July 21st, 2010 at 4:57 am
by Mommy (Development, Generally being cute, Social)
Trevor has made up a new song which goes along like this “Apple falls from the tree and bird poops…” and then some mumbling and repetition and so on. He is in a propeller phase where he must look at the propeller of every boat we pass. He is speaking more Croatian words though he is not interested in grammar. He wants me to jump into “mora” (sea) and when he is in the shower says “not my hair, only tjela (body)”. He is starting to say “Dobar dan” (good day) now and then and his firetruck “gasi vatru” (puts out the fire) and when sun goes down there is “samo mjesec” (only moon) in the sky.
Trevor is more comfortable with the “mora” now though he thinks other people should jump first. He now has a lot of friends on the beach, though most of them are at least 20 years older than him. Yesterday, a new girl was standing with some of his friends and he got her to put on his shoes and go play in the sandbox with him very smoothly. As always, he is cautious around kids his own age.
Owen-towen is growing like a weed too. He now has top teeth. Ironically, they are the I-teeth so now he looks like a little baby vampire. He has mastered crawling though he still does not do it too much. He is still the most distracted baby while feeding, but now he can actually get back to the boob after he rolls away from it. He has also figured out to go to the fuller boob once the one he has been draining is empty.
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June 18th, 2010 at 3:14 am
by Mommy (Development, Generally being cute)
When I was packing for the trip I was a bit worried about the toys. I wanted to bring minimal number of toys that will keep the boys occupied. Well, I needn’t have worried; Auntie Barbara has Legos! Trevor has been playing with Legos pretty much since we got here.
Owen is fine too, he is playing with the box Legos came in.
The boys are growing at an alarming rate. Trevor is still not speaking very much Croatian, but he seems more comfortable and he is more likely to not mumble when I ask him to say something in Croatian. He has met a number of new friends, Maja in particular. Though they are a bit wary of each other, being a bit new and territorial, they still managed to have some fun getting into trouble for jumping in the playpen. Maja calls Trevor Tevoj and he calls her “my girl”.
Owen is working hard on large muscle mobility. He can stand up in the box by himself and he can say Barbara, or something that sounds very much like it.
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May 29th, 2010 at 3:45 pm
by Mommy (Development, Generally being cute)
“Trevor, you cannae change the laws of physics.”
“Yes, I can! I don’t like that law!!!”
The latest version of Trevor’s house has three floors, the coughing room is above the living room and below the bathroom.
Trevor has added “Ode to Joy” to his singing repertoire and Owen can now stand by leaning/grabbing onto something other than another human.
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May 23rd, 2010 at 7:15 pm
by Mommy (Development)
Owen looked up from the Jolly Jumper at me and meaningfully and with great intent pronounced ma-ma.
According to Chris, he said ma-ma yesterday while they were out shopping and he was missing me. But that is not all, he will actually react to hearing the word “Trevor” and look around for his brother.
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May 22nd, 2010 at 2:12 pm
by Mommy (Development, Generally being cute)
Owen is now able to sit on his own for a short while. After a minute or two he will attempt to move out of his comfort zone and fall over and bump himself. He loves sitting though and he is able to entertain himself for a short while with toys if he is on his belly. He is quite an experienced chewer of toys, but we have so far not been successful in feeding him solids.
Owen is an adorably sweet baby. He smiles at the drop of a hat and is very cuddly. He is no longer as anxious to be close to me at all times so he has been spending more time with his daddy and other friends.
As much as we try to convince ourselves that Trevor is the best behaved child ever, he is still a three year old. Here is a very common event:
Trevor has been exploring our boundaries more and more to which we have responded by reinforcing the discipline. A lot of the time, he is just too tired, since he does not always get his nap. Other times, he gets frustrated with his toys not working the way he wants them to, or we are not allowing him to do what he wants to do.
When he is in a good mood, which is quite often, Trevor loves building structures. Here is a house he built for himslef and his brother:
In one of the versions of the house, he had a room on top of the puff. He asked me to put Owen in it. I did and when both boys were inside the room, I asked him if this was Owen’s room. He wasn’t quite ready to give up the room entirely, so he thought about it for a minute at which point Owen coughed. Then Trevor coughed too and happily informed me that this was a coughing room.
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May 7th, 2010 at 9:48 am
by Mommy (Development)
Trevor has been struggling with the laws of physics over the last few months. He has been making different machines, from boats to printing presses to car crushers etc… However, whenever something doesn’t work the way he wants to, he cries and screams. There is not much we can do, we cannot tell gravity to go away.
Trevor is pushing through the frustration though and he has been able to build more and more complex machinery. This one even has a user interface and requires an operator. Once it was completed, Trevor requested Owen’s help in the trial run.
Apart from the hands-on experience, Trevor is also learning theory. When I was dressing yesterday, I put on my pi shirt. Trevor asked me about the symbol on my shirt and I told him that it was a special number, 3.14 something something. Later that day, Trevor was taking a bath and we had a bit of an argument because he was slurping the bath water after I had told him not to. As a result, instead of warning him that he has five minutes left to finish the bath time, I told him that he has three. He was not pleased about being punished and insisted that he should have this number of minutes left, showing me a different combination of three fingers. I connected my three fingers to his and told him that we both have three fingers and therefore he has three minutes left. He kept insisting that his number is different from mine. I said, “Fine, my number is three, what is yours?” and he retorted “Pi!”. I agreed to that approximation and then we counted down to two minutes left in the bath time.
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April 24th, 2010 at 8:55 pm
by Mommy (Development, Generally being cute)
“Peep! Waaaah! Peep!”
“Trev, you can only watch the Peep cartoon if you ask nicely in Croatian.”
“Molim Peepa.”
Owen is getting stronger and more ambidextrous. He is almost about to tripod without help. He is also much more mobile, though he can’t roll over from his back to his stomach yet. He can grab his foot with his hands and this amuses him well enough. He is spending a lot of time in the excersaucer and has started jolly jumper this week.
Owen was so excited about my breakfast that I can no longer hold him while eating it. He is batting at the bowl and grabbing it towards himself. Because of this interest we have started offering him some cereal. He is interested but does not seem to like the taste too much. He does not complain when we put the cereal in his mouth but he still has a bit of a reflex with his tongue and most of the cereal ends up outside of his mouth. He must have ingested at least a little bit, because the next day his pee smelled like cookies. This solves the mystery from a couple of years back. It was the cereal all along!
It is so strange. Babies at this point seem to be completely aware of their surroundings and understand everything that is going on. Both Owen and Trevor were very lucid this early on. I can just tell them what I am going to do and they both reacted like they understood me. I love my boys so much.
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April 12th, 2010 at 9:41 pm
by Mommy (Development)
Trev has gotten into habit of randomly rhyming his words.
Car-par
sockes-foxes
mommy-tummy
Owen-towen
etc…
He is all about spacial reasoning today. He is looking at the house from different angles and figuring out where everything is. He is pointing out his and Owen’s room from outside and then from downstairs or other upstairs bedrooms. His fascination with machinery continues, he made a printing press out of Owen’s crib and a ribbon. He is now technically potty trained, he tells me to stay where I am and he is going to the bathroom. He still does not flush or wash his hands on his own, but we’ll let it go for a few weeks just to let him get more confident and comfortable with the basics. Trev is more open to speaking Croatian, he is pretty good at repeating short sentences, but mumbles a bit. There are only a few phrases, “Molim voda” for example, that he can remember off the top of his head, but hopefully, he will improve with practice. The best part is that he invents words in his own language and asks me to repeat them in turn. He doesn’t do declension yet.
Owen is maturing by leaps and bounds. He loves the excersaucer and can do “tricks” in it. He stands or lifts both his feet while playing with a toy. He can now intentionally grab and pull. When Trevor sings, Owen sings along with him and when Trevor cries, Owen will cry too. He calms down when Trevor sings to him. He eats and sleeps well and is only cranky when he needs to poop or is tired. He is very attached to me, but did very well being babysat by Steve and Carol’s clan last night. The cutest thing is that when he wakes up in the morning, he spends about an hour just lying down cooing and doing his break-dancing moves. I have plenty of time to get ready and he is in a good mood when I am about to bring him downstairs for breakfast. I hope he keeps this up. He is still very smiley and social.
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April 7th, 2010 at 9:27 pm
by Mommy (Development)
Trev is absolutely fascinated with machinery. The garbage truck and the street cleaner passed by our house and this must have been the most exciting thing that happened today. Not so exciting was that the cleaning lady took apart Trev’s truck structure and when we got back home he was screaming for about an hour (he was too tired from the playgroup to put it together the way he wanted it). I managed to calm him down for about 15 minutes with milk and TV but he went right back to screaming as soon as he recovered from my subterfuge. Eventually, after we played with the train set in his room for a while and he had supper, we managed to reconstruct the Machine the way he approved.
After that he felt much better. He was so excited with different sections of this contraption it was all “Look at this hole!”, “Look at this bucket!” and “Look at this machine!” for another hour. He even managed to create “gears” with two interlocked wheels.
2 Comments
March 29th, 2010 at 4:34 am
by Mommy (Development, Social)
Owen is almost at the stage where he can sit in tripod position. He can sit now, but only for a moment until he falls over. He must have been going through a growth spurt because he has been eating a lot. It seems to have slowed down now. He is paying more and more attention to his brother and all other goings on. He is no longer content to just lie around and get massaged or tickled during bath time, he wants to be held so he can kick and dance around with his feet. He is very social and the more I hold him and entertain him, the more he smiles and laughs.
Trevor is making new logical connections, today he discussed the difference between knee and leg with daddy. He managed to dress himself to go outside with no help whatsoever, including zipping up his jacket. He has a few tricks to make Owen laugh. For example, he sits or lies on his belly or legs and Owen giggles and smiles so I assume it far from bothers him. Trevor is still very interested in beavers so he gets Chris to show him different videos on YouTube.
Trev will need to work on understating smiles for the camera. This weekend at his grandma house, Trev asked me to put Owen in the toy stroller so he can push him around. Owen seemed happy enough with the situation so we run to get a camera. It went something like this:
“Smile!”
“Ok, don’t smile.” At this point he realised that the wheels on the stroller were bending and demanded that Owen be taken out of the stroller lest it broke. We managed to convince him to do another pose before taking Owen out.
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