I was going out yesterday to go do some shopping at Costco while Kindra stayed home with the kids (The Girl had just woken up, Colin was sleeping) when Danica asked me where I was headed. Thinking I was being cute while attempting to keep her from coming with me, I told her I was going to get a bear.
The Girl(eyes wide): “A big bear?”
Dad: “Maybe.”
TG (a little worried): “I don’t like big bears. I want a little bear.”
D: “I’ll see what I can do.”
TG: “I just like little bears.” (Holds up thumb and forefinger showing just how small a bear).
I thought it was pretty funny, especially since she reminded me to get her a little bear as I was leaving the apartment. It got funnier when I received this text message from Kindra as I was driving:
You’d better come home with a little bear! Daddy going to bring me a wittle bear! I going to show my bear my apron. Is it a talking bear? I going to feed my bear my applesauce.
Heh.
And no, I did not show up with a little bear. I almost went to Target to get her one, but had too many other errands to run. When I got home, Danica asked where her bear was, but I told her I couldn’t get one, and she dropped the whole subject. *Whew.*
I know… I dodged at HUGE bullet. It’s kinda strange, because she’s been super sensitive recently and will cry at the drop of a hat. Double *whew.*
Okay, let’s get this out there because I knew a lot of you would be asking about this photo:
I really just wanted to get a shot of Colin because he’s turned into a TV zombie, just like his sister and father (totally our fault, and I feel like a crappy parent for letting it happen, but that’s another story). Anyway, it wasn’t until after I posted the photo that I even remembered he had a bandage on his arm, so here’s the story to put an end to most of the questions...
We’re not quite sure how it happened, but Colin ended up scraping/bruising the crook of his elbow. We think it’s from him trying to reach between the bars of his crib to touch the clock radio we have on the end of the couch in his room, but aren’t quite sure. Regardless, it got relatively bad so we slapped some Neosporin on it and covered it up. He’s fine now.
The bandage is a little out of proportion for him, but we needed something that would stay on. It’s the same size as one of the ones you would use to cover up a large scrape on your knee. Personally, the first time Kindra put it on him, I thought he looked tough - like he was wearing an elbow pad. Heh.
Oh, and to point out the one you guys didn’t catch, he has a band-aid on his left ankle because he’s had an usual case of eczema that gets irritated and cracked for a long time. We’ve asked our pediatrician about it, but she insists it’s just eczema, but we’ve been treating it with Neosporin. We’ll be consulting another doctor soon about it.
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In other more amusing Colin news, he hasn’t picked up that much sign language as of yet, but he has developed his own sign over the last couple of weeks. If he’s going to do something that he shouldn’t be doing, and you call to him to tell him “no,” he’ll look at you, hold out his hand palm up and wave it back-and-forth. It’s his acknowledgement that he knows you’re telling him to stop doing what he’s doing, but most of the time he just does his little judo-chop/pseudo-wave, and then returns to what he was doing.
Unfortunately, we’re in the sickness… Danica’s been fighting what seems to be a sinus infection for about three weeks, and Colin seems to have picked it up over the past few days. We took Danica to the doctor a couple of weeks ago to get her checked out and were given a prescription for an antibiotic. It was a mild drug, so it didn’t quite do the job (obviously).
Fortunately, we had an appointment scheduled for Colin yesterday, so we took them both in to get them looked at. We have a new prescription for a stronger antibiotic, so hopefully that will knock the darn thing out.
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Colin had his regular check-up yesterday as well, measuring in at 29¼ inches and 20 pounds, 6 ounces (rough estimate, since he wouldn’t sit still on the scale). He’s on the big side for his age (barely), which is a bit surprising, though Danica was the same way. As for his weight, he’s leaned out a little and so is on the low side.
His weight drop is most likely due to the fact that he doesn’t eat baby food anymore. Ever since he got a taste of “real” food, he won’t eat the baby stuff anymore. Danica was exactly the same way. *sigh*
The Boy’s picked up some tricks over the past couple of weeks. He waves at pretty much everybody, will clap when you tell him, “Good job!”, and has learned to throw his hands up over his head when you tell him he’s “soooo big!” His mobility’s increased as well – though he still tends to do the worm to get around, he’s picked up actual crawling in the past week or so, and will pull himself up on the couch and scoot around.
He’s really into exploring new things, which is a nice way of saying that he doesn’t like to play with his toys for very long by himself. He’ll usually end up crawling out of the living room area and down our hallway or into our kitchen to see what’s going on. However, it is fun to see him try to put Lego blocks together or see how things fit inside other things. It’s also a nuisance to have him poking around with the DVD player all the time. At least he isn’t into the DVD boxes like Danica was.
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The house is coming up on Week 8 since we started talking about it, about Week 6 since they said they were going to lay the foundation. It’s got a frame up, which took about a week-and-a-half, and is pretty crazy to see in person. And though it is exciting, please stop being so excited for us, because we have to wait it out for a few months before we can move in.
I know there hasn’t been much update on Colin, but I think it’s because things come fast and furious with the growing boy. It’s also a little that we’ve seen the changes before, and our reactions are more, “Oh, wow. You can do that, too?” as opposed to “OH, WOW. YOU CAN DO THAT!?!” This is not to say that we aren’t happy to see Colin doing some of the things that he does now, because we are.
So what’s new? The Boy’s nine months old now, which is amazing to us. Kindra and I were looking at some old photos and video, when we started watching this:
The video was shot just a couple of days before we had Colin; it was unbelievable that she could barely get out “Wa-wa” for “Wall-E” back then. How is that so much time could have passed, and so much could change with the kiddies without us even realizing the leaps we’ve made as a family?
Colin’s got his two bottom front teeth in and has taken a couple of playful (and not so playful) bites out of our fingers. Of course, those teeth have been around since roughly December 29th, so that’s not big news. However, he has started to get his top front teeth, which may or may not have been bothering him over the past few weeks.
I’m pretty sure they were bothering him two weeks ago when we first noticed them, but the past couple of nights, he’s not been sleeping well. Usually, we’d put him to bed around 6:30 p.m., and he’d be out for the night. Recently, though, he’s been getting up crying and/or screaming at least a couple of times a night and not because Danica’s woken him up. (Oh yeah, did I mention that we moved them back in together (sorta)? More on that later…) We’re hoping he’s not taking after his sister’s sleeping habits.
One habit Colin does have from his sister is that it’s next to impossible to get him to eat baby food anymore. Danica was the same way – introduce “real” food and the ability to self-feed, and that baby food crap is out the window. Problem is, there’s only a limited number of items he can gum down, so Kindra has to force him by giving him some food to eat himself, and then shoveling some baby food into his mouth between bites. He also used to love Cheerios, but now, if there’s something else available, he’ll ignore those.
As far as mobility is concerned, Colin’s started to want to stand more and can pull himself up onto things of a certain height. Heck, it was weird to us that one day he just decided to be able to go from being on his stomach to sitting up. He still does the worm to get around, and I don’t think he’ll ever pick up actually crawling. I guess it’s mostly because I haven’t shown him what it is like I did with Danica.
He’s still happy and smiley, but has begun to develop a bit of stranger anxiety. We just had my two cousins come by, and while he stared at them when they came in, he decided to burst into tears when it appeared that they were going to be staying for a while. One of my cousins, Tsu-Heng, swears that he cries whenever he looks at her (possibly true: he cried when he was having a bottle, and I handed him to her so he was facing me, and he started to bawl).
In just the last couple of days, he’s picked up waving and clapping; I think he learned to wave consistently on Sunday or Monday. This morning, in fact, we were having breakfast when I asked him to wave, and he promptly shook his hand at me. It took him a while, but after I asked him to clap, he did that, too. He gets a kick out of it because he knows he can manipulate us into waving back at him. He also gets a kick out of seeing his hand wave, as he’ll be waving, notice his hand is doing it, and then stare at it as he continues to wave. I’ll get some video of it soon.
Our little newborn boy has been replaced by a little baby boy. I know, I know… time to work on another one. Um… don’t count on it (unless they change child labor laws, or we win the lottery).
By now most of you have heard that Danica’s been peeing on the potty fairly regularly for about a week and a half. It really got started the last week of January, but has been building for a while. It was a year ago that this picture was taken:
That was way back when she started to figure out when she needed to pee. Unfortunately, we didn’t take advantage since we felt she was 1) too young to pull down her pants by herself and 2) we were worried she might regress when Colin was born. We tried potty training her a couple of months later, but that didn’t work so well (obviously). Regardless, Danica’s always been the type to do things on her own time, so I think that we really just figured it would happen when it happened.
Our daycare provider had been working on potty training Danica a little bit, which mostly involved sitting her on the potty without much to show for it. She ended up just slapping some underwear on The Girl, sans pants, to see what would happen. Turns out, Danica was worried enough about peeing in them that she ended up actually going to the bathroom on the toilet a week ago Wednesday.
Kindra and I were pretty excited about it, so when I was home with Danica on Thursday, I tried the same thing. It’s worked out pretty well ever since. We only put her in panties when we’re home and when she’s not napping, since we’re a little too chicken to try otherwise. She’s started to come around and ask to pee even if she is wearing a diaper sometimes (though it hasn’t happened outside of the home), so we’re able to put pants on her over her underwear.
The only drawback of the whole thing is that we were giving treats to Danica (fruit snacks or M&M’s) whenever she peed in the toilet, including small amounts when. Sooooo… as you can imagine, this has turned into a bit of a fiasco now, as Danica pees about a teaspoon at a time now in order to maximize on the amount of pure sugar she can weasel out of us. Typical.
Hopefully, we’ll get her out of diapers altogether by the summer, but we’re pretty happy about where we’re at now. It’s been good living the in the urine-nation (though we still pretty much reside in the state of confusion).
When It Rains, It Doesn’t Pour
If you’ve been following along on the Flickr site, you know that we’re waiting on the house that we purchased to be built. We took our first family photo in front of the lot four weeks ago:
Four weeks later, it pretty much looks the same, but with a fence around it. You can keep up by going here. I had a meeting with the construction supervisor last Wednesday, and they had the lot trenched, framed, and ready to go to pour the foundation, which was supposed to be done last Friday once they got all the requisite inspections done.
Unfortunately, we’ve had a characteristically bipolar winter, where the weather oscillates between summer temps in the 80’s and wet, rainy weather. Guess where we’re at now. So no, when it rained on Friday, they did not pour. The worse news is that it’s supposed to rain this week as well, on-and-off. Still, they might be able to sneak it in.
The supervisor actually called me on Friday to keep me in the loop, so I’ll say that at least the communication has been good, and hopefully, he’ll let me know what their plans are. He said that framing should take three-to-four weeks, including getting most of the electrical in (the houses next to ours were framed in about that time, so I know he’s not full of it), at which time we’ll have a framing walk-through. Just thought you’d like to hear what the next target date is after the foundation gets done.
I was going out yesterday to go do some shopping at Costco while Kindra stayed home with the kids (The Girl had just woken up, Colin was sleeping) when Danica asked me where I was headed. Thinking I was being cute while attempting to keep her from coming with me, I told her I was going to get a bear.
The house is coming up on Week 8 since we started talking about it, about Week 6 since they said they were going to lay the foundation. It’s got a frame up, which took about a week-and-a-half, and is pretty crazy to see in person. And though it is exciting, please stop being so excited for us, because we have to wait it out for a few months before we can move in.
