8
February
2007
Andrew is getting really good at communicating and sometimes he even helps Bran. Today I was trying to get Bran to tell me what he wanted. I knew that he wanted more of his cheerios, but wanted him to say more or cheerios or something other than nah, nah. Drew looked at Bran and made the sign for more to him. Bran made a sound of acknowledgement and signed more. Later that day I was asking the boys to touch their heads, Drew touched his and when I asked Bran to do it he wouldn’t, so Drew touched his head for him!
Drew really likes to recite the letters of the alphabet with me. But the past 2 days he’s been getting stuck on what appears to be his favorite letter, “F”. I say “A”, he says “F”, I say “B”, she says “F”, until we get to “G”, then he repeats the correct letters until about “S” and then he’s bored and won’t do it anymore.
Bran has only jumped in once or twice when I do the alphabet with Drew and then only with 3-4 letters, he doesn’t seem interested. Today he was off playing by the back door by himself and I heard him start the alphabet. He got to “C”, then went back to “B”, then “A”, then said them all in order all the way to “H”! I guess maybe he was paying more attention than I thought!
Bran’s favorite book right now is a counting book. Each page has pictures of a different number of animals related to the sea all the way to 12. He can find the animals I ask him to find and then actually does a good job of counting them, if it’s not higher than 3. After 3 he just keeps tapping the page, until I stop counting. We have to read the book several times a day. It’s also becoming Drew’s favorite so we have some disputes over who gets to turn the page! Bran always seems to be the one to have a favorite book, then Drew starts to like it too. First it was Snuggle Puppy, then I Love You Through and Through, then Brown Bear or Polar Bear, then The Christmas Tree book, and now the counting book. I think Goodnight Moon fits in there somewhere too. The last 5 are still on the best reads list. As much as we read to the boys from the very beginning, they’re not big readers.
Yesterday we heard Bran counting. He was looking at a book with numbers in it and said one, two, three, while he pointed to the one and the seven! The book was upside down, so you could argue as Mike did that that seven upside down looked similar to a two! 
We’re reaching but what to do you expect, we’re parents!
The boys are starting to say lots of words. Drew almost always says thank you when you give him something and is getting better at using his words to say please rather than his sign. They’re also starting to repeat our words more. The biggest thing is that while they know the words, can say them, and I think even know when to use them, they don’t. They have to be prodded, or you have to say it first and they’ll repeat. For example if they want Milk, they can repeat Milk if you ask them “Do you want milk?”. But they won’t actually ask for it, instead they put their hands up to the counter and say “nah, nah, nah.” Which I confess drives me absolutely crazy, especially by the end of the day.
Once when we were going over what certain animals say I asked them, “what does mama say?” the first time the response was “no”. Jen do you remember telling me that Kylie also said that? Well they only said that once, now their response is often “grrrrrr”. Apparently I growl too much, maybe I should go back to saying no more often.
Shayna 
Drew & Bran 
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8
February
2007
Last week our good friends Toby and Chloe came for a visit. It was so great to have them here with us! We took a trip to the Science Centre with the boys, ate at our favorite restaurants (Langano Skies-Ethiopian and Haweli’s-Indian), and I got lots of help around the house with laundry and watching the boys so I could run errands. If only I had that kind of help all the time…I would have to invest in Starbucks though! Part way through their visit we got to take a side trip with Mike’s department to Jasper. They did some skiing, I took the day off, did some hiking and took photos. Sunday we went on a 3-hour hike through Malligne Canyon. Every year I never cease to be amazed by how beautiful that walk on the ice is, and how beautiful the mountains are. We saw lots of long horn sheep this year, an elk, and even a wolf! So beautiful. The boys did really well on the hike and I was glad to share some of the outdoors with them. I was also super thankful for Yaki who carried Brandon for me!
In addition to enjoying the beauty of Alberta outdoors, our friends’ visit also gave us the chance to play lots of games! And you can never play too many games! Our favorites for the week were Power Grid, Fury of Dracula, and an old standby El Grande. Unfortunately, or fortunately, Toby didn’t get to make his freaky voice overs with Mississippi Queen. Maybe next time?
Mike and I had been playing some 2 player games of Power Grid before Toby and Chloe came and were really starting to get into it. The four player game is quite different though and I had trouble keeping up! It must be the cutthroat play of our friends! The premise of the game is to build power plants and power cities, whoever is powering the most cities by a certain point in the game wins. Toby brought up Fury of Dracula and we liked it so much we bought it from him. In this game there are four Hunters who are searching Europe for Dracula, one player is Dracula who secretly records each city he goes through. It’s a cooperative game from the standpoint of the Hunters. Our first game, we were just learning the rules, took about 5 hours and we just quit because it was so late! But we were able to get the second game down to 4 hours and the Hunters beat Dracula. I feel like I’m getting a better sense of the game and having been a hunter twice I’m anxious to try out the role of Dracula. Mike and I are thinking about playing a two player game after paper deadlines. El Grande is well…El Grande, an awesome game that we don’t get to play often enough, mostly because it takes over 2 hours to play and also because we have so many other ones to choose from.
Thanks Chloe and Toby for the fun times, all the help with the boys, and giving us so many opportunities to play games! We really miss our times together and it’s fun to recreate them every so often. Love you guys, you’re the best!
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8
February
2007
The night wakings have gotten worse, but that’s mostly because they have ear infections. So I have to give them some grace on this getting me up in the middle of the night nonsense. However, we’ve had another wrench thrown into our getting them to sleep wihout their cribs. Not only is the room an adventure in itself (they’ve taken to climbing in and up the dresser drawers), now they can open their bedroom door. We have a gate across the door so they can’t get out, but this means they do two things, first they throw all their toys out into the hallway, including soothers and then they play with the door. The biggest fun is waiting until the other brother is standing unawares between the door and the gate and then trying to close the door really hard on him. It creates many crying episodes and little sleeping. Ever since Bran got his finger pinched in the door in the living room, I get really freaked out when I hear them opening and then slamming their door. Unfortunately we’ve had a hard time stopping it. Which means no naps and late bedtimes.
Today I was finally able to get a device that locks the doorknob in place. The door has one of those pull down handles rather than a knob, so this device attaches to the handle so that it won’t pull down and open. Mike is right in the middle of paper deadlines, but graciously put it on for me tonight while I got the boys ready for bed. We smartly attached it to the outside of the door so that we could flip the switch and lock it in place from our side and then unflip it when we wanted to get in (we had a brief moment of insanity when we thought we should put it on the inside). We brought the boys up to bed and I closed the door to keep them in…unfortunately the knob was in the the locked position. So there we all were in the boys room with no way to get out. Toby…remember the time I rescued you from a room? It was pretty much just like that. I noticed that Connie’s car was next door, but couldn’t figure out how to get her attention from the back of our house into hers, it was afterall -16C and she was unlikey to have a window wide open. So Mike took on the role of MacGyver and after a LONG while of using an old door knob, and eventually that wooden lightsaber, as a hammer, he got the hinges off of the door and we got out! It was quite a little fiasco, and I’m still chuckling over it.
But I have to say after all that…it worked! The boys tried a few times to get the door open, couldn’t, and went to sleep! YAY!!! Hopefully naptime tomorrow will be as successful.
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8
February
2007
It’s actually now Day 17, I wrote this at Day 14 and never put it up.
WOW! I really thought I would make this a more consistent post. Maybe for me this is consistent! Well, it’s been 14 days and a lot has happened. By day 4 the boys seemed to be getting things down. We realized that we had to put them down a little bit later (1/2 hour or so). Normally they might chat or play before they fell asleep, but with the whole room available to them, it was just too exciting to fall asleep. By the fourth day they fell asleep right away and slept the whole night through! Woo Hoo! That was a Thursday, Friday we left for a weekend in Jasper. The boys did well in the cribs there, except that Sunday morning I awoke to Drew tugging on my foot. He had crawled out of his crib, barely 3 feet from me and I didn’t even hear him! Unfortunately it was also 6:45 am. 
The boys came home from the weekend with colds and have been sick ever since, so that’s completely thrown off their sleeping. We’ve been going in to them at least 3 times a night, often more. I realized how used I had gotten to getting a full nights sleep! We’re tired! Hopefully as the boys get to feeling better, they’ll sleep better too. Although we do have some funny stories…
Their room doesn’t have a closet, so when we originally set it up Mike built a little add on between their dresser and the wall. It has a top shelf and a bottom shelf, and a rod right under the top shelf where we hang coats and sweaters, there is no door on it. One night they weren’t going to sleep so I went to check on them. Bran was hiding in the closet holding all the clothes still on their hangers while Drew was running around the room with a short, thick, wooden rod. It kind of looked like he was waving a light saber! It was both hilarious and scary, while I was laughing all I could think was “I thought we babyproofed this room!” Apparently not, a few mornings later Mike went in to get them and found another surprise. We have a wooden, giraffe shaped shelving unit in their room. It’s about their height and has two shelves with 3 cloth boxes on each shelf. The top has a small shelf for books, etc. We didn’t attach it to the wall because it’s not heavy and they’ve pulled it over without incident before. When Mike walked in, the shelf was about 2 feet from the wall and Drew was shaking it back and forth…and Bran was sitting on top of it! I think they could make a hazzard out of anything.
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24
January
2007
Tonight we went to IKEA to look for toddler beds. They didn’t have the ones we wanted and it might be a month or more before they get them. Boo. But, we ran the boys all over the store in hopes of tiring them out. That plus the boys not sleeping much the past 2 days (yesterday there was no nap with Drew constantly climbing out of his crib and today we were picking friends up at the airport during their usual naptime, not that they would have napped with their new bed arrangement anyway) I was hoping that we might have a better sleeping night than last night. And we did! Yay! The boys played around in their room for about 45 minutes with only a few cries here and there (probably toy stealing!) and then they fell asleep.
They don’t seem to have figured out that they are supposed to sleep on their mattresses, even though they’ve been using them for the past 20 months. They are using the mattresses as pillows while the rest of their body is on the floor next to it. This evening I went up to help Bran when he woke up crying, he settled quickly, another Yay!. But I noticed the cutest thing, the boys have a shelf with cloth boxes that we have toys and books in, Drew was covered with 2 of them, one on his back and one on his legs! Only Brandon could have done it. I guess he was tucking him in. I was so happy with how well they went down. Hopefully it will only get better as they get more used to this new arrangement. Our next challenge is to find 2 new beds. Let’s see how tomorrow goes…
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23
January
2007
Well, the boys have finally gone cribless. Drew started climbing out of his bed constantly. He got to the point where he was so good at gettting up and over that he became reckless and had a bad fall. We decided that the beds had to go. We don’t have toddler beds so they had their first night sleeping on their mattresses on the floor. Two and a half hours and lots of crying later (us and them) the boys finally fell asleep. Drew fell asleep right inside the door (he had been standing there crying) so we could barely open it to put him on his mattress when we went to bed. That woke him up and he was up for another 2 hours. We have company coming to visit this week and were expecting to have many nights of game playing, with the boys doing their normal 7:00pm bedtime. Not sure how that’s going to work out…
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15
January
2007
The boys had a check-up today. They’re doing just great. I often worry about their language development, but even though they’re behind others, they’re not behind, they’re using most of their energy for physical activity at the moment. Like climbing out of cribs! They understand language really well, and they babble a lot, they just don’t like to say many “words.”
Here’s their stats:
Andrew
Weight: 23lb, 8oz
Height: 32 1/4in
Brandon
Weight: 24lb, 15oz
Height: 32 3/4in
Apparently someone in our family is to blame for Bran’s gigantic feet! He’s size 6.5. Drew’s a 5. I wasn’t surprised to be handing things down between the boys, but I wasn’t quite expecting it to be their shoes, or quite this early.
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15
January
2007
Drew has a black eye. The boys were pulling photo albums off of the bookshelf (which they know they’re not allowed to do) and he got cracked under the eye.
Fake Believe:
The other day the boys and I were pretending to eat ice cream cones. A week later we were playing with their pots and pans and feeding each other, and they remembered the ice cream cones and were trying to eat ice cream from my pretend cone. “Fake Believe” is the title of a song from a new CD/DVD the boys got for Christmas. It’s They Might Be Giants, Here Come the ABC’s. It’s an awesome CD/DVD. Mike and I have been going around the house singing the songs, and they’re not annoying. The boys enjoy hearing the music and watching the DVD, and they’re learning lots about their letters.
Funny things:
1. At night when we tuck the boys in we play “Tuck Tuck Goose.” We tuck the boys in saying tuck, tuck, tuck, then tap them on the head for Goose! So now Brandon goes around the house making the sounds for tuck, tuck, Goose! and then throws something. He’ll do it over and over again.
2. Sometimes the boys get to watch a video on my computer, so when I pull out the computer to play music for them, they pull up their chairs. So you might find them sitting in their chairs facing the bookshelf, looking up at the computer which is just playing music!
3. I told you before that Drewie likes to dip things. He really likes to dip chicken nuggets in to sweet and sour sauce, but today he sunk to a new low…drinking the sweet and sour sauce.
4. Sometimes when Drew is playing with his blocks, he’ll stop and look at the last block he put on, say “no”, take it off and put a new one in it’s place!
Shayna Drew & Bran 3 Comments »
15
January
2007
We’ve had an exciting week here at our house.
Last Saturday I was talking on the phone to my friend Chloe, telling her that we were thinking the boys may end up needing to be moved to toddler beds around their 2nd birthday. They’re just such climbers that we didn’t think they’d make it much longer. Well… while talking to her on the phone we heard the blinds rustle and then Drew laughing as he slammed the bedroom door shut! “Oh no,” we thought, “it’s already happened!” We went up the stairs to check things out only to find Drew’s bed on the floor. Later we would discover that the boys had locked arms and pulled the bed over! We moved the beds to be end-to-end instead of side-to-side thinking that would end the crib tippings.
After naps on Tuesday I went in to find both mattresses on the floor, clothes strewn everywhere, Bran sitting in the middle of it all… but no bed on the floor. I put him back in to show me what he’d done, but with me standing there able to get him out, he couldn’t quite manage it, nor did I want him to try very hard. (Later that day, on a totally unrelated note, Drew figured out how to open the back door in the middle of a blizzard. He’s been doing that pretty regularly now too, so we’ve been having to keep it locked. Ahhhh! Note: picture me pulling my hair out!
When Mike got home that night we took the boys upstairs to see if Bran would show us what he did and he hopped right out. The height from the mattress to the top of the bars is 22 inches and he’s just over 32 inches. He puts his foot up and over the bar and then pulls himself up until his whole body is straddling the bar then the other leg is over and he jumps down. It’s actually pretty graceful, but sometimes he bangs his chin coming down. So that night we had to figure out what to do. We hadn’t done a ton to child-proof their room since they are never in there unattended. So, we spent the evening adding locks to the two doors that lead to the eaves, covering all the outlets, removing a curtain…
We couldn’t decide what to do about beds, so we researched a bunch of sites to see what other parents have done when their 19 month olds climb out of their cribs. (Drew can’t quite do it, he’s about 3/4 of the way there and gets REALLY frustrated when Bran gets out and he can’t.) We didn’t want to use the pack-n-plays because the sides are the same height, so physically he can do it and we actually want to avoid them learning how to get out of those because we use them when we travel. So we opted to just put the crib bars down: they can get over really easy then without getting hurt. We keep the bar up while they are falling asleep because it’s too hard for them to go to sleep when they can get out so easily. Since we’ve found the time they’re most likely to climb out is after they wake up, we just put the bar down after they’ve gone to sleep, close the door, which they can open about 25% of the time and have a gate in front of the door. So far, it’s been pretty effective. Not sure how long it will last. Eventually we’ll have to move to toddler beds, but right now they fall asleep better when it’s not so easy to get out. We’re open to ideas if anyone has any.
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19
November
2006
The boys are doing all kinds of fun and crazy things, but by the end of the day I’m so tired I usually forget what they were! I’m trying to keep notes so I can start updating more regularly again.
Breakfast has been interesting lately:
The boys like to have cheerios in milk. They actually have been able to eat a bit with their spoon, but usually use their hands. After eating about 1/2 of it, they drink the rest of the milk, taking in a few cheerios with it! They think it’s so fun to do this. Sometimes Drew blows bubbles in his milk.
Bran really likes to dunk his toast in the milk. Usually after a few dunks he decides to just submerge his entire piece. When he gets it to his mouth it’s dripping milk. And he’s so happy!
Andrew
Drew has learned to to blow on his food, he’s been doing this often at dinnertime. This morning he blew on his cereal. He scooped up a spoonful, leaned over it and blew!
At swimming lessons yesterday they got to try on life vests. Bran hated it, but Drew did really well, he floated for about 5 + minutes and was just relaxed and peaceful. It helped that he was holding a ball the whole time!
Today at lunch Drew was putting his cheese on Bran’s plate while Bran was proceeding to put it back on Drew’s plate.
Drew can blow his nose. You put a tissue up and ask him to blow and he does! He’s been doing that for a long time. It’s been very helpful because ever since he was a baby he’s gotten stuffy noses and he hates to have anyone wipe it or pick at it (would you?). So now I just put a tissue to his nose and tell him to blow.
Brandon
Yesterday Bran’s cup fell on the floor and when I asked him if he wanted me to get it, he signed “please”
Bran loves dried apples. This morning he pulled the baggie of them out of his diaper bag and brought them to me. I asked if he wanted some apples and he signed “please”. After eating one, he brought the bag back and was trying to pull apples out of the bag. I asked if he wanted more and he looked really intently at his hands and signed “more”. This is a big step because Drew tends to communicate more verbally and with signs than Bran does, so it’s good to see Bran learning how to tell us what he wants.
Bran has been doing a good job of following multiple commands. Thursday morning I asked Bran to “go get your blue shoes and bring them here” and he brought the right ones! While not necessarily multiple commands, he’s also been good at following directions like put the blocks back on the box. He also likes to help me put things away. Of course he’ll often take them right back out after they’ve been put away!
Other Fun Things
The boys are starting to learn how to blow kisses.
They have a sign for finished/all-done. They use this sign for all kinds of things now. If they see something they aren’t allowed to touch (like the dog’s bowl) they go up to it and sign finished.
Words that WE know they are saying: dog, done, yes, mama, dada, bow wow, more (sounds more like Na, but Drew is beginning to use his “m”, so sometimes it sounds like ma. They use this whenever they want something so we hear na or ma all day long!), no (with a headshake), blocks (Drew just started this one), touchdown (this goes along with the touchdown sign, they haven’t gotten to use this one much lately though), stop (they tell Noah to stop when he’s barking).
Shayna Drew & Bran 1 Comment »
Andrew is getting really good at communicating and sometimes he even helps Bran. Today I was trying to get Bran to tell me what he wanted. I knew that he wanted more of his cheerios, but wanted him to say more or cheerios or something other than nah, nah. Drew looked at Bran and made the sign for more to him. Bran made a sound of acknowledgement and signed more. Later that day I was asking the boys to touch their heads, Drew touched his and when I asked Bran to do it he wouldn’t, so Drew touched his head for him!
