History of the J Man

I can’t get over how big these boys are getting and how different their personalities are.  They get along really well together but Jonah is like my sister was as a kid.  If you ask him he never wants to go anywhere or do anything but once you get him there he doesn’t want to leave.  Elliott, on the other hand, will bring everyone their shoes then go stand by the front door and shout “let’s go!”  Here’s a photo of them waiting at the door to leave.

And a photo of Elliott from our visit to Santa’s Village last weekend.

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.)

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.

My parents got a bike from a neighbor so Jonah has been riding that one when we go to their house.  He’ll get a new one from us for his birthday too.  We were planning to get him a balance bike but now that he has this one with training wheels I don’t know what kind I should buy.  We may just bring Jonah to the store and let him pick.Below are 2 photos of Jonah on his “fire bike” (his name for it because of the paint job I guess).  I can’t wait until he is actually old enough to ride on a path with me.  I loved going on bike rides with my dad as a kid.

There’s been a Buzz Lightyear resurgence in our house.  First Jonah spent the weekend in his Buzz PJ’s - during the day that is. He had to take them off so we could wash them overnight. Then today he wanted to wear his Buzz Halloween costume to school.  My feeling is that as long as he gets dressed himself he can wear whatever he wants! And at least I’m getting my money’s worth out of that costume.

My one fear is that he talks about how everyone will wear space helmets at his birthday party…not sure that’s going to happen…

I have a lot of updates that I’ve been meaning to write about for weeks.  I’m not working full-time these days but between juggling a couple clients, interviewing for a new job, researching to find a new job and spending time with the boys I feel like there’s less time now than there usually is.

Jonah

Jonah continues to love school.  I swear he comes home each day singing a new song and talking about a different kid.  He does have a couple BFFs but he does a great job of playing with other kids on days his BFF is not there.  His vocabulary is also expanding rapidly.  Some of our favorite new words of his include: dead end, muck, nocturnal and automatic.  He’s also been counting and doing simple math problems both at our prompting and on his own now.  We do them a lot at the dinner table.

This session of gymnastics just ended but he’s come a long way.  I’ve been able to take him myself a few times this session and it’s great to see him running and participating in the activities and also answering the teacher as she talks to the group.  I think school has been great for Jonah’s self-confidence.

Elliott

Elliott has been growing and learning new tricks a lot lately too.  The biggest ones are walking and signing.  He’ll do sign language signs now for ‘milk’, ‘water’, ‘more’,  and the other day I swear he did the sign for help as he reached for the door knob on the front door.  He knew it was time to go an apparently didn’t want to wait for the rest of us.

I was prepared to write and tell about how often he will now stand on his own and will occasionally take a few steps in between furniture but by Friday those couple of steps have begun to stretch out to 4-6 at a time.  Usually it’s with us calling to him and pulling away as he comes towards us but now I’ve seen him take a few all on his own too.  Today he was literally laughing out loud as he walked between Chris and I.  His other trick is playing catch.  If you roll the ball to him, he will throw it back and laugh.  Chris is also sad that he is using his right hand to this almost exclusively, which means his dream of Elliott playing major league baseball one day probably won’t come true.

This won’t be news to anyone who I’m friends with on Facebook but Elliott is also out-eating Jonah at times.  I hope they both continue to be good eaters who like a lot of different foods as they grow up.  On the other hand, at this rate Chris or I will have to pick up a 2nd job during their teen years just to keep food in the house.  Elliott does eat well but so far I think he’s trending slightly smaller than Jonah was at this age but with more hair (and in certain lights his hair is reddish!).  There’s not a huge difference between their sizes but he’s not as heavy as Jonah was, based in their doctor visit records at least.

Unfortunately, Elliott still isn’t sleeping through the night very well.  He’ll still wake up a couple of times a night, though there are some nights where he doesn’t wake up at all, so it’s a little hit or miss.  He definitely not anywhere near as good a sleeper as Jonah was and remains.  You can change Jonah’s clothes if he’s truly out, but the other day Chris took Elliott for a walk in the stroller.  He was asleep when they came back and all he did was raise the shade on stroller and Elliott was awake.

Lastly, I need to get Elliott signed up for a music class.  Jonah likes to sing but Elliott seems to be our musical boy.  He likes it when anyone sings, he dances to his toys that play music, he likes to play with Chris’s guitar and he even starts to hum a bit himself when he’s tired.  It’s very cute.  Maybe he’ll take after Chris and have some musical talent.

Over the holidays we decided to take the boys bowling.  This new alley actually had a “mom & tot” time in the morning so we went, bowled a game then had lunch.  Well actually we played some indoor bocce ball first, or pretended to.  Jonah just liked to roll the balls down the court and run up and down.  He liked that much more than the bowling.

Here’s a short movie of Chris helping Jonah bowl. 

Jonah Bowling from Julie Diehl on Vimeo.

I’m not sure what it is about the holidays for us.  If it’s all the new junk food that’s introduce to our diets, seeing more friends and family than we usually do in such a small space of time, or if it’s the cold weather somehow but it seems to get us every year.  First there was the day after Christmas that we spent in the ER with Jonah when he was about 1.5.  Then I think it was last year sometime when we went back to the ER to find out he had croup.  This year it was Elliott turn to get sick during the holidays.

Elliott helped me welcome in the new year by puking on me and the dinner table just after our dinner on New Year’s Eve.  He’d been pretty sleepy that day and had already had a blow out at the restaurant at lunch so I was already a little worried about him.  It was justified because he ended up having diarrhea for the next 48 hours.  I called the pediatrician’s office (of course closed for the holiday) and got the recommendation to give him pedialyte and no formula. He was nursing too but doing more comfort sucking than actually drinking and I was worried he’d get dehydrated.  The pedialyte was a no go though.  He wouldn’t drink it.  Not the flavored kind, not the unflavored kind, not mixed with formula or juice either.  After a solid day I went out and bought him some lactose-free formula, just so I could make sure he was taking in some liquids.  After the first night he perked up again so I figured he was doing ok.  Then he peed in the bath on the morning of Jan 2nd so I took that as a sign that he wasn’t dehydrated and was on the mend.  If I hadn’t seen that we may have headed to the ER later that day. 

Of course this always happens at times when Chris and I had plans to go out.  We didn’t bother trying to make New Year’s plans but we did book Grandma and Grandpa to babysit on the 2nd so we could go to dinner and a movie.  That didn’t happen though because Chris started feeling sick that morning.  We revised our plans and asked G & G to come and take Jonah, the only one feeling fine, out for a bit so Chris could rest and I could shower.

That’s about all I got do to though because I answered the phone after getting out of the shower to hear, “We’re coming home, Jonah just threw up in the car.” Our car that is, the one with they took because it has the car seat in it. 

So fresh from my only shower in 2 days and feeling crummy myself I strapped Elliott on and helped get Jonah into the house, stripped down and into the bath whild Chris and Grandpa attended to the car.  That night we all took it easy and had only a few handfuls of dry Cheerios for dinner with lots of water to drink.

I expected a rough night from the kids after that.  Figuring I’d be cleaning up more puke or comforting sick children but miraculously everyone slept the whole night.  Everyone but me that is.  I was up and down to the bathroom myself LOTS of times from 9:30pm to 2:30am when I think my fever finally broke.  What is it about a mom’s mind/body that allows us to not get sick until everyone else is taken care of? 

We spent the next day drinking more water and Gatorade and hanging out watching movies.  Trying to get Jonah to relax and rest was a challenge.  Luckily we’re all feeling better now, this must have been more like a 24-48 hour bug.  Not so fun though.  Not a good way to ring in the new year.  What is it about the holidays?  Next year I need to beef up our vitamins or hand washing or something!