So... Will's half birthday is upon us. He is 2 and a HALF now! I can't believe that. This has been a whirlwind 2 and a half years. Here's a bit of an update on our toddler...
At 2 and a half, Will...
... is getting taller and taller. He has started to grow a lot like his Sissy did and shoot up in height after about 2. He has always been tall-ish but now he is taking off. We don't have a formal height or weight on him yet because his half birthday happens to fall on Good Friday and our pediatrician is closed so we have to wait until next week to get formal info. We have tried measuring him a few times and usually get right around 37.25 inches depending on how cooperative he wants to be. If that is correct then we estimate him at about 82nd percentile. Ironically, if it is correct, he will be the same height Kenzie was at this age. They matched up in height at 2-years-old as well. According to our marks on the wall, he has grown about 5 inches in the last year. That is crazy! As for weight, he is not super heavy. He has been lengthening but not adding a ton of weight. He is currently about 29 pounds (about 40th percentile). Lately I have been having a lot of people ask me if he is 3. I guess he just looks big. I'm so used to looking at him, that I don't see it as much. They are always a bit surprised when I say he is 2 (and I have been adding the half lately).
... is firmly planted in at least 3t to 4t shirts. He even has a few xs or size 4 (not toddler) depending on the brand as some definitely run smaller than others (I'm looking at you Old Navy!). In shorts he can wear a 2t to 3t. Boy's shorts are made pretty long so he can get away with a 2t a lot of the time which is good because even those are sometimes too big in his waist. He wears a 3t for pants most of the time as he has started to gain length in his legs. The issue is that he is thin so we have to have pants with adjustable waists or that have a bit of extra length to allow us to fold over the waist once. I think all of his 2t pants have officially been cycled out. Unlike his sister who wears leggings that should be long pants as capris for a while, we move his pants out when they get too short. He wears a size 8 shoe with a bit of growing room. If he ends up anything like his sister (and his growth has started to follow a similar course as hers at this point) then he will likely start to slow in the foot growth area which is actually nice because it means less shoe buying for us. I won't complain.
... can EAT. He likes his food. Sometimes we find that he eats everything in the house and sometimes he eats just the minimal amount of food so I guess it all evens out. More often than not, you will find him eating or at least asking about eating. Even if he doesn't plan to eat whatever he asks for, he continues to ask. He is constantly concerned with where his next meal is coming from and when. He will say, "My tummy hurts" when he is hungry. He must just burn calories at a crazy rate because he doesn't put on a ton of weight. We spend at least 90% of our day with him asking for some sort of food and me telling him that it is almost time for the next meal anyway or that I can't give him a snack right now because we have errands to run or that he just needs to wait 5 minutes and let the rest of his food settle... it's ridiculous. He wakes up in the morning and most of the time the first thing he says to me is, "Mommy, I'm ready to eat." like I didn't know. Typically he drinks some milk (not a full cup as he isn't a milk loving kid like Kenzie) when he wakes up and for breakfast he usually has yogurt and fruit. Then he will ask for either a pancake or two or cheerios or any other cereal we have around. He often asks for refills on fruit too. He prefers applesauce pouches but is good with just about any fruit. For lunch his favorite is peanut butter sandwiches. He typically eats 1-2 but has asked for (and eaten) up to 3. He doesn't eat the crust right now so he isn't technically eating a "full" sandwich. He also has more fruit at lunch and usually will finish his morning milk. Then when we pick up Sissy from school he usually wants to take fruit gummies and goldfish or cheez-its in the car. He likes an afternoon snack and usually has an applesauce pouch or another type of fruit. He also likes bananas. For dinner, we give him what we eat and he usually eats some of it but due to his current pickiness, not all of it. He also has fruit again. He likes to eat off my plate still and can polish off an entire salad if I feed it to him from my bowl. We are having some issues lately with him taking snack like food out of the pantry and going to town until we catch him snacking. He has done it a few times but I think I finally have him convinced that is off limits.
... is crazy verbal. We used to think that he would be our quiet one because Kenzie talks so much but we were wrong. He can compete with his sister any day of the week. One thing we noticed though is that he is a bit quieter when she is around. Once she is out of the picture though... he never stops talking. He talks to himself, to us, to random people if they will listen. It's very much like Kenzie. It's never quiet in this house. We have also noticed that his language is amazing. He has such a grasp on language skills and has a pretty big vocabulary (which we attribute a lot to listening to his sister talk nonstop). However, while his language is amazing, his speech is still pretty typical for a 2 year old so he has a lot of times that he can be difficult to understand if you don't listen to him frequently. I hear him talk all day long and still have issues sometimes when he gets going and is speaking fast. Once you figure out what he is saying though, it's apparent that he has quite the language skills. We have pretty much determined at this point that at his current age, his language is better than Kenzie's was but his speech is not as clear.
.... love love loves being outside. This has always sort of been his thing but as he gets older, he seems to love it more. If that is even possible. He has started taking to more "sport" type things too. He loves to use his teeball and bat. He loves to run. He is also a "typical boy" and likes to play in the dirt with his trucks or dig. He has started using the balance bike some but isn't super into it yet. He does love his 4 wheeler and has gotten really good at steering it. Thankfully. I was getting tired of removing him from the grass where it would often get stuck. He also knows now that he can remove it from a position that it is stuck in by getting off and pulling it out so that is helpful. He also loves the big wheel which he refers to as his "motorcycle". His legs are almost long enough to pedal but he still likes to use his feet to push it along. While on the subject of sports since it can be related to a point... he is also still favoring his left hand. If we hand him a bat, he automatically bats left. If we hand him a ball, about 80% of the time, he switches it to his left hand to throw it. He also eats with his left about 99% of the time and when he is using a spoon and when he is eating something such as yogurt, he spills less when he uses his left hand.
... loves anything with wheels and a motor. The kids is truck obsessed. The bigger, the better. He gets super excited about the school buses, garbage trucks, and delivery trucks he sees in the neighborhood. He is also obsessed with trains. He thinks they are the coolest things ever. He can spend all day looking at or playing with train sets. We read a lot of books about vehicles and traveling on them. Those are usually his favorites. His favorite book right now is either "Truck Driver Tom", any of the "Little Blue Truck" books, or "Goodnight Train". See the theme?
... has quite the imagination for a 2 and a half year old. We think that is mostly because he has been his sister's playmate for two plus years now and she has imagination for days. He loves playing with her. So, we found that his imagination became more developed faster than we expected. He loves to pretend like he is running a restaurant. That is probably one of his favorites. He likes to put all his car tracks together and make a city then make us drive cars around and be a part of that city. We will sometimes find him playing with Kenzie's doll house and talking to himself playing with the dolls she has in there. He likes using playdoh to make things (usually cars or some sort of food) and have us play with him. He also loves tea parties and picnics and will often set one up for us and make us participate. He treats Kenzie's baby dolls like real babies and will hug and kiss them and try to put them to bed. I saw him "reading" a book to one of them the other day.
... is hilarious. He knows it too. He just does funny things. All the time. He is a lot like his Daddy and sister and seems to require an audience. If he knows that something makes you laugh, he does it over and over again.
... has a temper. While he is one of the sweetest little guys I know, he also has quite the temper when he gets upset. When Will decides he doesn't want to do something... he doesn't want to do it. We call it the "chair effect". One time we handed him his chair at the beach and he threw it in anger. He calmed a bit, asked for it back, said he was going to sit in it, we gave it to him and repeat. Sometimes when he gets angry, he asks for something just to chuck it across a room. We have taken to ignoring most outbursts. We walk away and don't play into it. I have started to tell him that he is in "time out" when he starts the angry crying or fit throwing and we will not interact until he calms down. We don't usually remove him and put him in isolation though because we learned that just ignoring him seems more beneficial for us. He fights us if we put him against a wall or something and his outbursts last longer. I think it's because all he is looking for is interaction anyway and we play into him when we try to contain him. If we let it run its course, he calms faster. (Kenzie was a bit different and would sit in time out without too much arguing. All she needed was to removed from a situation and she usually calmed so this was a learning experience.) This lets time out work even when we are in the car or out in public. Thankfully, he doesn't do this in public often. He did have a really bad morning the other day and screamed for about 10 minutes in Target. I ignored it (much to the chagrin of some of my fellow shoppers, I think) and he calmed. He was fine until we went to Winn Dixie when something else set him off and we repeated the scenario from Target. Again, he calmed after a few minutes and was fine after that. He sometimes gets upset in restaurants for random reasons and we have removed him from a few to let him calm down. Not sure why restaurants seem to throw him off. We think he just gets hangry and then gets upset that food is being brought to other people and not him.
... is super independent. He does not like to ride in a stroller or shopping cart when we are out unless he has to. We make him ride in his stroller at Disney or on long walks.At this point, he usually walks when we are out and about. That's totally fine except if I end up with both kids alone somewhere and they are in an excited state. Then it's sort of like herding cats. If he is alone with me though, he is usually really good. Sometimes I still make him ride in Publix on our longer shopping trips but since it is usually just him and me for that, he is often okay walking. He knows his own limits and will ask to ride in a cart or a stroller often though when he gets tired or bored or if he wants cuddles since he likes to give hugs while riding in a shopping cart. If he gets tired or needs love and we don't have something for him to ride in, he will say "Up, please" and ask for us to carry him. Thankfully he isn't crazy heavy yet so we can sometimes carry him for a bit if we want/need to.
...is potty trained. Mostly. Haha! He has that whole pee in the potty thing down and we are to the point that he tells us about 99% of the time that he needs to go instead of us asking first or just needing to take him frequently without asking. We use pull-ups at nap, night, and if we are out at an all day type place (like Disney). We don't use them if we are doing something that is just a few hours like when we went strawberry picking or if we go to a park for a few hours. We just take him a lot while we are there and keep our handy portable potty in the car. We also use them on longer car rides. Anything over about an hour usually qualifies. We rarely have any "accidents" in pull-ups when we are out for our full day things. His pull up is usually dry after a day at Disney unless we end up needing to wait in a line or something for a really long time. If he has accidents most of the time now, it is usually late in the day when he is more tired and has been drinking more and a lot of the time, he tells us right before it happens as if he knows it is coming but can't wait any longer. Poop on the other hand is a whole different ball game. The pediatrician has assured me that it's normal that poop takes a lot longer to train, especially in boys for some reason. We are still working on it. We can sometimes catch him based on his demeanor but not always.
....is particular. This is totally a trait that he got from me. He likes things a certain way. However, it's like he wants to test us. He will tell us he wants something done one way and then change his mind. If we try to change how we are doing it though, he freaks out and goes back to wanting it the original way. For instance, he likes his fruit to be in bowls the majority of the time. He will tell us yes to a bowl. Then, once we are about to put it in a bowl, he says he wants it on the plate he already has. Then when we got to put it on the plate, he freaks out and goes back to the bowl. He is just weird. The difference in him and me though is that we can usually convince him to change his mind on things he wants done in a specific way if necessary.
...loves animals. Especially fish. He could stare at a fish tank all day. The bigger the fish, the better. He loves dogs and cats (aka meows). He also likes bugs. He loves when ladybugs land on someone or he can get his hands on a rolly poly to try to get it to roll up. Butterflies are always a hit, too. He tries to chase them around and catch them but hasn't been successful yet. I had to catch him the other day before he tried to pet a fuzzy caterpillar. We had to have a discussion about how not all bugs are as friendly as rolly polies or ladybugs.
... is still an awesome sleeper which is totally making up still for that first year of his life. He is still in his crib and I am perfectly fine leaving him there for at least another 6 months if not longer. He sleeps 11-12 hours at night. He goes to be around 7:30 most nights though he is perfectly fine staying up longer. When he is tired... he just sleeps. He doesn't let us stop him. We are to the point, as well, that he doesn't get all crazy if he is overtired. He might hit a second wind and get overexcited but he doesn't have breakdowns. He still naps once a day for 1-3 hours. It's a huge range of time but we never know what we might get. We wake him up by 4 if he is still napping so that bedtime isn't pushed back. He can also sleep for 10 minutes as a nap and be perfectly fine the remainder of the day. He can also sleep anywhere, anytime, and through anything. Loud noises don't bother him unless he is almost awake anyway or switching sleep cycles and the noise happens to catch his attention. I can still do things like vacuum while he sleeps and he is fine. I think a lot of that is because he has always had Kenzie right outside his room carrying on while he naps so he is used to it.
... has a few favorite phrases that he says all. the. time. One is "I don't know." That cracks me up. If you ask him any sort of question and he is not entirely 100% sure of the answer, his automatic response is "I don't know." with this adorable shoulder shrug and his hands going up in the air at his sides. He also loves to ask, "Mommy, Daddy, Sissy, etc... Where are you?" It took us a while to figure out that he not only sometimes means where are you but it is also synonymous with "What are you doing?" He can be looking right at you and ask the question but really he wants to know what you are up to at the moment. He has started to ask "What are you doing?" more often but he still sometimes uses "where". We have also started to hit some of the "why" stage. He doesn't ask it too often as we often end up giving explanations of things without him needing to ask. And if he doesn't ask... Kenzie does so he is still getting answers. Unlike his sister, he is also more likely to just take what we say at face value and go along with it so he doesn't question us as much. He also does this adorable finger point thing frequently when he tells you something. He is very matter of fact about a lot of things and the finger seems to stress that this is his answer or his thought and that is that.
... can count to about 14 or 15 now depending on his mood and backwards from 5 (and sometimes 10 if someone is counting with him). He finally has one-to-one correspondence for at least 5. Sometimes I think he has more but he isn't consistent with that yet. He counted stairs as he was climbing them the other day and went all the way to 12 with it so sometimes it seems like he gets it but sometimes he doesn't. He also knows a few colors such as blue, red, white, yellow, and sometimes green fairly consistently. He can sing his ABC's (if you can get him to pay attention long enough). He also can hear and remember nursery rhyme songs fairly easily even if he hasn't heard them before. He has a few favorites though such as Wheels on the Bus, It's Raining It's Pouring, Twinkle Twinkle, and Itsy Bitsy Spider. He knows the shapes circle and square fairly consistently. We will start working on some letter and number recognition more frequently over the summer. It's hard to determine where he should be sometimes because next year he will be in the 2-year-old class at school but will turn 3 about a month and a half after school starts so I would like to see if he is ready for some recognition skills but I don't want to push him. We will work at his pace.
... is so super sweet. He loves to blow kisses to people (and sometimes random things). He loves to give kisses and hugs and continues to be a better snuggler than his sister ever thought of being. He is still a Momma's Boy but is definitely getting super into Daddy lately. He thinks Daddy is so cool. He starts every day by asking (after he asks about food) about Daddy.
... loves to help. He is a great cleaner. He loves to help us outside when we are working on something like when we have to bag leaves. We are working on getting him ready to have more serious "chores" like Kenzie. He is learning to clear his plate after all meals and clean up his room with less help. He likes to help Kenzie feed Jack if given the opportunity. He is actually a great cleaner most of the time and is willing to help you without needing to ask over and over again.
... loves baths. I think it might be one of his favorite parts of the day. He doesn't necessarily care to be washed (and definitely doesn't like having his hair washed too often) but he loves baths themselves. We are excited to get back to the pool and beach more often this year to see how he does (he will start swimming lessons again in June) because it is obvious he remains a little water baby. When we went to the beach a couple of weeks ago, he spent about minute unsure and then was off. Before we knew it, he was playing in the (69 degree) water and splashing all around like it was nothing. He was wading through the water to the sandbar and digging in the sand trying to make sandcastles and holes to put water in. Side note: He is also crazy ticklish. Baths are actually a bit difficult. He is fine on his arms and legs as well as his back but when we have to was his tummy... he loses it. He collapses in giggles and squirms all around shrieking about it tickling. I also have some trouble removing his socks sometimes because his feet are ticklish.
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... is super go with the flow. He is so easy compared to some other child I know (I mean Kenzie for anyone that didn't get that). He continues to like having some routine but he will go around with us whenever and wherever and be fine. He has started asking to go home sometimes when he is bored with what we are doing or just doesn't feel like doing it but he is easily swayed into doing what we are doing and forgets about going home.
Will has been such a blessing for our family. He has continued to teach me to go with the flow more. He has taught me that little boys love their mommies and can be such sweet little guys. Raising a boy is very different than a girl but he lets us give it a whirl. He came into our family and helped us feel complete. We love him to the moon and back. Can't wait to see what his next 6 months brings.
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