include Sam saying animal sounds.  He knows a cow, monkey, fish, lion, cat, and this weekend we found out he likes to buzz whenever he sees a picture of a bee. He is also talking more in general.  We counted up his words and he has at least 12.  Doesn't mean other people could necessarily catch them, but to us it is clear what he is saying.  The latest ones are "Wow!" and "bowl" and "cheese".  He can stand for a minute and sometimes take 2 steps, so there's not much walking yet.  That's okay though.  Every child has their strengths. :)
Andrew plays with trains and wooden track several times a day.  When he gets bored he asks for tv shows- his favorites are Dora the Explorer and Backyardigans.  We use it as an incentive for trying to dress himself, eating well at mealtime, cleaning up his toys, and other things. I'm not quite sure I like using tv as a bargaining chip because it might encourage him to think that tv is the end all to excitement, but it has been yeilding a lot of positive behavior.  Andrew also likes to sing.  He knows the lyrics to a lot of pop songs, and has started substituting the names of his toys or other things into the songs to make them mean something different, which makes us laugh.  He was singing love songs to his shopping cart one day so I grabbed the camera and prompted him a lot to do it again.  His newest adventure is that I found a co-op preschool for him to be in.  He has been to one field trip and one regular lesson day so far and loves it.  At first I was nervous because the other little boys are all 9-14 months older than him, but he seems to get along with them and keep up really well.  This week will be our turn to host and I had a great time brushing up on my lesson planning skills to get ready. 
In case you need a little entertainment and the pictures lately haven't been quite enough, here are some little video clips of the things I've described. Sam's is from close to a month ago, and Andrew's was last week.