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In: Kids

January 18, 2013

I’m Bigger!

That’s Milo’s favorite sentence these days and he can’t seem to stress it enough. Notice how he is not only big, but bigger? What he is trying to say is that he is a big boy and trust me, we are holding him up to this statement as often as needed. I think he got it from preschool, where the older class is allowed certain things that the little ones can’t do.

In some aspects Milo is really becoming a big boy. He goes to preschool 5 mornings a week and is learning so much. His speech is exploding and now 80% English and in full sentences. He is holding conversations with his friends and they can play totally self sufficiently together. Also, just like a big boy, Milo has a girlfriend. Actually, one in school (her name is Veda. They show each other their lunch boxes if you know what I mean ;-) and a different one in his free time (Lilia). He is definitely into older, dark haired girls. And they love him too.

Milo is now also using the toilet big boy style. About three months ago he started to become interested in the potty and voluntarily used it every time before bath or bed time. Sometimes also in the morning. Since he showed interest, knows how to pull pants down, and can say what he needs, I figured we’d give official potty training a shot. For Thanksgiving I had 4 days off and with united efforts Linc and I started mission potty training:

  • Day 1: Put Milo in underwear or without pants and sit him on the potty every half hour to get him into the routine of going potty and avoid accidents. Successfully even through the Thanksgiving party. We still put on a diaper for his nap and at night.
  • Day 2: Spacing potty visits out to every 1 hour. One accident. Milo had been holding his poop for two days because he doesn’t want to do it in the potty, then it plopped just out on the floor when he was without pants.
  • Day 3: Milo is tarting to say when he needs to go potty, but you gotta be fast because it comes out the same minute. So, we still put him on the potty eery hour. Another poop accident. This time in the pants.
  • Day 4: Discouraged by the poop accidents and the fact that Milo doesn’t seem to be able to hold stuff in, I put a diaper on him in the morning. But he doesn’t want it, so I explained to him how he needs to hold the pee in when he feels it coming and that he can use his hands to hold his junk if needed. He totally got it! (Sometimes I still underestimate this child’s brain growth and tend to give up instead of explaining things. Gotta get rid if that habit. He’s a smartie after all.) From then on we only put Milo on the potty before leaving the house or sleepy time and relied on him to let us know when he needed to go. No accidents! He’s successfully holding everything in until we get to a potty. even when out and about.
  • Day 5: First preschool day without diapers. I deposit 3 extra pants and underwear, but he doesn’t need them.
  • Day 7: After one week with diapers only for sleeping, the nap diaper is now staying dry. So we skip it and only keep the night diaper.
  • Day 30: Night diapers have been dry for two weeks, so we ditch them as well and never looked back.

That’s how Milo became completely dry within only a month. Much easier than anticipated.

He IS my big boy.

July 12, 2012

Kiddisms

This is Milo’s idea of a modern and somewhat functional art installation. Whenever he helps me put clothes away in our closet he asks for a good amount of hangers and makes sure to hang them all the same way on our dresser. Hopefully this is a sign of his sense for organization.

Now that Milo has sufficient words to tell us stories all day long, but not quite enough language to always be coherent or precise, there is some pretty funny stuff coming out of his mouth sometimes. It kind of gives you an idea what an almost two-year old’s logic looks like. I will collect those random outbursts of genius and share them here with you.

#1: These Milo says “this” or “this one” to anything that he does not know the word for. So, the other day at the park we ran into some friends that we don’t see too often. Their kid is called Alex and Milo played with him for about an hour. Apparently that was not enough time for Milo to learn the kid’s name, so when we left Milo waved at Alex and said to him: “Bye, this one!”

#2: When in Germany Milo started digging the typical Marmeladenbrot or Butterbrot – a slice of bread with butter and or jam spread on it. After we got back home, I was talking to Milo about his brother and asked him what we should name his brother. Milo said “Brot” (=bread). Apparently Bruder / brother sounded similar enough to Butter / butter, so that he immediately connected it with Brot / bread.

January 27, 2012

Did I Say Big?

If I ever said before that Milo was becoming a big boy I was lying. Because he is a big boy now! I mean, look at this kid. He is not even 18 months old and totally keeping up with all his older buddies. He is running, climbing, jumping, doing forward rolls, singing, dancing, and talking non stop. While I am writing this I absolutely realize that it is pointless describing all of these cool things when I could just post some self-explanatory videos instead.

Unfortunately it isn’t quite that easy, cause that kid has a serious iPhone addiction and as soon as you pull the phone out to shoot a video Milo just drops whatever he is doing and there is no way captioning anything but a kid running towards the camera with both arms reaching for the magical device. Of course it is our fault that this mini person has the iPhone completely figured out by 17.5 months of age. It’s the curse of the clever telephone. Instead of reading a newspaper, we read the news on it. Instead of calling up friends at unsuitable times, we just post something on Facebook. Instead of getting a book at the library for advice, we google the heck out of the phone. So there we are – a really bad role model for Milo showing him that phones are the most desirable toy in the world.

Anyway, we still limit Milo’s phone usage to half an hour of videos and half an hour of games a day and so far it doesn’t seem to have any negative effects on him (except for his addiction problem). He is still developing ahead of his age group, has way more fun playing with older kids and talking the days away. Lately his words have become more defined. Instead of just doubling up the first syllable of every word (wa-wa for water, ba-ba for bath), he is now very clearly saying “water”, “juice”, “car”, etc. He understands pretty much everything we say in any of the three languages and communicates clearly what he wants. I gotta admit that I am guilty of letting him go through with things I should probably say no to, just because I find it so cute how he communicates them.

So, tomorrow I will attempt another video shoot of all those fun things he does and then hopefully update with some footage here.

Cheers!

December 7, 2011

Milo’s Advent

Over the first few days of December Milo has totally gotten into the Christmas spirit. Or at least he appreciates all the extra fun things that were put up around the house. He is practicing his lungs by trying to blow out the advent wreath candles from a 4 foot distance. He runs towards the advent calendar first thing in the morning, hoping to find some sweet treats to replace his breakfast. So far he has gotten a few packs of raisins, one piece of chocolate (mega drool!), and some stickers. And one new car that he thought was very nicely parked behind the small door, so he put it right back.

On the morning of the 6th Milo got some bigger toys in his boots from St. Nicholas. He got lucky St. Nicholas was so generous because usually only good kids get something and recently Milo is going through this phase where he wakes us up a few times per night, hits his mom, and acts up for no good reason. Let’s take these toys as some motivation to be good from now on.

October 18, 2011

Boy=Noise+Dirt

Who knew that parenthood could be so much fun? Just when you thought that your baby smiling, laughing, crawling, babbling is sooo awesome, it gets even better. It’s just so much fun seeing this little guy growing up that I still can’t get over it and catch myself frequently staring at him in awe or laughing out loud over one of the funny things that he does.

As we all know, Milo is not so much of a sit-n-looker, but a hyperactive doer. He still barely ever sits still. Now that he is walking probably less than ever. He just started walking at 11 months and now he is already running and chasing us through the house. He climbs up and down the couch, dances, jumps without lifting the feet, and would walk/fall down the stairs forward if we let him.

If I had to take a wild guess at what Milo could do as a job later, I would probably say something handy. His fine motor skills are super precise. The morning cereal gets scooped up with the spoon and into the mouth almost without spills. The screws in the play work bench get unscrewed with the play screw driver like no big deal. And have I mentioned before that my 14 month old boy knows how to use the iPhone to a point where it gets dangerously close to sending emails to work contacts?

And he learns processes so quickly. These days you can’t do anything without fearing that Milo will copy it immediately. Yes, fearing. Like don’t let him see how to turn on the gas stove. Or how to push buttons on the dishwasher. But yes, let him see how we swipe the floor and how to wipe the table with a rag. The broom is his best friend right now. The other day we went to the animal farm where I put a quarter in the food machine, got some grains out on the bottom, and held them up in my hand for the sheep to eat. After watching this whole process just once, guess what Milo was doing for the next half hour: Feeding imaginary food to the sheep.

With all this alertness going on I shouldn’t be surprised that Milo is already using a bunch of “words” consistently and understands a lot of what we say. I just didn’t expect it to happen so soon. Considering that he has to process 3 languages on a daily basis. My brain has a 2 language maximum at any given time.

Milo understands the words for daily activities like eat, brush teeth, change diaper, put on shoes, turn off light, etc. in both english and german. And sometimes he will even follow those requests. The language coming out of his mouth is still mostly gibberish except for a few words that he uses consistently in the correct context in one or the other language. His first word was “Hi!” and he still uses it very frequently. Another favorite is “Ja” – German for yes. He will answer it to almost any question you ask him that he is okay with. If he doesn’t want he will not give any answer. If he doesn’t want something at all, he will say “no, no, no”! He also says “maaa” which means more/mehr and works in both languages. His latest word is short, but very useful for Mister Engineer: “A!” – short for “an” (means on) which he uses whenever he wants something that makes sounds, lights, etc. turned on.

See for yourself:

August 23, 2011

The huuuuge 1!

August 12, 2011. The day of Milo’s first birthday ever! It started with Milo waking up screaming at 5 AM and then me melting down because I just couldn’t take those 5 AM wake times anymore. Afterwards we both went back to bed and at least Milo was happy when he woke up the second time. I think this is the only memory I have from my little one’s actual birthday.

But luckily we got another chance the next day. We both got plenty of sleep and had a great party. The weather was a little unstable, but who cares. We just moved the whole shebang indoors. Yay for our house which fits approximately 15 kids and 15 adults and still has some room for everyone to run around like crazy. Milo had a blast and it seemed like everyone else had as well. Thanks everyone for coming and bringing so much joy to our little boy’s life! Milo loves all the toys he got and every morning he has a hard time deciding what to play with first. Peace and Love, The Trans.