The Two Little Boys Biggs: July 2012

Hello! Just a quick update to try to get up to speed here.

We had a great time on our trip to Canada. Both boys loved being doted on by their grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. I put photos of the trip on Facebook, and it's really too big of a job to go back through and put them on Picasa as well, so I will just link those albums: Brampton and Ottawa photos; and Montreal/Wedding photos. The boys were good fliers, and adjusted quickly to the time change. Julian spent his first significant amount of time in the car, and did quite well, particularly on the Ottawa to Montreal drive! We were able to visit lots of friends and family, and in particular Theodore was able to have many playdates with children around his age. He especially loved all the time he spent with his cousins Austin and Alexandra. And both boys were wonderful at the wedding - Theodore had a three hour nap that afternoon and then stayed up dancing and partying until 10:30 pm!

Since then we have just been settling back into our normal routine. Billy had five days off work around Independence Day, which was fun for everyone. We are doing PT once a week now for Julian and speech once a week for Theodore, and Theodore also has a gym class once a week.

Speaking of speech, Theodore has made huge gains in his vocabulary recently. His word list is now well over 50 words long, probably even more as he has so many new ones, I can't keep up! He is also able to put words together to form simple sentences: he will say "help please", for example, or his new favourite, "train time!" He is much more willing to try new sounds and words, and is even refining words he previously had (such as saying train rather than just signing, or saying "eh-mo" for Elmo instead of how he used to just say "eh-eh-eh"). He will also tell you about his day in sentences - we just don't understand all of it yet. But most of his words are quite clear, and we're extremely proud of his progress.

Julian is also developing wonderfully. He started rolling when we were in Ottawa, and hasn't stopped since! He can roll all around to get wherever he wants, and has also started army crawling. He's definitely on the loose. He's a very smiley, happy baby who loves his brother and desperately wants to put all of his brother's trains in his mouth, haha! He will be six months old next week, so I am getting ready to start feeding him solids. He has actually been 100% breastfed from the tap so far - no bottles of expressed milk even - I am pretty proud of that achievement.

As always, here are some photos and a video. I will try to update after Julian's 6 month appointment with his statistics!