Sunday, March 2, 2008
Fun at the Children's Museum
Feb. 25-March 2, 2008
On Monday Isaac came up with a new game called “galleria” where we pretend to ride on the elevator in my room (using the folding bathroom divider doors as our elevator doors) and then we run over to our bed and pretend to eat at Mc Donalds and use different colored balloons to represent different flavors of ice cream.
Levi can make the sign language sign for “where”
This week Isaac and I have started playing school while Levi takes a nap and Isaac really gets into it. He’s wanted to focus on shapes and he loves seeing me draw the shapes and he’s really good at naming all of them in English and Spanish.
Isaac always wants to invite all of the neighbors over to dance to the elephant/tiger song by Hap Palmer. On Tuesday we had most of the Helguera kids over and Isaac insisted on repeating the song at least 5 times in a row. The bonus is that the song wears both Isaac and Levi out.
Levi has another bottom tooth coming in and his favorite teething food is now croutons.
Isaac is learning to say “quien es” when he wants to know who someone is instead of “que es eso”
During family prayer, I paused after I said, we thank thee for. . .to let Isaac fill in, but Levi beat him to it on Tuesday and filled in the blank with “bubbles” and then “papa”—pretty cute eh.
On Saturday Isaac was talking with Clara (our neighbor) and she said, “Isaac, your afraid of dogs” and Isaac said “no I’m not” and she said, “but you’re afraid of dogs you don’t know” and Isaac said, “but baby kittens make me happy.” He said it in such a cute way that it made me crack up.
One night Isaac refused to pick up two of his legos and I said, “you will pick up your legos,” but he still refused so he went to time out and then had a change of heart and picked up his legos. What sunk in more than the cleaning lesson though was the future tense—he caught onto that and has been using “will” with every verb he can think of all week. His favorite statement is “I will eat a pbj”
Levi will do the sign language for “where” and “shoes” when he wants to go outside.
Levi can now say “star” and “amen” and “huevo” very clearly.
For Spanish storytime we went to Angela’s house on Friday and Isaac and Levi had a blast doing the “caminar caminar y parar” song.
Isaac is really into “if/then” statements. When we pulled up in front of Angela’s house he said, “We have to speak in Spanish mom because if we don’t speak in Spanish, then Angela will be sad.”
We made two homemade piggy banks out of old containers for the boys this week and they absolutely love them and also make absolutely huge messes with all of the coins, but it keeps them busy.
Isaac is very excited about role playing. He is constantly pretending to be characters from books or movies and people we know. On Sunday he was pretending to be Lorenzo (his little amigo from San Diego) and calling James “Richard” and me “Diana”
Levi’s hair is adorable right now—he’s got very blonde hair and its forming very cute little curls in the back. I don’t think I’ll be able to bring myself to cut it for a while.
On Thursday we went to the Houston children’s museum for the first time because my neighbor had given me a free pass that was going to expire at the end of February. We invited my friend Erika and her little boy Dallin and all of the boys had a blast. They had a room called the “Tot Spot” that the boys couldn’t get enough of. Isaac’s favorite was the ball toy and Levi’s favorite was the “candle” that you could pretend to blow out.
On Friday James and I did a baby sitting swap with some friends from church and we went out to an Italian Gelato place called Picomolo--it was truly amazing stuff. The gelato was phenomenal. James got lemon and chocolate and I got very berry and chocolate. The ingredients were very fresh and it was definitely a worthwhile splurge and also just good to get out. We need to be better about having a regular date night.
On Sunday we took the boys to the Houston temple just to walk around the gardens outside and they really enjoyed it. The flowers there are gorgeous right now and Isaac was very excited to be visiting a “flowery garden.” Levi kept trying to take off his shoes and jump in the giant water fountain, but luckily we were able to keep distracting him.
Fire Fighter Poles and Armadillos
Feb. 18-Feb.24, 2008
We saw an armadillo by the red bridge on the bayou on Tuesday. It was really cool to see an animal like that up close and alive (usually you just see them as road kill). Isaac thought it was the coolest looking animal ever and wanted to spend the rest of the day hunting for armadillos and hephalumps.
Isaac always mixes up his pronouns, “can I stay with me?” / “can I pick me up” “can I go to the park with me?” but he’s really good about correcting himself if I model it the right way for him
Levi loves his veggies but he’s refusing bananas lately—I can’t get either of my boys to eat bananas and it drives me nuts. Isaac has also decided he wants to live on tostadas.
On Wednesday we went to another Hershey Trail Park that Isaac has dubbed “Levi’s park”—he would have named it Isaac’s park, but since that name has already been assigned to the little park by the Catholic church down the street, Levi got to have Hershey park named after him. The best part about this park for Isaac is that there is a really tall “fireman’s” pole that he can slide down. He’s very into sliding down fireman poles. Unfortunately, he can’t quite do it by himself yet, but he’s getting more and more confident.
James was out of town all week and it was really hard to have him gone after have about a month without him traveling. Levi kept looking for James all over the house and saying “papa?” “papa?” Very cute. Isaac, on the other hand, knew that James was far away and he would continually insist that I take him to the airport so that he could fly to Canada to find his papa.
James brought both of the boys little matchbox cars from Canada and they both absolutely loved them. You’d think that he’d brought them home a million bucks. They were both very excited about the cars and spent most of the day playing with them.
On Saturday we got Isaac’s haircut and it was a miracle—he actually didn’t cry or do any major freaking out. He let James hold him in his lap while Perla cut his hair and he was a fairly good cooperator. James and I couldn’t believe our eyes. It was truly a beautiful moment to behold. Afterwards we celebrated by going to Double Dave’s Pizza—an amazing pizza place that we just discovered. Isaac downed his weight in pizza and Levi focused on drinking ranch dressing, decorating the table with ranch dressing and creating mosaics with the croutons and the ranch dressing. James and I indulged in the chocolate chip pizza and then we conspired not to let Isaac know that it existed for fear that he wouldn’t eat normal pizza anymore if he knew that something called chocolate chip pizza existed.
So we’ve made it a whole month without t.v. in the house, but the boys haven’t been completely deprived because they can see t.v. when I go to the gym and they’re in the daycare area. The nice thing though, is that by not having it as an option at home, its forced the boys and I to be a lot more creative and we’ve had a lot more fun together and there’s a lot less whining and contention. We read a lot more books during the day and Isaac is very into role playing imagination games. He likes pretending that we’re characters from books or movies (Bob the Tomatoe, Larry the Cucumber, Dora, Diego, Boots, Smile Crocodile, Nanny Goat, Tito the Firefighter, Anthony, etc.)
One day this week we went out to get the mail from our new mail man that we met a couple of weeks ago. I was about to ask his name because I couldn’t remember it, but before I could say anything, Isaac said, “Thanks for the mail Robert!” The mailman was so surprised he about dropped our mail and said “He remembered my name!” with a true look of amazement on his face. I think that Isaac definitely made his day. I’m hoping that Isaac’s talent of remembering names will start to rub off on me.
James and the boys got sand for our green turtle sandbox (kindly left by the previous owners of the home) and it has been a big hit. Levi loves sitting and pouring the sand back and forth and Isaac loves making imaginary strawberry and rainbow cakes.
Happy Valentine's 2008
Feb.11-Feb.17, 2008This week we’ve had some rain and so its made for some days of glorious puddle jumping for Isaac and Levi. Ah yes.
Isaac again demonstrated that he is extremely excited about holidays and more aware than ever about the associated goodies. In his words the valentine’s story goes like this: “one day it was valentine’s eve and papa and Isaac went to Kroger’s and bouth momma some flowers and valentine treats. Then papa ate an owie strawberry and said o wow ow (it was actually a chocolate covered jalapeno that James tried against his better judgement).Then Isaac went to sleep and when he woke up it was valentine’s day. He went downstairs and read a book and then gave momma flowers and said,’surprise! Happy valentine’s day’ and momma said ‘I love my boys’.”
Isaac came up with the idea of it being valentine’s eve all by himself after he was reminiscing about Christmas eve.
On Valentine’s morning the boys had fun putting little treats in our neighbors mailboxes.
Levi can now say: moon, rock, “dis”, cow, bird, globo, agua, guau guau (dog), moma, papa, bath, bubble, and ofcourse popo (poop in Spanish).
James and I went on a date on Friday and we had Rori (the cool Venezuelan girl that we met a couple of weeks ago) babysit for us. Isaac liked Rori a lot and now asks “cuanto vamos a la casa de Rori?” For our date we got some yummy Indian food and then some marble slab icecream. We were too tired to see a movie so we ended up shopping for some basics at walmart (that place is way overcrowded on Friday nights) and heading home.
On Friday we had a really good turn out for Spanish story time and Luz’s house and Isaac was very excited to read “Tito el Bombero” with everyone.
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