May 4, 2016
Princess
My little girl is now 4 ½ years old. Last
summer she got glasses—she has broken one pair but has been doing really well
with wearing them. In August she started Preschool at our local Christian
School. She had to be in the 3 year old class as her birthday missed the cut
off by a few days! This means that she currently goes 2 days a week in the
morning. This fall she will be in the Early Kindergarten class and will attend
every day in the afternoon. She is really looking forward to this as she asks
us all the time why she can’t go every day! I’m thinking this summer will be rough,
we may need to try to find some organized activities for her.
She finally got
potty trained last fall—it only took 11 months! Now some days she tries to get
Buddy interested (actually a year ago he was further ahead than she was but as
he was still quite young lost interest) by telling him he can have candy if he
goes. On the one hand it might be nice to have help, on the other I am NOT
READY to start that up again, certainly not before our vacation this summer.
Also, Buddy is still not verbal enough (more later) to tell us when he needs to
go, so I would rather wait!
She has become quite
the little helper (when she WANTS to) around here. She is often able to get me
things I need for the boys. She likes to help unload the dish washer and
usually likes to help sweep the floor. We have recently made it her job to
sweep after lunch. She does this with varying degrees of completeness but it’s
a step in the right direction. She LOVES to tell her brother what to do;
sometimes he listens to her better than to us! We tell her that it is not her
job, but I’m not sure she believes us. She likes to treat Blue Eyes like a
doll. Tries to pick him up, move his body around, pick out his clothes (I think
she’d try to dress him if I’d let her.) Considering that he weighs almost 2/3
what she does and is quite tall while she is short, it looks funny and scares
me a bit. In case you are wondering Blue Eyes usually takes her in stride and
doesn’t complain her treatment of him!
Buddy
My little boy is now
2 ½ years old. He has more words than he did a year ago, although there are
also words he used to say but does not anymore. However, he is often hard to
understand. Last fall my brother noticed that Buddy wasn’t raising his tongue
up to the roof of his mouth. It’s hard to say certain sounds without doing
that. He is doing a little better now but still drops or doesn’t say some
sounds. I talked to his doctor about it and she said to keep working with him
for now but that if he doesn’t improve in a few months we will probably have to
get him some speech therapy. He has really liked the books I’ve gotten him that
use the same letter in various parts of words and in the different ways and has
been doing better the last month or so. He still doesn’t pronounce the first
letter of his name, but is VERY insistent that it is his name. His sister has
always tried to add an “a” or “ie” to his name, lately when she does that he
points to himself and says “NO, I …” dropping the first letter but pronouncing
the rest. She added the word boy to his name as well as his middle name and was
corrected quite strongly by him too! He can’t say her name so he calls her
“Girl”. She told me that she didn’t like that and he needed to call her by her
name. I explained that he couldn’t, but that if she really didn’t want to be
called “girl” then we needed to come up with another name that he could say for
him to call her by. She decided he could just keep calling her “girl”.
Last summer he had a
rough time with the kiddie swimming pool. He kept landing face first in the
water. For a while after that he hated the bath but now likes it again. We will
have to see how he does with water this summer. J
His sense of play
and imagination has really blossomed. He loves to play fix-it, build, and
cooking, as well as turn anything and everything into a weapon (including his
body!)
Blue Eyes
I had a terrible
time coming up with a blog name for my baby boy. Nothing seemed to fit. Since
he has beautiful blue eyes and appears to be keeping them I decided to call him
that. He is now 11 months old! In many ways this year has flown by fast. He has
done some things earlier than the others while other things took a little
longer. He is still not in the same room as his brother. We moved him into our
closet a few months ago, and keep talking about putting him in Buddy’s room but
there are always reason to put it off!
He is bigger than
the other two were at 15months! When he stands up under the table he hits his
head. He isn’t walking on his own yet, but is standing and walking along
furniture. There for a while we thought he might skip crawling but he didn’t.
Over the course of about 10 days last month he went from scooting backwards and
spinning to change direction (and being able to walk holding onto
someone/something) to doing a funny sit scoot (similar to what Princess did) to
actual crawling to crawling with one or both feet flat on the ground. He acts
like he is just going to take off walking any day now but so far hasn’t. I
haven’t seen how he does it but he is standing up in his pack in play, which
must be some trick as there really isn’t anything to grab onto.
He eats more solids
than the other two did at this age. At 4 months he WAS sleeping 10 hours a
night but then he started teething and the time changed so he didn’t really do
that again for about 4 months. Since then it’s been an off and on thing. Lately
he hasn’t been again. L
I’m hoping that changes quickly as I’ve been pretty much sleep deprived for the
better part of the last 5 years!
Overall he is a
content little guy, though lately he falls apart if I leave the room. I know
this is normal but it is still hard to have him screaming as he tries to follow
me. He loves to crawl all over the main floor of our house. We took down the
baby gates last fall and haven’t put them back up because with two older
siblings it’s kind of pointless to try to block off the front part of the
house. This means though that he can get to the stairs now. He made it to the
third step the other day and then started to lean back when I grabbed him. A
couple days before that he fell backwards off the bottom step. He’s fast when
he wants to be. The other day as he headed down the hall, I followed. When he
got to the bathroom doorway he paused, looked back at me and then put on a
burst of speed to try to get in before I could stop him. I shut the door just
before he would have gotten in. He knew he wasn’t supposed to be in there!
Sometimes Princess and Buddy will crawl around so he can follow them in a
circuit around the house. He loves it but gets so tired trying to keep up!
Well, I should stop
now. It was longer than I intended but oh well. J I may fill in a few memories of the last months in future
posts as they occur to me or are relevant.
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