Football=Multiplication

So these days, Carter is doing legos, Olivia is playing in her exersacuer, Nolan is making messes, and Tyler is playing football. He plays these football games all by himself. Its usually Air Force verse someone, Notre Dame verse someone and now more recently the Broncos verse somewhere.  (A side note - he LOVES Tim Tebow and we had to go buy him a Tim Tebow shirt. Lets just say they day he found out they lost in the playoffs and the seasons was over he was not happy). He plays all the different positions and plays both teams. He keeps the score in his head. Many times throughout the day he comes and makes sure his addition is right. I hear "mom 28 plus 7 is 35 right?". The teams also seem to get a a lot of safety and field goals. The thing I love most about this though, is you can ask him what the score would be if a team made three touchdowns and three extra points and he knows its 21 points without even thinking about it. If he tells you the end of the game the score is 52-24 he will tell you exactly how each team got those points, and it almost always adds up correctly.  I love watching his little mind at work.

Messes

We have a lot of messes around our house - here is a little video of why that may be.

Nolan's Speech

Nolan finally got re-evaluated for his speech. I was pretty sure he would qualify this time as technically he qualified last time and this time the referral was coming from our doctor. The ladies who did the evaluation (including our lovely friend Marj) this time were different than the first time and they were confused as of why they didn't let him have services after the first evaluation. They asked me what, if anything, had changed since his first one.  Well he now would try to make the "ma" sounds, but he wouldn't direct it at me, he would hold his hands up more often when he wanted to be picked up, and he started waving bye bye. So really not much. They qualified him right away and said he was at about a 9 month developmental level. He also got a hearing test done showing that was fine. We have had two sessions so far with his therapist, Julie. She thinks that its a muscle problem - that he can't make his mouth imitate correctly to make the sounds come out. So we are working on him imitating other things first - like tapping his head, clapping, pointing out body parts etc. He seems to be doing ok with this, but the more fine motor you get (pointing at body parts) they harder it is for him. He has started saying "uh oh" when something falls on the ground and I think he is trying to say "bye" to Tyler everyday when we drop him off. He waves at him and make an "i" sound anyway. We are also working on getting him to sign more. Right now we are concentrating on "eat" and "up" so that he will do those consistently. So far if I say eat or sign it he will do it, but he won't sign it to tell me he wants to eat. But at least we are getting somewhere. The other fascinating thing out of all of this, for me anyway, is that his receptive language, or what he understands, is actually above where he should be. We can pretty much tell him anything and he gets what we are saying, from go put your milk in the fridge, to where are your shoes, to when somewhere says they are going to leave he goes and gets them their coat.  He also has his own way of telling us what he wants. If he wants food he goes to the cabinet and points at the food. He has learned to shake his head no in the past few days so now he can tell us no he doesn't wants the kix, he wants the graham crackers. So the tantrums are down somewhat thanks to those new milestones, but by 18 months he should be saying the words not pointing. But I think with Julie's help the words will come sooner and hopefully by 2 he may be where he should be at.

Play time

The boys, all three of them, at least once in a while all play together and I love watching it. Nolan has recently learned how to color. Here are my three boys coloring away together. Life is good.

Haircut

Nolan's hair was getting crazy with all of his curls so we had to give him a haircut. I was somewhat sad as I was afraid his curls would go away. That didn't happen though, if anything his hair seems even more curly and of course he looks a little older. He did great during the haircut, just sitting their very nice and hardly moving his head at all. She only used scissors though and trimmed it up so we didn't get to see how he would have reacted to the razor, but I think he would have done just fine. Here are the before pictures:

And the after pictures:

Tyler Update

So an update on Number 1 now. Tyler is still doing great in school. They test them at each quarter and he is way above where he should be. He reads me new words and books everyday and got all Proficients on his last report card. I love seeing his writing as well. A couple weeks ago he wrote me a story about the zoo. This is what he wrote: "I like the zoo. I ucided to dru a bir bkuz I see birs at the zoo." Translates:  "I like the zoo. I decided to draw a bear because I see bears at the zoo."   This week he wrote this: "I like to play on the playgrnd. First I Cim the slid. Next I run. The playgrnd is fun." Translates: I like the play on the playground. First I climb the slide. Next I run. The playground is fun." I thought that was pretty good improvement!

Carter Update

So just a little update on Number 2. Carter is doing great in school and he blows my socks off with how much he is already reading. He can sound out words like a champ and already knows about 10 sight words. When Tyler is doing his homework and trying to come up with words for a certain letters, Carter usually chimes in with at least one new word for that letter. We registered him for Kindergarten and boy was he excited. They didn't test them like they did Tyler last year. I was hoping they would just so I could see how well he is doing for their standards. Tyler's teacher did call me and ask if she could request Carter for next year, so I guess that's a good sign that she thinks our kids are pretty great.
Carter got a bunch of legos for Christmas. Usually he sits there and hands Justin or I pieces as we put the things together. However he is finally into them and does them day after day by himself. If we even help him a little bit, he will take it apart because he wants to do it on his own. I love that he is enjoying them so much as usually he would rather play with people than toys so it can make long afternoons without Tyler around.
One more funny Carter story - he got Cars 2 pajamas for Christmas. The are the pants with the button down collared shirt type of pj's. He LOVES them and for three days refused to take them off. He finally did so we could wash them, but as soon as they were dry he put them right back on. He even wore them to Red Robin when he did a after dinner surprise dessert run. Justin calls him "Hef" after Hugh Hefner. Gotta love my boy!

5 months

So this post is way late...about 2.5 weeks ago Little Livi turned 5 months old! She rolls everywhere, and scoots backwards. She loves her cereal and is starting to take longer naps. One of her favorite things is getting changed - the girl thinks it so funny to get her clothes taken off.  She has dropped her dream feed and goes from 7-7 most nights! She always smiles when she sees her brothers and is getting pretty tough when her littlest big brother accidentally steps on her.  Olivia has also started playing in her exersaucer and thinks its the best thing ever. We lover her giggle, her smiles, and we love her.