We celebrated Easter today by attending a nice service at church, had fun with a small Easter egg hunt at home (our hypoallergenic Easter eggs were filled with jelly beans and marshmellows), ate monkey bread, and spent a lot of time outside enjoying our beautiful spring weather.
The boys are both doing great. Morgan is really progressing with his language skills and adds new words to his vocabulary each week. We're really being intent with his words and what he's trying to communicate because, and this will probably not surprise any of you, he's recently decided to test out temper tantrums as a form of communication when we're just not getting it. And he's only had a couple of incidents of this behavior, but it took a couple of them before I realized what was going on since we're not very experienced with these (Jacoby didn't go down this road). During one of the incidents when Morgan was inconsolable, throwing his head around, etc. I decided to put him down and carry about my business while he worked out whatever the problem was. The child stopped crying, crawled all the way upstairs to find me, and then proceeded to throw himself down on the floor and start crying again. And that's when the light went off for me. So, needless to say, we're caught up on our reading about tantrums and are working hard to ward them off. He's doing great at school and has recently started sleeping on a mat like a big kid instead of in a crib! He and his classmates are big enough now to enjoy circle time with singing, stories, and they're already learning their ABCs. He's a very happy camper when I pick him up, which does his Mommy's heart good.
Jacoby is very busy with imaginative play. I think I could probably pack up most of our toys and he wouldn't notice since he's so involved with the scenarios in his imagination. The coat closet is typically a garbage truck or a fire truck, depending on the moment. Our railing is a pole he slides down when there's an emergency, and you wouldn't believe the kind of fires he keeps having to put out all around the house! Good thing we've got a very attentive fireman to keep us safe! He's always interested in doing an art project, so I try and schedule one or two of these in to our routine each week. I showed him how to hold a pencil the correct way a week ago or so, and he was very intent on mastering this skill. I've caught him a couple of times holding crayons or markers the right way and he talks a lot about the letters he's drawing when we're coloring. We've pretty well exhausted the truck section at the library, so now we're into the animals and we're learning about mammals this week.
Justin is busy with his last quarter of the school year. He's in a dissertation seminar and working hard on a topical analysis and dissertation proposal. He was recently tempted by a job opportunity in Amsterdam that one of his professors shared with him and even said that she'd write him a recommendation for it. I think that it would be very tempting if he was just a bit further along and we weren't on the brink of some serious medical issues with one of our kiddos.
I spent most of the weekend in the kitchen cleaning out our cuphoards and refrigerator, researching alternatives for our new diet, and preparing some things for the upcoming week. I've got a list going of brands that are friendly for our diet and a list of those who are not. It's definitely been a time and energy-consuming process. Our kitchen is becoming made-from-scratch central! News about Jacoby came very close to the Easter weekend, and I'm sure I'll find some meaning in that a few months down the road but I'm not quite there yet. I just focused on hugging him a little longer (whenever I could catch him) instead.
Easter 2010
What a difference a year can make!
