Milestones...

Max
I'm not gonna lie, when we were last at the doctor I questioned Max's development. I know he was an early walker. I know his gross motor skills and communication skills are fine, advanced even. But I was concerned about his fine motor skills. He doesn't care to color, to use a spoon, or to stack blocks. Knocking down a tower of blocks is a different story all together. Having an education background and having worked around pre school aged kids, I know where stages are. But when it's your own kid, sometimes you don't have as clear a perspective.

The doctor reassured me that sometimes a kid will jump ahead in some areas (speech nad gross motor in Max's case) and be behind in others for a while (fine motor skills). I've been trying to be patient and encouraging those skills the past couple of weeks. And I've determined, that Max isn't "behind" at all. He just has a problem sitting still. This week I've seen him stack blocks, put wooden puzzle pieces in the right spot, color, draw many times on the magna doodle (left handed every time by the way), and use his spoon. You see it's just much more convenient for him to shovel his food in with his ham hands instead. So once again, he's proving he's much smarter than I give him credit for. He's just a boy with too many things to do. He doesn't have the time to sit and stack all those blocks, he'd rather play Godzilla and knock them all down when we stack them.




Max's doctor was amazed that he knew animal sounds already. But Max loves animals so much we talk constantly about animals while working on puzzles, we sing Old McDonald a million times a day, and we love love love these flash cards.

They go through the alphabet- have a letter on one side and an animal that starts with each letter one the other. While his favorites are still an elephant, monkey, duck, and dog (actually a xolo in this set) he's recently learned "sssssss" for snake and today was very interested in the hippo. I unfortunately don't know what sound a hippo makes. Max can also "roar" for a lion, "nay, nay" for the zebra or horse, "doo doo" for rooster (cockadoodledoo) and we've been working on "chomp chomp" for alligator. All other birds besides the rooster are "quack quack"s.




Crafts
Thursday, Friday and Saturday involved a lot of football watching. So some projects were finished and some started. I started and finished a new shawl for Adam's mom. The yarn reminded me of the ocean and so that's where it will go on Thursday. To the ocean with us for a quick trip to visit Grammy at the beach. Uh, so that yarn was a breach of my yarn buying ban, but I feel a little less guilty since I worked up the whole project in a day. I also finished the other shawl I'd been working on.


Started the little girls hat for Rylee in a lovely raspberry color, but don't even have enough done to make it worth a picture. And also worked a bit on the twin blankies which now that I have the color changes and pattern down will hopefully go much quicker, or there may just be one blankie by March. :)

I'm starting to feel in the Christmas spirit, and so I've been doing a little searching for Christmas projects to make for the majority of our Christmas list.