Isaac the Artist and Levi the Snuggler

March 3-March 9, 2008

James took Isaac and Levi to “candy mountain” on Tuesday night since the enrichment activity was over at our house. It’s a cool indoor playground at Memorial City mall and Isaac always fantasizes about going there to play so he was pretty excited.
Levi can now say “agua” and “Donawds” (for McDonalds) and “taco” (for Tacobell). Yep you can tell that I probably have had a few to many fast food adventures with the boys lately.
The “if/then” statement fun continued with Isaac this week. His new favorite is to say the if clause and wait for you to fill in the “then” clause. For example, “If we don’t put on our shoes. . . or “if I don’t take a bath.. . “
For some reason Isaac is terrified of grills in people’s back yards as well as cooking in the kitchen. He’s never burned himself on a grill and as far as I know, the only time he’s ever burned himself is when we were at Matt & Lara’s house and he burned his fingers on a bread pan. Anyhow, last week we were in one of our neighbors back yards and when she started putting coals on the grill and some lighter fluid he started freaking out and wanted to go home. Now he always wants to hear the story about the grill. That boy needs therapyJ
Levi has had a communication explosion this week. He’s started using the sign language signs for “more” “no” “where” “shoes” “owie” and “eat.” Its really cute. He’s also started saying a lot more words. He’ll say “hot” “huevo” “agua” “up” “down”
This week Isaac discovered that Levi understands commands and he started mastering the fine art of big brother trouble making. He’ll tell Levi to do things that he knows he would get in trouble for doing like bonking someone on the head with a baseball bat, kicking the door or throwing random objects in the washing machine. We’ll have to try to nip this one in the bud.
We usually have young women activities over at our house on Wednesday and Isaac absolutely adores having the young women come over. He likes getting to play with them and mooch the refreshments.
James was gone this weekend so I was a single parent for a couple of days and that’s definitely no fun—especially on a weekend. Church was kind of crazy. I had a presidency meeting before church, but Alisa and Lonnie helped me watch them which helped out a ton. Then the boys made it through the passing of the sacrament, but Levi started throwing stuff and squealing so I had to take them both out. Luckily it was nice outside and I just let them wander around the church building and commune with nature. We stopped by the Stenseth’s house (our Norwegian neighbors) this afternoon and they were celebrating Sondre’s 3rd birthday. Isaac was very pumped about arriving in time for birthday cake and just sat in front of the slice of cake they gave him with a big Cheshire cat grin. I asked if he was ready to go home and he said, “no mom, it’s Sondre’s birthday, we need to celebrate it.” Levi just ran around like a wild child and fit right into the chaos of the Stenseth’s five boys and their visiting cousins. I really like that family. When I see the inside of their house I always feel better because it looks just like ours—very basic furniture and toys all over the place.