Finally, an update!

Trying to get back into blogging!

Julian will be one year old next week - hard to believe!  He is doing wonderfully.  He has four fully reliable words - "gat" for cat, "ba" or "a-ba" for ball, "buh" for book, and "da" for dog.  He also babbles a variety of sounds and calls all cars and trucks "ca".  He is very funny though - everything is a ball, such as when we were at the market and the pile of oranges made him desperately reach out going "ba, a-ba, a-baaaaa!".  For a while, however, only our Samcat was a cat - but now he is calling all animals other than dogs "gat"!

He is not yet walking independently, though loves to walk holding onto our hands and while pushing Teddy's shopping cart.  He is eating a little bit better, though it comes and goes.  He enjoys avocado and guacamole, cheese, crackers, applesauce, yogurt, and ground beef.  He loves playing with his brother's toys - second kids are lucky! He pushes the trains along the track on the table, he plays with Teddy's new castle with great concentration, and loves leafing through all the paperback books.  He also enjoys colouring and puts real colour down on the paper with the crayons, though he also likes to eat them, of course.  He has a great attention span and is very good at self-entertaining, though also is social and loves to play with others.

Things are going well with the helmet - he continues to tolerate it fine, and we have seen a good amount of improvement.  The overall asymmetry is down to 7.1mm from 10.5mm to start.  We will probably finish with the helmet after six months of wearing, because the change will have been enough.

Theodore is also doing pretty well.  He continues to enjoy preschool, and has made some friends there.  He enjoys the circle time, music, and especially outdoor play.  

We stopped his private speech therapy, but he continues with the school district twice a week.  One of those days there is another little boy in his session, which is great.  His speech has improved dramatically and we are thrilled!  He sings and tells us sentences.  He has even started playing games with his toys where he makes up little stories for the trains/dolls/etc and narrates it out loud.  We are still working on pronunciation and complexity, but we're so proud of his progress.

Christmas was spent in Canada, and we had a great time.  We were all extremely sick before leaving and didn't really recuperate until nearly Christmas Day, but were glad we went (and glad for some TLC after a hellish week of coping here on our own!)  We were in Brampton one week and Ottawa a second week, and saw all our families.  Theodore absolutely adored playing with his cousins Austin and Alexandra in particular - it was lovely to watch them play.  And while the cold weather was quite shocking to both boys - and Theodore was not impressed with having to bundle up - the snow was well-received, especially by Theodore.  Ottawa was buried in it, which was great.  Theodore also really enjoyed the Santa aspect of Christmas this year - we wrote him a letter, left out milk and cookies the night before, etc.  It was fun to see!

Winter here in California is not as cold as back home, of course, but we are still all a little bit cooped up at present (and everyone but Billy has a bad cold again!)  Still, we try to get out as much as we can, to the store and park.  We just started a Gym Kids class all together - Teddy used to go before Julian was born, but now there is an ages 1-4 class that we can all attend! 

I will try to update again after Julian's first birthday with his stats from the doctor's visit and party pictures!

Here are photos from December; photos of Brampton and Ottawa are on Facebook: Brampton photos; Ottawa photos.

And two videos from December:

Silly noises:

Little reader: