Photo Dump

So very behind on this blog! All is well, both boys are doing great.  I will do a proper update soon, hopefully, but for now here are photos from March and a separate small album for Easter.

March 2013: Photos here

Easter: Photos here

February Photos

I'm totally behind again, but here are photos from February.  I will try to do a proper update soon.  The boys are well and doing great, and I hope you enjoy the photos!

Adding slideshows from Picasa no longer works, so here is the link: February 2013 photos

January photos

Just a quick photo update.  All is well with the Biggs boys, though we are currently suffering through our third cold this winter. :( But since I last updated, Julian turned one and he stopped wearing his helmet!  I will try to write more another time.  Here are January photos in the meantime.

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:

Just a media update

No time for a proper update right this minute, but wanted to post the photos and videos that I've had ready for several days!  Hopefully a proper update before the holidays.

November 2012 photos:



Videos (there are a lot!)

Julian's silly noises:


Julian rocking out:



Julian driving the train at the park for the first time:


Teddy singing his ABCs:


Teddy singing Twinkle, Twinkle:

October 2012

Another month gone by!  Here's a quick update:

Not too much new in Theodore's world this month.  Still enjoying preschool, playdates, etc! Coming soon, we will be dropping his private speech therapy, but he will still have therapy twice a week through the school district.  We are all so impressed by his speech development, however.  His physical skills keep improving as well - last week he climbed up the slide for the first time!  He did enjoy Halloween - he was obsessed with pumpkins all month and is sad they aren't in stores any longer.  He did very well trick-or-treating.  We only went to a few houses but he said trick-or-treat and thank you, and was not scared or shy.  

Julian is now nine months old.  He is still wearing the helmet.  It's going well, though at our last checkup he hadn't had any significant change.  Grow, little head, grow!  He got a clean bill of health at his doctor's visit as well, though once again the Biggs genes are asserting themselves apparently, as he got longer but his weight has dropped down to the 3rd percentile.  He is starting to eat better and so we are just giving high calorie, high nutrient options and seeing what comes of it.  He is incredibly active, meeting all his milestones, vocalizes a lot, and very happy, so we are not worried.  In fact, he officially graduated from physical therapy this week!  

We've had some lovely weather lately, so are enjoying as much outdoor time as we can before winter.  We had a great visit with Auntie Suzie (who is Teddy's new best friend) and Cathy this week, and Auntie Suzie will be back on Thursday.  We had a fun party for the election last night and are looking forward to Thanksgiving in a few weeks.  Other than that, life continues as normal!

Here's the photos and video!

Busy busy:

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: