“Trevor, go upstairs and brush your teeth.”
“I caaaaan’t!”
“Why not?”
“The beaver ate the stairs.”
“Ok, I’ll go fix them.” Chris goes up the stars and bangs around for a bit. “Fixed!”
Trevor goes upstairs.
“Ok Trev, brush your teeth now.”
“I caaaaan’t!”
etc…
You might have noticed that the photos lately favour Owen. This is not my fault, I have been having a terrible time getting pictures with Trev to turn out. He is just moving around too much.
“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.
“Mommy, Owen is sitting and playing with his foot, go get the camera.”
“Do you know where the camera is?”
“In the office.”
It was not, but good guess. Once I got the camera Trevor insisted on taking this picture himself (minimal help from me, of course).
“Look Trev, these are the front doors, this is the office window and this window is for the living room, on the top we have Owen’s room and your room. I haven’t built the whole model yet, but this door is the one over there leading to the mud room and the garage. Get it?”
“Not yet.” walks over to the mud room door, looks at it and comes back. “Mommy, where is the garage?”
“Me and you need to go to the store to buy more train tracks.”
“We are not going to buy more tracks.”
“I need to finish my tracks.”
“You have enough track to make a figure eight, you can’t finish this configuration.”
“A train has to stay on the tracks no matter what!”
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.
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.
