Break through

When I pick up the boys from Kindercare, I go to Andrew's room first, then Owen's room. After doing the opposite a couple of times when Owen first started at Kindercare, it was very clear to me that Andrew didn't like it that I was holding Owen when I would go to his room. Now Andrew gets some time alone with me and he can tell me about his day and what he is doing when I pick him up. Then together we go and pick up Owen in his room. Usually when we get into Owen's room, Andrew goes straight for the toys and plays until I gather up Owen's bottles and his daily report. But today, Andrew saw Owen sitting on the floor and went right up to him and gave him a big hug. Awesome.

Growing family

Little Nikolaos is here! Can't wait to see a picture of the littlest cousin.

Andrew 34 Months

Did I do that?, originally uploaded by leslie_capron.

Thank you 34 months for giving us a break. Andrew has mellowed a bit from last month. I think getting Andrew back on his regular schedule combined with effective discipline helped Andrew to manage his behavior much more successfully this month. I am so relieved. Thank you everyone for your valuable advice. It helped so much to have a couple of more tricks in my bag to help manage his behavior in a really positive way.

But life is funny (not ha-ha funny, but funny) as Owen is now soundly sleeping through the night, Andrew is now having a hard time going to bed. Andrew's least favorite activity is going to bed. Even after several stories at night and some good snuggle time before lights out he does not want to go to bed. He's talking a lot about spiders and monsters so I think he's scared to go to bed. I'm not sure where the fear is coming from, whether its the movies he's watching or if he's having bad dreams. Eric and I are committed to getting our bedroom back so we will be going though the crying with Andrew again. We will also be upgrading his nightlight.

Andrew is talking a lot! Here are some of thing things he's saying:

"Your name is Leslie?"
"Your name is Eric?"
"What's going to happen?!?!!"
"It's going to crash!!"
"I'm going to Disneyland"
"Oh, I spilled!"
"I need to check my email"
"Owen went pukey-pukey!!!

Yes, he speaks in exclamation points.

He can have conversations now too.

Andrew really loves riding his tricycle. If it not raining, we'll go for a spin around the neighborhood a couple of times a week.

We're still working on potty training. He's successful about once a week. If he goes in the potty, he gets a jelly-bean. If he goes a couple of days in a row, he gets Emily. I predicting potty training success around June.

Andrew's favorite things continue to be Thomas the Tank engine related. I had to take a Thomas catalog away from him because he kept trying to get the trains out of the catalog - and you know that wasn't happening, and seeing so many train possibilities in the catalog were making him a bit crazy. (Maybe I should get a Thomas training potty, hmmm.)

34 months is better than 33 months, but we are ready for the next challenge!

Owen 10 Months continued

Yes, Owen sleeps through the night now. And all it took was for me to fly to another state and to a place where I could not hear the Ferberizing. Thank you very much Eric and Jennifer for teaching our sweet, sweet baby that a crib really is not a torture device. This week the bed time routine goes a little like this: play until 6:30, then bath time with Andrew, get into jammies, have a bottle around 7:30, then a story (or five) with Andrew and at 8:00, Owen goes into the pack-and-play for the night. Owen usually cries for about five minutes and then he's asleep until 6:00 am. I really don't think I can adequately describe the joy that this milestone brings to my heart. All I can say is that my passion bucket for sleep is full.

In other exciting Owen news, he is really getting ready to walk. He loves to play and walk with his push cart. He can also walk a few steps while one of us holds just one hand. I am reaffirming my prediction that he'll be walking by his first birthday. (Which, OMG, is just two months away!)

Owen is really bored with baby food. He displays an interest in our food that I don't remember seeing in Andrew. Now Owen usually gets some of our food at mealtime. He likes pizza, chicken Parmesan, fruit, rice & beans, bagels, frozen yogurt and sushi rice with soy sauce.

If I had to pick a favorite time of day for Owen it would be bath time. As soon as he hears the word "bath", I could put him at the bottom of the stairs and with excitement of a kid at Christmas, he would climb up each stair, crawl across the hallway and climb up and over the edge of the tub and plop right into the water. Not that he has ever done that. Ok, just one time he crawled over the edge of the tub and went head first right into the water. If I had to pick a really panic-inducing moment in parenting, it would be that time he did that. He's fine, I'm still not quite over it.

Now that Owen can cruise around with the push car, he is a little less insistent on being picked up, so that has been a really nice development for Eric and me.

He is a smiley and happy little guy. He likes a lot of interaction with people, but can now happily play with toys on his own (as long as those toys aren't too close to Andrew).

Owen 10 Months

Hey there, walker!, originally uploaded by leslie_capron.

Owen sleeps through the night now. The End.

Strong Genes

Just in case anyone was wondering where Andrew got his red hair from (and most other features), please look at this. It's Eric as a ring bearer in 1978 in Aunt Jeanie's wedding.

Owen Likes Blackberries

Owen Likes Blackberries, originally uploaded by leslie_capron.

Owen enjoyed some yummy blackberries tonight...and a bath.

Happy Boy

Happy Boy, originally uploaded by leslie_capron.

My baby's back today.

ImaginationLand

Last night at bed time after we read his bed time books, Andrew proceeded to make me an entire imaginary dinner. I love experiencing this part of the 'new' Andrew.

More good stuff

In my long-winded description of Andrew's tricky behavior, I forgot to mention that a big new thing has developed. He's started to engage in more imaginative play. Last night while we were all in the living room and Andrew and Owen were playing, Andrew came up to me on the couch and plucked what he said was chicken nuggets out of the air and pretended to eat them and smiled and said "yum!". He's never really done that before.

Owen 9 Months

Doing the dishes, originally uploaded by leslie_capron.

Here we are doing the dishes. This is how we make dinner, vacuum and do most chores around the house. Owen continues his aversion to being put down. He can play by himself with his toys but sometimes he just does not want to be put down. So instead of fighting it, we go with it. The backpack works pretty well.

Owen is eating real food these days. Although he still gets a lot of his nutrition from cereal and baby food he can easily eat Cheerios, pancakes and the puffed stars. He is a master of the pincer grasp. He still really enjoys bananas and strawberries eaten through his handy food strainer. He finally will take a bottle from Eric or me with little trouble although he definitely prefers breastfeeding (however, he sometimes bites so I may be weening him soon!)

Owen is still in bed with us. He has not taken well to the crib and will cry, er scream, if we leave him in the crib for any period of time. He seems to have inherited Eric's Princess-and-the-Pea tendencies and objects to surfaces stiffer than our pillow-top mattress. But Owen is approaching one year, so we will begin the painful and noisy transition to independent sleeping this month.

I think he'll by walking by his birthday. He is cruising around the furniture with ease.

His disposition is very happy and curious. He loves to explore and has a supernatural ability to find little invisible (to the adult eye) choking hazards on our floors. He also loves to play with his big brother. We need to get a video camera because the other night when the three of us were in bed just before lights out Andrew was blowing raspberries on Owen's tummy and the two were just shrieking with laughter. I want to record those magical times so I can play them back when the going gets tough around here. I am really looking forward to more positive interactions between the boys. I think by this time next year they will be best friends.

Andrew 33 Months

Thirty-three months, you are an a$$-kicker.

Here are a few of Andrew's favorite phrases of the past month:
"No"
"NO"
"No mama, no"
"I don't WANT to ____" (insert any activity here, especially horrifying ones like drinking milk)
"I don't LIKE IT"
"Don't kiss me mama"
"You put Owen down?!"

Here are some of his favorite holiday activities:
Pushing Owen
Pushing Mama
Pushing friends at school (it's gone from reactive pushing to preemptive pushing)
Not getting into his car seat
Earth shattering tantrums
Not eating dinner
Not going to sleep at night

As you can surmise from the above, Andrew's behavior has taken a nose-dive this month. He is asserting his independence, testing his limits and being an all around handful.

He's become very unpredictable; I'm now not sure how he will react in any situation and his reactions make no sense to me sometimes. Like this morning. It was about 6:30 and from his room I heard "mommy!" and I yelled from my semi-conscious state from my room, "come on in here". And he giggled and ran into the room and I pulled him into bed. Let's pause for a moment, at this point Andrew is totally happy and wants to get snuggly in bed. So cute. These moments just make your heart burst with love and make you all warm inside. Let's continue. I ask him, "wanna get toasty under the covers?", "yes mama!" he answered, I pulled up the cozy comforter over him. And this is when the scene starts to go bad. I had, apparently and inexplicably, pulled up the covers incorrectly. The switch had been flipped, Andrew was now crying, and I was frantically trying to correct the covers, taking them off, pulling them back up with varying degrees of coverage. Then Andrew starts kicking and then he kicks me in the face. Now, I really don't think he kicked me on purpose, he was mad and kicking and I was there. Nonetheless, I was done with this situation and left and asked Eric to take over. Eric was downstairs trying to have a moment of peace before we all woke up - poor Eric.

Andrew's hitting, yelling and defiance are hard to deal with. We've had to escalate the discipline. Giving Andrew a time-out really has stopped being a significant punishment and isn't stopping the bad behavior. Yelling at mom or dad or pushing anyone is not acceptable behavior ever and we are serious and quick to give Andrew consequences. Now Andrew is losing his toys when he behaves badly. Last night, Thomas and his Thomas book were put away. He'll get them back sometime today if he plays well with others.

Having to discipline Andrew (hourly it seems) has been hard on me because I miss my sweet, sweet baby boy. I know (because we've been reading, asking friends and talking to his teachers) that this is very normal behavior, but that doesn't mean I have to like it.

I know a few things are contributing to the behavior. The big one is Owen. Owen is 9 months old but is still very high-need and I am carrying him a lot. Holding Owen doesn't let me hold Andrew and this is frustrating Andrew. The scene this morning probably would have been avoided if Owen wasn't in bed too.

Also Andrew has officially stopped using a passie. This was Andrew's primary soothing object. If Andrew was having a tantrum, giving him a passie was a good way to end the crying. Since we're not using the passie anymore his crying continues longer. He hasn't had one in over a week. (We lost the one we brought with us on our trip and we figured this was a good a time as any to finally move on from the passie).

On to the good stuff. Andrew is funny and becoming more and more articulate and is physically very coordinated. I will often hear giggling from Andrew and Owen in their car seats because Andrew is making Owen laugh. Usually by imitating Owen's vocal sounds or making funny faces. When we were in San Francisco and we were waiting for a cable-car (because by god, we were not going to leave S.F. without riding on a cable-car even if we had to hang on with one hand and dangle our sweet sweet babies out the side) I got down to Andrew's level to check in and ask if sees a cable-car yet and he asked me: "are you my conscience?", I did a serious double-take on that one. Turns out he had seen Pinocchio during the last parents night out. And last night Andrew started to use his push car like a scooter! Very coordinated that one.

So it's good, it's hard, but it's good.

More Andrew pictures are on Flickr!

Fabulousness

Fabulousness, originally uploaded by leslie_capron.

We are back safe and sound from our holiday road trip. I had big plans to blog and catch up but here we are at January 3rd and Eric's in San Francisco and I'm back at work and wrangling the kids so there's not alot of time to blog. I'm going to try to sneak some puter time in tonight and catch up on the latest; I've got an Owen and Andrew update to get posted.