The Boys

The boys continue to grow so quickly. Baby Nick will be one year old in only 12 days! I can hardly believe it. I really thought he would be walking by now...but it seems that he will wait like Joey did. He loves to walk around the room holding Joey's hands, even though Joey usually goes too fast, but he still shows no signs of even wanting to stand on his own.

Joey seems to be going through a growth spurt as well. He is continually complaining about leg and "jug" pain. ("Jug" is supposed to be jaw!) The only thing I can think of is that he is having growing pains. I remember that I had some of the most horrible growing pains when I was a tween, so it seems to reason that Joey would experience some real pain too. I feel bad about it, there is nothing I can do about it. He woke up the other night because his feet hurt. So I had him lay back down while I rubbed his feet for a minute.

Joey is favoring a couple key phrases lately, neither that make Nick or I very happy. When he gets really upset at us he will demand that we, "Go away; leave me alone." The other one is, "I'm so frustrated!" This one is both good and bad. It is good that he can identify and express how he is feeling in words rather than inappropriate action. I want him to feel like he can always tell me how he honestly feels. However, he says it ALL the time. Anytime I don't let him do what he wants, tell him to do something he doesn't want to do, or correct him for something he has done wrong (which is about ninety percent of his waking hours, as he is three years old) he lets me know that he is FRUSTRATED. I wish I could spell it like he says it, though...it's quite amusing. The other day he started saying, "This is gotta be adicalous!" I don't know where he heard the phrase, "This is ridiculous!", but he is so cute when he says it.
I know that I have told you how determined Baby Nick is to get up the stairs. He has, so far, gotten through every barrier we put in place (as we have no way of anchoring down a gate that latches.) As you can see in the picture, we try to put an obstacle in front of the gate that hinders his access, such as this play table. It's not too difficult to move, but it does slow him down. But after awhile, he just decided to scoot it out of his way. So Nick decided to lay his fairly heavy toolbox in front of the table so that Baby Nick can't scoot it out of the way. Well, this gave Baby Nick the added two inches he needed to easily climb up on top of the play table (something which has interested him for the last month or so.)
You can see how pleased he is with himself, that he finally managed to get on top of the table. Now he has the option to dive head first onto the stairs. That is really comforting!
Then, later that day, Joey left the remainder of his grilled cheese sandwich (we have gourmet dinners all the time) on the table within Baby Nick's reach. So he sat there on the floor munching down that grilled cheese sandwich like I have never seen him do before! It wasn't until the end that he was taking bites much too big for him and started gagging....so he really did pretty good.

Anyway...there is not much going on here. Nick will be leaving tomorrow afternoon to go to Fairbanks with his boss for a couple days. We decided, since his boss was going, and because they were only going to be up for a couple days, that the boys and I would stay home. It is a very long drive with two small kids to do twice in three days. So he will be gone until sometime on Friday.