Catch Up

Time to play catch up.

Melinda went to Wal-Mart one day and bought a new bra. Later at home when Abby saw the box sitting out in our bedroom she asked, “Mommy, you buy pillows?” Pillows is how she refers to Melinda’s breasts.

Abby has taken to calling her brother by his full name, especially when she is mad at him. But even in normal conversation, the routine goes that Abby will say, “Alex Shane” and he will reply, “What?” It’s really cute.

Alex has been trying to talk a lot more lately. He’s gone from repeating the last word of a sentence to trying to say the whole thing. It’s not really anywhere close, but you can tell he is trying. Just last night I was reading him a book before going to bed. He would open up to the title page and I would read, “My Baby Elephant.” He could say ‘my’ and ‘baby’ pretty well. Then he would close the book and say, “All done”. “All done?” I would ask. “More!” would come the answer and he would open up to the first page again. We must have repeated that conversation 10 times.

Melinda has nicknamed Alex BooBoo, due to his clumsy nature. I joke that he will have to go into the arts or something. It’s might be partially true because he seems to enjoy music a lot more than Abby does. He loves to hear Melinda sing and he loves to dance to music. When Abby was younger she always enjoyed being the conductor and waving her arms around whenever there was music playing. Anyway, Alex has the tendency to run into walls, trip on the carpet in the middle of the room, or one day, when he had it really bad, he fell down Poppy’s porch stairs in the back and then later fell out of the back seat of the truck, landing both times on his head and getting two nice bruises. He is almost close to jumping, or he’s at least getting the idea down. Abby likes to jump off the couch or Granpa Lazear’s footstool. Alex tries to copy her, but just ends up stepping right off the edge, and belly flopping onto the ground. We put a pillow or something soft in front of him, and surprisingly, he enjoys it, even when he does it without the pillow. He has figures out how to walk backwards, which was really cute the first time he did it.

Abby has become proficient at distraction. She will do it now if Melinda’s trying to talk to her about bad behavior by trying to point at something in the room of just completely change the conversation. She practices distraction when we are trying to get her to go to sleep at night too. “I want apple juice” (Which usually sounds like she is saying, ‘Abby juice’). After tasting the apple juice she will say, “I want chocolate milk” (Which sounds like ‘Cot-ik-milk’). After getting her preferred beverage she then asks for her purse. Recently she has been trying to figure out ‘off’ and ‘on’. She has it backwards. “Turn the light off”, she says when we go into her room. She has figured out boy and girl really well. She knows that Daddy wears a tie. When we put a little clip on tie on Alex one Sunday, she really wanted to wear a tie as well. That was the first lesson, that boys wear ties and girls where dresses. The second such lesson came when she learned that boys wear pants and girls wear skirts. The other night she asked me, “Is Kyah a girl or a boy?” “Kyah is a girl and Parker is a boy”, I replied. “OK”, was her understanding answer. She added, “Alex is a boy. Abby is a girl.”