Tom has found a new favorite food. He calls it Crap. The rest of us know it as Crab. I will be walking in the grocery store and he spots it and starts yelling "Crap! Crap!" It is hard to refuse when you know he likes it so much. Too bad he wasn't so excited about cheaper food.
We participated in the Pinewood Derby again this year. Tom was super excited from the minute I said the word car. I asked him what kind of car he would like and he said Lightening McQueen of course. So I made two cars. One for Jake that was pretty much a standard wedge car that Tom painted for him. Quick and easy. And then I took on the task of making Lightening McQueen. Making the shape was the hardest and did take a couple days. Then I painted it with spray paint and used paint pens for the accents. And it ended up winning a prize for best paint job. Tom won a toy car.
It was challenging to get him not to whine about the car though. He was better than last year, but he still wanted to just play with the car and the track himself. He had a hard time understanding that someone else races it for your. He was very excited at the end when he got to hold on to his car. And he proceeded to pretty much destroy them when he raced them all over the gravel parking lot. So I guess I will be making more next year.
Tommy is such a big boy now. He has a great time with all the kids at his school. He knows them all by name, and tells me what they do playing each day at school. Which is usually playing cars. He is has done a little bit of time in the preschool room but he needs to be fully potty trained before they will let him in there all the time.
We are working on potty training. But it very slow. Some days he will do great and stay dry the whole day. And then we will put him in underwear and he will have accidents. And he still has not done a poo poo in the potty. Hopefully he will get the hang of it soon.
Tom is also learning a lot at school. He has his numbers down pretty well up to 20. For sure to 10. He is also working on hold up fingers for the number he counts. He can hold up 3 for three years old but he does it with the wrong fingers because it is the hardest one to do.
He finally has gotten the hang of his colors. He says them correctly most of the time now. He also loves to sort things in piles of colors. He knows most of the shapes now too. He has puzzles and books that talk about the shapes and he likes doing those.
One of his biggest developments is that he is starting to recognize some of the numbers and letters when he sees them. It was shocking when it first happened. He first started doing numbers I think because it was easy to understand what each one was because he has already been counting up to 10 for a while and you say them one at a time. Usually he guesses the wrong number. But he know a couple pretty well like 5, 8 and 10. He was also memorized when told me he saw the number 9, but it was really an upside down 6. So I flipped it upside down a couple times for him to see and he thought that was pretty cool. The letters took him a little longer to understand. He has been singing his ABC's for a while and knew what letters looked like, but was a little confused by the actual names because they all kind of run together in the song. He really started understanding the concept of it when we started doing his ABC puzzle because it shows you the picture of each one and then I would tell him the name. And then he started recognizing some of them His favorite is to spell his name.
So when his birthday was coming up I asked him if he wanted to make cookies out of the shape of his name and he was really excited about that. I didn't have a lot of time to do them so I bought premade dough and frosting. But Tom did get to help me cut them out before he had to go to bed. And then I frosted them. We also did some cars because I also had a cookie cutter for that. And the cars turned out pretty good and they were a big hit.
Cars are still one of Tom's favorite things. He can spend hours just doing cars. He does fight with his brother quite a bit over who gets to touch the car, truck or train. So we have been letting him play in the upstairs living room by himself when he needs to. He has really gotten into the concept of driving as well. For quite a while now he has been into giving driving directions like "I want to go that way". So we started telling him how to do right, left, forward and backwards. And when we pick him up from daycare he tries to steer us in the direction of whatever store he wants to get a treat from. It is pretty cute. We also have to drive by the construction site near his school every day so he can see the trackers at work. He has also really gotten into the street lights and that red means stop and green means go. He will even have us do it at home for him and he will run the car when you say green light and stop the car when you say red light. He also like to do race track with Daddy a lot. Tom loves watching the Disney movie Cars and is very into race cars. He will yell "Start your engines!" and the make the cars go.
And he now has another favorite vehicle. He started watching Disney move Planes. Same concept but with planes. And now he loves planes. So we decided to take him to the flight museum. I was a little tough because most of the stuff that he wanted to touch he was not allowed to. But he thought it was pretty cool to see the large planes and was even fascinated by he tiny models in the cases. His favorite was the kids room where he could climb into little planes and touch them. And we got him a little Blue Angel from the gift shop that he absolutely loves.
On Tom's birthday it was pretty low key. We went to My Gym. And then did some puddle stomping which is one of Tom's favorite things to do outside. Let me just say, he is one dirty boy.
And then after Daddy got home from work we had pizza and chocolate cake. Tom was very excited about his upcoming birthday. Mostly because of the cake. I asked him what he wanted for his birthday dessert and he said CAKE and CHOCOLATE. It is very cute how his is over pronouncing the L in chocolate right now. He ate ever little bit of his piece of cake.
Then Tom got to play with his toys. Daddy got Tom a bath time boat. And mommy got him a Lego train like the one he plays with at school. And he loved them. He also loved the trucks Papa and Nana sent. I boy can never have to many vehicles :)
Then on Sunday instead of a birthday party we decided to take Tom downtown for a day of fun with the family. He got to ride up the rocketship (Spaceneedle). He liked it even more than I thought he would. He walk around it a number of times. And he liked looking at all the ferry boats, sailboats, building, cars and anything else you could see. And he was pretty excited when a helicopter flew by not that far away.
Then we headed over to the Science Museum. Tom had been once before but was a little young to fully appreciate it. He had a lot of fun this time. He spent a lot of time playing in the indoor water area. And Jake crawled around the play area and checked out all the toys. Tom wanted to see the dinosaurs but was a little freaked out when he saw them moving. We were able to calm him down by telling him they were puppets with batteries and he stopped freaking out and wanted to go back and look at them again. Then we went to look at the bugs. The first spider he saw really freaked him out and he started to back away. It took us a while to convince him that they couldn't get out of the tanks and then he had a fun time looking at them. He wasn't that interested in the butterflies, but Jake sure loved looking at them. Tom had a great day.
Jacob had his 9 month check-up. No shots, but they did but they did have to poke him 3 times to find a vein to take blood. Turns out he is a little anemic. Probably from the 7 day teething battle would be my guess. He also dropped at least 3 pounds during that week so his weight is a little lower than it was. We measured him a couple days before his appointment and he was 23-24 pounds which would have been heavier than Tom. I am sure he will bounce back.
This month was a challenging one. When I thought Jacob might have an easier time with the teething than Tom I was totally wrong. Jake already has 8 teeth. At nine months Tom only had 2. For the last 7 days he has been miserable. He hit a fever of 105. And we have been controlling it with medication to keep it down but when it wears off it shoots right back up. The doctor can't identify any reason that it is happening just like when this happened to Tom. So I would assume it is because of teething. Poor little guy spent most of the week curled up in my lap. He would have a couple hours throughout the day where he would feel normal and want to play around and then the medicine would start wearing off again. He is feeling a little better today but I am not going to hold my breath that we are done with this. At least we almost have half the teeth in already.
Before this week Jake was a pretty busy boy. He decided there were to many exciting things out of his reach and he started pulling up. We are also doing kind of baby steps while holding his hands but he hasn't really gotten the feel for it yet. Jake also started fully crawling this month without his stomach hitting the floor.
This has caused some more growing pains with him and Tom. Now that Jake can reach most of the toys there is a lot of discussion over sharing. Tom has gotten very possessive over his toys and it carried over to school as well. So we told him he could pick some special toys and put them where Jake can't reach them and only Tom can play with them. That has helped a little. But it is still a constant discussion. I have seen a few shinning moments of Tom understanding that him and his brother can play together though. Something to look forward to for the future. I know Jake really wants to spend every minute with his brother. But when Tom is a school Jake loves to have full access to all the toys.
Jake has also been trying out more foods and he is eating more finger foods. He has even tried his mesh fruit pop thing. He is still a little unsure of it. He loves his little cereals and whines about it until I give him more. We are working on signing "more" so he can let us know if he wants more but he still is looking at us wondering what we are doing. He did figure out how to say DaDa this month though. And he has also been imitating us. He clicks his mouth, makes fishy faces and tries to stick his tongue out.
Tom has been having a great time going to My Gym. It is a great place to go when the weather is bad. He gets to get some energy out, try new things, have fun and work on following direction. We are going to take a break for the summer because we are just too busy, but he has had so much fun the last couple months.
