What kind of a child. . .

. . . turns up his nose at ice cream and cookies in favor of broccoli and beer? Alex seems to have been born without a sweet tooth. On the rare occasions we do offer him a little treat, the cookie is often forgotten on the side of his tray. He turns his head away from the ice cream spoon. But he'll make a whole meal out of the broccoli, carrots and cabbage from our Chinese takeout. Thanks to Michigan's 10-cent deposit law, we often have a month's worth of soda cans and beer bottles in a container near the door. Alex rummages through these and invariably picks out the beer bottles, trying for a little sip. As he gets taller, we have to remember not to let our drinks sit near the edge of the table. He'll angle in under our elbows and make a grab for it.

. . . refuses to look at picture books until he can talk enough to read along? He's never been interested in books, rarely sitting on our laps long enough to get past the title page. In the past few weeks, though, his spoken word vocabulary has grown beyond "Mama" and "Dada" to include "App-mmm." Most people pronounce it as "apple" and for Alex, it can be applied to any fruit. Once he realized that "Chicka Chicka 1-2-3" has the word apple on almost every page, it became a huge hit. He'll hunt it out from the pile in the family room and run towards us, shouting "Appmmm! Appmmmm!" And as we read it to him, he'll repeat "Appmmmm" after us and we have to stop and praise him. He gets a huge grin and readies himself for the next appearance.

That's our Bear. As Jonathan said this afternoon, "He doesn't understand things, because he's a crazy baby."