Friday, May 25, 2007

May 2007




April 30- May 6, 2007
Levi is jabbering a lot lately. Rara and Mama are his favorites. He’s also crawling like a maniac and we really have to keep our eye on him.
Isaac has been suffering from post vacation let down. He wants to go back to the airport and fly to find his family and go on the big boat. “You wanna go find your family on the big boat.”
Uncle Timo and Aunt Julia came to live with us on Sunday because Timo is doing an internship in Houston for the summer. Isaac and Timo have developed new games like high in the sky with the laundry basket and elevator that Isaac just can’t get enough of.


May 7-May 13, 2007
When I was putting Isaac to bed on Tuesday we were talking in Spanish and he said, “Quiere la fiesta” and at first I was confused why he had started talking about parties, but then I realized he was trying to say “siesta” because I had taught him how to say “tomar la siesta” a couple of days earlier.
Isaac still talks in 3rd person about himself in both languages. He’ll say things like “he needs his mother” and “he’s not cooperating” or “quiere agua” or “quiere la comida”
Levi has had some rough nights lately. He seems to get air bubbles in his tummy or indigestion or something that makes him have a tough time sleeping for long stretches.
Isaac has become the master of saying “I won’t do that anymore”—especially right after he does something he shouldn’t do like throw his shoes down the stairs.
On the way to his preschool on Thursday Isaac said without prompting—“vamos a ir a escuela” very cute.
Isaac has learned to use the word “instead” and uses it for situations like—I want the blue one instead (referring to the color of the whip cream can top when shopping at Wally world)
Levi is a lot more self entertained than Isaac was at his age. Now that he’s mobile though I can’t just leave him with a pile of interesting stuff, because he’ll crawl all over looking for more interesting stuff and he loves following me into the kitchen.
I let Levi try some cheerios this week and he’s hooked. I didn’t think he could handle them yet, but he mashes them up with his gums just fine. He can also eat the sweet potato star puffs quite handily. It’s good practice for his hand eye coordination.


May 14-May 21, 2007
On the way home from school Tuesday Isaac woke up Levi which annoyed me at first, but then he asked to hold baby Levi’s hand and said “we’re best friends mom” and that melted my heart.
When saying the prayer for his breakfast Friday morning, Isaac said, “Dear Heavenly Father, thank you for this day, thank you for he goes shopping for his popsicles. . .” Isaac like to add things to prayers that he would like to do.
Levi is just ridiculously cute. He makes the best squeals of delight and has a contagious giggle if you tickle him in the right spots. We’ll have to start calling him lightning Levi because he really gets around fast these days. He’s a turbo crawler and he pulls himself up on every possible piece of furniture, toy, and even tries the impossible ones. Once he pulls himself up he likes to let go and see how long he can stand alone. He can last a few seconds but then usually plops back down. He’s also in the stage right now where he likes to put everything in his mouth. I’ve caught him a few times with random things like the tag from Isaac’s shirt or a sticker and that’s not good! I need to be better at making sure all dangerous stuff is out of his reach.
I was eating some fruit salad tonight and Isaac said, “Mama va a comer ensalada de fruta fresca!”
Levi has his first tooth—one popped out on the bottom.
Uncle Timo’s birthday!! We celebrated by putting a big sign up on our gate and going to Red Robin for dinner. Isaac was so excited about Timo’s birthday that he couldn’t really focus at school.
Thursday was Isaac’s last day of school over at the Catholic church. They have a break until September. Isaac really likes his teachers, Miss MaryLou and Miss Olenka and he’s going to miss spending time with them on Tuesdays and Thursdays (and I’ll miss the break too!!!)


May 22-May 27, 2007
Isaac can express himself pretty well in Spanish now. This morning he said, “esta lloviendo mama, vamos al doctor para ir en los ascensores!” We had to take Levi to the doctor Monday morning to get his shots and Isaac loves the part where we get to ride in the elevators and at the end of the visit we usually go up and down the elevators a few extra times just for fun.
Levi now has 2 teeth on the bottom!! No wonder he’s been wanting to stick everything in his mouth lately.
Isaac has been doing the same thing that he does in Spanish that he does in English—using the 3rd person when he’s talking about himself like “quiere agua” en vez de “quiero agua” / “he wants water” instead of “I want water”
Isaac is always tackling Levi, especially when he gets to close to the TV when Isaac is watching it. Levi is going to be a tough kid if he can survive his older brother.
At church on Sunday we were reading a story in Spanish to Isaac to keep him quiet and when the sacrament water came by he said, “Mas agua mama” and I handed a water bottle to him. He looked at the water bottle and then turned around to the next row where the water tray was and said, “no mama, quiero ESTE agua” It was funny because there is a sister from Panama in our ward who was sitting the next bench over and Olga did a double take when she heard Isaac being so expressive in Spanish.
May 28-June3, 2007

Isaac now has a new sound effect for when he doesn’t want to cooperate. He’ll go “da ta da” and then say “he’s not cooperating” It’s pretty annoying.
Isaac loves going for a walk to meet James when he drives home in the “big red car.” He usually wants to leave as early as possible to do this so sometimes we end up going on a pretty long walk before we “find” papa.
Isaac woke up at 6:00 in the morning on Wednesday and when he came downstairs, he took my hand to go out into the living room and said, “He’s a good waker momma.” That cracked me up even though a was pretty tired. We tell him he’s a good “sleeper” when he takes a good nap or sleeps well at night, but he came up with the idea of being a good “waker” all by himself.
So we’ve had some issues lately with Isaac breaking decorations. He had an incident last week and Amerika’s house and on Wednesday with Trina. He was looking at a decorative ball in the garden and dropped it. Both times I had been talking while it happened so I’m not sure what exactly happened, but he seems to be either trying to get my attention or taking advantage of my distraction.

Its been tempting to make use of his irrational fear of vacuums for our own purposes. We’ve used it to reinvigorate time outs, which had been declining in effectiveness. If anything starts to get out of hand we just have to say something like, “do you want to hug the vacuum?” or “Time out in the closet with the vacuum,” and he snaps to attention like nothing else. We do feel a little guilty for using it this way…
Amerika introduced us to a place called, “Beyond Bounce,” which is a paradise for playing with infants and toddlers. There are several inflatable obstacle courses that adults and kids can use. We went on memorial day and had a blast climbing all over, getting having the same adventure as Isaac. The coolest part is a 10ft near-vertical wall with barely adequate footholds which Isaac has learned to scale with no problem. We’re hoping it develops his motor skills and confidence. If nothing else it’s a ton of fun.
My Mom, My Dad—Isaac likes using possessive pronouns with us.

Disney Cruise



April 23-29, 2007
Disney Cruise!! James’ parents organized a family reunion on a Disney Cruise that set sail out of Port Canaveral, Florida and went to Nassau and Castaway Cay. Hooray for Grandma and Grandpa Nuttall. They also funded the cruise for everyone as a Christmas gift and we can't thank them enough. When we finally got on the big boat, Isaac saw Aunt Julia and Uncle JoJo (Joseph) and he was beside himself with excitement. He really loves being around family.
When we explored the boat, Isaac discovered that he liked the view from the balconies, but when James wasn’t watching him, he managed to take off his shoes and huck his shoes off of the balcony, barely missing a very expensive chandelier.
Isaac loved the elevators and pushing the buttons to go up and down and all of the numbers.
We had fun swimming together and Isaac loved going in the hot tub and then making us get back into the cold water with him.
Levi nibbled on lots of new kinds of foods, but his favorite thing was mashing up banana bread with his cousin Mathew. Levi and Mathew look a lot alike.
Palos—One of the best parts of the cruise was getting all of the adults together (while we had the kids in childcare) and having dinner at an Italian restaurant on the boat called Palo. The food was amazing, but more than anything it was fun to just sit and talk to everyone without being interrupted by kids.
One of the highlights for Isaac was seeing fireworks on the boat. For the pirate party they did fireworks and Isaac thought that was really cool.
James and I went on a fun snorkeling trip on Tuesday morning. I got bitten by a coral shark, but I just lost my kneecap. Actually I just scraped my knee on some coral but it didn’t feel too spiffy.
Isaac, “How do you say “pick me up” in Spanish?”
Isaac is developing his own little sense of humor. He started saying “Lowe’s is orange” on the plane ride home to get a reaction from James (since Lowes is blue ofcourse) He was also doing it in Spanish and saying “Lowe’s es anaranjado”
The night we got home from the cruise Levi started pulling himself up by himself and standing.

Tuesday, May 22, 2007

April 2007: Happy Birthday Isaac!!



April 2-April 8, 2007
Isaac wakes up every morning convinced that he can eat icecream and chocolate cake for breakfast. He’ll say “Let’s eat icecream or vamos a comer helado” or I want cake or quiero pastel de chocolate. I just tell him that he’s being silly and we can’t eat cake and icecream for breakfast. He usually tries repeatedly, and when he realizes that once more, I’m not going to give in—he usually settles on rice crispies or papa cereal for breakfast. It’s pretty amusing.
Levi had pink-eye in his right eye on Sunday, but I just squirted a bunch of breast milk in his eye at each feeding and on Monday morning it was miraculously healed.
Levi is officially ticklish and he also thinks his brother is very amusing and he’ll let out full on giggles at things Isaac does.
Both of the boys had fun spending quality time with Grandma and Grandpa Nuttall this week (they left on Thursday morning). Grandpa also helped us with a ton of projects around the house. Grandma gave Isaac an animal croquet game for his birthday and he had a lot of fun playing with the balls, numbers, and mallets.
Isaac is putting together some good phrases in Spanish lately. He’ll say, “quieres jugar con los juguetes?” and “quieres ir al aeropuerto.” He also said to James, “no hagas eso” when he was about to turn on the shower when Isaac was in the bath.
On Tuesday Isaac had a complete meltdown over wanting to watch part of a baby Einstein dvd that wasn’t working because the dvd was scratched. He wanted to see the pentagon put in the elephant shape toy and when it kept skipping that part he lost it. So I decided that the TV would be “broken” for the rest of the week. It worked really well actually and its been nice to have the TV “break.”(hee hee)
We got Isaac a haircut on Saturday. Pretty ambitious. It still takes 3 people to do the process—James holds his body still, I hold his head still and the lady cuts his hair while Isaac screams his head off.
We went to Lonnie and Alisa Mercer's house for Easter dinner on Sunday and it was alot of fun and it felt like being with family. We did a mini Easter egg hunt for the kids and Isaac and Levi searched for eggs with Loretta's (Alisa's cousin) kids. Isaac really loves the idea of getting a special treat in the Easter egg, but I discovered that there are actually some sweet things he doesn't like (he make the ick face after biting into a blue peep).





April 9-15, 2007
Isaac is the master DJ—he loves to be in charge of the music. He can sit and change the songs on the CD and he’ll rock out with the rhythm.
It was Isaac's friend Michael's birthday on Tuesday and Isaac and Levi had a blast with all of the balloons that Claudia had.
We had a fun birthday party for Isaac on Friday. I can't believe that he's now 3!! Wow. He definitely got into the birthday party idea this year. He wanted a pizza party so I ordered Dominos. I did it after the Spanish playgroup to make things easier. I found an activity parachute at Costco that worked great for games and dancing and making a giant bubble to run under.
Isaac can say a lot of phrases in Spanish now. He’ll say, “Quieres ver una pelicula?” and the other day when he got on the phone to a Spanish speaking friend he said, “Quieres jugar con los juguetes?” He can also say “Que es esto?” y “Donde esta papa” “Ahorrita viene papa.” We go back and forth between Spanish and English a lot and its also funny when Isaac tries to say things like the Wiggles in Spanish. He’ll do a really cute accent and say “los wee-glays”.
Levi does not realize that he’s only five months old!!! He really wants to crawl and he’s pretty darn close. He can get across the room by lunging when he’s on all fours and then rolling. He can also sit really well and he loves to shake maracas. He loves to touch new textures and shapes and he’s very self entertained if you put a pile of interesting stuff in front of him to explore.
We played a lot at the Norwegian’s house this week—Isaac can now say “no” in Norwegian (“nie”) quite well because he always has a sharing crisis with either Daniel or Sondre. They have a ball toy that he loves to play with.





April 16-22, 2007
For Isaac’s birthday on Monday we went to a new park with his friends Ava, Michael, Ernesto, and Miranda. Amerika (Ava’s mom) showed us a really cool park called Bear Creek park when there are a ton of playgrounds and also animals to see like buffalo, emus, goats, deer, owls, parrots, and turtles. Isaac liked the owls the best. There’s also a little stream with ducks and Isaac had a wonderful time throwing pebbles in the water.
Isaac has the habit of talking about himself in the third person and it cracks me up. He’ll say, “He wants to play with the ball toy” or “He wants to watch a movie.” If I correct him, he’ll usually repeat it with “I” but the habit is hard to break.
Levi jabbers a lot now-bababa, mamama and he lets out good giggles when he’s watching Isaac. He is also the master of escaping the diaper change lately. When you lay him down to change him he does a professional scissor kick and flips over and tries to wiggle away.
I told Isaac Thursday afternoon that we were going to the airport in the morning. He promptly ran into his room shut the door and laid down. I opened the door and asking him what he was doing. He said, “Can I wake up mom? Can I wake up and go to the airport?” He was VERY excited about the prospect of going to the airport.
Friday was James’ birthday so I made him breakfast in bed and gave him a big framed collage of family fotos that I put together.
On Friday Levi started officially crawling when we were staying at Manuel and Mariela’s house. His inspiration was a balloon. He was determined to move his little body over to a shiny balloon and play with it, so he managed to coordinate his body motion into a crawl.
* Isaac fell out of the big boy swing and scraped up his face pretty bad at the park, but hopefully he’ll heal quickly.

*James bought a used red VW rabbit from a friend at his office so we are now back to having 2 cars and its really nice. I had been driving James to work everyday and picking him up, which was fun but it kind of messed with the kids sleeping schedules when they would fall asleep on the way there or back. We named the new car “Gladys the Big RED Car” and Isaac loves “driving the big red car with papa.” We’ll walk down the road to meet him when he comes home and Isaac loves running over to him, jumping in the car and pretending to drive with James.


ISAAC's 3rd BIRTHDAY PARTY!!