Wiping Sticky Hands: September 17, 2013

Not much has happened in the past week, except, oh, that OUR LITTLE BABY TURNED ONE!!!! Our little Luke James, our mighty warrior. I would love to write on and on about him...but to celebrate his birthday (belatedly), I am going to save the words and move on quickly so I can soon enjoy something I did NOT have exactly a year ago: sleep.

We gave him his presents in the morning, but his party (cake, grandparents) will be this coming weekend. We gave him a blinky-blinky-noisy pull toy, and a set of his own cars to play with. I was actually surprised that he was more into the cars; he usually goes after the blinky toys.

That afternoon we went to the beach. Originally I did this because it was "B" week and Levi had been asking quite a bit to go back to the beach to see the boats. I thought, well, isn't that convenient. The BEACH to see BOATS and BIG RED! Then I invited Nana to come with us, and it was a fun way to spend Luke's birthday too.

How these boys are different can be summed up by their reactions to the seagulls that were scoping our lunch. Levi: very cautious, then very alarmed that the seagulls might want to eat his lunch. Quickly convinced that the seagulls were going to come and take his lunch rightnow. Whimpering a lot about the seagulls daring to take his lunch. Nana did a great job talking him down from his very concerned state.

Luke: Forget lunch, and who cares if anyone steals it. He jerks, arches, twists, and slides off my lap, and takes off as fast as he can so he can look at one of the seagulls lingering on a nearby picnic table. If that bird had walked up to him, Luke would have swan-dove on it.

...and who needs to eat lunch when you're sitting on a bunch of sand anyway??

Levi did get his brave back on and wanted to explore the little dune between the beach and the channel. It was way, way too perfect of a day for it.

We did celebrate Lukie's birthday that night with brownies and ice cream. :) Our "party" this year will be pretty low-key. I realized during Levi's first birthday party that first birthday parties are pretty unsuccessful from the baby's point of view. Levi, who didn't have a lick of social anxiety, was overwhelmed and slept through half of his party. Luke has had ~~a little more~~ a lot more stranger danger than Levi ever did (the first time ELI came over, Luke cried and looked at him like, Do you even have a SOUL?! I was like, Luke, HE'S FOUR). So ya, scrap the big party for this one.

"C" week this week - and I didn't plan a lick. Both boys came down with colds last week, I worked (ish, got downstaffed) over the weekend...but, you know, I don't have to be planny-planny all the time. SOOOO....I busted out some word puzzles for Levi and had them sitting out on Monday morning. Just figured a fun little challenge would be up his alley while I made breakfast. I was right. :) He's never been interested in these puzzles, but this time he said, "Can I play with these?" I had put the letters in the puzzles already, but he took them all out and placed them back in himself. This morning I set out different puzzles and had the letters all in a pile next to them, and he placed them all himself again.

We're listening to "Who made you? God made me" this week. A very catchy tune about Genesis 1:27.

Today we did creative writing. I printed off a picture I took of a tree at the park nearby. I figured it would be perfect for this type of activity - it had a little squirrel hole in the bottom and another one way up the trunk. I showed him the picture and asked, "Who lives in this tree?" and a few other prompting questions, and in true Levi style, he wove his tale about a donut-baking skunk who is afraid of the loud garbage truck who will go to Tip Toes to get a construction jacket when he goes potty on the potty, and who of course loves suckers.