Caer Corvus

It’s been yet another busy month full of big milestones and some setbacks.

Alexei continues to be the light of our lives. He is growing up so fast. He is very much no longer my baby and moving into being a big boy. He’s achieved the “do it myself” phase of development which can make daily life interesting.

Alexei’s language acquisition is amazing. He is learning several words a day now. Yes, it is definitely time for us to start watching what we say around him. He still calls some things by the noise they make, especially animals, although he clearly knows what the real name is. Cameras are “cheese” (because that’s what you say when you see one, duh!) and all horses are still Jo-jo. Lol! He is finally saying a lot of the words he once only signed though, like “please” and “milk,” so that is good. He’s knows concepts like up and down and on and off, though he sometimes still gets them mixed up. Also, somewhere along the line we stopped being “Mama” and “Dada” and became “Mommy” and “Daddy.” I’m a little sad about that. But it does warm my heart when he pats me and says “Mommy” with a great big grin on his face, which he does many times a day now. Awwww!

Both his gross and fine motor skills are also getting so amazingly good. He’s doing a lot of things in gymnastics without my assistance. He climbs up on absolutely everything now and I think it is only by because he fell out once and scared himself that he doesn’t climb out of his crib now. Almost time to think about converting to a toddler bed. He’s gotten way too good at taking the caps of bottles and in case you didn’t already know that “child proof” caps are a laughable concept, let me tell you authoritatively that they are. He’s been trying to learn how to take off and put on clothes. He can do up his own zippers and is getting pretty scarily close on buttons. He can already take off his diaper. The only thing between us and Naked Boy is that he cannot get his pants off all alone, yet.

We finally painted Alexei’s room and moved the crib in there. Alexei got to pick out the paint, a lovely shade of blue, which is his favorite color. Although purple was a close contender for a bit, but blue made the final cut. He LOVES the new color. For days after we finished painting he would just light up every time he saw the room and yell “blue!” He even literally hugged the walls. LOL! So we felt pretty confident about moving the crib. And he has done very, very well. He was all excited about the bed being in a new place and immediately wanted to play in there again. The first night he was a bit confused by going night-night in there but he slept pretty well. Since then we have had only one bad night (knock on wood) which was mostly due to him being sick. We actually think he is sleeping better on his own and I know I am. He’s pretty good about mornings, playing in the crib for a while before finally deciding between 6:30 and 7 most days that Mommy has slept enough and yelling for me. Hee, hee.

He is fascinated by babies right now. One of his daycare playmates has a new baby brother and Alexei will spend full minutes staring at the little one when little Jackson comes in with his mom. Whenever I pull up pics of other people’s little ones on the computer he jumps up in my lap and he loves to watch baby videos on YouTube. Sigh. Really makes me wish we could give him a baby brother or sister but that may not be in the cards. (More on that later.) He also still loves to look at pictures and videos of himself on my iPhone. Have I mentioned that he can use our iPhones, really, really well? If he knew the passcodes on those things, he wouldn’t need any help from us to use them at all. Apparently my phone is mostly for pictures/videos and Darren’s for games and music.

Darren and I celebrated our 10th wedding anniversary last week. So forgot to put up a post. Sigh. Facebook has made me an even lazier blogger than I was before. LOL! It was a very nice day. Alexei was at daycare so Darren and I went up to Santa Barbara for lunch and a spa day at the Biltmore. Yey! Then Aunt Sally and Richard babysat so we could go have a very nice dinner at Saddle Peak Lodge (which is becoming our traditional anniversary spot.) I’m so happy to have been with my best friend and love of my life for a decade now. Here’s to many more decades to come!

Alexei is grooving on the Christmas season. He loves, loves, loves any representation of Santa, be it a picture on wrapping paper or the big blow-up Santa in front of his daycare. But he still wants nothing to do with live Santas, though, so no Santa pic this year again. Sorry, I just feel no need to make my child cry for a picture. He loves the lights as well and we’ve had to have a few walks around the neighborhood to look at them. May have to hit the after xmas sales to pick up decorations for next year. We didn’t do a tree this year – neither Darren nor I can do live trees and we generally don’t like the look of fake ones. Sally offered us hers but we decided against because the kittens are in to absolutely everything and would probably have the thing down in no time. Maybe next year.

He way grooved on opening presents, and there certainly was no shortage of them for our boy. Many thanks to all the friends and family who provided our boy with a bunch of new things to play with. His favorite though was the guitar followed by the toy camera. But trains, cars and the talking puppy were all big hits. (Time to purge the toy collection though!)

We had a nice little Christmas Eve. Paul flew home for the holiday and finally got to meet his nephew. Yey! Aunt Sally and Richard came over as well as Auntie Boo (LE) who is the first person outside of Mommy and Daddy that Alexei could identify by name (OK nickname) in pics and asks for constantly by name. We need to have you over more, LE!

SO unfortunately in the midst of the merriment, Darren was laid off from his job. D being the major breadwinner, this is a bit worrying, though he got a very good severance and we have savings etc. But this does make the job search a little urgent. He has some pretty good leads so we have every reason to believe he’ll be working again soon – and hopefully at a job he enjoys again. But any good job search mojo from y’all would be most welcome.

In addition we are slowly coming to the conclusion that we may be done with family building. I have been researching like mad for other options that we feel comfortable with for a second adoption and we are just coming up with nothing. All of the international programs are seeing issues which are slowing them down, closing them down, or shifting focus to special needs and older child adoption only. The one program that is still placing infants with no identified special needs is fraught with ethical and political baggage and we just cannot go there. We even started looking into domestic adoption again – and I actually had some hope for this route as there have been some changes in how some agencies do business vs when I first looked into it 7 years ago. But I wasn’t really able to find an agency or attorney I felt really comfortable with. I understand it is a business but I just kept getting the feelings that these folks were either making promises they couldn’t keep or had to be putting inordinate amounts of pressure on the birth-mothers to get the to place their babies. And with both domestic and IA there is the pretty good chance we may be waiting 2 or more years, which is a little hard to think about when I’m about six months shy of a big round birthday… Sigh! So unless some program shows more promise soon – or some other miracle happens – it may be one and done. I’m not really ready to say I am done yet though. But we shall see.

Ok, so you’ve waded through the walll of words so you deserve the pay off.

The Ultimate "cheese" face

Paul home for the holidays!

Yes, most of that is for Alexei

Avidly opening his loot

How do you get this thing out of here?

Guitar!

Ready for bed after a long day

Anyway, I’m ready for 2012 now. How about you?

love and bright blessings,

Janice

Alexei is definitely making  big strides.

As I mentioned, we’ve begun the language explosion we were waiting for – he is talking up a storm, now, not always understandably but he really, really wants to communicate. A typical sentence from our boy is something unintelligible and then “choo-choo.” Or “ball” or “car.” He’s also relented on the horse = cow thing but now they are all “Jo-jo” which is even funnier. At the Wharf the other day he kept exclaim “There’s Jo-jo” at every picture of a horse. Seriously. Every. Single. One. He’s also gotten a few more signs. Interestingly, except for a few words, he always uses the sign for some words and always uses words for other items. He rarely mixes signs and words and we cannot get him to say some of the words he has signs for to save our lives. For instance he can sign “please” but never says it, he can say and sign banana and uses them interchangeably, but he never uses the sign for ball even though it is a really easy sign. *Shrug*

“I want that” or just “that” has replaced a lot of asking of things unfortunately. This of course leads to explosions of another type whenever he cannot get his wants or needs across: tantrums! Yay for being nearly two. LOL! He’s had to have a few genuine time outs for making bad choices like throwing things and hitting. But he is still a very happy boy by and large.

He’s really, really gotten into trains – he calls them choo-choos. He knows the word “train” but prefers the sound to the word. Thomas the Tank Engine has been prominent in our daily routine lately. Thank gods for Netflix streaming!

Somehow he snuck up to 32lbs and I swear he grows taller every time I blink! He has to duck to make it under the roll-out cutting board and everything needs to be moved back from the edges of the counters now.

He continues to enjoy gymnastics. He loves all the jumping and running and last week his hands were finally big enough to hang onto the rings and swing a bit (I’ll see if I can up load the video – its too cute!)

Our biggest challenge is still sleep. He’s always been a restless sleeper and for a few months we’ve been dealing with multiple night disturbances – he doesn’t quite wake up but cries inconsolably for several minutes at a time. It’s worse when he’s in the co-sleeper so he’s spent many, many nights in our bed. Lately the pattern has been he falls asleep on our bed, I put him in the co-sleeper and sometime in the night he wakes up crying to come into our bed and takes 15-20 minutes (or more) to go back to sleep. Then he wakes at the crack of dawn and wants to play with us. Sigh! So we decided to try something radical and buy a crib for him. We got a lovely 4-in1 so hopefully it will grow up with him. Today I put it together and lo and behold he LOVES it. He begged to be allowed to get into it when he first saw it. Jumped around for about half an hour or so and then we went down to have some dinner. Then at bed time, I laid him down in it with his bottle and he went down without a single bit of fussing. He finished his bottle, got a story and a back rub and fell asleep within 15 minutes with only a couple sit ups and a very small amount of crying. It may not sound like much but that is huge to me! Usually he simply will NOT fall asleep anywhere but in our bed. And even then it could take 20-30 minutes or more, with much flopping around and many times sitting up before he finally gives in.

So as I write he’s flopped over a couple times but has generally been pretty much dead asleep. Really excited to see if he is able to sleep through the night in there. Really hopeful. More sleep for all of us would be great.

His love of animals is still very strong. He really enjoys going up to the stables with me after gymnastics on Saturdays. He loves all the dogs that hang around Uncle Kelvin and Auntie Debbie’s house (and they all love him with only one exception) and we always have to go say hi to Liam and Aslan whenever we are out there. It’s really evident he misses our kitties, too. He gets so excited whenever he sees any kitties and cannot understand why Auntie  Debbie’s Binks is always hiding. LOL!

On that front, as I mentioned, we finally felt ready to add new kitty babies to our family and tomorrow we will be picking them up! We got them from a fabulous organization called Resqucats. The place is absolutely amazing and the woman who runs it and all her volunteers are lovely. We’ll be bringing home two little tortie girls – we wanted two kitties and preferably siblings who got along so they could keep each other company – and they’ll be renamed from their current Violet and Lapis to Sazerac and Bordeaux.

OK, pics then bed.

Blessings,

Janice

One of the last pics with our kitty girl Ebony

Contemplating world domination with Dad

Alexei loved the butterflies from daycare so much that one of them came home with us

Alexei and Sterling (Auntie Lynn and Uncle Wolf's cat)

Alexei and "Skullcrusher" Jo - my trainer is going to use this pic to shame big strapping men who say they are afraid of horses.

Yes, he is an SCA child. Why do you ask?

Sporting the Orange and sitting in his great-grandfather's nearly 100 year old rocking chair

Playing in the new crib. Yay!

Sleeping in the new crib. Double-yay!

Bordeaux

Sazerac