Ryan, Debi, and Toren Cragun's Blog

Debi and I were talking over dinner one night about Toren’s development.  His language skills are coming along fine and he’s always been perfectly well-developed with his physical skills.  But Debi had noticed that he is particularly good at problem solving.  If he can’t get something or wants something, he’s pretty good at figuring out a way to make it happen.  I noted that one clear example of that was the fact that he ate pasta almost every night.  He loves pasta and employs a number of manipulative techniques to get it.  He’ll ask us to open the fridge before we ask him what he wants and ask for pasta (we usually have some fucilli or rigatoni pre-cooked for him).  It’s hard to tell him he can’t eat something healthy when he could be asking for cookies or candy.  He’ll sometimes ask for pasta directly.  And sometimes he’ll just say no to anything else we suggest until we ask him if he wants pasta.  He does eat other stuff, but pasta is preferred.

While we discussed all of this, Toren was eating pasta quietly at his table.  At one point I said to Debi, “He’s definitely a good problem-solver because he gets pasta almost every night.”

Toren, who wasn’t a part of the conversation up to this point piped in and said, “Good mommy.”

We looked at him and he said, “Good daddy.”

Wondering why he was saying that we were good parents, I asked him, “Are you saying that because you have us well-trained?”

To which Toren said, “Uh huh,” as he continued eating his pasta.

We’ve been trying to help Toren learn that he has more than one name.  He knows the other names – “Marx” and “Cragun” – but he still doesn’t seem to realize that they are names for him.

We tried quizzing him one night to see if he would remember what his last name is.  Here’s how the conversation went:

Ryan: “Toren, what’s your last name?”

Toren: “Granmary.”

Rosemary’s recent visit was obviously memorable for him.  He now thinks his last name is “Granmary.”

Debi and I were in the kitchen cleaning up after dinner while Toren was sitting at the table.  While we chatted, probably about some issue one of us was having with our research, Toren spoke up.  Here’s the conversation:

Toren: “See mommy!”  (“see” means “look”)

Debi: “See what?”

Toren, pointing to the water he just spilled all over his table: “See my big mess.”

I didn’t get enough footage of Toren as a Jedi, but I did catch these two short clips of him as a Jedi at the Halloween fair at UT.  In the first clip he got to decorate a cupcake and then eat it, which he loved:

In the second clip he’s just walking between activities:

At one of the activities, a male student raved about the costume.  He probably said it was the best Halloween costume he had ever seen about 10 times.  He loved it!

Here are a couple of additional clips Toren hiding in a nightstand and running in Debi’s shoes: