Letters and Numbers

Micah is officially counting to ten! It's very cute, and he does a really good job with it on a regular basis. The only problem, however, is that he almost always starts with the number three. :) What's really cool, though, is watching him point to objects and count them one at a time. He gets the whole counting concept. He is also trying to sing the alphabet, which is cool, and does a pretty good job with that, too. (When I say a pretty good job, I mean that I can figure out what he's saying because I'm his mom...) His newest thing to learn is shapes, and he's starting to recognize some of the basic ones. Hooray for learning!

FOr some reason, he's been pretty anti-veggie lately, which makes for some interesting meal times. It's hard to believe he's almost two, though. In the past week he has started to walk down the stairs by holding the railing and doing it like a big kid. Micah also slept in a sleeping bag for the first time last week. We stayed at my parents house, and the kids slept in the guest room together. The only real problem was that both of the kids needed to poop right after I put them to bed, so that was a bit disruptive, but after a few minutes Micah settled down and they both went to sleep. Also, after wanting to play for a few minutes at Nanny's house, they both went to sleep pretty readily in their sleeping bags. Granted Micah was out of his sleeping bag and on the floor in the morning, but there were no problems. NO MORE PACK AND PLAY!!!

I've been working a little bit with math with Alexis, and she has started wtih some sight words, and I have a small list of some things I want to review with her this summer. And then she's off to preschool in the fall. It seems so weird, although it's a little less odd since she'll only be gone two mornings a week. I think she's really going to love it, though.

They've also been having a ton of fun with everyone visiting the past few weeks. It has been VERY busy around here recently, mostly being able to see old friends from Lee. The kids fall in love with everyone, which is pretty awesome, and it's great to have kids who are so friendly and engaging with strangers. It's also VERY cool that on this Monday morning the kids are roaming around the house together. Alex is leading Micah in a very cool way (not bossy at all right now) around the house and encouraging him to play with her. This means that I just got to exercise and am now typing this blog post out without worrying about kids. Very cool.

Alex Independence

Yesterday we went to the part with some friends who were in town. They brought along their golden retriever, and while in the fields at the park, Alexis took Ava for a walk all by herself. She also got a kite to fly twice all by herself. She was adorable, running along the path with us watching in the distance, leading the dog and later on flying the kite. Those are the kind of moments that stick with you and make you realize that your kids are truly growing up.

A Good Day

Today is Memorial Day, and we ended up having some old friends over for brunch. We met their two kids, hung out, and just generally had a great time. We also just got in from spending almost two hours in the backyard, which might be a record for us in one sitting. We played in theie little kiddie pool and then had hot dogs and sausages with homemade chili and watermelon. Very stereotypical, right? It was a great day, even though Micah REALLY doesn't want to sit in the water. He did, however, want to spend an hour pouring water into a cup. I wish I could be entertained that easily...

First, Alexis. Her fourth birthday party was awesome. We invited her friends over and EVERYONE came, which we didn't expect but was awesome. We scheduled it for 10-11 on a Saturday morning, and basically they all played downstairs int he ball pit and then came upstairs to have some cake after singing happy birthday to her. Jason's favorite moment was when everyone was singing to her, and she was so delighted that she got shy and started hiding her face in her daddy's legs. It was adorable. I made her a butterfly cake and a maardvark cake, which were both a hit, especially the maardvark cake. I am never again, though, making two birthday cakes and decorating them for this girl. We asked people not to bring presents because we're really trying to prevent her from going into overload with presents, but a number of friends made their own cards and brought them to her, which I thought was really, really nice. It was a good time. She also got a free meal at Red Robin, one of her favorite restaurants, and the staff sang to her and brought her ice cream, and she got a free meal at Chick-fil-a and one of the managers came and brought her a little "eat more chicken" cow. Overall, she had a great birthday and got lots of presents from family that she is enjoying a lot.

Alex is recently doing a really great job writing letters, so we've written a few notes to people. I tell her how to spell, and she writes it. She's been dealing in capital letters and I've wanted to move on to lowercase letters soon, and that was affirmed by a friend at church who works as a reading specialist who has to get kids to unlearn writing words in all caps. I know what's on my agenda for this week.

Micah is our boy of despair. If he doesn't get his way, he despairs. If someone takes something from him, he despairs. If he doesn't want to eat, he despairs. (Okay, so I am speaking hyperbolically. Kind of.) He is so happy when he's happy, but when he is sad (and he's teething and had a cold before that), he is miserable. It takes quite a bit of patience, but time outs seem to be helping some.

However, he does know his alphabet. He confuses v for y and z for s, but otherwise he's prety accurate most of the time. It's cool because I can just point at a letter and he says the name instead of me getting him to choose the correct letter. We'll start working on lowercase letters soon, but I'm pretty proud of him for his uppercase letters. He is also trying to count and knows numbers 1-5 pretty well and a few others, but not consistantly yet. He also tries to sing the alphabet song and count, both of which are really cute. He doesn't know colors or shapes yet, but we're working on those. He does, however, know most body parts, which is pretty cool.

Also, about a week and a half ago we switched him to a toddler bed, and he did an AWESOME job. I think he has seen hers and was excited about it, and we've really had very few problems with it. That's really nice in the midst of his other crankiness.

It is now family pie time (where we sit down and eat some pie, exactly what it sounds like), so that's it for now.

The Zoo

We went to the national zoo today. It was the first time in a LONG time, and it was Micah's first time at all. Alex had been sick this weekend with a fever, so she was actually pretty tired while we were there. She still enjoyed it, though. Micah LOVED it! The only problem is that he ALWAYS wanted to be out of the stroller walking around, and sometimes he needed to stay IN the stroller. However, with Amber's help (an old friend from college who was in the area), we kept the two kids happy and fed and excited. The crowning moment, though, was when Micah walking around in the small mammal house. (I've discovered that smaller, scurrying animals are more entertaining than large, immobile animals.) Micah put his face right up to the glass and saw a golden-tailed tamarin, which has always been one of my favorite animals at the zoo. For some reason, this tamarin decided that my son was IT and jumped down directly onto the glass right in front of Micah's face to pounce on him and then run away again. Micah thought it was the most hysterical thing he had ever experienced and kept jumping up and down over and over again. It was a long, but good, morning. The journey out there can get a little long because it's the city, but it's worth it. We actually became FONZ members today as a family, meaning that I can park for free anytime that I go! The zoo is free, but parking is a bit expensive, so this makes it easier to think about going for shorter periods of time. Plus, the kids get free animal crackers every time they go!

Speaking of jumping, this is Micah's new favorite activity. He just jumps ALL of the time around the house until he falls down and then gets up and does it again. This kid catches more air than I do!

Micah's Development

Micah continues to amaze me, and I think I have to thank Alex for a lot of that. His vocabulary just seems huge to me, especially when I think about how few words Alex said at this age. I know I've mentioned that once or twice (or a hundred times) before, but it's crazy to me how he just says a word because he's mimicking someone or he sees someone doing something. FOr instance, he just saw Alex dancing and said "dance", which I've never heard him say before. So incredibly cool. He's also VERY into pretending right now, especially pretending to be asleep. We've created two little monsters who both think you're supposed to roar at someone to wake him up! It's pretty funny.

However, the main thinkg right now is that Micah has started to use the potty. AT 20 MONTHS! How cool is that? He is by NO MEANS potty-trained at all, but apparently while Alex and I were gone this weekend, something clicked for him. Jason was telling Micah that he was using the potty, and Micah got really excited and started to say POTTY POTTY POTTY! SO Jason got his potty out of the closet, and Micah sat down and used it. How cool is that? This was on a Saturday. On Sunday Jason told me this sotry when I got home, and I asked Micah if he used the potty, and Micah said POTTY POTTY POTTY, went upstairs, and used the potty. No joke.

Yesterday he used the potty four times. For real.

Unfortunately, he can't even pull his pants down yet. But he gets the concept! It will take him a long time before he's actually potty-trained, but if he wants to try, I'll certainly let him.

Alex and I had a great time visiting friends this weekend. Micah was sick, so he and Jason had to stay home. However, I think Alex enjoyed being without Micah for a while. She kept wanting to hold our friends' two-month-old baby and had a blast playing with her Uncle Kyle's old toys, including a Wonder Woman figure that she became quite attached to. She got a huge kick out of being able to choose some special things like a gourmet chocolate, and we went to this HUGE indoor playgound/ballpit,jungle gym/bouncy place called Ballocity. She was so much smaller than most fo the other kids, but she just WENT for it and had a blast inside. It was also adorable when we visited Kyle's church. She loved the SUnday school and apaprently enjoyed being a hlper and speaking into the microphone, and she is in love with Kyle and insisted onholding onto his hand when he was done praying with people up front. (He's a pastor and was speaking that morning.) It was adorable.

And the big news is that Alex is officially going to preschool next year. She's in a program at a church right around the corner from our house, which is really nice, and she'll be there two days a week for about three hours. And get this: IT'S FREE! Yes, we had another option that was a great price, but it was five days a week, a little more than I really wanted to send her right now. Plus, now we'll have some money to do other special things with her!

Updates - Very Brief Paragraphs

Micah:

Micah is saying dozens of words, which continues to astound me. One of his latest is help. That's actually very helpful (no pun intended) simply because he can let me know when he needs help doing something, and I think it's creating a little less frustration on his part. He has no problem picking up words, and I've watched him trying to put two words together. He is also doing better at identifying some of his body parts, although he certainly gets them wrong fairly frequently. He has some of them down, though. For example, he loves to say hair for some reason. He eats well and has a smile that lights up the room with one huge dimple on the left side of his face. He is also really into grabbing people's hands and saying hand when he wants to lead you somewhere or have you take him down the steps. He does this to people he doesn't know, too. These days he's waking up at about 6:30 in the morning, but we'll see if the time change coming up helps keep him quiet longer. Who knows?

Alex:

Alexis has entered a whiney stage, which is not fun. We're working a lot on how to express herself in an appropriate tone of voice. We're also actively working on manners a lot, and she's getting pretty good at saying excuse me to interrupt people. Now we're working on when it's an appropriate time to actually do that, and if she's anything like me, she'll never learn that lesson completely... her tracing skills are getting prety good, and she's doing a better job writing letters. However, one of the things she's gotten REALLY good at is determining what letter a word starts with, and that's very cool to see her develop that skill.

`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:

That's for you, mom, because my son is a jabberwocky. He just jabbers and jabbers and jabbers and jabbers and jabbers and jabbers... You get the point. It's so weird to watch the language development because Alex was so slow with it, but part of me thinks he'll be a lot slower in putting words together to form sentences. We shall see. It's hard to think that he'll be at the level that she was when she was two, but that is six months from now, and six months in toddler world is like eighteen years for the rest of us. He likes to volunteer lots of words and now that he has mastered the old favorites, like sit, he likes to use new ones, like sock. That's one of his most recent favorites. He has also mastered going down the stairs. He's not walking down, but he's scooting down on his but, so one of his favorite things to do is play up and down. (Alex created that name.) They both go up and down the steps and then play on the landing while bursting out from one side to scare me. Micah is totally enamored with this new freedom. Me? It kind of freaks me out a little bit, but he's very stable and I've got to let him go sometime. And on a random note, he now LOVES brushing his teeth. I don't know when this transition took place, but he's all into getting up on the little stool and letting me do it and then trying to do it on his own.

We got rid of his high chair a few weeks ago, so now he's just using his booster seat. I've also finally been able to get him to delay eating dinner, at least most of the time, so that we can all eat together as a family. This is really, really nice. Another nice thing is that he's sleeping later. He got into some bad sleeping habits over Christmas, so finally I just started letting him cry again when he woke up at 5:30, and now he's usually sleeping until almost seven with no tears in the early morning. Hooray!

Christmas was so much fun. I think I had my first true parental delight in getting presents ready for the kids. We moved the coffee table out of the way and created piles for the kids' presents, complete with stockings for both. Micah got this huge letter train that I got at a yard sale, and we put a blanket on top of it and let him pull it off. Then, after she had opened all of her other presents, we told Alex she had to go looking for her last present. It was in a huge bag in the basement in the middle of the floor, and she got a kick out of that! It was her shopping cart, and we spent quite a while with the kids playing with their new toys with the fireplace going. We did all of this on Christmas Eve, including taking Alex to the doctor because her ear was hurting. I'm really glad it happened before we left town. We actually picked up her medicine on the way out.

And of course they got tons of toys that they loved. Some of the favorites? Alex got lots of craft stuff that we've been working our way through. That's not exactly an instant satisfaction toy, but she's beeb loving using all of her supplies. I think her favorite among those has to be these collages that Uncle Jason got for her that create little animals. If I can ever get her to let go of them, we want to put them on her walls when she's done with the set. She also keeps wanting to make the Crayola cookies that Aunt Jen and Uncle Keith got her, but we're waiting on that for when we don't have any more Christmas junk food in the house. She also has gotten really into putting wooden beads that she got into the lunchbox that she got and carrying them around the house and arranging them. And while she can't follow the directions yet, she loves the little piano she got that has a book of songs that go with it to play by numbers. One of Micah's instant favorites was a wooden toy that comes with a hammer and balls. You hammer the balls down and then they roll out again. It was instant obsession, and I thought he was going to break the glass in the door when he was playing with it. He seriously just confiscated the thing, took it over to an area, and started whamming it to pieces. It might be my favorite Christmas moment of the season. He was also very excited about the bouncy ball that he got and kept trying to throw all over my grandparents' house, and he loves his laptop, especially the button that makes the donkey noise. Over and over and over and over. And the dump truck. ANd the list could go on for both of them. However, it makes me happy that some of their favorite toys are also things we got for them. For Alex, her shopping cart and Uno Moo, which is a great game! For Micah, his alphabet train.

And they both discovered their devotion to ham. Being part Martin, it was bound to happen.

The snow the day after Christmas in NC was wonderful. It was about nine inches I think, and if Alex hadn't had an ear infection, she would have loved going out in it. Fortunately, the snow didn't delay our schedule, and we were able to get home on Monday night.

Alexis continues to amaze me with her appropriate use of words like fragile and apparently. Her neverending desire for interaction is making us think it's time to explore some more activities options for her. We're looking into come classes at our community center, although they don't have enough people signing up for classes to make, so I'm hoping that will change in the future. But they offer all sorts of things, including swimming, which might be good for her to have. Manassas offers a pre-ballet class, which she might enjoy, but Id have to get her some gear for that. We're just looking for some reasonably-priced options that would help develop some interests and have her interacting in a different way with teachers and kids. And while we're not going to do it this year, we're seriously considering preschool for next year for her. Manassas Park offers a morning preschool five days a week for 150 a month (right now), and we think that this may be well worth the money, especially because her kindergarten will be all day. I'm not very worried about the academic side of stuff, but I'd really like to give her the ability to interact with other kids and teachers in a "school-like" way. Not so much for the transition to kindergarten, which I think would be fine and we could always work through if needed, but mostly because I think she would really, really enjoy it.

SHe got into a phase of not eating her dinner and we had to have a number of discussions and time outs, and she is now doing a great job! The time out seems to be a pretty effective tool for us, so we'll see how it works for Micah. I'll never forget the time that she got out of time out and Micah got into her chair and started making crying noises like he was in time out! He wants to do everything that she can, naturally, but sometimes he bugs her, so we're learning about independence and what she has the right to do (go into her room and shut the door if she wants to play alone) and what she doesn't have the right to do (demand that Micah stops looking at her, which is a big one lately). And she always wants to help with everything, so I try to find ways to let her do that. Although when it comes to her own chores, that's another story... ;) She also says the cutest, sweetest stuff, like when she wanted to go downstairs when someone was sleeping she said, "Don't worry, my eyes are very quiet." "I'm writing a letter to God so he doesn't get sick. Dear God Don't get sick love Love Alexis." "Does God live in our heart? Will he be there when we get home?"

It melts my heart.