Our growing boys

One of the neat things about being at home with the boys is that I get to see most of the "firsts" that I would have otherwise missed. I was there for Leo's first steps, his first signing of the word "more" and his first successful identification of a giraffe. Hopefully, I'll be on hand for his first use of the word "dad". Taking a cue from an earlier post on Max's milestone hits and misses around the one year mark, here are some of the things that Leo is doing now that he was not doing while we were in BC:

*pointing
*understanding words (ball, giraffe, kisses, goodbye, hello, dance, throw, Max, downstairs, telephone, share?)
*enjoying books
*crawling down stairs
*making noises accompanying the right activities (vrooms when playing with cars, devouring sounds when eating something)
*biting, then stopping biting
*walking (now can carry things and throw things while walking)
*kicking objects
*climbing out of seats (highchair, stroller)
*using a fork well
*stacking things
*helps getting himself dressed; especially tops
*crawling on top of Max to play with him (yeah, Max likes this just about as much as splash pads).

I put a question mark on understanding "share" because I can't quite confirm or deny at this point in time. The other night, at Costco, I handed Leo his favourite juice container and he was about to sip from it when I said "here you go, but it's not all for you, you'll have to share with your brother". At which point he handed it over to Max before sipping. So it's possible that brother is the word he understood. Either way, we have no experience with learning those words as Max didn't learn them until after Leo came along.









Max's development has been more verbal than physical. I've started working on letter sounds with Max so he's starting to figure out the starting letters for words by hearing them. I feel like he'd be starting in on reading, but that the focus of alphabet books seems mostly to be on capital letters...which doesn't help so much when the average sentence book has such a small number of upper-case letters. So we'll have to relearn the alphabet a bit through lower-case letters. Max is starting to use bigger words and expressions, which blows my mind. We have started jotting down some of the awesome things he comes out with in a journal. A couple of our faves to date are:

(ME): Do you want to eat at the dining room table or the coffee table?
(MAX): The coffee table. There's all sorts of tables in this house!

(MAX): What's that dripping down your eyes?
(MOM): What do you think it is?
(MAX): Spit.

(ME): That's the War Museum.
(MAX): Where's the cold one?

(ME): Can you tell me why you were so upset this morning?
(MAX): It was hard.
(ME): What was hard? I need you to be specific in order to me to help make you happier next time.
(MAX): Some things in my life.

I've also noticed that Max is starting to pay attention to the words spoken in conversations and songs (that's a big "Uh-oh!" for my music library). So out of nowhere, Max will say something like "Why did he say surgeon?" or "He said neck and shoulders!". Just a total reminder that you NEVER KNOW when Max is really, really paying attention.

We've also been recently getting into a colouring activity book to get Max into drawing and colouring a bit more. He can now draw circles (well, closed loops) around objects and can kind of put an X on things. He's getting better at filling things in, but still holds his crayons at the top, which doesn't provide much stability. We're working on it.










p.s. Feel free to add a caption to your favourite photo in the comments!