Catching Up

I got September's photos posted a while ago, but haven't had time to write a blog post - apologies!



The big news for Theodore, of course, is that he turned three last month! He was super excited about this and loves telling people how old he is now.  His actual birthday was a Friday, so he went to preschool as usual, and then in the afternoon we went for frozen yogurt and to the park.  The next day we had four of his friends and their parents over for a little party.  Everyone had a fun time!

He has also been going to preschool for just over a month now, three mornings a week for three hours (9-12).  He adjusted to this really well and seems to be enjoying himself quite a lot.   They have a great outdoor play area, music twice a month, circle time, and a nice group of teachers and kids.  In fact, at pick-up recently one of the teachers, Miss Linda, pulled him aside specially to tell him he was one of the sweetest, most fun, and most gentle kids there.  That warmed this mom's heart!

As I mentioned last month, he was also assessed recently for services through the school district due to turning three and aging out of the Early Start program.  He qualified for speech therapy so we are now attending that twice a week.  It is meant to be a group program but so far he is a group of one...the therapist is working on it!  She's very nice and seems to be making good progress with him.  His vocabulary continues to expand rapidly, so we are really working now on articulation in particular.  He is still doing private speech therapy as well, though we have just changed to a new therapist because I changed all our days around a bit after letting our nanny go (once Theodore started preschool, I didn't feel we needed her help any longer).



Julian is 8 and a half months old now.  He has mastered the "traditional" hands-and-knees crawl and is astonishingly fast!  He is also pulling up and getting back down easily, and cruising along furniture.  He is our very bold and adventurous baby for sure. He is starting to eat more solid foods, especially if it's puffs - we dip them in purees and a reasonable amount gets in that way.  He likes to feed himself - he is a very independent child in general!  It's been so interesting to watch his personality develop in comparison to Theodore.

As you can see from the photo, he is now wearing the helmet I mentioned in the last post.  Everything has gone very well with it.  He adjusted quite quickly to wearing it, and now wears it 23 hours a day, with a one-hour break at dinner time (all the better to smear food into his hair!)  After two weeks we went for a check-up, and he had already had 1mm positive change in his head shape.  The measurements refer to the asymmetry on the diagonal of his head - 0 would be perfect, but since no head is perfect, we are aiming for 5mm or less of asymmetry.  He started the treatment at 10.5mm, so the change so far is great.  He does get a little itchy when it is off, and for a while was sweaty, but overall he barely notices it (though we are already, despite our best efforts at cleaning, noticing a slight funky smell - they warned us about this, but I can already imagine how it will be by the end of treatment!)



September and October so far were busy but fun otherwise.  We had a nice visit from Grammy Eileen that the boys loved, especially a trip to the train shop!  Unfortunately Grandma Carole and Granddad Bill were not able to visit as planned because Granddad suffered a heart attack two weeks ago.  I'm happy to report that he is doing very well, and we are talking on Skype every day to keep in touch instead.  We have also kept busy with playdates and outings, such as taking both boys up to the city for the first time to visit with my old friend Jeanette.  The rainy season started up last week, but before that we had a heat wave (over 100F one day!) and today it is warm and sunny again, so we are spending as much time outside as we can until winter sets in.

As always, here are photos and videos.  I put the photos up a while ago, as I mentioned, so they run through the end of September only (and my videos seem to be a little out of date too). I'll try to do October's photos and a blog post for them in a more timely fashion in a few weeks!



Julian just after learning how to sit up, early September:


Feeding himself squash, also early September: