Anyway, there are lots of things that have happened in Evan's life this past month it seems. Here is a recap...
Firsts:
-Eating a hamburger! We called it a meat chop (because he seems to like lamb chops and pork chops so why not see if a little mind trick would help!). We gave it to him plain between two buns, but he immediately took that apart and just ate the burger patty. He got well over halfway through it, and it wasn't a small patty!
-Eating lettuce from my salad! (with ranch dressing on it...)
-Complete sentence
-Singing along to songs!
-First injury from another kid :( This happened at daycare after Evan took a toy off the kid, she scratched him right by the eye.... :( It left a scab below his left eye for several days, and even still has a bit of a scar there. I hope it goes away completely with time though.
Look closely under his left eye and you'll see the scab :(
Growth and Development:
He's still around 28 lbs, and wearing size 5 pampers diapers, size 24 month or 2T clothes, and size 6 toddler shoes. The major exception is his swim shorts. He still fits into his Australia swim shorts that he wore last summer! His new 2T ones that I got for him are still "swimming" on him, haha.
His communication is developing faster than I can remember to document it all! He now recognizes when people/things are sleeping by getting all hushed, holding his index finger to his face (not quite just his mouth, it usually lines up more with his nose) and whispering "shhh, _____ sleeping". For example, lately we've been tucking one of his teddy bears into the twin bed mattress on the floor in his room (the place we used to have to sleep on a lot with him!). And then Evan will say "shhhh, teddy bear sleeping". He'll also do it when we read books and the characters in the books are sleeping or laying down. It's adorable.
And even though we haven't been pushing potty training lately, he has taken an interest in going potty in his potty chair! This started last week when one night Evan told John "potty" and John asked him if he had to go potty, to which he replied "yes". So John took him to the potty chair, got his pants and diaper off and Evan sat there and did pee a little bit in the chair. Granted, he had already pee'd a bit in his diaper before getting to the potty. Then the next day with me it happened again, and this time he went a lot in the potty chair! Now he seems to ask fairly regularly to use the potty, but he still does go sometimes in his diaper without telling us too. Also, when one of the times he was sitting on his potty chair with me he was kind of just waiting, I asked him if he'd like to read a magazine while he waits. He said "yes" and so I gave him one, and now he often likes to sit with a "zeen" while he waits. It's hilarious to see....
His motor skills are getting better and better. He jumps with both feet off the ground very well, he rolls around on the floor with ease (he's perfected the fold arms in and under when going to stomach, and then opening them out wide when on his back), and he does very well taking the stairs up and down on his own two feet (holding onto the handrail or our hands or both, of course!).
Helping Daddy in the garden...
Sleeptime:
The latter half of this past month, we've finally been getting back on track with most nights having him sleep through the night not needing us to come up and lay in his room with him (thankfully!). Prior to that, he would wake EVERY night around 10:30-11:30pm crying hard for one of us. He wouldn't stop until one of us went up there, and we would do so to just go check on him to make sure he was okay. Most of the time, there didn't seem to be anything wrong, but he'd expect us to lay down in the room with him, because if we left he'd only be madder and cry harder and longer. We were about to get the "No cry sleep solution...for toddlers" book for some tips on what to do, when he started having good nights all the sudden! He still has a few nights where he'll wake up crying, but he usually goes back to sleep on his own, or after we speak to him through the camera. Speaking of the camera, he knows it's there and at bedtime tells us "talk camera", so I think he knows that's us talking to him and that is why it helps. I have the feeling like the general reason for his crying was due to fears and thus having one of us there is why he's easily be calmed enough to go back to sleep. Anyway, on these nights he sleeps well, he often tends to sleep in a bit later too, so his overnight sleep time is typically down around 7:30-8pm, and then up around 7am, as opposed to getting up around 6am previously.
He still takes one nap per afternoon, right after lunch, and sometimes they can be fairly long! He even slept for over 3 hours one Sunday recently! Now I'm seeing a pattern, that he'll sleep more after we've spent the morning outside in the sun. Regardless, his shortest naps are about 1.5 hours, but they can be up to 2 hours or more some days!
Mealtime:
Evan will eat nearly nothing one day at dinner, and then others eat a ton. We try to still just serve him what we eat, so sometimes I think it's just because he doesn't like what we're having. Other times, though, I do think it's directly related to how much food and snacks he's had during the day. Daycare days I think he is very well fed, so those nights dinner time is usually a wash. Or even if we have a later dinner and he's had too many snacks at home before mealtime, it also does impact his appetite for what we're having...even if it's a food he'd normally eat.
And....he eats asparagus now! He even asks for it sometimes. It only took a handful of times offering it to him and having him spit it out...but it finally worked! :) Otherwise, though, vegetables are the hardest thing for us to get him to eat (go figure!). He loves pretty much every fruit there is, but his veggie source mostly comes from the blends in his fruit and veg pouches, or asparagus, corn on the cob, cut up cherry tomatoes, or sometimes zucchini or squash. He won't eat broccoli yet, not even when it's smothered in a creamy cheese sauce.
Playtime:
Playing outside (at the park, "play water" in his water table or with the hose/sprinklers, etc) are still Evan's favorite pass times. He likes to go to the pool, but he doesn't like to use our little pool we got for the house (probably because the water's always too cold!). We've been taking him to the outdoor local activity kids pool and also to the indoor rec center pool (that also has a zero entry kids play area) lately. He likes to pretend he's swimming by laying on his tummy in the water and walking around on his hands. I remember doing that as a kid too...lol. He still hasn't put his head under water (intentionally), nor does he like to let us help him float on his back. I think we'll have to try putting him in swim lessons again this fall and see if they can start teaching him anything more.
"Look ma, I'm 'swimming'!" (At the indoor rec center pool)
Pulling on the rope to turn on the water from above
The outdoor activity pool on a beautiful summer morning.
At the park, swinging is his absolute favorite thing to do. While I let him swing a bit in the big kid swings, I often convince him to go to the toddler swings so he can go high. He loves getting pushed really high, and I'm not willing to do that with him in a non-enclosed swing just yet (in part because a two-year-old at the park a few weeks ago was swinging on the big kid swings right by us, and he fell off backward and flipped before landing on the ground...he was fine, but his dad was right there with him and so I realized that could happen to Evan and I'm not ready for that yet).
When we're inside, he's started to dig deeper in his toy box and play with some toys that had been neglected for awhile (choo choo came out this past week for the first time in awhile), and he likes to play with his shape sorter more again now. He does a great job at putting the yellow circle in, in fact he'll do that over and over on his own. But he can manage to get most of them in, especially with some guidance from me (suggesting which color or shape to look for). I think he definitely knows circle and triangle shapes, from what I've observed him say and do with the shape sorter, and I think he knows blue and green colors. And while he may not know how to say or respond to the names of other colors, he's great at color matching! He now matches each piece by color of his colorful Melissa and Doug caterpillar gear toy when he puts it together!
He likes to push around his Tow-Mater ride on toy (pushing it more than riding it) and especially loves to ram it into things (like cupboards, the couch, and/or my legs...ouch!). He likes making his toys crash together too. When they do he'll say "cash!" or "kaboom!" (the latter thanks to my mom teaching him to say that one during her recent visit).
The last week while I've been watching him he has suddenly started telling me to lay down with him. He'll say he's sleepy and tell me to lay down on the floor with him. Then he'll get some of his plush toys for us each to snuggle or find a book to flip through while laying down. It's pretty funny and cute at the same time. Sadly, for me, it does make me sleepy to lay down like that, making me just want to take a nap, yet he really wants to play and talk and read books and do things.
And of course, he's still into playing games on our phones or the playstation (he's been playing a flying game with John lately, where he usually just "crashes" the plane, but he tries hard to use the controls to pull up when we tell him to do that, etc). Nonetheless, we're trying to limit his TV and game time, which is maybe why he's started to remember some of the cool toys he has at the bottom of his toy box!? :)
Evan got to go to work with Daddy this past month...and so of course he had to wear his aviation bomber jacket!
3 comments:
Nora likes to do the "tummy swim" too. Sometime we need to get these kids together!
Yes, we sure do! :)
I sadly have not been able to keep up on your blog with everything that has been going on here. In fact I didn't know you were pregnant until Brenda told us. Congrats! I'm so excited for you guys. Also, you inspired me as you will see in my next post. That will go up as soon as Kyle edits it. I have such poor grammar that I always have Kyle edit it first :)
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