September 2007

Sept. 3-Sept.9, 2007Isaac asked “how do you say whine in Spanish?” today. The best translation I could come up with is chillar and now Isaac can say “no chilles”Levi is now an official dance machine. When he hears music he’ll start to bounce up and down and try to jump. It’s very entertaining to watch. Isaac and James went shopping for more big boy underwear today and Isaac decided he wanted “breakfast underwear”—a package of fruit of the loom boxer briefs with a picture of a fruit bowl on the front. Kind of quirky, but he wore his breakfast underwear all day and didn’t have any accidents.On Monday we got in our last good swimming day of the summer. The boys both had a blast. Isaac really loves going under the water with James and watching James make a big Splash when he goes off of the diving board. Levi doesn’t mind going under the water, but he prefers toddling around the side of the pool picking up leaves and sticks and wandering off into the grass if he can get away with it. Isaac is becoming more expressive in Spanish when he plays with his toys. He uses English more, but I love it when he plays along with me in Spanish. He’ll say “donde estas Paco?” and then “Aqui estoy!” I told him “el pajarito esta durmiendo” and then he grabbed the bird and said, “mira mama, se desperto” and then he grabbed a horse and said “el caballo esta volando.” Another day he called me over to tell me “el cerdo esta atorado” (the pig is stuck)—sure enough the pig was stuck in his school bus toy and had to be rescued by momma. On Friday Levi started waving and saying “bye bye” when some of our friends were leaving. Extreme cuteness.Isaac is still intensely into looking at family photos. He always wants “read the story about our family.” Last Saturday Isaac went with James to take our friends Jake and Alyssa to the airport. They were heading to Ireland and that sounded like a pretty cool place to Isaac and he’s convinced that he’s meant to go to Ireland now. He asks to go to Ireland at least twice daily. Isaac had his first full day of preschool on Thursday (he’ll just be going to a Tuesday/Thursday class) and I bravely sent him in his big boy underwear. He refused to use the bathrooms at school, but miraculously he didn’t have an accident. He held it the whole day and went right when he got home. We really have to work on this. I don’t know how to get him comfortable with using bathrooms away from home.When I asked Isaac how he liked school all he would tell me is “That’s fun to go to the big boy class and do ‘bing’ on the table” I’m not quite sure what ‘bing’ is, but I can imagine that it was pretty annoying for his teachers.

Sept. 10-Sept.16, 2007
We had to put the cabash on Levi swiping food from the blue table and running around the house dropping crumbs everywhere. I’m just trying to be quicker about clearing the food more quickly and not letting him get a chance to scavenge Isaac’s left overs.
Isaac is doing really well with “potty power” but he’s still not cooperating with using bathrooms outside the home. He’s also not so hot about remembering to do number 2 in the potty.
When Isaac is annoyed with Levi he’ll say, “do you want baby Levi to bonk his head” He also does it with other people’s names. For some reason he loves the word bonk. I’m looking forward to the bonking phase being over.
Levi’s new favorite foods are fish sticks and chicken nuggets. He tries to spear them with a fork and its really cute. He doesn’t have the patience for staying in his high chair too long though and today when he wanted to get my attention that he wanted out, he started waving “bye bye.” His “bye-bye”s are simply adorable.
On Wednesday night Levi kind of learned the word “light.” I made the sign language sign for it and kept repeating it and he finally starting saying “ay!” “ay!” and pointing the light.
Isaac’s new favorite book is “The red balloon” about the little boy in Paris with a magic red balloon. The only tricky thing is that Isaac doesn’t understand why he can’t get a bunch of balloons like the boy in the story and fly around the world.

August 20-26, 2007
I was reading a story with Isaac and I asked him to look at a group of purple objects and find the thing you could sit on. I pointed to some grapes and asked of those were for sitting and he said, “no, those are for eating, “ then I pointed to a purple flower and he said, “no that’s for giving for momma” then I pointed to a chair and he said “yeah mom!” I thought that his flower commentary was really cute. He likes giving flowers to his momma.
Levi toddles all over the place and is very vocal. He’s always making new sounds and has some very dynamic jabber going on. He says ball really well and he’s starting to make the sign language sign for milk.
We went to Chucky Cheese for playgroup this week and Isaac was overjoyed with the opportunity to set a couple more balloons free.
Isaac is obsessed with the word “bonk” this week. “He wants to bonk his head!”
Levi is still Mr. kitchen scavenger. He absolutely loves finding pieces of food on the little blue table where Isaac eats.




August 27-Sept.2, 2007 Isaac has been more interested in learning new words in Spanish this week. We were reading a story and he asked how to say cherries and peaches. He picks up on new words really quickly. He also likes translating things that he says in English. He started saying, “In December we’re going to the airport and wer’re going to the airport and then another house and we’re going to grab a balloon and let it go” Then he said, “En diciembre vamos al aeropuerto y vamos a otra casa y vamos a agarrar un globo y soltarlo. “Isaac quieres. . . .” tirar cosasIsaac do you wanna. . . .go to Ireland—We drove our friends Jake and Alyssa to the airport so they could go to Ireland and now Isaac is intrigued with the idea of going to Ireland. We told him that in two weeks we’ll be picking Jake and Alyssa up from the airport, but he thinks that in two weeks we’re going to Ireland. I wish.Today James and I noticed that Levi is starting to fold his arms when we bless the food. It is pretty darn cute.We tried taking Isaac on Saturday to see James get his hair cut and he still freaked out even though it wasn’t his hair being cut. He kept running around with his hands over his head to protect his hair and saying “ay ay ay” Oh well so much for our brilliant idea of getting him more comfortable with the idea.Isaac made leaps and bounds with potty training this week. On Friday we said “no more diapers for me” and we’ve been diaper free ever since—except for night time. He’s had a few accidents but over all is doing great. The only dilemma is that he only wants to use the toilet at home. He wouldn’t use the one at McDonald’s or the bookstore or church yesterday. Two times he held it till we got home, but at church he ended up wetting his pants. Hopefully we can work through this glitch in the process.Isaac was looking at family pics on the computer and said, “Can I jump in the computer and see Aunt Julia and Uncle JoJo?” He’s starting to use his imagination more and more.

Familiy Pic gone astray

Chucky Cheese with Timo and Julia

August 13-August 19, 2007
Funny sentences is Spanish that Isaac has said this week while reading stories,”Quiere ir abajo del agua en un submarino y tocar el langosta” “Quiere tocar las langostas? Te van a pelliscar “el pulpo quiere comer pastel pero no comes la vela—es fuchi!”
Isaac’s favorite books of the week “Dora and the submarine” and “Ernie’s big mess” He loves the submarine book—especially the pictures of the big red lobsters. He can’t pronounce lobster very well and says “wobster” Pretty funny.
Levi got a big owie on his lip when he fell down on the sidewalk outside church on Sunday and it was taking forever to heal because the wound kept reopening. Finally we put some liquid bandaid on it and that definitely did the trick. It looks a million times better now.
Isaac likes to say “dame cariño” and “time for family snuggles.” It’s become a tradition now that we do family snuggles on the “thinking chair” (couch) and then do family prayer.
At the grocery store Isaac asked if we could go look at the “not today cakes” I thought that that was hilarious because he came up with that since James tells him “not today” when he asks for sweet stuff at the store.
Overhead from Isaac this week, “when you woke up you can do family snuggles” and after bonking his head on something “that smarts! He look I’m a Larry-go-round”
I took care of my friend Heather’s little 2 year old named Leandro for most of the week so I got a taste of what its like to have 3 boys. Luckily Leandro is pretty mellow. He loves eating lots of chicken nuggets and running around with a superman cape. He actually plays really well with Levi. They had a blast playing peek a boo in the little blue IKEA tunnel that we have.
Tim and Julia treated our family to a night at Chucky Cheese for their farewell party this week. It was very cool of them and the boys went crazy running around the mouse palace. Isaac made some mischief by carrying skee balls over to another game and clogging up the other system. Levi liked sitting on the air hockey table. Afterwards Isaac’s favorite part was setting his chucky cheese balloons free—right outside the door, he couldn’t wait for the rush of adrenaline he gets when he sees balloons float up into the sky.



August 20-26, 2007I was reading a story with Isaac and I asked him to look at a group of purple objects and find the thing you could sit on. I pointed to some grapes and asked of those were for sitting and he said, “no, those are for eating, “ then I pointed to a purple flower and he said, “no that’s for giving for momma” then I pointed to a chair and he said “yeah mom!” I thought that his flower commentary was really cute. He likes giving flowers to his momma.Levi toddles all over the place and is very vocal. He’s always making new sounds and has some very dynamic jabber going on. He says ball really well and he’s starting to make the sign language sign for milk.We went to Chucky Cheese for playgroup this week and Isaac was overjoyed with the opportunity to set a couple more balloons free. Isaac is obsessed with the word “bonk” this week. “He wants to bonk his head!”Levi is still Mr. kitchen scavenger. He absolutely loves finding pieces of food on the little blue table where Isaac eats.

August 2007

August 1-August 7, 2007
On Sunday Levi said his first word (besides mama) and it was. . .you guessed it, “ball.” Yep. Just the same as his brother. James was playing with him and he said something that sounded pretty close to ball.
Levi is definitely into toddler mode now. He wants to walk all over the place and he does. Goodbye crawling. He can stand up by himself in the middle of the room
Isaac actually went pee pee in the toilet while standing up after bath time today and then said, “Mom now I Have to go shopping for the Swiper book” “Mama quiero el libro de swiper.”
“Levi no swiping” –this is Isaac’s new way of telling Levi not to grab his toys
My friend Carmen came and watched Isaac and Levi this week and I told to speak only in Spanish to him make him practice. She slipped and asked him “Queires apple juice?” and he said “No, Carmen--Quiero jugo de manzana” I thought that that was pretty funny.
We did a lot more swimming this week. Isaac is an underwater animal—he likes holding the green floatie and kicking now too. Levi’s is happy to splash around but he prefers to escape from the pool and toddle around exploring things.




















August 8—August 12, 2007This week at HEB one of the worker’s named Omar gave Isaac a red balloon and Isaac was on cloud nine. He kept wanting to go back to the store and get more balloons from “Amor”—he can’t pronounce “Omar” correctly and calls him “Amor” hee hee Isaac is definitely in the “I can do it myself” stage. He wants to try to put on his own clothes and car seat buckle. He’ll say “Isaac can do it herself” Swimming at Brenda’s pool—Isaac had an awesome time in their baby pool.Isaac comes up with cute sentences en Spanish lately. I asked him “donde esta el libro” and he said “esta abajo de las escaleras”Our neighbor named Hanako has a sister named Suzako who was visiting with her daughter Samantha who is Isaac’s age and we had a lot of fun hanging out with them this week. Isaac called Suzako “Snoozako” which was pretty cute.I took the boys to Andrea’s birthday party on Saturday and almost got a ticket for following a car the wrong way through a detour. Luckily the police had bigger fish to fry. It was pretty scary though. We finally made it to the birthday party and Isaac was in heaven with all of the balloons. We brought 4 of them home and the first thing he wanted to do was go home and set them all free. Starting on August 9th Levi is an official walker. He rarely crawls and just stands up and starts toddling around. Very cute

Swinging Boys

Levi plays croquet