From youngest to oldest, here is the latest:
Ellie
Ellie at 13 months is now a full walker. She no longer crawls at all, she walks everywhere and has awesome balance. She's a tough one. She finds a way to get around to whatever it is she wants and if one of her brothers gets in the way, she has no problem pushing and shoving her way through.
Recently she learned to put bowls up on the counter...modeled behavior from her brothers. It's so cute to see her stand on her tiptoes to reach the counter. She can't reach so we help her and she looks at us with a smile and a feeling of accomplishment when the bowl is finally on the counter.
Nick taught her "nose" and when prompted she points to her nose or our noses. I'm now trying to teach her, "nariz" is the same as nose. She does know "lengua" (tongue) and will stick it out when prompted. Ellie loves books and points things out in the books.
She still doesn't talk much. She makes lots of noises and tries really hard to imitate word sounds but so far can only say, "Ma-ma" and "Da-da", "Hi" and "back-pack"....she learned that watching Dora. This girl is an iPad PRO already. Once we log in with our password, she takes over and slides the screens until she finds her favorite app, PBS Kids. She clicks it and then scrolls to find her favorite show, "Super Why". She only likes the song so she clicks on it, listens to the opening song and then exits the show to do it all over again so she can hear the song again. She dances to the music and the face she gives when she gets the ipad and what she wants is precious. We have to keep the iPad away because once she sees it, she throws a fit if she doesn't get it. We don't let her use the iPad much because 1. we don't want her to loose the excitement over it, and 2. I obviously feel awful having a 13 month old watching "TV" on the iPad but when we need silence, it works like a charm.
Liam
Liam is a little talker and lately has just been using great long sentences with big words out of nowhere. He is so fun and has now started saying the darndest things. He is still highly motivated by food and he loves his snacks and "junk food". When I started writing this post a month ago, Liam was eating very little real food...meaning he only wanted to eat snacks and not anything labeled as "lunch" or "dinner". This week, he's been a great eater, eating a lot of variety and great portions too. Today, he ate two bowls of a kale minestrone soup all by himself. So, I'm not worried about it anymore. He has his moments I guess.
Liam does love his junk food though and unlike Gavin, he doesn't understand when we say "this is for grown-ups". I can drink wine in front of Gavin and he knows he can't have any but Liam just keeps saying "I want some of that" or when Nick drinks coke when we're out, Liam will say to him "I want a little bit, daddy". But of course, it's never just a little bit. Once he has a sip he wants more and more. He actually uses the phrase "a little bit" a lot...anytime we tell him he can't have something (food related).
His favorite toy is still the play kitchen which lately has actually become a real kitchen. He steals stuff from my pantry for his kitchen. This week, he stole the oats canister and I found oats all over the carpet in his room. He was putting them in all of his pots so he could cook them. I clean it all up. Later that day, he walked out to the living room with a mouth full of uncooked oats....that he ate from one of his own pots....he'd stolen the canister again. I literally cannot cook anything without him right behind me saying "I help you Mama". We took the kids to Lowe's for their monthly kids workshop where they were supposed to build a wooden note holder. Gavin did great. Liam liked opening the package but then lost interest and all he wanted to do was go to "the kitchen". He played the whole time in the kitchen demo area and he kept asking me to go get him pots so he could cook. Eventually, he settled for the oven trays that come with the ovens and pretended to bake with those.
Liam is still obsessed with Michael Jackson music. He was devastated when we found out that the "This is It" DVD was left behind in FL. We found it on Youtube so at least now we can appease him when he has separation anxiety over the DVD. He KNOWS all the songs. Can recognize a song within the first beat. It's hilarious to hear Gavin and him talk about the songs. The other day in the car, the conversation went like this:
Gavin: Liam, what's your favorite Michael Jackson song?
Liam: Beat It
Gavin: And after Beat It, whats your favorite?
Liam: The way you make me feel
Gavin: And after that one, what's your favorite?
Liam: Annie (his code for Smooth Criminal..."Annie, are you ok?"
Gavin: So, you like Beat It, The Way You Make Me Feel, and Smooth Criminal?
Liam: Yes.
Of course, sometimes these change. Beat It is consistently his first choice but some times he'll say "We're starting something" as his second choice. I love how the boys bond over both liking MJ. Gavin loves to dance to the songs. He sings them too....he makes up words for the parts he doesn't know and I don't correct him because some of the lyrics are not appropriate for a 4 year old you know.
Gavin
Well, Gavin will be 5 in 2 weeks. He is such a good reader and I love that he loves to read. He's up to level 3 on the "I Can Read" books which is the level right before chapter books. I'm so proud of him. He has taken over bedtime story time and now he's the one that reads to the little ones. I will be enrolling him in Kindergarten sometime in the next few weeks which is crazy to think. At the parent/teacher conference, the teacher had nothing but good things to say which made me so proud. I was worried about behavior since some of his school buddies were getting in trouble almost every day but the teacher said he's doing well (of course, she says that in relation to others, not that he's perfect but I'll take it). The teacher said to challenge him in math because he's very "math inclined". I'm not sure what he's done at school to get her to think that, but we have noticed that he does like to play with numbers....doing addition/subtraction without us prompting him.
Gavin continues to do gymnastics on Tuesdays with a couple of his school friends. He has also started swim lessons and he absolutely loves it. He is so proud of himself. The swim school didn't know where to place him based on his swim experience so they started him at the 2nd level (one step above Liam) and Gavin is the oldest in the class. The other 2 kids are both a young 3, so Gavin comes off as a better listener and more "driven" to the teacher. The teacher gives him so much praise for listening, following instructions and swimming so well that the 1/2 hour swim lesson has turned into a confidence booster for him. I now see why some parents "red-shirt" their kids for Kindergarten to let them mature and be older when they start. I recently read an article that talked about the benefits of being the oldest in the class and for Gavin's swim lessons, it's all true. He now graduated to the next level so we'll see how he does when he's around older kids.
On interests....Gavin is REALLY into Star Wars at the moment. He has a lot of "I Can Read" books that are Star Wars stories so he learned the story line without ever having seen the movies. Nick finally showed him Episode I and Gavin is hooked. He just wants to watch all of them. So far, he's seen I, II and IV and 1/2 of V. It's amazing how he recalls the details from the books and connects them to the movies and vice versa.
Gavin is really looking forward to his party. He has changed his mind about the theme like 4 times already. I told him he had to make a decision and he picked Lego's last week. Then this week, he starts talking about his great Star Wars party and I said, "No, it's Legos. Remember you picked Legos"....cue the sad face..."No, I wanted Start Wars". Then he says, "I have an idea, why don't we do both and do Star Wars Legos!!!" So, now we're doing both.
Oh, and I have to share something that happened today. I have to give you the back story first. Last year, in a conversation I told Gavin that he was Puerto Rican and he was really upset about it. He said, "No, I'm not, I'm American!" and seriously was upset that we were calling him Puerto Rican. So, we knew we had to do some work on this. To "culture" him, we've been reading a book about the Puerto Rican natives, the Tainos. In this book, the illustrations show the Tainos in loin cloths. Gavin never asked or talked about that. But today after his bath, he was naked in his room and he told Nick, "I'm naked like the Puerto Ricans." Nick asked for clarification and then Gavin said that he was naked like the Puerto Ricans that live in Puerto Rico, the ones shown in the book. It never occurred to me that Gavin would think that the Tainos are living in Puerto Rico right now and that the illustrations on the book would be his perception of Puerto Ricans. I asked Gavin, "do you think Puerto Ricans walk around without clothes?" and he said, "yes" and I said, "But I am Puerto Rican, Abuela and Abuelo are Puerto Rican and we don't walk around without clothes" and his response was, "yeah, but the people that live in Puerto Rico do". So, we had to clarify that the Tainos lived in Puerto Rico a long time ago and clarify that Puerto Ricans are just like Americans.
I will be using this story as an example in my class of how the imagery in media creates and perpetuates stereotypes. Here we thought we were doing a good thing teaching him about his heritage and we almost made it worse!
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