Kids: November 2008 Archives

Today won’t be the detailed rundown of how everything went. I’m still playing catch-up from being out of the house since Tuesday. The family took a trip to New York City (well, part of us did), and everyone had a good time. The pictures and video are bountiful, so I’m going to need some time to pull it all together. However, a bullet-point summary of what we did the past 5 days would go like this:

Tuesday

• Travel to my parent’s in Northern Virginia after school with all 3 kids

Wednesday

• Leave the twins with my parents (thank you for watching them) to drive to Manhattan to visit my sister Emily for a few days
• Walk around the tour of the Macy’s Parade balloons, as they are moored next to the Museum of Natural History (only 1 block from Emily’s apartment) — it was crazy/busy there

Thursday

• Watch the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade from the middle of 73rd Avenue — we couldn’t get any closer, but was close enough to see almost everything
• Take Will to a playground in Central Park for a while, then walk over to Strawberry Fields and back to the apartment
• Eat a Thanksgiving dinner with Emily

Friday

• Ride the subway twice — first to go to the Empire State Building, then to go to Rockefeller Plaza to watch ice skating, see the tree (unlit), and eat lunch
• Meet up with Emily and visit St. Patrick’s Cathedral
• Walk to FAO Schwartz, only to find the wait in line to be rather long
• Take a taxi back to Emily’s apartment (Will’s first ride in a taxi), then back to the playground one last time
• Go to the movies to see Madagascar 2 (all 4 of us enjoyed it), then go out to eat at a diner-style restaurant

Saturday

• Try to leave early, only to discover the battery was dead — finally got a jump from AAA
• Drive back to Northern Virginia to spend the night at my parent’s house
• Got to see Dena, Dennis and Nicholas at dinner — Will really enjoyed seeing his new cousin again

Sunday

• Drive back home in the rain — only took about 30 minutes longer than normal, and that included a stop for gas

That’s a lot going on in one long trip. We all survived, and we really enjoyed the company of everyone we met over those days. We hope everyone else had a fun and safe holiday weekend. We hope to see you soon.

As I said, I hope to post pictures and video at a later date, but I hope this suffices for a quick summary at moment.

Well, this one is a day late. Yesterday was a busy day, so I’m just going to give you a video of the boys’ second birthday celebration highlights. (I still have a couple other sets of highlights to pull together — there’s last Saturday’s birthday celebration with my parents, and then yesterday morning’s visit with Santa at our church bazaar. So much to cover, so little time.)

And after all of the bustle of yesterday, today was a bit more quiet and allowed folks to settle down. In fact, I found Sean and Daniel doing just that this morning. I found the rather relaxed posture on our good couch kind of amusing.

This first thing is a bit of an experiment. I am trying out a freeware program called Jalbum for creating an online photo album (rather than creating a video of images). This has the potential to be a much more useful tool for displaying a lot of related images, rather than tossing them into a video or showing a whole bunch of them below. It’s a Flash-based application that will do a whole bunch of different things, depending on what I set it up to do.

My first attempt is actually a more complex set of albums, with artwork and other projects that Sean and Daniel have been doing at their daycare center over about the last 6 to 8 months. You click on the links in the top left to open any of the three albums (Sean & Daniel combo art, Daniel-only art, and Sean-only art). Scroll through, or launch the slide show, even download some of the pictures (albeit lower res — still working on that). And let me know what you think of the approach.

And here is some video of Sean at dinner tonight. He loved one food in particular — ‘pease?’

Are they really coming up on their second birthdays? Yes, they are — this Saturday. They’ve already had one birthday party this past weekend (with my parents), with more to come this weekend with the local contingent.

But today was a checkup day. When we last checked in five-and-a-half months ago, they were growing fine. And they still are — Daniel is over 90% in height, while Sean is over 75% in height. We just have to remind ourselves that they are also 5 weeks premature, so they’ll be down the scale a little bit. But at this rate, it looks like Will may wind up being the tallest (he was 37.5” at his 2-year check up). Here are their

Daniel
Height: 36” (+2.25”)
Weight: 28 pounds 10 ounces (+2 pounds 11 ounces)
Head: 51 cm (+0.5 cm)

Sean
Height: 35” (+2”)
Weight: 24 pounds 0 ounces (+2 pounds 10 ounces)
Head: 49cm (+1 cm)

Everything is pretty much staying on the proper curve from the last time, so their growth patterns are very consistent (including Sean being in the tenth percentile in weight, despite being as tall as he is). Keep growing up, guys, like this video below shows.

We knew there were a couple of other loose teeth, but we certainly didn’t think anything was that close yet. But Will came home from after-school care today and announced that he had lost another tooth. He didn’t want to show it off at first, but we finally got him to open his mouth enough to see that the next lower-right tooth was gone. (He’s already lost both of his front-bottom teeth, so this was the next one on the right.)

So in less than a week, we’ve had two more fall out. And we know that the other top-front tooth is also loose, so who knows how much longer that will hold on.

I think the tooth fairy is going to be kept busy at our house.

Yes, these can happen even on the warmest of days, like this past weekend (when it was in the 70s). Sean and Daniel have figured out how to have snowball fights - using toilet paper and kleenex. I know — it’s the normal thing that kids this age do. It’s still kind of cute, though picking it up is less so. Particularly when they find the trashcan with the remains of the fight and proceed to empty it back out again.

Then there is Daniel, showing off his dancing skills (of the most dangerous variety). Not sure what he was dancing to, but it clearly caught his fancy.

This one was a bit crazy. Will’s top-right tooth was hanging on on one side only, so it was actually slightly crooked in his mouth (tilting toward the other front tooth). I kind of wish I had taken a before picture. The tooth moved front-and-back a whole lot in his mouth, but it was hanging on just enough. It took a wet paper towel to get enough of a grip on it to remove it from his mouth.

And voila — a nice big gap in his mouth. Of course, it felt funny at first to him. So in went an ice pack and a little Tylenol, but within about an hour, no more comments about how funny it felt. I think he’s back to normal.

Now we’re just waiting to see if the tooth fairy shows up tonight.