My sons are definitely the greatest source of change and newness in my day to day life, so it makes sense that so many of my posts are about how different they are today than yesterday. But hey! They’re so different!
The biggest milestone moment lately comes with Grey. Those of you who aren’t parents (or wish to be) probably can just skip the entire rest of this post. Really. Because Grey has successfully gone sans-pullups for the last 4 nights without incident! (For those not in the know, incident here means “Having to change the sheets at 4 am”.) The ability to stay dry through the night is actually more a physical one than one he has much control over, but imagine! Having one child completely out of diapers!!! If he makes it to this weekend, I’ll take him to Target (home of all delights) and let him pick out the bedding set of his dreams. I’m thinking it will likely be Spongebob and made of sandpaper, but only because they don’t have Spiderman sheets made of sandpaper.
Grey has been super wonderfully snuggly lately. He wasn’t a snuggly baby or toddler, but he’s an extremely affectionate preschooler. The best part is that it’s not only directed at his father and me, it’s directed at his brother too. He plays very nicely with Thane, bringing him toys, using this hilarious voice to try to talk him into things “Daaaane LOOK! It’s a caaaaar!”, tickling his belly and playing peekaboo. Sometimes when Thane is dead-set on getting into one of Grey’s toys conflict occurs (which, to be fair, a dead-set Thane is a very difficult commodity). The other day I watched Grey sort of herd his brother with these not-quite-pushing body-checks all the way across the room away from Object Of Desire. I’ve never seen Grey do anything unprovoked to his brother, and he usually withstands a great deal of provocation before behaving inappropriately. (And hey, sometimes a guy wants to build a transformer out of blocks and not have his baby brother ruin it. I can dig that.)
On the flip side, Thane is actually pretty solicitous of Grey, when not attempting to eat his block-transformers. The other day Grey was playing with a Bakugan card and then turned and played with something else on the other side. Thane picked up the card and brought it over to Grey and gave it to him. Awwww!
So generally, the whole brother thing is going well.
Thane is driving me less nuts. I think he’s not sick at the moment, which is a great boon. He has two major passions in life right now: cars and dinosaur books. He often carries a Matchbox car in each hand. Yesterday when I took him out of the car to go to Abuela’s, I removed from him his two cars. When I picked him up, as soon as I put him in the carseat he started saying “ca! ca! ca!”. He wanted his cars back. He remembered. The dinosaur books are specifically the “How do Dinosaurs…” with his favorite being “How Do Dinosaurs Go to Bed”. He adores the page “Do dinosaurs ROAR?” and does his own little roar. He also loves the page “Do they up and demand a piggy-back ride?” and always says “Oh!” If you are not fast enough to volunteer to read dinosaur books to him, he will hit you in the head with it, then turn around and plop his heavy little butt into your lap. That, my friends, is clear communication.
His verbal skills are taking off. He can request his favorite foods. He says “Vroom” when playing with his cars. “Up” “down” “more” and “all done” are awfully helpful, but his main discourse is around those two passions of his. I’ll give a more complete update next week for his 15 month checkup!
RANDOM:
My mother-in-law bought me a reading chair for our bedroom (from afar) and here’s a picture of how it looks!
My Truant Pen 