Portia and Her Pup

It's 9pm and Portia is as fit as a fiddle and Kiwi is passed out. Must have been a good day at the lake! Portia needs shorter naps.

Smile, Wiley!

No!

Graydon's Hieroglyphs

Graydon and Jessy baked Santa some Nutella cookies before Christmas and then put out the tin with the obligatory glass of milk - and a note to make sure Santa knew the cookies were for him. Good thing Santa can read Graydon's writing!

Wiley's Christmas Experience

For his "Christmas experience", Tante Nise took Wiley to listen to live music at a local cafe.  After smearing a chocolate cupcake all over his face, he danced until the band went home...

Our Big Monkey

For weeks, Graydon was bugging us to let him show us how good he had gotten on the monkey bars at school. Finally, we got around to a demo. Mami and Daddy were impressed with our Big Monkey!

Wiley Portrait

This is one of Mami's favorite photos of Wiley.

A good sign...

So far, Portia's favorite toys include blocks, the ADAC helicopter, a singing tractor, and various matchbox cars and trucks. Yes!!

Christmas Impressions

Maniacal goose carving (it turned out delicious!!), trying (and failing) to convince Wiley to join us for a family portrait in front of the tree, and some fun with gifts - sounds like a great Christmas Day to me!

A beautiful day

For playing at Dripping Springs! It is unseasonably warm (even for Texas) so we went out to Dripping Springs for some work/play time. Here is Nana with her two boys while the rest of us flagged road and fence outlines.

Jingle Bells

Swabian finger food

Most kids around here start out on Cheerios. And Portia has done all sorts of things with Cheerios, almost all of them resulting in feeding Kiwi. But Spätzle, well, *those* are worth figuring out how to put in your mouth!

Sometimes we don't even ask...

Teeth!

Last night at about 3 am, I figured out why Portia had been sleeping poorly the last couple of weeks: There was a tooth! I was a little more thorough in my investigation this morning and discovered that BOTH bottom center teeth had broken through sometime in the night. It didn't change how tired I am this morning, but I do feel a little more sympathy for my littlest one today. She was much happier after we had given her a little Tylenol.

The end of an era

Well, this weekend, I packed up two boxes of 0-6 months size baby clothes. While of course quite the relief, there is some sadness to the realization that we will never have such a little one again.

More Wiley Observations

Today, we went to a friend's birthday party. 

While Graydon was in the thick of things (and one of the, if not the most, effective piñata destroyers - not to mention the lone boy dancing in the "freeze dance" game with about a dozen girls)...

...Wiley decided he would be better served eating a second, leftover, cupcake than joining the fray in pursuit of piñata candy. 

Later, he wandered off on his own to explore the nice "backwoods" in the park. We would have had another "where's Wiley" panic moment if not for one of the grandmothers pointing out that he was on his way... Good thing he was easy to spot in his bright red sweater. I followed him through the brush for at least 2-3 minutes (and several hundred meters) before he turned around to check where he was and spotted me. I got a quick, reassured smile and on he went. 

Then he showed me the way back to the party.

Differences

"Differences." That is what Graydon, then about the age Wiley is now, wanted to call Wiley when he was born. We laughed at the time, but in hindsight, it was prescient.

Despite very similar appearances, Graydon and Wiley are different in almost every way. Graydon is talkative, loud, active, very in-your-face (oh, the attitude sometimes...!) and never wants to be alone. Wiley is quiet (except for the semi-routine terrible-twos-tantrums we are currently experiencing), has only just begun to talk at all, is fiercely independent (see the part about tantrums), and is perfectly happy on his own most of the time.

We've known for a while that Graydon has quite a bit going on in his head and is ahead of the curve in both language and math. For example, he is keen to tackle puzzles and - but for his inability to be alone - would be perfectly capable of finishing a 500-piece adult puzzle without help. And at Wiley's age, when he was riding his stride bike, Graydon would exclaim upon falling over, in perfectly enunciated adult-style English: "That is why I wear a helmet!" and carry on.

Wiley on the other hand has been an enigma to us. He has been delayed on nearly all of his developmental milestones, both gross motor (walking) and verbal. But recently, we have had some pretty amazing glimpses into his little mind. For example, we have discovered that at the ripe old age of 2 1/2, he has taught himself to recognize nearly all of the letters in the alphabet. We think this came mainly from playing quietly with a favorite leap frog tablet, potentially after Gramps first taught him to spell his name several months ago. Our first "aha" moment on that front came during an evaluation session at a speech therapist's office, which we visited a few weeks ago precisely because Wiley is somewhat behind on language development. During the assessment, the therapist showed Wiley pictures in a book and asked him what they were. "Dog", "cat", etc. Then they came to a picture of a stack of those typical building blocks with the little letters on them. The therapist asked him what that was. And, in his little, hard-to-understand voice, instead of saying "blocks," Wiley just read the four letters on those blocks to her.  After we got home, we started quizzing him on the letters and discovered that he knew nearly all of them! He also knows his numbers from 1-10 and counts to twenty (and beyond, if you allow for gaps in the number sequence). All of this makes us wonder what else he knows but hasn't bothered to tell us...

Another great big brother moment

Here we are waiting around at DPS while Jessy is getting her Texas driver license. I asked Wiley to show Portia all the things in his book, so here they are!

Big Brother Wiley

Portia was fussing as we were putting up Christmas lights on our front yard, so Wiley sat down behind her, gave her a if snuggle, and a kiss.

Babies for Bike Lanes

We all rode in a family bike ride in support of the bike lanes in our neighborhood (the city is at risk of caving to a handful of residents with outsized political clout who want parking lanes instead). Neal and Graydon even made the evening news on three channels! Here are some photos from the event.

Less than Three Weeks to Go...

And we're starting to get into the spirit.