Cookies and Crayons

It’s hard to believe the holidays are over. We have a bunch of posts to catch up on to share how it went. Hopefully, we’ll get those out over the next few days. We’re making an effort to Blog a bit more often this year.

After a break for Christmas, we got back into the swing of toddler activities today. We’ve switched to a program for older children (2-5) that is a bit of an adjustment for both of us.

We started with “math” which, for Dougie, is just counting. We had 10 cups each marked with a number. We counted out the correct number of balls for each up and then we counted them again as he put them in the cup. He had a great time and got very excited as we finished each cup but tired of the activity when we got to seven.

Putting the balls in the cup

Cheering for himself

We talked for a while about the color blue and looked at blue things. Then Dougie did a matching exercise. For some reason, this always surprises me that he does well at it but he has become quite adept at matching.

Finally, it was time for art. Dougie loves making “art.” Our project today was to use a balloon to make overlapping circles that would look like a snowman.

As you can see, Dougie didn’t quite get the concept. He had fun anyway though and when he was finished we added some sparkles to make it look like snow and hung it on the wall.

All in all, a good start to our new program.

We had Dougie’s 2 year check-up today. He’s still growing and remains on his curve.

Stats:

• * Weight – 24.6lbs (11%)
• * Height – 34″ (40%)
• * Head – 19.3″ (56%)

Dougie is doing really well. He was developmentally on target for everything except communication (which wasn’t a surprise to us). The doctor reiterated that he thought it was important to have Dougie in speech therapy at this point. Apparently, he should have about 50 words by age two. Dougie only has 15 and doesn’t pronounce some of them properly (not normal toddler mispronunciation but a lip position issue). We’ve been lucky enough to do speech therapy with his old feeding therapist so we all know each other well. Of course, Dougie is convinced that he should be eating and keeps getting into the high chair.

Our little guy turned two today. We had a great day! I have pictures but we’ll post those tomorrow. I wanted to share one of the ones from his birthday photo session.

We took Dougie down to get his picture with Santa today. Scott wanted to join us this year and he took the day off for Dougie’s birthday so it seemed like the perfect day.

Dougie didn’t think so. The picture is better than last year (last year’s Santa experience) but not by much.

Maybe next year…

It has been a long 10 months. A very long 10 months! We have officially graduated from feeding therapy. Dougie is in no way an “excellent” eater but he qualifies as normal toddler “picky” which was enough. He still needs a lot of encouragement to eat anything other than the foods he really likes and the list of foods he enjoys is pretty short but we’re continuing to work with him.

We had soccer again today. Dougie is quite mixed on the entire thing. At times, he is having the time of his life and other times he doesn’t seem to want to participate. It’s quite different for him though and we think he’s just adjusting.

We did manage to get the good camera out today to get some better pictures.

Scoring a goal on Daddy

Throw In (okay, not really but it looks like one)

Kicking down the field

Knocking down cones(this isn’t how it was supposed to be done but the coach told us to just let him do his thing for a few classes)

He eventually got what he was supposed to do with the cones

Running around the field

Watching the hoops

Today, we did our first toddler art project. I’ve been looking forward to Dougie making art pieces for a while now. In keeping with our snow theme, we made a snow covered tree.

Dougie started by applying the paint with his fingers. He didn’t really like the feeling of the paint on his fingers though.

Then he moved on to applying the stickers. Dougie could have done this a lot longer but we ran out of stickers.

Finally, Dougie discovered the paintbrush I had given him early. He decided to try his hand at painting again.

Painting with a brush is fun!

I finally made Dougie stop when he started eating the paint (thank goodness for non-toxic). His final masterpiece:

Dougie decided to play with his snowballs more while I cut out his tree.

Today was a lot more successful. The morning seems to be a much better time to get Dougie into his activities.

Dougie doesn’t get a lot of one-on-one time with the dogs. We’re still a bit concerned that they’ll knock him over. We had Maggie in the other day though and decided to let her have some playtime with Dougie. It really is great how well they get along.

This week’s focus is snow so all our activities are snow based. As you can imagine, being in Texas adds some complexity to it all but we’re making do as we can.

We threw snowballs into a basket

Then we played with a snowman felt toy (that mummy made)

We also talked about snow and looked at pictures of snow though Dougie wasn’t that into that part.

Tomorrow is art day, hopefully, we’ll have some cute pictures to show from that.

Santa sent Dougie a message:

Message from Santa