No More Monkeys Jumping on the Bed...

and other pictures of cousins playing..





Might be a little tired?

Hmmm

This was supposed to be a pic about "food comas" - Jack falling asleep at the high chair after eating like 2 lbs of Mac N Cheese.. But it turned out to be a weird iPhone photo glitch...

Fun with Daddy

Late, Late 17 month update

Starting with 18 months, I am going to do these every-other month!

* Jack has some sporadic, but severe, separation freak-outs. At times, if I go upstairs (while he is downstairs with Steve) he screams. He screams if I go into another room. We visited Santa today (pic to come in the near future) and he just kept his arms out reaching for me. We got one ok picture. Our "teacher" at class, who is a development expert, says this is very common at 18 months.

* He says "fuff fuff fuff" for "woof" when asked what the doggy says. He also makes a funny elephant sound. Besides this, we often think he is saying /trying to say words all the time (eyes, keys, computer, giraffe, house, daddy) but never are 100% sure if he really is!

* He knows many body parts and can point to some animals and truck types in books. However, our "teacher" said it isn't great to quiz toddlers a lot as they sometimes get really anxious making what should be fun (reading, etc) worrisome to them.

* He is obsessed with trucks. It is his favorite word and he only wants to read books with trucks in them (even if they are minor parts).

* He is, for lack of a better word, brattier. If he wants something he shouldn't have, he screams, cries and pouts for quite some time. He sometimes refuses to be put in the highchair or stroller.

* His nighttime sleep couldn't really be any better. He goes down easily at 8ish and is up at 8ish. Napping has gotten less consistent. He refuses to nap some days which means I end up driving around in the middle of the afternoon to make sure he sleeps at least a little. Overall, I can't complain about this.

Not quite what I had in mind...

This is what I envisioned...and I got it for about 3 minutes....





And then the real fun started...

Not helpful

Hard to fold laundry when Jack is in the way....

Crate the baby?

Hmm, not sure this is the parenting lesson, we wanted to share with our friends who are going to have a baby in April.









Of his own volition, Jack played for an extended period of time in their dog's crate. He even shut the door in Lucy's (the dog) face! Luckily she was well behaved about it and didn't mind sharing.

Halloween Wrap-up

We got about 100 trick-or-treaters last night! Jack had lots of fun taking the candy out of the bowl, handing it to daddy or throwing it around. Steve brought him out to a few neighbors too, so he added to our stash:)

Now that I am part of a lot of local parents lists/communities, I learned that it is now requested that you have a nut-free bowl in addition to the regular candy bowl. Basically any chocolate is considered suspect as they have nearly all been made in a "facility that also processes nuts" and some kids won't even be allowed to eat non-nut candy that is in the same bowl as the nut-candy. Yikes! The non-nut bowl can have little toys, stickers or sugary-candy (with no allergy issues). I was interested in that 4-5 kids were excited about having a nut-free bowl. Still a small percentage, but they seemed really happy, so I suppose it was worth the very minor effort.


Jack and I also went to a Parade for tots/preschoolers in town in the late afternoon. It was quite cute and I would say there were at least 200 people there which surprised me!