A Long Overdue Update

Mother's Day with my boys!

I’m obviously LONG overdue for a blog entry and sorry it's a long update! Of course, the fact that Dominic and Blake can both run around - in different directions now - prevents me from having much time on my computer these days, and when I do have time, I’m honestly just worn me out, so I’m too exhausted. I feel like the fog is beginning to clear, so I would really like to catch up on here before the next wave of craziness hits me. I love going back and reading what Dominic and Blake were a year ago because I end up forgetting so many things over time and hate that I have been bad about recording things over the last several months.

It's May and these 2 still had to wear a jacket and long sleeves outside. That's just not right. 

Dominic and Blake continue to keep me on my toes as I chase after these 2 characters. The boys have been sick basically the entire winter, going through the cycle of having 1 of them catch a cold and take 2 weeks to recover during which time the other child catches it (and usually me too)and takes 2 weeks to recover. Then the family will have maybe 1 week of good health (if we’re lucky) before one of them catches yet another illness and the cycle starts all over again. Yes, this is how we spent this very long winter. Not fun at all.

On top of the almost constant sickness, Dominic also began receiving speech therapy which involved one problem after the next, and we also hosted about 1 party/shower a month since November, all while juggling 2 kids under 4. With all of that said, I can’t put into words how much I continue to love spending each and every day - even the most challenging days (and there can be a lot of those) - with my boys, watching and helping them grow and develop. It is a gift that I am thankful for every day!

The question now is when can they get bunk beds?

Dominic has had a lot of change in his life over the last several months. He's really growing up and maturing! A week or so after his 3rd birthday, Brian took the side rail off of Blake’s convertible crib and put on a half rail so Dominic could get in and out of the crib-turned-toddler bed. I like to refer to this transition as “releasing Dominic from jail.” About 2 months after that, we moved Dominic into a “big boy” bed, which is the twin bed that Brian slept in as a child. For a month or so Dominic just slept on the mattress and box-springs on the floor in order to give him a chance to get used to the new mattress before he gets the height increase too but about a week ago Brian assembled the bed frame, so Dominic’s bed is the standard height now and that’s gone smoothly (thankfully). 

We decided to keep Dominic in his crib until he was 3 because our pediatrician highly recommends this for children and figured why mess with a good thing considering Dominic was napping and sleeping at night well. However, since we’re going on vacation over the summer, and he will be way too big for a pack n play, I really want Dominic to be fully used to a regular twin bed by then since that’s what he will be sleeping in at the beach. With the warm weather finally arriving, I also took Dominic out of his sleep sack (yes, finally). Thankfully, he didn’t seem to think much of this. Unfortunately, since he moves around a lot while he’s asleep and kicks his covers off, Dominic has been waking up earlier in the morning ever since because he gets cold without the sleep sack.

The transition to the toddler bed and then the big boy bed has been pretty successful other than naps becoming less consistent for Dominic, something that could also be attributed to his age. Dominic only had one fall when he was sleeping. It was during naptime the day after he started sleeping in the toddler bed. As far as his inconsistent sleeping during nap time, one day, I decided to go up there and put several books in his bed with him, and now when he doesn’t nap, Dominic knows to go get some books from across the room and just lay in his bed reading and will sometimes fall asleep in bed doing that. It’s adorable. It's not very consistent but I would say on average, every 3 days or so Dominic has “quiet time’ where he reads like this instead of napping. His room will end up being a train wreck on those days as the books end up being spread everywhere. There was one day when he didn’t want to sleep during nap time so much that he actually cleaned up his room though!

Nap time involves reading a lot of Curious George

During nap time, for the first couple of weeks after the transition, Dominic stayed in his bed as if he was still in his crib, yelling for me if he wanted me, but slowly he became more and more brazen and started stepping onto the floor and then walking around the bed before he ended up walking to the other side of his room. It was funny watching him on the video monitor, and then surprising him by going up to his room and opening the door . Sometimes he would hear me coming upstairs and would race into back into bed before I could open the door. However, I have I have opened to see him dashing across the room, freezing when he sees me there and gives me a “I’ve been caught” look. He then started knocking on his own door (from the inside) to let me know he wanted out. It took an entire 2 ½ months before he finally ventured out of his room, but he only got a few steps out into the hall to the gate at the top of the stairs before he bolted back to his room, slamming the door behind him. That was the day we put the child-proof cover on his doorknob from the inside. He still naps most of the time, thankfully, and those naps usually are an hour and a half to 2 hours long, but I am sad to say that I believe this is the beginning of the end of Dominic’s napping. I’m just trying to appreciate and take advantage of this time while I can.

Dominic attempting to remove the child-proof lock from his door  with Daddy's screwdriver

There was also an incident when he managed to lock his door, so when I came up to get him, I couldn’t get in. I tried picking the lock, but it was a special lock that requires a screwdriver. Meanwhile, Dominic was crying and screaming on the other side of the door wanting out. My sister rushed over to try to help but she had the same luck. Finally Brian came home and opened it in a few seconds. It was the worst 30 minutes of my life as I heard my son begging to get out while I couldn’t do anything to help him. I'm not sure who was more scared, but I know Dominic was at least temporarily scarred from that occurrence because he kept telling me how scared he was that the door would be broken again. Hopefully, it's not something he talks to a therapist about in 20 years

Dominic continues to wear underwear, or “big kid pants” as he likes to call them and is doing great! He’s been fully pee potty trained for almost 5 months now (wow!!!) although he continues to wear a pull-up during naptime and bedtime. I still have to remind/make him go if he’s busy playing especially outside or watching TV, but he’s getting better and better and is otherwise good about telling me that he needs to go. Dominic can hold his bladder for up to 4 hours, so that helps! He was having little leaks occasionally, but any more than that, and it typically indicates that he was sick. For the most part, we’ve faded the M&M reinforcements out but if he remembers to ask, we’ll give him 2 or 3. Thanks to the use of a (disgusting) porta potty at Lemonade Days, Dominic is now standing to pee too although I later found out that he’s been doing that at school for a while now haha.

With all of the pee success, #2 was a far more difficult and frustrating endeavor. This was a surprise because Dominic actually started pooping on the potty before he peed. For about 2 months, Dominic’s naps suffered because he would hold his poop until naptime so he would go in his Pullup. Then he would obviously wake up or not be able to sleep afterward. I would try making him sit on the toilet before naptime - often times for 30 - 45 minutes - but he would just keep holding it until a few minutes after I left him in his bed. The pediatrician recommended that we give Dominic milka magnesia to make it difficult for him to hold, but all that did was make him poop multiple times during naptime and even at night too. Then I started rewarding him with his 2 favorite toys, his crane and Mac truck if he had a clean Pull-Up after nap time, but he continued to poop during his naps anyway. Finally, I decided to take his love of peanut butter and use Reese’s Peanut Butter minicups (or “Reese’s Chocolates”as he calls it) as a reward. After a couple weeks of this, he started telling me that he needed to poop and we’ve only had a couple of poop accidents since then (knock on wood)! I would say that Dominic is fully potty trained now!

3 years old and reading sentences to me!!! He's obviously very proud of himself and I am proud of him too! 

As Dominic continues to test every rule and boundary, he also keeps excelling with his reading. He’s still not independently putting the letter sounds together to read a word phonetically, but he is doing so when I guide him with each letter and best of all is reading more than 40 sight words now (most of the Pre-Primer Dolch list plus a few more) and identifying the letters and letter sounds with ease. I'm having him read sight words and some phonetically spelled words in sentences on the boys' easel's dry erase board too.  Obviously, I'm enjoying putting my bachelor's and master's degrees in education to use! I've actually been looking forward to preschool being out for the summer, so I’ll have more time to work on his reading. Dominic is improving with his counting too, now counting to 25 with just a couple of mistakes and improving on his one-to-one correspondence. He’s learning the days of the week at school too, and I put up the calendar I used with my students when I was a teacher, so we can continue this over the summer.

As Dominic learns to read and do other "academics," one of Dominic's favorite things is to help around the house. He loves “being a gentleman” for me and opening the door for me (after I decided that having 2 sons gives me the right to never open a door again). It has also become part of his mealtime routine to take his plate to the counter when he finishes his meals and use our Dust Buster to clean up after meals (a HUGE help to me). Another one of Dominic’s “chores” is helping me load the recycling and bringing up the empty recycling bin from the street after the garbage men collect the recycling once a week. It’s funny how these tasks that I detest doing are considered fun for Dominic.

Dominic is also helpful with Blake like when I put him down for a nap and also is good at keeping an eye on Blake for me. This is especially helpful when we’re outside and there’s more opportunities to get into trouble as they roam free the backyard. The tattling is actually something that I appreciate although I’m sure it’ll be very annoying to me soon. Dominic additionally seems to enjoying bossing Blake around, which cracks me up. For so long, all of Dominic’s little girl friends have bossed him around (proving to me that it’s in our nature to “take care” of boys), so it’s nice to see him taking charge in these situations even if it’s with his younger brother. It’s funny to see Dominic take Blake by the hand, sternly saying, “Come on, Blake. Let’s go!” and dragging his little bro over to me. Blake doesn’t seem to mind too much yet, because he laughs as well.

Dominic's 1st ice cream cone ever! 

I know I’m completely in the minority when I say this as everyone I’ve ever talked to has told me the opposite, but I honestly feel like - so far - that the Terrible Twos were MUCH more challenging than the “Tortuous Threes.”  Obviously, the 3’s are not easy at all, and maybe I feel like things got easier because Dominic’s speech developed later than a lot of other kids helping with his frustration level a lot, but I would take the button-pushing over the random, repeated meltdowns any day. And yes, Dominic still has meltdowns, but at least I feel like there’s some control with them now as I can say something to him or he can express his feelings to me in a way that ends the behavior more easily. Testing the boundaries is something that bugs me, but I can understand those actions and know that it just takes a lot of consistent consequences to teach him. Maybe it goes back to my teaching background or maybe Dominic’s Terrible Twos were just THAT bad for him and me (and believe me they were horrible!). I remember some days when Dominic was between 1 ½ and 2 ½ that as I was pregnant with Blake during that period, I wondered how in the world would I ever be able to handle 2 at the same time. The ability for Dominic to reason (if you do this, you get that) has been life changing in his behavior, potty training, and eating. Yes, he eats veggies at every single meal now and also eats meat including beef which I never thought would happen!

I couldn't love these boys more!

Dominic is growing up way too fast. These days he’s wearing 4T shirts and pajamas, 3T shorts/pants, 3T-4T underwear (and Pull-Ups at night), and size 9 shoes. He’s one of the taller kids in his class and is losing his cute baby fat, so he looks more and more like a little boy and less like the baby that I think of him as. Although his behavior is still not great, tantrums still happen, and some days I question every decision I've made with him, overall - believe it or not - Dominic has become a rule-follower with me and knows right from wrong. He can be such a contradiction because he wants to do what he wants to do, but once he's used to following a rule, he refuses to break it even when I tell him it's okay.

Just as one child is (hopefully) exiting the terrible behavior, another one is replacing him in trying to send me to the loony bin! Blake, 18 months old now, is a full-blown toddler! This stage includes tantrums when he doesn’t get what he wants, but it also means he’s understanding what we’re saying and communicating with us more and more. The biggest thing is that he seems to understand a lot of what we’re saying. One of the happiest moments happened when I said to Blake, “Give me a kiss,” not thinking he’d actually do it, but he walked right over to me and kissed me on the lips! It was sloppy and absolutely heartwarming. :)

Blake's 18 month stats: over 97th percentile meaning off the charts for height at 35.5 inches tall and 78th percentile for weight at 28 pounds and 5.5 oz. In other words, our baby is a big boy! The pediatrician said that Blake is the size of the average 2.5 year old boy. I dread feeding him in his teenage years! These days, Blake is wearing 24 month/2T shirts and pajamas and 18 month shorts. He’s wearing size 5 diapers, which thankfully he doesn’t go through as quickly as he was a few months ago. He wears size 6 shoes and 2T-3T socks. Blake continues to be an amazing sleeper, napping once a day in the afternoon for 2 to 2.5 hours (3 hour naps happen here and there too) and 11 or 12 hours at night. His hair is just adorably curly and it makes him even that much cuter.

A few months ago, a friend of mine told me that kids are supposed to have 20 words by 18 months old. I remember that striking fear in me because Blake was only saying a couple of words at that point. Now, as he approaches 18 months, Blake has started saying a new word/phrase about every couple of days, is up to about 20 words/pharses. He has also begun to put the words together (i.e., “Hi, Daddy!”). One of the first things he said was a full sentence, "I see you!" Now he is trying to say, "I love you," which I think is the most amazing thing ever of course. He signs things like "all done" but most of all seems to really understand a lot of what we say. My favorite thing he says is “Clean up!” when we’re cleaning. Unfortunately, Blake still has yet to call me, “Mama.” Although I’m the one who spends every day with the child, he calls both Brian and me “Daddy.”

My baby is getting way too big. 

This is especially ironic considering that Blake has entered a full-blown phase of mommy separation anxiety. He’ll scream and cry when I leave or if someone else is holding him when I’m around and will stop as soon as he’s in my arms. I call him my “Stage 5 Clinger,” and it has made running errands quite a bit more challenging because he refuses to ride too long in the grocery cart or stroller. Not to mention the fact that Blake has even shown jealousy when Dominic sits on my lap (a first since Dominic has ne!ver shown that towards me - only when his Aunt Steph plays with other kids). Although I love all of the cuddle-time that Blake has been giving me especially since he loves rest his little cheek against my shoulder, but I look forward to getting this stage over and done with. I know when he’s a teenager I’ll long for this stage which is sad to think about.

The mess maker in the mud!

At the same time, Blake is keeping busy getting into trouble! It can be exhausting keeping him from splashing in the toilets (his favorite activity a couple of months ago), opening every drawer and cabinet in the house (including the liquor cabinet), getting into the recycling, grabbing things off of the counters and tables, and knocking over furniture. We call him “The Mess Maker” because he’s constantly making a mess...and all while looking at us with a smile like "I'm doing something bad!" Our trash cans are all on top of furniture because he gets into all of it and then carries the garbage around the house...allowing me to pick up the same piece of trash numerous times. There was an incident where I walked into the house after tutoring while Brian was “watching” (and I use that term loosely) the boys, and I was greeted with a smiling Blake holding a mini-bottle of tequila in his hands. That same morning while I was gone, Blake also somehow got a water glass and broke it all over the floor. 

He's standing on the table but how can I get mad when he  flashes that adorable smile? 

He loves to cause mayhem all of the time and already is pulling the same testing behavior (with the adorably devious grin) that his brother has been exhibiting. The problem is when we tell him no or take something away from him, Blake does not like it which leads to tantrums. I actually have had to start timeout with him (30 second timeouts). He's seen his big bro do it, so he knows to sit there.It seems like more of a change of scenery/distraction because he ends up smiling when I come to get him. With all of his behavior, thankfully Blake has that adorable, dimpled smile that makes it impossible for me to be mad at him.

My champion eater continues to love to eat, but suddenly he has become very picky. He used to LOVE pizza, but now he won't eat it. He used to enjoy grilled cheeses, but now he won't eat that. He used to be obsessed with peas, but now he refuses to eat those either. These days Blake wants to eat a lot, but just a more limited number of foods. He loves Cheerios (one of his first words), yogurt, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, crackers, bananas, and other fruits especially dried ones. He continues to grow and is quickly approaching his big brother in height, so I'm assuming he's getting enough nutrients. I'm used to a picky eater because as soon as Dominic turned 1, that's exactly what he became. However, since Blake had so much trouble with finger foods because of his gag reflex until he was about 13 1/2 months, I guess the pickiness was just delayed. Blake is still a "good eater" just more selective, so I'm much less worried about this. I guess that's the story of a mom with her 2nd child.

I’m continuing to get to know Blake’s little personality as it is developing at such a fast pace at this point. He’s still the very low-key child he’s always been, but now he’s extremely curious, exploratory and displaying how much he knows and understands. We joke that he’s very similar to my dad because my dad is very tall, easy-going, and into sports and they just seem to have similar personalities. 

Blake is also becoming a typical little boy as he loves rolling cars around. His favorite thing to do is play with balls (one of his first words) especially putting them into the basketball goal. He also loves playing with blocks, crawling through the boys' tents, chasing his brother, being tickled, opening and closing doors, and singing songs. Sometimes I think he might have that disease where he feels no pain because he'll fall down and isn't phased at all. This is a good thing because he has an older brother that he loves to rough house with and also because Blake is just such an active child. He ALWAYS wants to be outside ("side") playing, climbing all over anything and everything, sliding, and just running around (usually in hysterics). 

Most of all, Blake is very social. He tries to keep up with Dominic (who also loves playing with his little brother thankfully) and all of Dominic’s friends. In addition to being so physical, Blake is very smart (and yes, I’m aware of how biased I am but he really IS very smart). He identifies his tongue (which is incredibly long just like mine - it's a gift), nose, and ears, is starting to sing the ABC song, and is already really eager to learn his ABCs just like his big brother.

The boys' schedule continues to be the same as it has been for the last 6 months or so. 

8:15 - wake up 
8:30 - breakfast
12:00 - lunch
1:30 - Nap time
4:00 - Snack
6:30 - Dinner
7:30 - Bath and get ready for bed
8:15 - bed time

Dominic and Blake continue to be each other's best friends. This is something that I treasurer. They never laugh as hard as they do with each other. These days, they hardly ever fight with each other. If Blake fusses about a toy, then Dominic gives it to him or gives him another toy, and Blake handles Dominic's roughness better than most kids and just laughs. As each day goes by, I notice more and more how different my 2 little boys are. I love them both, and I think their differences complement each other so well which is why they get along the way they do (so far), but they're often like night and day. On the other hand, their love of cars, certain TV shows/movies like Curious George, Super Why, and Finding Nemo are very similar, not to mention their level of activity that keeps all 3 of us on the move constantly. Dominic is very cautious initially while Blake can be a little more adventurous. Dominic would never have ventured out of the backyard on his own but now we’re having to fence in our backyard Blake is already escaping every chance he gets. When we would go to jumpy places like Catch Air, Dominic would make me go up on the slides and playscapes with him, but Blake goes up on his own. I think a lot of it is a 1st child vs 2nd child thing, but they are certainly not the same kid by any stretch. At the very least, they are both all boy and love to keep me on my toes and make me fall in love with them more and more every day!

True love!