Family life in February

About a month ago, Mom was putting on her wedding ring after her soccer
game. Logan looked at the ring and asked what it was. She told him it
was a wedding ring and that it meant she was married to Daddy. Mommy
said to Logan "maybe some day you will want to get married." Logan
considered this for a bit. "Oh," said Logan "Someday I will marry
Daddy." Mommy then explained that usually boys marry girls and girls
marry boys. Logan thought about this and then said, "well then I'll
marry you and Delenn."

Delenn (now age 16 months) is quite adept at building towers. She will
stack up to nine block shapes (of similar sizes). This morning, she
worked on stacking boxes of various sizes. As she stacked, she started
to put a large box on top of her tower. She realized the highest box
was too small so she set the large box down and rearranged the blocks so
the largest one was on the bottom! We are really impressed! She also
is getting good at putting large beads onto a stick and stringing beads
onto the string snake.

Delenn continues to sign well and adds new signs daily. She has added
"thank you," "sorry," and "please" to her vocabulary. When we ask her to "use her
manners" (as we do with Logan), she will sign "milk please." At times
Delenn will start to whine when she wants something. Again, when we say,
"use your words" she'll use the proper sign instead (such as "please" if
she wants a toy from Logan or "eat" if she wants a dried mango slice,
"water" or whatever.)

When Delenn was watching a baby signing video a couple weeks ago, a new
word came up -- "clown." To do this sign imagine twisting a red clown's
nose on your face. Instead, Delenn devised her own sign-- putting her
finger in her nose and twisting. Yuck!

Before naps and at night, Mommy sings several songs to Delenn. One of
them is, of course, the alphabet song which Mommy also signs. One day
(Jan 25), Mommy came upon Delenn in the kitchen. She had pushed a
button on a fridge game that sings the alphabet song. She was swaying
and waving her hand about -- she was obviously signing the ASL alphabet
because she made a clear Z at the end!

As for speaking, Delenn spends much of the day saying "Mama" in just
about every tone you can imagine. She clearly says up, stop, cat, dog,
hot, uh oh and a few others.

Today at the library, Daddy told Delenn, "Go get a book and we'll read
it at the table." She grabbed a whole lot of books, so Daddy said,
"That's too many. Go put some back." Delenn picked up a book and put
each one back one by one. What astounded Daddy was that when she put it
back one book back, it was upside down and backwards. He figured he'd
fix it after she was done. But then Delenn noticed and she turned the
book around and also turned it right side up. She had placed the books
back neatly and side-by-side.

Last weekend was another first for Delenn. She repeatedly hit Logan on the
head with a sharp toy. Daddy picked her up and placed her in the naughty
spot. Delenn sat there and let out quite a wail. Then she had to say (sign)
"sorry" to Logan for hitting him. Delenn was quite upset, but Logan? He was
delighted. "She's old enough for the naughty spot!" he told Daddy again and
again. Later in the week, Delenn again was hitting Logan. Mommy said to her,
"Delenn stop hitting or you will need to go to the naughty spot." Delenn
marched off down the hallway. Then she started to cry. Mommy looked at
Logan and he looked at Mom. "I think she just put herself in the naughty spot."
"Yes she did," Logan replied. So after about 30 seconds (that's as long as
she's in the naughty spot at the moment) Mommy had her stand up
and say (sign) "sorry" to Logan. We had planned to wait until she was 18
months (when we started with Logan), but I guess she has a full understanding
of the naughty spot already. For some time now, she has been signing
sorry to Logan (when he's been in the naughty spot) and gives him a kiss back
when he apologizes to her.

Logan's imaginative play has really gone to the next level. Most every
day, he builds a "submarine" or "rocket" out of cushions, foam blocks
and small preschool sized chairs. Then he adds various things such as
round discs for the torpedoes, Lincoln log blocks for the guns, little
pom poms for the "buttons" to make the rocket/submarine go faster or
slower and so forth. Then we can spend up to an hour sitting in our
seat riding through the waters while being threatened by giant squid,
hammerhead sharks, killer whales, sea snakes and an occasional octopus or two!

It was nice to see Logan playing a really imaginative game with his
friend, Portia, as well. From what Kim and I could see, they were being
threatened by a monster and had to go hide in their rocket. Then they
got "guns" to "get" the monster and both ran around squealing and
warning us (the Moms) of the impending dangers that lurked around us.

Logan also is becoming quite the master at building things out of his
zoobs, Lincoln logs, kid k'nex, legos and so forth! He primarily builds
rockets and they always have guns (to shoot the other "naughty rockets")!

Logan is doing fairly well with his writing skills. While he's still
not overly keen on arts and crafts, he has been enjoying doing mazes and
most days practices writing his name at least once. He does not yet
write his name independently (Mom or Dad lightly write his name in
pencil and he writes over it.)

Several times a week we set up a treasure hunt for Logan and Delenn. It
started a few weeks ago when Mom set up a dinosaur egg hunt (plastic
Easter eggs with plastic dinosaurs inside), followed a couple days later
by hiding the letters in "dinosaur" and another day by hiding big
dinosaurs around and about. In the weeks since, we've hidden rockets,
race cars, letters, and rhyming words. Both kids enjoy it thoroughly --
and Delenn even finds them on her own now!

Our weekly activities have slowed down a bit as Kindergym and
Kindermusik are not up and running at the moment. (Hopefully both will
start up in April.) We often (though not always) go to a couple of
playgroups (Monday/Friday) and Logan goes to Nana Kath's on Tuesdays.
Logan goes to 3 year old kindy on Thursdays, but after much debate (on
the parent's part) we have decided to pull him out for the time being.
He often doesn't want to go -- and his behavior afterwards (whining and
general out-of-sorts-ness) is not pleasant. We also get together with
friends for playdates -- at the pool, Squiggles, and at our houses. We
still try to get out and ride bikes 3 or 4 times a week. Logan is quite
strong riding his big boy bike with training wheels. We still have swim
lessons every Saturday (for both Delenn and Logan). One of our favorite
activities is going to the town library (we often go after the pool on
Saturday because then Daddy can help out with Delenn since she enjoys
pulling books off the shelves). We always wind up with a huge bag of
books (15 books or so)--mostly non-fiction books. The majority of them
are about jet planes, space travel and race cars!

When Logan turned three, he started doing "chores" to help out in the
family. His jobs are to put the silverware away and to take his plate
and cup up to the counter after every meal.

Speaking of meals, after a long break (while we were trying to deal with
the difficulties of spoon feeding a baby) we resumed being thankful at meal
time. For us, this consists of holding hands, bowing our heads and having a
few moments of silence. Delenn finds this an important part of our mealtime
routine, insisting that we be thankful not just once, but three or four times
each meal!

As for Mom and Dad, we're doing just fine. The kids run us ragged
(primarily because Delenn does not sleep through the night yet. Yawn.)
We both play soccer on Tuesday evenings and Mom continues to play in the
Alexandrea Quartet. But all in all, the kids bring many smiles to our
faces and we are very happy here in the DingoDen.

There are a few more pics below as well.