Well, it’s been a while since the last blog post. We really had wanted to do a better job of keeping up than this, but we’re persistent, so here’s a new post.
Tess is crawling! Wow, is she cute – her bum is so round and she’s so chunky. It’s only been a few days now that she’s been mobile this way, so she’s still perfecting her method. On the slippery wood floors, her preferred method is to put her hands ahead of her, then slide her knees, feet and bum, en masse, forward. She has discovered that this doesn’t work so well on carpets, so she crawls the traditional way there. It’s a whole new world now – we’re in trouble. It’s time for us to seriously baby-proof.
Another development- Tess’s first tooth is poking up, finally. We’ve been waiting and waiting, and it’s finally here. It’s on her bottom right, in the front. She doesn’t seem to notice it very much. Also, she’s a pinching machine, which makes feeding her lots more fun (not that it wasn’t fun already). Sometimes she can’t quite get a piece and she has to chase it across her highchair tray- pinch, pinch, pinch, pinch, pinch. Very entertaining!
Noah is getting so big, I can’t believe it. He’s huge! Well, actually, he’s at the 50th percentile for almost everything, so he’s average for his age, but he seems so big. It must be the comparison to Tess. His brain must be bursting out of its skull, he’s so curious and gobbling up facts as fast as he can find them. He’s taking swim lessons this winter, and he has special goggles. He’s discovered that if he puts his face in the water and opens his eyes with his goggles on he can see under the water! He hasn’t gotten the nerve to put his whole head under the water at once yet, only his face or the back of his head, but not both. He has swum, though! Very exciting. We’re reminding him of all the fun adventures we can have in the summer time if he can swim.
A couple of weeks ago, we discovered Wheels Family Fun Park here in Durham. It’s got arcade games, foos ball, skee ball, pool tables, a skating rink, go-carts, and mini-golf, all of which looks like it’s straight out the ‘70’s. I know the furniture hasn’t been changed since then. Kinda smells like it, too. But that’s worth it just for the biggest, coolest habit-trail we’ve ever seen. “Habit-trail” is our name for one of those tunnelly, crawly, climby, slidy jungle-gym things in the front of so many fast food joints. Well, this one beats the pants off all those. It’s in a gymnasium, if that gives you any idea. It’s three levels, and has a ball jumping pen, two trampoline-like things, countless slides and tunnels, rope climbing places, two zip lines, and lots of secret hiding places. There was a time when Noah would’ve been frightened or gotten lost or stuck, and at first I was a little worried that he would get lost this time. Nope. We went with Emma and Christopher and we almost didn’t see them for two hours. They came back to the table only for provisions. Except when Noah banged his lip coming down a slide – then he came to me crying and bleeding. We went to the concession stand for ice, and clearly the woman who worked there was used to this. She had all her supplies right there and made a bag of ice with great efficiency. Then we went to the bathroom to clean up Noah’s face. As we were coming out all fresh and clean and iced, he turned to me and said, “Don’t I look tough?” I laughed so hard at the time, but now it’s a little sad. He’s five going on 17. Then other times, he wants to held and cuddles like a baby. What a sweetie.
He has a hearing test on Wednesday. This is because of his history of ear infections, because six month ago when we made the appointment he was complaining of not being able to hear well out of one ear, and because we thought he was having a difficult time hearing us when we spoke to him. I’m expecting everything to be fine. I think when we thought Noah was having a difficult time hearing us, he was just distracted and so wasn’t paying attention to us.
We’ve been reading Winnie-ther-Pooh, the classics. It’s great. It’s funny – Winnie-the-Pooh is marketed as merchandise to toddlers but the stories themselves are much more appropriate for pre-school and early-school aged kids. The characters are complex and full of pathos (just think of Eeyore), and the plots have cute little twists involving misunderstandings and such. Noah loves them. We read them all straight through at every quiet time and every bedtime until we were finished, and now we’re reading them for the second time.
