It's been about seven months since the last post, and I've definitely accumulated enough material to type out about these two kids. Obviously in addition to whatever development has happened for them, there have been significant, world-changing events that are worth bringing up too, and I'm lucky to be able to say everyone here is safe and healthy.
The majority of rapid development has been with my tiny child, R, but the bigger G has had his share of changes too. Let's see what they've been up to.
Pandemic Life
It's hard to believe we're already several months into this shelter-in-place effort. Already the routine I had before is sometimes hard to recall. Things like going into the office every day are in the long past (and good riddance to them). It feels weird to think about how long it's been since we had friends over for dinner or done play dates with the kids or even dropped G off at school.
Our routine nowadays is basically:
- I wake up around 6 AM, exercise a little, have a shower
- Either do a little tidying or a little work before the kids wake up
- Both kids wake up around 7:30
- I have G do his morning stuff like bathroom and brush teeth, then start breakfast in the toaster oven or frying pan or whatever while I get R up and change his morning diaper
- We eat breakfast
- After breakfast is over and cleaned up, mommy takes over until lunch (more on that later)
- Then I shut myself in the office to work until about 11:30, which is lunch time
- I make and serve lunch for people, then I put R to sleep for his afternoon nap at around 12:45
- I go back to the office to work until 5 PM, which is when I typically stop working
- I come out and make dinner and spend family time until their bedtime, 7:30 and 7:45 for R and G, respectively
I used to have a 1 hour bus ride each way to and from work, which gave me a lot of time to warm up and cool down for the work day. I used to write these blogs mostly on the bus, for example. I don't have that now, and so consequently I think I end up working just as much time overall as before, despite the long lunch break, though I might be a bit less efficient working from home.
Surprising absolutely nobody, not commuting is awesome. I like this new schedule a lot, aside from the general uncertainty about the world and the lengthy isolation, of course. I get a lot more time to see my family, whereas I got too little before. I'm also extremely lucky that I can do my job basically just as well remotely as in the office.
The inconvenience of businesses being closed hasn't affected us too much. I make one trip a week to the grocery store by myself for supplies, and a trip to Costco about once a month for bulk food. We also have a milk delivery service from a local farm that also brings us baked goods like bagels once a week. For our other needs, we can generally get that stuff delivered.
What happens while daddy is working
I shut myself away for several hours a day to work, so what happens while that's going on? Mommy springs into action! A few times a week, she takes them out to parks to walk on trails or other outdoor outings. The kids always have better days when they get out of the house rather than being cooped up inside. I was able to take some vacation this summer, and it's been awesome going along with them and seeing how those outings go.
Even on days when they don't go out to a park, they spend a lot of time in the back yard. We have a little outdoor table they can do activities at, or mommy sets up the easel for painting, or they play in the kiddie pool or do other water play.
Some of the time is spent doing school work. G had lessons virtually, but it was hard to make him focus, so mommy has taken reading lessons into her own hands. With her help, G can now read three-letter words that follow the phonetics with decent accuracy (not weird ones like "one", "the", and "bye"). He can read some simple hop-on-pop type book pages. When it gets up to more than five words on a page, he starts getting overwhelmed, though. We're still working on techniques to read one word at a time and even read part of a word at a time for multi-syllable words.
Mommy flexes her science teaching background by doing nature lessons, too. She does booklets with parts of bugs for him to identify, write the names of, and color in, much like he was doing at school. These are a big hit; he carries them around for days after he completed them and shows them off.
We're not really sure what the school situation will be in the fall. We're absolutely not going to send him back to school physically, so it's more likely that this next year will be taught at home. I've started looking into what it will take to teach math and numbers stuff, and mommy will continue with reading work. The worst of it will of course be that he won't get to socialize with other kids regularly.
More Routines
As time goes on, old routines phase out and new ones take their place. One fun one is how we do shower time now. I switched G from baths to showers when he was 10 months old and I realized he was able to crawl around on the bath tub floor and handle the water spraying on him. Showers are great because I can bathe myself and then carve out a bit of time to wash him. All the rest of the time, he is doing fun water play in there.
A natural extension of that is of course having a shower with both of them at the same time. I tried it a while ago, back when R still needed a bath seat to support him while sitting, and it was a pain because there just wasn't enough room in the tub. Now that R can sit unassisted and crawl and stuff, it's still a little cramped but much more doable. The efficiency gains are worth it, plus the kids like to play together with water toys.
After I get out of the shower R usually wants to get out too and G wants to stay in and keep playing. R is always incredibly sweet just after the shower. After I wrap him in a towel, he just puts his little head down on my shoulder for a while. When I've had enough cuddling, I clip his sharp little demon fingernails and toenails. G also gets his clipped when he is finally done in there, too. G now sits patiently for this, but R generally needs a little distraction by holding something interesting, like a flashlight.
Another fun routine that came up, surprisingly, is how R goes to sleep for naptime or bedtime. I'll announce, "R, time for bed! Time to sleep!" and he will just up and start crawl charging towards his room at top speed, with G sprinting past him to lead the way. They mess around on the floor with toys for a minute while I prep the diaper change, then G hangs around in there while I get R all dressed for bed. Usually I sing a song or talk to R about the sounds things make or play with his feet. Sometimes he holds a book while lying on the changing table. G keeps playing with toys or starts messing with all the stuff in there that he's not supposed to touch. Sometimes I have to kick him out of there. I just think it's funny that when I announce it's bedtime there's so far no reluctance to going.
G's bedtime hasn't changed a lot. I'll take him to the bathroom to do his last pee and brush teeth and change into a pull-up for night time (he keeps it dry consistently, but we don't feel like risking it yet). Then we come back and read a bedtime story with mommy. Then I tuck him in, and mommy visits him a few minutes later. A while back he was having some kind of anxiety about sleep, where he wanted numerous visits from us, but that's sort of gone away for now, thankfully.
Food Times
My primary responsibility around the house is managing food stuff for everyone, so I spend a lot time on that. I try to experiment with new recipes every couple weeks or so, but I also have a steady stable of meals that I pull from most of the time. Even now working from home, I tend to do large batch cooking on the weekends so that I don't have a lot to do to prepare for dinner on weeknights after I stop working.
The foods that R likes and doesn't like have started to emerge. When you put food in front of him that he doesn't like, even if he already has food he does like, he starts swiping at everything on his tray and tries to chuck everything on the floor. The way I address this is to tell him that's not allowed and move his entire tray of food away for a minute until he cools down.
That boy definitely doesn't really like eating most fruits and vegetables, even ones that are objectively delicious like fresh cherries or strawberries. In fact, he won't even try them. Only recently he's attempted to eat bits of apples, though he only has like six teeth (and no molars, at that), so he struggles mightily with them. Thankfully he still takes puree pouches, which have enough fruits and vegetables to get him by for now.
Here's a list of things that R currently likes a lot: butter chicken curry, pho, tuna casserole, roast broccoli or brussel sprouts, shrimp and grits, lasagna, spam, hot dogs, breakfast sausages, bagels and cream cheese, homemade burgers, medium rare steak, waffles, grilled cheese sandwiches, chili and beans, hamburger bean dip and chips, Italian wedding soup, graham crackers, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, chicken nuggets, fish sticks, refried beans and rice, jambalaya.
And here's some stuff he doesn't like: strawberries, cherries, tomatoes, sandwiches, eggs, pickles, beets, salmon.
G is picky in his own ways. He eats eggs (at least the whites) and fruits, but passes on a lot of the things I listed above. Just the other day he tried a grilled oyster dipped in garlic butter and thoroughly rejected it, but a few days later also started to really like grilled corn on the cob.
One of the coolest things is how R has gotten better at eating by himself, by that I mean the mechanics of handling utensils. He's proficient with a fork as far as stabbing things goes, and can even use a spoon sometimes to eat goopy food. I can plop a whole bowl of oatmeal with a spoon in front of him and he'll polish it off without any intervention. Well, he does as babies do and sometimes experiments with the novel sensation of plunging his entire hand into it or rubbing it on his face.
Of course, he'd have an easier time if he had more teeth. He's over a year and a half old now but only has eight teeth that have come through to some degree. He doesn't really have molars to chew with, so a lot of foods are hard for him to deal with.
G changes
Our oldest son has had his share of interesting developments over the last months. He's been solidly potty trained for over a year now and from many months ago was even keeping his pull-up dry overnight. As with all kids, he sometimes tries to hold it longer than he should, but he doesn't have accidents. Still, overnight accidents seem like such a pain to deal with that we'll probably wait until he's five before switching to underwear at night time.
He can now open the door to my car, get in, and even buckle himself into his own car seat. The flip side is he might be strong enough to unbuckle himself too (but he knows it's not allowed), and he can easily reach the door handle and open from the inside, so child locks are very much in effect. He can get himself fully dressed if he wants to, but usually needs some level of encouragement. He's also strong enough to open the fridge door and tall enough to get his own milk cup out of the fridge or puree pouches out of the pantry.
I took him to the dentist the other day for the second time. Six months ago, it was sort of a disaster. He had to sit in my lap and barely let them look in his mouth. This time he let them inspect his teeth and even clean his teeth a little. He didn't like the flavor of the polish and didn't like the thing they stick in your mouth to suck out the water and saliva. Huge progress, I'd say.
The other day, mommy cut both kids' hair in the backyard using a trimmer while I helped hold them. Their acceptance of the trimmer was a big deal; in the past G had been pretty nervous about the trimmer, and R had mostly had scissors haircuts. Both of them sat really well for it, all things considered, and now they look very sharp (with haircuts that are basically the same as mine).
Probably the most interesting and also challenging of G's developments is what he calls his "water machine". Basically every single day he takes a bunch of items out of the toy bins plus pillows, cushions, and blankets, and arranges them in some particular way to create a "water machine". Usually these take up as much space as they have available to fill--meaning the entire room--and have delicate parts that cannot come out of alignment without incurring the inventor's wrath. This means if R comes over and so much as bumps into the water machine, G freaks out. And at the end of the day the whole room has toys--sorry, machine parts--strewn about that can't be dismantled.
We hate to stifle his creativity, but the problems around the water machine got so bad we eventually had to tell him he couldn't build them at all. Now when he makes something like it, he declares loudly, "It's not a water machine. It's a spaceship", but to my untrained eyes it's an identical contraption. It's also helped to state our exectations up front: "your brother might come in here and mess with it. It needs to be taken apart before quiet time. Are you okay with that?"
We've steadily been accumulating a small collection of Legos over the last couple years. At some point G suddenly got way into building stuff with them. He favors making small contraptions with lots of weird attachments. Inevitably they're some kind of device or machine, and he loves to give detailed explanations about what the different parts do and how they work. It'll be stuff like, "and this is the part where you put the milk in, and this part makes fire that makes the milk hot, and then you have to crank it and the milk comes out all dirty and this button is for the bugs that live in there too."
The last recent big outlet for his creativity has been drawing. We can now trust him to have a pencil and paper unsupervised, so sometimes during quiet time he draws pictures. He often has a vivid idea of something to draw in his head and industriously works to put it on paper. The other day he had an idea for a grilled cheese sandwich to draw. To my eyes, the final result was some approximation of that, but he seemed satisfied that he'd captured the important details, such as many small dots on it, lines in certain places, and the overall shape. Oh yeah, then he turned it into a robot sandwich by adding antennae, arms, legs, etc..
He seems to like drawing maps of places and adding lots of landmarks on them. I think that meshes with his interest in looking at maps basically wherever they show up. He likes to watch the GPS when we're driving somewhere, and he likes to look at the old (and extremely dated) road atlas I still keep in my car for some reason. He spells out the names of places, looks at symbols, and reads zip codes, and asks about different features like parks, bodies of water, airports, and so on.
R's progress towards walking
We've been waiting for R to start walking forever. For months and months now he's been doing this ridiculous knee-walking thing, but he's so fast with it I think he doesn't yet see the value in walking. I've been racking my brain to think up the "killer application" that will spur the "necessity is the mother of invention" drive, but he's already seen his brother do all kinds of fun stuff while upright, so I don't know what I could show him that he hasn't already seen. He's also been able to hold onto something and stand up or lower himself for months. He's done lots of practice climbing up and getting down off of things (usually turns around backwards and lowers himself until his feet touch the ground).
In about the last three months, he showed he could "cruise", that is, walk along an object like a table or couch while holding onto it. In the last two months we noticed that he could stand unassisted if we set him up for it. In the last month or so we started doing a lot more walking while holding hands, first holding both hands, then only holding one hand. Eventually we started walking and then letting go. Surprising absolutely nobody, he was fully able to walk, but generally just went down to his knees instead because it was easier.
He had something of a breakthrough a few weeks ago when we went to my in-laws' place for an appropriately distanced visit. We were able to convince him to walk across the patio a bunch of times, maybe 20 or 30 steps at a time. Since then he's been a bit more agreeable to walking, but often still wants to knee walk for ease. I've seen it a couple times that my kids have had a mental leap like that when they went out of their routine and usual environment. For example, I remember G first stood up on a family trip to Australia.
When your baby isn't walking, taking them outside to play is sometimes a pain, since they can't run around and do stuff. In fact, R was pretty nervous about being outside on the ground for a while. We started out taking him out on a blanket and just sitting there. He refused to touch the grass and was generally unhappy just being there. After a while he was okay with the blanket but still didn't want to touch grass. Now he's pretty comfortable outside: he'll crawl around the yard if we let him (we don't love that because we have backyard chickens and the poop associated with them), and he likes to ask me to hold his hand and walk around back there barefoot.
Since he doesn't walk much outside he doesn't wear shoes, but that doesn't stop him from wanting to. The other day, wearing only a diaper, he knee-walked over to me carrying pair of shoes and thrust them at me to put them on him. So I did, and he seemed happy with them. In fact, he often brings us clothes to put on him: sunglasses, earmuffs, hats, sweatshirts, and so on. He seems to kind of like wearing different clothes.
Some extremely cute R stuff
The best part about babies is how cute they can be. Our little one does some stuff that's so cute we can barely handle it. Before we talk about talking I wanted to catalogue some of that cute stuff before he grows out of it.
He likes to make faces sometimes, especially when we make faces with him. He's got this thing where he scrunches up his face and sticks out his lip and it's super cute but hard to capture in motion. So hard, in fact, that I can't find a single one. You'll have to take my word for it.
He loves listening to music and does the usual thing that babies do, nodding along and dancing a bit when it's catchy. He also knows some parts of some songs, like ones that go "woohoo" in parts, he'll remember and do it too.
He must have seen us making phone calls, because at some point he started picking up basically any object he could and pretending it's a phone. He'll grab a piece of sandwich and hold it up to his ear and start saying "HI HI BYE HI BYE". He loves when we talk to him back on our own random phone object too.
Probably my favorite thing he does is when he's feeling cuddly, you can pick him up and put his little head on your shoulder, and he rests his whole tiny body and puts his arms around you and just lies there like that. Sometimes he even pats and strokes your arm. It's times like that when I think about how we'll never again have such a tiny baby to cuddle with like that.
Communication Update
R is not talking in sentences or anything, but he can say a lot of words (or approximations of them, at least). He recognizes even more words than the ones he can say. I'm often surprised when he understood a sentence from me. I can say things like, "can you poke this with your fork and eat it?" or "your lovey is on the floor next to your crib" or "can you put this toy back in the bin, please?" and he'll show that he understood.
His pronunciation is not quite where it needs to be, so I've prepared a handy table of words he can say and how he pronounces them. Please refer to the following table.
| Words | Pronunciation |
|---|---|
| hi | hi |
| bye | bye |
| Poppy (our dog) | Poppy |
| Laika (our other dog) | La-la |
| Hildy (our cat) | Heddy |
| mommy | bobby (wat) |
| daddy | daddy (very clearly) |
| pouch (as in puree pouch) | bupp |
| down1 | down |
| up2 | up |
| help | hepp |
| laptop | bap-bop |
| hot dog | hoddo |
| milk | hakku |
| water | hokku |
| hat | hat |
| light | dite |
| all gone | gagan |
| walk | hakk |
| fork | hokk |
| bib | biiib |
| sleeves | leeee |
| off | ahhhh |
| book | hokk3 |
| phone | bohhhh |
| apple | appu |
| empty | etty |
| got it! | dil-liii (uh wat) |
| knee | knee |
| eye | eye |
| ding | duuuu |
| juice | jesh |
| Cheezit (that's a snack we have here) | jezhy |
| Cheerio | jeejo |
| grilled cheese | gicheeee |
1 He has ascribed his own meaning to "down": it means "I want to go there". So if he's on the ground and wants to climb up into your lap, he'd point at you and say "down".
2 Sometimes he says "up" properly, but it's inconsistent at this point.
3 You may have noticed that like four different things are pronounced "hokk". It's true, we have to follow contextual clues sometimes.
He also likes doing animal sounds and sounds of--oddly enough--kitchen appliances. In addition to the usual cow, cat, dog, sheep, and horse sounds, he likes can opener (brrrrrr), microwave ("beep beep"), frying pan, toaster oven ("ding!"), and... wait for it... pressure cooker (psh psh psh psh psh). Oh, he'll also do the sound a zipper makes, "zzzziiip!"
We tried to teach him some useful sign language. He's retained basically five signs: more, all done, airplane, bird, and sleep. Really, he's mastered the most important things in a baby's life. We noticed he now sometimes touches his diaper and says "poop" when he's peed or pooped in there. That's pretty interesting awareness for being just a year and half old. I'm hoping it will lead to easy potty training later.
The other very useful thing he does now is know how to say "yeah" and "no" when we ask him yes/no questions. "Do you want to eat this piece of sandwich?" "YEAH". "Do you want to drink some water?" "Nooooooo" (accompanied by vigorous head shaking).
He's had an odd relationship with books so far. For a while he was interested in their physical form only, opening and closing them and turning the pages back and forth. Now he seems to have figured out that these weird objects also contain pictures and other information, and he will sometimes stare at a single page for a long time, seemingly absorbing it.
How they play
Both the kids love to have some rough play. G has been doing roughhousing for ages, but it's harder now that he's over 40 pounds. I can no longer just let him jump on me however he wants, because he will probably break my bones. He does like to be tackled and wrestled with. One of his favorite games is to have me try to restrain him while he attempts to wriggle free.
I try to make sure to pay special attention to his body language when we're playing, to make sure I'm not being too rough. I ask him every minute or so if he needs to say stop or to tell me if it's too rough. He pretty much never does; it's always me who tires or gets bored first. Kids will do the same thing forever if they're able to.
Another one has him running past me, then I nab him as he passes, put him on the floor, and roll him away across the floor. R seems to also like this one too, and I take turns between them. R does not understand or like the concept of taking turns. When I politely tell him it's his brother's turn, he gets mad and stomps off on his knees. He'll figure it out someday.
The kids sometimes also play really rough with each other. I've witnessed them sitting on the couch together just kind of wailing on each other with hits and kicks, but neither of them seems mad or crying, so I let them handle it themselves. I figure they're going to fight in some capacity throughout their lives. If they're fine with it, I'm fine with it. I periodically chime in with "does anyone need to say stop?" to remind them they have an out.
I try to interfere as little as possible with the way they play. G has gotten older and has been exposed to some amount of media just by having friends at school or seeing movies at other places. He's seen cartoon fighting and guns and stuff, so he naturally makes some of his machines into things that can "pew" people and things like that. Oftentimes there are "bad guys" he has to fight in his pretending. Sometimes in pretending, he talks about having to kill those bad guys. Other times he lies down and says that he's dead.
It bothers me inside, but I also remember doing exactly the same things when I was a kid. It's a natural outlet, and he understands that what he's doing is playing and pretending, so I don't pass any judgment on it. The parenting books we like say, "however your child is playing is exactly what they need right now", so if it's not causing a problem (dangerous, breaking stuff, etc.), I try to let it be.
We balance it out at other times by emphasizing the importance of being kind to others, showing how we are gentle and careful even with bugs, and seriously answering the real questions he has about topics like death.
A decent amount of the time is spent mediating between the two of them, because they inevitably butt heads over stuff when playing. A lot of emphasis on using words rather than hands to say what you want, avoidance like putting your toys somewhere where the little one won't get them, and if you do hurt the other one, helping them feel better.
I often think about what kind of relationship they're going to have when they're older. They're only about three years apart, so they're both going to be teenagers at the same time someday. It's going to be so weird to see how they grow up together and what kinds of stuff they do together.
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