Eli and Jude have grown tremendously since they entered pre-school. If there's one good thing that has come out of Alex's current job, it's certainly that our boys have become polite, sociable little boys. Both Eli and Jude are working on saying "please" and "thank you" when they want something and when they receive something, and generally will use polite language for other things.
They're also showing more and more empathy for each other after a lull in their general attitudes towards each other. Eli and Jude definitely love to do crazy things, such as jumping off couches, running around bonking into things, climbing their dresser and jumping off, and oftentimes, they hurt themselves. They've become really good at asking "What happened?" to each other, obviously very concerned about why their brother was sad. Unfortunately, they also do this when they know exactly what's wrong, too. Eli has gotten into the habit of waking his brother up as they're going to sleep, and while Jude cries out, Eli says "What happened?" over and over. It's definitely a work in progress!
More on language, the boys are becoming masters already. They know all their numbers through 10, all their capital letters (we haven't done lowercase ones much yet.... something that's really strange honestly is that most of the toddler toys don't have lowercase letters on them...) and I'm slowly starting to teach them words to recognize in the books they read. They can "read" some of the books already, but I really think it's that they just remember what Alex and I say when we read it to them, so it's not true letter recognition, rather a memory exercise. They are catching on well though, and we've been complimented on how smart they are at school already. I'm really proud!
Oh, speaking of bedtime behavior, Eli and Jude have been developing a fear of the dark. I had hoped that keeping their room dark through their early years would stave off this fear, but I suppose it's just natural. For their birthdays, Granddad got them a night light- a "jellyfish" tank that has a motorized light that turns on and changes colors every so often while pushing the rubber jellies through the water. Eli and Jude absolutely love it, and because they love it so much, they've wanted to touch and play with the jellyfish. This recently came to a head one morning when the boys woke up, climbed up on the table and tipped over the tank, which contained about a 3 liters of water. The boys were sitting up on the dresser, stunned by the mass amount of water they were sitting in and screamed out for help, to which I came running only to find that the jellies were all over the place, with water streaming down the sides of the dresser. Each boy was sitting soaked, and very upset about their friends' plight. Alex remembered that the tank was supposed to be ages 7+, and I guess the boys were just too tempted to leave it alone, so we've had to remove it now for the time being. I'm going to try to see if it still works at all once the motor is all dried out, but in the meantime, we've purchased two little baby-resistant night-lights: a green turtle and a blue car. The night lights are rubberized, rechargeable and seem to have little to no exposed parts that the boys can get into trouble with. I'm hoping that this will solve the problem of the lightless room for the boys, but they do ask us each night still about the jellies. They love fish and water, so I think that we'll just have to get a shelf far out of their reach to hold up the jellyfish tank. Although, since the jellyfish tank is AA battery-sucking, I'm not really so upset to see it not in regular use. I wish it could have been AC powered!
Finally, potty training is going. Yup, it's going, not much to really report about it yet. The boys are letting us know that they have to pee and poop, but it's still generally too late to use the potty exclusively. Their accuracy is definitely improving though, and I hope that the praise we give them for great potty use will sink in as a good habit soon. I really, really am tired of diapers.
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