The Harvey Family: Blake

Our newest nephew was born on October 25 a few minutes before 9pm. Congrats to my brother and sister-in-law on their beautiful, healthy, baby boy, Wesley Paul Gessner! He was 7 lb 2 oz and 20 1/4" long and arrived about a week after his due date. Maggie is still in the hospital due to some blood clotting complications after delivery so I know she'd appreciate any thoughts and prayers you could send her way. We love you Maggie and hope you get to go home soon!

This is a quick pic Michael sent me. Look at all that hair!

And Pop Pop with his newest great grandbaby.

Blake:

counts a little. His favorite numbers to count are 8-12, but he did count 1-12 one time. He's just very inconsistent and you never know if he'll do it right or not. He tends to skip 5-7 most times. I'm guessing he goes up to 12 because I do my leg lifts on the living room floor and count up to 12 for those.
throws temper tantrums in a blink. He all of a sudden started the toddler whining stage and loves to throw his arms up and go limp when you need to pick him up to put him in the carseat or change his diaper. If it's not his idea, there will be a fight... and even if it is, there will more than likely be a fight.
reads soft paper books now in addition to the board books. We used to have to keep them away since he would rip pages out, but now he's gotten a little more gentle with books and he even does a good job reading them in the car.
uses cup holders in car. We folded the arm rest down in the middle of the backseat and there are 2 cup holders there so he decided he wanted to use them for his drinks (and sometimes his snack trap) while he's in the car. He also likes to call it by name when he gets in the car (fights me as I wrangle him into the carseat) and he won't take a sip of his drink unless he places it in the cup holder first.
likes to color in his coloring book. It's cute to see him try and color Mickey's shoes or Goofy's hat since he scribbles back and forth twice and that means he's done. Sometimes it's just once back and forth. At least it is another way to try and learn his colors and he's starting to make progress... he knows brown and black and sometimes pink. The basic red, blue, green, and yellow seem to be the hardest ones to learn. If you ask him what color something is he'll normally respond "blue" first and if you say no, then he'll guess "yellow".
has been talking in multiple word sentences. Sometimes they aren't real sentences but they're definitely enough to understand what he's going for. The longest one I remember was when he was looking at the bubble blowing wand on the kitchen table and he said "this for Mimi blow bubbles". Also when we were out taking a walk the other day he heard a dog barking and he said "oh I hear doggie". He's pretty good at stringing a bunch of words together to get you to what he wants. It's funny to try and decipher what he's getting at sometimes but most of the time it's quite logical.
stacks his books on the night stand. It seems to be the only thing that he feels have an organized place. He's still totally ok with dumping out his toy bins and leaving the toys lying there sadly.
very worried about yuckies. Sometimes he'll see a string or piece of fuzz and it will freeze him in his tracks to the point where he can't enter part of a room unless he comes and gets me to remove it. If he sees a piece of hair it is also paralyzing and he can't continue playing until it is picked up and thrown away.
boycotted food for about a week. All he wanted to do was drink milk and juice (watered down juice) and would refuse to eat almost all food. He would nibble a couple puffs or sweet potato chips but that was about it for food for the day. I was definitely getting worried about him but the doctor said this was a normal phase and he'd get past it. Of course in the mean time she suggested Pediasure which wouldn't work since we haven't ruled out a dairy intolerance and they all seem to have that as one of the top ingredients.
can climb back down off chairs finally. He used to be able to climb up and would sit on the edge and yell "down, down, down..." until either Chris or I would come get him down. It was nice that it was probably the last phase where he could be contained somewhere, but it was also annoying to have to get him down over and over since he climbed right back up as soon as we'd help him down.