History of the J Man

Sitting in the living room last night Jonah feels my leg and then says, “Mama, why do you have a beard growing on your legs?  Mine are nice and smooth.”

How do I even begin to answer?!

This weekend we headed out of town with our next door neighbors and their 2 kids to spend the weekend in Lake Geneva.  We thought the two 4 year old boys could entertain each other and let us hang out with other adults a little too.

We all got there on Saturday, ate lunch then headed to the beach.  The big kids loved the water and the sand and the little kids seemed content to sleep or play on the blankets.  We got back, cleaned up and went out for a nice dinner.  They stuck us in the basement in a corner but we were totally happy there and the food was really good.  Yeah to Ryan Braun’s Taven for having a gluten-free menu.

The most excitement probably came in the form of Jonah’s first “sleep-over.”  In the basement at the Lake Geneva house is “Jonah’s bed.”  He’s slept down there by himself and also with his Aunts but never with another friend.  The babies went to bed in their respective pack-n-plays in the upstairs bedrooms and then the 2 big boys went to sleep in side-by-side beds in the basement.  The adults all left them around 8:30pm.  Jonah came up a few times, Luca came up a few times, each boy peed about 4 times. They chatted and whispered for at least another hour before finally falling asleep.  We heard them finally quiet down on the monitor and were a little surprised to find that they both fell asleep in their own beds.

The adults got to have a drink and chat for a bit in the upstairs living room and then everyone slept soundly until the babies woke up around 5:45 and the big boys at 7:00.  We went to breakfast at a new place and spent the rest of the day watching the big boys run around in the back yard.  They would wrestle, gather pine cones, look for birds and bugs and play baseball and soccer.   They got along really well the whole weekend, it was nice to see.

Of course the babies nap schedules suffered as we tried to entertain everyone and move with a group of 8 but they didn’t seem any worse for the wear.  Elliott is into everything these days and wants to run and play with the big kids.  If there’s anything going on he doesn’t want to sleep and miss out.  At dinner Saturday night he must have eaten as much as Jonah, easily.  He’s got all 4 first molars almost all the way in seems to be doing a good job of communicating either through signs or new words each day.  His current favorite word, much like Jonah at this age, is “ball.”  With 2 boys in the house some days I feel we’ll soon be overrun with balls and cars.

Jonah had his 4 year check up this week.  He is 42″ tall and about 36.5 lbs.  That puts him right about average, maybe a little on the tall side still.  At 4 eyes and ears get checked so here is a photo of Jonah sitting very nicely and raising his hand when he hears the beeps for the hearing test. (Those are stickers on his cheeks, his idea that morning.)

Some recent photos of the boys.

Most of you know by now that Jonah managed to swallow a small button battery a few days before his 4th birthday.  I don’t want to go into specifics because it makes me feel like a bad mom.Long-story-short, he told me he “accidentally” swallowed that “shiny thing.”  Once I figured out that it was we headed straight to Children’s Memorial Hospital and spent the next 24 hours there.

Here are some photos from his stay there.  He never felt sick and the battery ended up passing out the natural way.  Overall Jonah had a blast.  Just the type of hospital stay you’d want your sick kid to have, but I wished they had helped a bit more to reinforce the “we don’t put anything in our mouths that’s not food” concept.