Hello, boys —
As promised in the post just below, here is your first shared monthly report post. I hope you will be good sharers, because there’s going to be a lot of that for the next several years. Currently you are sharing a bedroom, an arrangement which works out a good deal better than we had dared hope. Though both of you have your age-appropriate squalling fits, you each seem immune to being woken or disturbed by the other’s. A nice little bit of symbiosis.
In fact, if anything, the cloying togetherness threatens to be a problem: Adam’s fits more and more these days are related to our jackbooted attempts to limit his kissing of Alek, something he generally wants to do only right as Alek is falling asleep.
So far, just a month into life, Aleksander seems to be a highly complacent baby. We try to recall Adam at this age, but all we can do is shudder. Alek, on the other hand, takes everything in stride and just rolls his eyes as his brother pitches a hissy about Little Bo Peep or something. Other than occluded gas, there doesn’t seem to be much that upsets the new one. Even washing is usually an entirely silent affair.
Once the initial thrill of having yet another baby around wears off, there’s not a whole lot to say. The low-maintenance thing is great for sleeping and general lack of stress, but it doesn’t have the traffic-generating draw that nightmare baby stories boast. With Adam, it took months before he learned to sleep. His first smile cracked his face at the three-month mark. Alek has done little else besides smile and sleep, and frequently shows off by doing both simultaneously. Basically, he starts off cute, finishes the same way. Nothing to see here, folks. Move along.
Adam’s last month, on the other hand, has been full of major landmarks. He has started to really help out in the kitchen, for one thing, and frequently demands his own cutting board and special knife.
Adam also got his first “trike” this month. Actually a tiny bike with training wheels, because if you promise a new vehicle to a two-year-old, you don’t come home empty-handed even if you do live in the live most trike-bereft city on earth. So Adam got his first-ever vehicle upgrade due to lack of availability.
Now for a development so major it requires no discussion:
Adam’s language hit critical mass this month, too, and has exploded. Some of the stuff he comes up with astonishes and entertains us, and if it also occasionally mortifies us, we just tell ourselves he’s spending an inordinate amount of time speaking with frustration and vehemence about frogs. Whole strings of words are now emerging joined more or less coherently together, and there are signs that he’s on the verge of discovering the function of the verb. He’s finding that language is a powerful tool for relocating people from furniture to floor, or even from one room to another. Typical:
Papa…peas…come…sikh…HEAH
Prepositions and articles still baffle him, which is interesting because his Polish and Slovene already show pretty advanced syntax (declension, e.g.), though he seems to favor English. He has learned to count to five reliably in English and Polish, and a new favorite game is to demand free jumps, in which he clambers and hacks his way to the highest point of his father and hurls himself off. Three times. In just the four days I was away last week I noticed significant growth in his speaking: when I left, he was obsessed with building Lego die-suss; by the time I returned, he was all about dyna-sauce. Free syllables, even.
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His haircutting skills still need a little work, though.
Jeżyk getting ready to go out
11 Responses
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February 19th, 2007 at 14.47 CET+2.00
Wooooooooo! Dyna-sauce. Awesome.*
Has anyone mentioned how disgustingly adorable your children are?
Excellent job on the sweater, Magda.
*Possible evidence that Adam is more articulate than me.
February 19th, 2007 at 20.53 CET+2.00
Yes, cute babies who eat and sleep and smile are so BORING, aren’t they? And when siblings get on well with one another? Yawn!
You do realise how lucky you are, I assume…
February 19th, 2007 at 21.57 CET+2.00
Maybe there will be some pyromania next month.
February 20th, 2007 at 16.48 CET+2.00
Seems you’ve cornered the market on cheeks. Facial cheeks, I mean.
February 20th, 2007 at 18.51 CET+2.00
LOVE the special knife. Well done in forming a low-maintenance baby. I am requesting the same for our second.
February 21st, 2007 at 15.27 CET+2.00
Not only facial cheeks, it turns out.
Dude, don’t even mention no pyromania. Unless you’re talking about the Leppard.
I’ve seem him eviscerate an overripe pear with that special knife, which helps keep the illusion viable.
To anyone hoping for a low-maintenance second baby, I wish you all the luck in the world. It’s a wonderful thing. Or was, until mentioning it drove Jeżyk into the arms of painful gassiness.
February 21st, 2007 at 20.10 CET+2.00
Dude: No serenade. No fire brigade. Just Pyromania.
February 22nd, 2007 at 19.25 CET+2.00
We had the low-maintenance first baby…which…doesn’t bode well for the second time around?
You really need to stop letting that Alek sleep so much. All we’re getting is pictures of sleeping and bathing. This is no fun. But I do love the lobster pajamas (on Adam).
I was thinking of you two last night as I was planning my garden and all the things I’m going to pickle. Does Adam love pickles? So does. Love to all four of you.
February 23rd, 2007 at 21.01 CET+2.00
i am overwhelmed by the cuteness. words fail me.
February 26th, 2007 at 03.07 CET+2.00
Oooooooooooooooh what a gorgeous baby. Our boy Jacob was a low-maintenance baby. Slept, ate, slept etc for a year. Actually had to wake HIM in the middle of the night for feeds or my milk would have dried up. Three days before he turned one he started walking and we haven’t stopped running since. He runs and hurls himself at random from high points and we spend our days running after him, always just one step too many behind. Its the quiet ones you have to watch out for………….
February 4th, 2008 at 07.19 CET+2.00
sorry I am commenting on a year-old entry.
it was just like that with my little sister and baby brother - my sister was a “fireball” from the time she was born. due to complications she took almost three days to be born, and then everyone in the house spent the next year or so with very little sleep due to her amazing capacity to scream very loudly for long periods of time, usually just when i’d fallen asleep or an hour before i had to get up. she’s in kindergarten now but still the loudest one in the house.
my baby brother on the other hand had a much easier and faster birth, and although he did cry at night it wasn’t quite as loud or as frequent. in waking life he was quiet, complacent and able to entertain himself - unlike my sister who threw random tantrums that i suspect were products of boredom.
of course i love them both, and now that they’re a little older they play very cutely together - although during play my brother’s most frequently uttered phrase is probably “stop it, Een!” (he calls his sister Een, which is sort of the first sound of her name stretched into two E’s, then the rest of the sounds left out, but finishing up with the proper N sound. me, he calls Wubrey (although you don’t actually say the U in my name… but he must have sensed it was there).
p.s.
Adam looks like a cherub in that potty-training pic!
p.p.s
sorry for the long comment on an old entry!