Three Boys

Andrew is 4 years 11 months old

I think Andrew is really ready for kindergarten or something with structure for more of the day.  This has kind of been a tough month.  First, he had the flu and missed a couple days of preschool and then he had two weeks off from preschool and oh, how much he told me about how he missed his friends.  And the last week or two … he has been a HANDFUL.  I just can not believe how much trouble the boys have been getting into.  Andrew kind of gets into this trance where he won’t listen to me and is just very disobedient.  He throws things, says mean or unkind things to me, laughs maniacally and spits and is just totally crazy.  I have been trying to pre-empt it and stuff like that this week.  We’ll see if we can get some improvement.  Hopefully.

On the other hand, Andrew can be so sweet and good some of the time.  He really loved Easter time this year.  I could tell that he really looked forward to doing the activities and watching the bible videos each night.  And I can’t believe how much the kids loved the Passover dinner and our “Jesus foods” dinner and honeycomb.  Andrew told his teacher on Good Friday how “this is a very sad day because Jesus died”.  Although Andrew told us after last week, we didn’t need to have Family Home Evening because we have been having so many.  He doesn’t like church, but he seems to be really intune with spiritual things.  He has been telling me about how he has been feeling the Holy Ghost and how we need to remember to pray every morning and night.

Andrew hasn’t been eating much.  He goes into these tantrums at the drop of a hat – “I don’t like that food”, “I don’t like blue plates” and then refuses to eat.  Sometimes he eats no lunch at all or a snack.  Sigh …  Of course, if I let him eat fried rice 3x a day, he would probably eat tons.  He loves that stuff.  He also loves any Asian food.  We have 2 tickets to the Cardinals opening day and we were trying to figure out who was going.  I said I could take the other boy out to get Chinese food – and now, both boys want to get Chinese food and don’t want to go to the baseball game!

Andrew has decided he wants to do gymnastics as an activity.  He thinks it will be really good for him.  He doesn’t want to do dance because he already knows all the moves (ha ha ha).  We’ll have to try to find him a class.  I feel a little bad that he doesn’t have any activities yet, but I feel a little too lazy to do them with him.

Andrew and Seth have been playing a lot together this last month, usually happily.  But the cars a constant set of problems, so we split them up and labeled most of them.  I think this is helping, though Andrew still tries to help himself to most of them sometimes because he always has some good idea, that he is trying to convince Seth of.  They have also been wrestling constantly.  I do not quite understand the compulsion to wrestle.  Like, why do you need to wrestle in the library?  Or in the grocery cart?  Why????

Otherwise, a good month.  Andrew is almost 5 and I can barely believe it.

Fun Things We Did This Month

• Flu – okay, this was not too fun, but definitely noteworthy.  Andrew got Tamiflu and perhaps this is why he had to the shortest of all and recovered fastest.  He did throw up quite a bit, which no one else did, though, so maybe that evens it out.  Poor kid.
• Shaw Nature Reserve and Purina Farms.  Andrew enjoyed the dog show and thought seeing the animals was fun.  I wasn’t sure how he would like the dog show, since he is kind of scared of dogs and doesn’t like them to be near him.  He loved the nature at the Shaw Nature Reserve – he always loves to tell me about how much he loves nature and how he is a nature boy and knows so much about it.  He really loved the children’s play area there.  Of course, their favorite part was McDonalds afterwards.
• Egg Hunts – we did two.  I think I am bad at overdoing it, but I love holidays.  We did one in Maplewood and then one in Des Peres the next weekend.  The one in Des Peres, you had to take a trolley to, which the boys thought was pretty fun.  Andrew was upset that he got less eggs than Seth and was kind of throwing a fit about it, but he eventually got over it (and he had lots of eggs besides).
• Letterboxing – we did one with just me and the boys at Stacey Park, which is close and was a little tricky to find.  Andrew found it actually and of course, he told everyone we ran into about the “treasure” and all the adults just kind of give me a knowing wink.  It’s pretty cute.  We also did one in a park near the temple in Town and Country.  It had three boxes and was pretty tricky, but we found them all.  And the boys really enjoyed the park and especially seeing all the caterpillars on the hiking paths.
• Mo Willems Author Event – our first and the boys really enjoyed it.  Andrew was laughing out loud at the reading of the new Elephant and Piggie book.  They weren’t too interested to actually see Mo, but they loved the videos he showed.
• Easter
• Palm Sunday – Palm branches, dying eggs, and a nature walk
• Tuesday – talking about parables, eggs from Grandma
• Thursday – a little Passover – well, matzo, bitter herbs, grape juice and lentil soup to eat.  Lamb was just too expensive.  Andrew loved this – I think because we have spent so much time studying Moses and the Exodus.  The boys LOVED it.
• Friday – making Resurrection cookies and talking about the crucifixion.
• Saturday – making Resurrection rolls.  Easter Egg hunt.  Jerusalem dinner – food that Jesus ate – olives, goat cheese, cheddar cheese, pitas, hummus, figs, apricots, grapes – boys also loved it … while we watched Tin-Tin (okay, not so Eastery)
• Sunday – talking about resurrection, eating rolls and egg casserole and of course, the Easter Bunny and an easter basket from Martha, plus ham and brocolli and devilled eggs for Easter dinner.
• Monday – fish and honeycomb for dinner and talked about resurrection some more.

Logan is 5 months old!

Wow – what a month, for the whole family, but for Logan, too.  Logan also had the flu, too, poor guy, but only had a high-ish fever for a day or two.  And I don’t know about the aches/pains/chills, etc., but he did seem pretty miserable.  But worst of all, he also seems to have eczema.  I swear, he did not have it at all before (reference his beautiful portraits that we took in the middle of the flu epidemic).  But he came down with eczema around the same time as the flu and it is miserable.  He is itching all. the. time.  It is almost impossible to get him to take naps or put him down at night, because if he rouses just a bit, he starts itching, and then really wakes himself up.  He is now waking up like every hour or more at night until we go to bed.  Somehow, having us in the same room as him calms him and he only wakes up once to eat at night and then wakes up at 6ish.  And he has scratches on his face and all over his legs and his skin just seems rough and dry and yucky seemingly no matter how much lotion I put on.  Poor guy.

Logan sits up pretty well.  He falls backward if you leave him, but he sits up not too bad.  He also sits up in his high chair quite a bit.  He did roll over from front to back quite a bit one day, but now has 0 interest in doing it again.  He looks like he can almost roll from back to front, but has yet to do it.  He loves to stand on his legs.

He is starting to “play”.  He loves to grab anything and everything.  He likes to knock over towers, especially cup towers and to grab and hold whatever he knocked down.  He also seems to enjoy looking at books a bit and has already started to rip paper ones that got too close.  He likes to shake things to make noise, when he remembers that is what they do.  Mostly he likes to put things in his mouth.  Everything.

He looks very longingly at food when we eat and seems to get upset that he can’t eat.  He tries to grab our food and plates.  I tried out rice cereal today and he did not like it at all.  He started to kind of choke on it and then just grimaces.  I was so surprised.  I guess we will try again in a little while.  But he still looks so longingly at our food.

He has started to get upset with lots of loud noise in crowds.  Especially when he is tired/hungry.  We went to an egg hunt last week and he was fine for a bit, but then the crowd scared him and he was just wailing in fear until he fell asleep.  Same thing happened today at an author event sponsored by the library.

He wants to be held almost all the time.  Which is hard because he is so heavy (22 lbs at the doctor when he had the flu).  I hurt my back sometime on Friday and I have had a hard time lifting him, especially into/out of his crib.  He kind of lifts up his arms when you are picking him up – I think he is trying to “help”, but it actually makes it much harder to pick him up.

He LOVES his brothers, especially Andrew, and really loves when they play with him.  He likes to watch them playing, too.  He is unfortunately very interested when they are watching the TV.  He really gets excited when Katsu comes home and seems sad when he doesn’t see him for awhile.

He is a sweetheart and we love him.  Now if we can just heal our poor boy’s itching, we will all be a lot happier.

Fun Things This Month

- Flu … just kidding.  Not fun.  Also, they could not see Logan’s ear drum when we were there, so they poked and prodded and finally washed the wax off his ears.  They had to bring in a nurse to help because he was protesting so much.  He is a strong boy.

- Boys feeding his raisins.  Also not so fun.  Note to self – do not let boys alone with Logan ever.  Thankfully he didn’t choke and they came out the other end.  Sigh …

- Eating at Fitz and letterboxing.  Logan was super heavy to carry during letterboxing and was oblivious, of course.  He did however, really enjoy looking at the bottling process as we juggled him between ourselves so we could eat.  We also went letterboxing at Stacy Park which Logan completely slept through.

- Butterfly house again.  Logan was not interested in being in his sling and threw a huge fit.  He liked the butterflies though.

- Purina Farms and Shaw Nature Reserve.  Logan was still kind of sick and you can tell by looking at the pictures.  He was tired and fussy at Purina, but after taking a nap, he seemed kind of interested during the dog show and even watched a bit.  He seemed to enjoy the great outdoors at Shaw Nature Reserve, though he was sleeping in the car for at least the first hour or so that we were there.  The wildflowers especially were very beautiful.  He always gets a little fussy if he has to be in the sling for too long.

- Egg hunt in Brentwood.  Too bad Logan isn’t crawling yet – they even had a crawling section and it was SO cute.  Logan freaked out before the hunt even began because of all the noise and was crying, crying, crying, and then promptly fell asleep in his stroller as we walked to the car.

- First author event – Logan met his first author, Mo Williams.  He freaked out before the reading started, but I nursed him and he fell asleep and calmed down.  He seemed a little non-plussed, but hey, what a great first author!  We even got a book signed.