Erin's brain is getting fast and strong, too! She's settled nicely into our new ready for bed routine, which now includes either sitting with the boys, Dada, and me to read all together, or Erin picking out her own (shorter) books to read with me. She likes reaching over to pick up her book and then taking it out of my hand to put it back at the end. She now also has a few favorite books and will sit still and watch and listen, too. And she gets a kick out of turning the pages herself.
Erin's funny version of talk is getting to be constant. She has just two or three words she says clearly enough that someone other than our family could understand, but she is very close to mastering another dozen or more. She has a few sounds that are her favorite way to fill in blanks when she has no words left. One, a sort of sharp "brr-uhh," always sounds like a question, the way she raises her pitch at the end. She gets her message across, though, and she wants to hear us say the words for the things she wants so she can imitate. Erin frequently points directly at some object and says "zdah?" What's that?
Luke has had a little bit of a rough adjustment to Adam's school schedule. He's not always ready to get up early in the morning, and that plus not napping most days now can add up to a grouchiness that isn't really him. But two months in, he's doing much better. And he's seeing the benefit!
Luke really enjoys his new-found one-on-one time. On a day when Adam is in school, the second Erin is napping, Luke starts playing in a whole new way than he does with his siblings. He gets to pick what we'll do without being outvoted. "What we'll do" is frequently something three-dimensional. Luke really loves Legos. He likes "drawing" with magnetic letters. He likes puzzles. He loves going outside to collect sticks or jump in piles of leaves. But often, Luke is perfectly content to pick out a few books and curl up with me on the couch to read.
Speaking of reading, Luke has begun to see letters and numbers in all kinds of ordinary objects. He stood in the middle of the kitchen the other day, pointed to the floor, and said "Look Mama, it's an L!" He was seeing the outlines the grout makes around the tile. The one word he can spell right now is his name, and he thinks it's a lot of fun to line up toys in shapes that "make Luke" on the floor. In the photo above, Luke was showing me how he can make his legs form a 4. Those wheels are turning all the time!
Luke has discovered a new interest, too: dancing. Well, that's what he calls it. It's actually running as fast as he can around the coffee table while music plays, and throwing himself onto the couch when it stops. He plays this both alone and with Adam, and he grins the whole time both ways.
Drawing and coloring are still Adam's favorite things to do. The boy would burn through a ream of paper a day if we let him. Tim has taken to raiding the recycle bin at work for paper that has been printed on only one side. (No tsk-tsking, please. The paper still gets recycled when Adam's done with it.) His pictures have always been pretty impressive, but now he has gotten very good with using scissors too. He holds them in an unconventional way that, to me anyway, looks really cramped and uncomfortable. But it doesn't bother him and he is absolutely in control of whatever he's making.
Adam is busy with a lot of things at school. We know this mainly because the teachers communicate frequently. Getting Adam to actually tell us what's going on at school is a different story. Refusing to answer a question seems to have become a game for him. We ask "What did you do today?" and he answers with as ridiculous a story as he can come up with. He might tell us that Batman visited his class, or that his classmate turned into a monster, or that he had a birthday cake for lunch. Adam still talks a blue streak--just when and about what he pleases, not when and what we ask.
Busy little people!
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