Meeting Santa

Friday night we spent the evening at our neighborhood park building where our friendly neighborhood Santa held court and the boys' friends colored and ate cookies and ran around. It was so nice out we walked there, the boys in their new jammies and what they call their "Santa" hats.

Fun at the Ecotarium in Worcester

Big boys in the wind tunnel at the Ecotarium in Worcester, MA the day before Thanksgiving.

Mama and Reed at a friend's birthday party a few weeks ago.

Visit with Deb and David

The Friday after Thanksgiving we had a lovely visit with my Aunt Deb and Uncle David in Clinton, MA. Reed and Uncle David had a grand time together, and the boys loved Aunt Deb and her wonderful toys as always. The boys also got to break their first wishbone. We all enjoyed the smorgasbord of delicious food.

Thanksgiving 2015

A few pictures from our 2015 Thanksgiving with the Leibowitz-Van Nostrand family in Massachusetts

Putting up the tree

As we were putting up the tree I set up a time-lapse video to show the process. Part one is pre-dinner, and part two is post-dinner.

Developmental Update continued

This is the 800th post of Team Lovebo, over just about five years. It's been a fun way for me to keep track of milestones, record funny events or thoughts, and share photos and videos of our lives. Thank you for joining me and our family here!

More about Beckett and Theo at 4.5 years old:

Beckett is effusive, fun and enthusiastic. He is a risk-taker and runs fast and hard at all times. He loves being rough-and-tumble with his classmates and friends and brother Theo. He loves wrestling and hippo rides on mama's back and being affectionate and touching his friends and family. Beckett also loves words and letters and everything verbal. He loves to rhyme and switch the first letters of words and learn the meaning of every strange word he encounters in adult speech and books. Beckett knows more of his letters even though he's not as good at actually writing them. Even when it looks like he is not paying attention, he is watching and listening and often blows me away with what he has quietly observed and put together to make sense of a situation. He also has an incredible memory and looks for patterns to figure out what will happen next based on what has happened before. Beckett also loves imaginative play, both by himself and with Theo, and often narrates his imaginative play out loud as a book is written (“'Let's get them, guys!' Lightning said. 'On my way!' Finn yelled.”) He is very competitive and does not like losing games, even of chance, and can get bent out of shape when Theo out-runs him on the way home from school.

Theo is thoughtful, kind, and precise. He lives to draw and color, and he has a specific aesthetic that he likes. He went with Jeff to pick out the Christmas tree because I suspected that he had a particular idea of what the tree should look like. He loves to draw ninja turtles and superheros and his family, and gets better and better every day. When he wants to draw something new, he usually asks an adult to draw it first, which I resist because 1) I'm worse at drawing than he is, 2) I feel like he should try himself, to improve his skills, and 3) I feel judged by his discerning eye when my attempts inevitably do not meet his expectations. Theo is sometimes a more considerate friend, such that when we're playing a game and he's winning he'll say, “It's okay, you'll catch up too, right?” Theo is more easily entertained by himself, including in the bathtub. They've been taking more baths separately recently because Theo loves to “swim” in the bath, going underwater and holding his breath and opening his eyes while he takes strokes. Theo is precise with his letter-writing even though he's less interested in what letters mean or how they combine than Beckett is. Theo is a wonderful older brother to Reed, playing with him, singing to him, smiling at him, and delighting in Reed's sounds, turning over, and smiles. When we are busy getting out the door and I have to set Reed down to get everything together to leave, and Reed gets fussy, it is usually Theo who attends to Reed and tries to calm him down. 

Developmental update: 4.5 and 0.5 years

My big boys are four and a half years old, and Reed will be seven months old on Thursday. I thought it might be time for a snapshot look at what they're doing and interested in at the moment. So, from youngest to oldest:

Reed: has started rolling over, both front-to-back and back-to-front, pretty ably. He's interested in eating just about anything. I usually feed him yogurt, applesauce and rice cereal at home, plus these nubby little rice crackers he can hold himself, and he eats anywhere between one and three meals a day depending on what the rest of the family is up to. He also eats table foods here and there. He will almost always reach for apples, so he has had a lot of that, but he has also had squash and other squishy things we're eating. Tonight Theo and I made chocolate cupcakes so Reed had some of that too. He can pick small bits of food up (like cheerios) but isn't that great at getting that food from his pincer grip into his mouth. Though he is interested, for sure. He still spends a lot of time lying on the floor, rolling about and scooting himself up by pushing off from his feet, but he has not yet mastered sitting. He likes being in a more upright position, though, so he spends a lot of time in the jolly jumper, the bumbo seat, and the “baby vegas” exersaucer. Since we keep breaking our dining room chairs we've moved Reed out of his seat that straps into a regular chair and into a chair that attaches to the table, and he's sitting next to Theo for the time being. Usually Reed is leaning over the arm of his chair and trying to grab whatever's on Theo's plate. As for sleeping, it's truly hard to complain, even though Jeff and I still don't get enough sleep. Reed sleeps from about when we put the big boys down (usually between 7:00 and 7:30) until somewhere between 3:30 and 5am. Since he has gone all night (til 6 or 7am) we have been trying to follow the advice of the Sleep Lady Good Night book and trying to hold him off til then, but the result has been that we are up popping a pacifier back in his mouth over and over again three or more times until it's the designated “wake-up” time. It's possible that it would work if we were consistent about it over time but it's hard when it seems like things are always changing—he had a stomach bug about three weeks ago that made him have a BM in every diaper, so then it seemed like he was at risk of dehydration, so I fed him more at night, and then he had a cold and was congested so was waking up more. Last night when we were up from about 3:30 on, and Jeff reported that one of the times he went in Reed tried to nurse on Jeff's arm, it occurred to me that I fed the big boys at 1am and 4am until they were about a year old, and then just at 4am until they were at least 18 months old. So our plan as of last night was that I'm going to try going back to nursing him when he wakes up and then putting him back to bed, at least as long as it stays that he sleeps 8 or more hours straight before waking up. Then of course last night he slept from 7:30pm until 7am with no wakeups. So who the heck knows.