Museum of Play

Friday we lucked out to have Claire visiting and have a superintendent's conference day for the boys on an unusual, non-holiday day, so we packed up for a day at the Museum of Play in Rochester.

Reed and Beckett digging while Theo and Auntie Claire were reading at the Berenstain Bears exhibit.

Claire got very comfortable with the Ergo and Reed was so happy that he slept on her for a while. Poor Reed didn't get his nap schedule accommodated much in the last few days, with all the activities we were running off to all the time!

My Theo, stopping to read in a quiet nook of the Museum, which is also a library.

Beckett and I discovered a previously-unknown section of the Reading Adventureland exhibit, where you can pretend you're on a pirate ship and send notes across the sails (or something like that). Beckett loved writing letters and drawing pictures and sending them to me across the sail.

Theo's favorite part of the museum was a SuperYou exhibit he and Claire found where you can put your face in the body of a superhero. He really improved his mouse skills choosing the superheros and accessories out. I also blew their minds when we got back and I put the pictures they had created on their cameras, so they can see them whenever they want!

They got to ride the train all by themselves, a very rare treat.

Very close to crawling! He so wants to....

Snowshoeing

Claire and I took advantage of having childcare for Reed on Thursday to head out to Beaver Lake Nature Center for some snowshoeing. We stopped at the beautiful, volunteer-staffed center where we rented snowshoes and got a map, and then headed out. We seemed to be the only snowshoers out, and except for the clomp-clomp, scratch-scratch of the snowshoes, we enjoyed a quiet, peaceful hike through the woods, over frozen marshland, and up and down hills. It was really fun and I hope to convince the whole family to go out for a daytime or a moonlight snowshoe someday soon.

Wednesday Claire and I took Reed to his nine-month pediatrician appointment. His height was down an inch from a month ago (thanks to the super-accurate measuring technique of simultaneously yanking on his head and foot) and he's up almost a pound. He's not crawling yet but seems so much closer today than he was even Wednesday. He's saying lots of MAMA, DADA, GAGA sounds. Apparently he says mama in an anxious tone when I'm not around. Reed got two more shots, the last round of Hep B and the last flu shot, and he was tested for lead and hemoglobin (both normal).

Visit with Claire

My dear friend Claire came to visit this past week. I met Claire rowing freshman year at Harvard and we have remained friends ever since. Claire is now a board certified OB-GYN practicing in Flagstaff, Arizona, and so I feel very special that she can take time out of her very busy life to come visit us for a week. I took the week off of work to spend time together, which kind of meant more work for me at home than usual! She settled right into the routine here, and the boys took to her right away. I'm not sure I washed Reed's highchair tray all week, and she was as happy to put Reed down for naps as she was to read books to the big boys.

Bubble baths

I used some new bubble bath that created way bigger and more long-lasting bubbles than anything we've used before. The boys had a blast. Reed was puzzled but seemed to like it.

Once it got too rambunctious for Reed in the bath, Theo and Beckett took turns loading each other's heads up with bubbles. The belly laughs coming from the bathtub were music to my ears!

We have had Reed's jolly jumper up in the kitchen now for a few months. For the first little while, he mostly played with the toys on the dashboard, as his feet barely touched the ground. But for the last two months he's been going to town on the jumper. He loves watching his brothers chase each other and play around him, and watching us cook and work in the kitchen.

 

This is Beckett "reading" one of his favorite stories, a book about Superman. This is mostly memorization but he is starting to recognize some words.