The Harvey Family: January {2015}

Wow has another year gone by already? It's hard to believe Blake is going to be 3 soon. It seems like he's been 3 for a long time now with all the things he has to say along with some toddler moments thrown in for good measure. His first year had so many changes that it seemed like he had come so far by the time that first year came to a close. Then the second year made for big changes as well, and now his third year brought many more intellectual changes than physical changes it seems. I love how his brain works and he makes me laugh on a daily basis with how literal he is (the apple doesn't fall far from the tree does it?). When we went to Walmart the other day Chris asked what that smell was and since I smelled it too and immediately recognized it, I said it's Subway (they have a few Walmarts down here with the Subway restaurant inside) and Blake gave me a puzzled look without skipping a beat and said, "they have trains in here?". These are the moments that make my day. We got a good laugh out of that one.

This month Brett:

has been nursing in crazy positions. I usually take him to the rocking chair to nurse since it's in my room and away from the distractions (Blake screaming) but as soon as I get him to try and sit down he immediately flips over onto his knees. Unfortunately he has a lot more leverage this way and wants to try and pull with his whole body to get the milk to come out. Oiy.
started wearing size 4 diapers overnight last month. He kept overfilling his size 3s and getting his clothes (and bed) wet so we started using some of Blake's old 4s (and moved Blake up to 5s) and he has had much less clothes wetting for sure.
says hiiiii sometimes. If you say hi to him over and over, sometimes he'll respond back but it's hard to tell if he's just making a higher pitched cooing sound or not.
climbs on me all the time. He is nonstop all the time. If he's on the ground he's crawling to get somewhere. Most of the time he's either on his way to get something he shouldn't have or he's pulling up on me and climbing. His fingers are so strong that I have bruises all over me from where he's pinched me from grabbing on to pull himself up. He's gotten so quick in such a short amount of time that it will take less than a second for him to go from sitting to standing. We already have a feeling he is going to be a very coordinated boy and possibly athletic.
eats solids 2 times most days, sometimes he'll eat lunch too. He will typically have fruit in the morning for breakfast and a veggie at night for dinner.
tried prunes, green beans, pears, peas, peaches, and apples and seems to love them all. Either that or he's so hungry that anything will do. After he downs his food he's usually ready for milk as well. He's moved onto stage 2 for the foods that he's been eating a while since his appetite is increasing and he can eat 2 stage 1 foods at a sitting (5oz) so the stage 2 foods (4oz) seem more appropriate. I guess you gotta eat a lot when you move around as much as he does!
cruising much more confidently. He has figured out that he has to move his feet to stay upright and keep moving in the direction he wants to go. He'll usually cruise down the couch if he sees a remote control that is within his reach. He hasn't quite figured out that he has to move his feet if he wants to walk tho, he still leans and can't figure out why he isn't walking when he just falls over.
loves shoe strings. He is constantly untying the shoe strings on my house slippers and boat shoes and loves to eat them. I get tired of retying them so much that I end up walking around with my laces undone a lot... which is quite dangerous actually. He has also found "the string" on Daddy's blanket that Blake used to play with all the time too. I guess it's good that I never finished that blanket and left the string hanging... it has made for lots of entertainment for the boys.
can stand on his own for a couple seconds. This normally happens once he's pulled up on something and gets a toy in his hands. He'll use both hands to get it in his mouth and not realize he's standing, but then once he realizes it he'll gracefully plop himself down on the floor.
got his first tooth! His lower left tooth was the first one to pop through on the 9th. He definitely hasn't done well with teething and it does seem to cause him a good bit of pain. However, he is a pretty fussy baby so we never really know if that's the cause or not. He loves to cover up his top lip with his tongue and do a sucking motion and that really started once he got that tooth so maybe he likes the feel of it on his tongue? He ended up having the other bottom tooth pop through this month too so hopefully he'll settle down on the crankiness from teething until the top ones decide to make their appearance.
blows lots of raspberries. He has gotten quite good at this and gets everything all wet from the drool and projectile spit that ensues.
scratches at things to try and figure out what they are. It's so cute when he finds a little spec of dirt on the floor and he has to scratch at it to see if he can move it. He also does this with my freckles and moles. This, however, isn't so cute... it kinda hurts and is good motivation for me to keep his fingernails short.
bangs on his tray. When he's sitting at his high chair he likes to bang on his tray in between bites. I'm actually ok with it as long as it is in between bites and not as I'm moving the spoon toward his mouth and the spoon getting swatted down (that happened once and of course it had to be carrots).
hates being cleaned off with the washcloth after eating. I guess the washcloth isn't warm anymore after he's finished his food so inevitably he always gets his mouth wiped off with a cold washcloth and boy does he let you know how much this bothers him. You can go from a happy full boy to a screaming, crying one in a matter of 2 seconds.
attempted sleep training but trained us instead. We tried the progressive waiting that worked well with Blake and wow, it did not go well with Brett. To be fair, Brett has never actually slept in his crib so that was a new environment for him, and now he's used to having me nearby all night so being alone was something very new to him as well. The first night he actually did the best, he got a 2 hour stretch of sleep and a 1.5 hour stretch then I gave up with all the crying. The next night was worse, then the one after that was worse, then on night 4 he cried for over an hour straight so we put the whole thing on hold. I'm not sure how much crying it will take to get over the hump but on the bright side, he at least had a few times where he slept by himself in his crib and he maybe put himself to sleep one of those times. We tried it the next week and even for naps for a few days and didn't make any improvement, if anything he got worse. Eventually we had to stop since my back started hurting so badly from leaning over his crib to lie him back down each time I went in there, and rub his back to calm him down (which didn't work very well either). I'm still trying to let my back recover.
had a couple days where he took 2 naps, but he takes 3 most days still. He's starting to be able to tolerate being awake longer stretches but it depends on how well he sleeps at night (he still wakes up 4-6 times each night, ahhh!).
crawls with one knee and one foot. I'm not sure if he uses one foot to get better traction on the tile or what. We have been keeping him in pants and they seem pretty slippery on the tile so that could be the reason. I can't remember if I've gotten this on video yet but hopefully I'll get it before he moves onto walking.
hasn't really started talking much but he does like to make a lot of talking noises. He acts like he's talking with his mouth closed and most of the time it sounds like he's saying "gum" over and over with his lips closed... (you just tried it didn't you, haha.)
has gotten way worse with separation anxiety. Maybe it's a result of the attempted sleep training, or maybe it's just his age but he can't bear to be away from me if he sees me. Needless to say, it hasn't made it easy to let my back heal when he wants me to hold him constantly.

This month Blake:

wants to help do everything. He wants to be more involved in everyday life and asks to help with anything and everything. Most things he can help with in some capacity but I have to draw the line at cooking on the stove which he doesn't like but accepts.
tells you what he's going to do when he gets mad. He gets this bright red face and you know he's going to explode and then instead of doing something crazy he very sternly says "I'm going to drop my juice" or "spit out my food on the floor". Thankfully he doesn't actually take action most of the time. He's quick to anger but I've tried the technique of acknowledging his feelings and redirecting or giving him an alternate way to cope. Hopefully he allows me to help him through these toddler years.
started preschool and loves it! This is the first time I've dropped him off with someone that wasn't family and at first I thought it might be hard, then I started to feel a little guilty when it wasn't as hard as I expected. He just did so well with drop off that it put me at ease (and in the back of my mind I knew he'd do well). He also tried a class at MyGym where the parents sit off to the side and watch, and he did so so well! He actually is a much better listener when I'm not right next to him. Turns out that I'm more of a distraction than anything and he just wants to play with me and not listen to the teacher. I was so incredibly proud of him behaving so well while the other boys in the class were being crazy and not paying attention.
makes up songs about anything and everything. He went from singing songs that he knows the words to, to making up his own words with the same tune. He'll sing the wheels on the bus tune and just make up the words with anything he sees. For some reason he likes to sing about where his trucks are going to drive or where he's going to jump and most of the time it has something to do with going up to the fan on the ceiling.
has so. much. energy.
very logical in his opinion on things. He also has the mindset if he doesn't like your answer he'll basically go with the "I'll ignore your reality and replace it with my own." He almost thinks if he waits a couple seconds and asks us the same question again that he'll get a different answer. He even acts like he never got the first answer and doesn't even protest until he gets the same answer again and acts like it's a new one. It's hard not to laugh.
says funny phrases that he picks up from Chris and I or sometimes off tv shows. This month when I say "we need to go to your bedroom", he'll say "bedroom it is!" Or if we need to go to the bathroom to brush teeth he'll say "bathroom it is!"
has a new swagger and confidence which means he's been more defiant. After going to school and being on his own he seems to have acquired a new confidence and when I ask him to do something he'll give me a flat out NO, I'm NOT going to do _____. He's never done this before so hopefully it'll just be another phase and my sweet boy will be back soon...? It's so hard to send your child to school because you never know what they're picking up from other kids.
always has his tongue hanging out. In fact it's out so much that the skin around his lips are chapped a lot and he won't let us put Vaseline on without licking it immediately off.
has had an imagination explosion. He has always been pretty stubborn when it came to imaginative play and wouldn't do anything that he couldn't see with his own eyes. All of a sudden he has decided to start coming up with tons of machines and friends that are all over our house and he has wild stories about what they're doing. A lot of the machine stuff came from the show How It's Made that he's obsessed with. He wants to make all of the factories at our house so we can pretend to make all of the things that they make on the show. The best I got was to make a car wash and a conveyor belt (which got parted out before I got a picture, sad.)
stopped taking MiraLax. After hearing that this might, in fact, be harmful in the long run we decided to see if we could get by without it. Blake still won't have a bowel movement on his own but he can at least work it out without the use of MiraLax. We still give him a combination of apple and prune juice everyday which must be helping.
loves to talk with rhyming words. He names his pretend machines names like wong, dong, fong, etc. and is quite good at remembering which is which. He is quite amazing with his vocabulary at this point and we talk with him like we would any other adult for the most part, but he still likes to make up random rhyming words every now and again. His teachers at school even commented how they were impressed that Blake would use his words to let them know if someone was misbehaving or bothering someone instead of trying to solve it himself.

Pics:

Hanging out in the playroom with the box to a toy while Blake played with the actual toy.

My favorite toys are not actually toys.

Blake's first day of preschool was super cold and windy.

Sitting out in the grass for the first time.

This is pretty fun!

Hold on Mom, Blake is talking.

Watching the stroller roll down the driveway.

Brett loves being outside.

Blake catching the stroller.

Trying to get both boys smiling.

Success, but not both looking at the camera.

Taking out the double stroller while Mommy gets a nap since the little one has been keeping her up...

Brett just adores his big brother.

Daddy is pretty funny!

Playing on his knees a lot these days.

Water bottles are the best.

Going in for the attack!

What else can I find in this big toy chest?

Teething like crazy.

And a sweet smile.

Someone made a mess!

It's so cute how they play together now. Brett was doing his big laugh where he kicks his head back and closes his eyes while laughing.

Big brothers are the best!

Watching the horsey ride past.

Hey look a real smile from Blake!

Explaining to me something about how the gutters work.

Brett being a big boy and riding in a car.

DJ Brett.

His legs sure are leaning out.

Blake was helping fix the table but tightening some screws.

Another real smile! (It took some convincing and about 10 takes.)

Such loving eyes at his big brother.

Blake's "foot machines" moving some toys around.

Taking a drink from the gas can...

Here comes Brett! Almost always moving toward me.

We had a super windy day and I looked out the window and asked Blake if he saw the trees moving around like crazy in the wind, and he said let's fly a kite! He got a kite for Christmas, so out to the park we went. Chris did most of the hard work and Blake did a lot of running around and laughing.