Steve & Emily + Trey

Trey at four years old:

LOVES construction equipment.  He says he's going to be a backhoe driver when he grows up.  After watching some Diego, he says he wants to be an animal rescuer and drive a Jeep.  He also enjoys playing with dinosaurs and Transformer Rescuebots.

Starting to like to tell jokes.

Has an amazing imagination. 

Loves to read.

He goes to bed at around 7:30.  Sometimes it takes him a while to fall asleep, depending on whether he took a nap or not.  Some days he still naps for around an hour after lunch.  We bought an alarm clock for him that turns green at a preset time (6:30 am) so that he would stop getting out of bed at random hours in the middle of the night.

Favorite foods - yogurt, cheese, "chickwin and duckwins," meatballs, chips (pretty much most junk foods), bacon, sausage, hot dogs, beef jerky sticks, and he likes to identify his meat by what kind of animal it's from - "More cow meat, please!"

Really starting to get interested in learning and seems to learn most things without direct teaching.
- Knows how to spell his name and is doing better at writing it.  We're working on recognizing the rest of the letters of his name, put them in order, and how to write them.  He can also spell Dad and Mom.
- Can sing his ABCs.  He's recently become much more interested in letters and can identify most letters and their sounds.
- Also much more interested in counting.  Sometimes gets as high as 21 or 22, but we haven't been working on as much the last month.  Has one to one correspondence.
- Likes to do "school" in his preschool workbooks.  Doing much better with his grip. We've been working on controlling a writing utensil to draw lines and shapes.

Likes to help with firewood.  Likes to chop wood with an "axel" and help Steve carry it inside.

Talks a lot.  Fast.  All the time.

Becoming much more independent.  Wants to pick out his own clothes and shoes, wants to buckle himself into his carseat, etc.


Gabe at two years old:

Goes to bed around 7:30.  Naps after lunch for one and a half to two hours.  Wakes up around 7.

Loves boy stuff and wants to do whatever he sees Trey doing.  Drives cars, plays dinosaurs with growls, builds blocks.  Destroys. :-)

Loves to read books.  Any books.

Gabe is our strong willed child.  If he's doing something he's not supposed to be doing, he does not respond at all to verbal directions to stop.  He keeps at it until the last possible second before you get to him.  Current challenges include escaping out the front door, taking off his clothes/diaper, and climbing everything.  Since we converted his crib into a toddler bed, keeping him in it at night has been quite the job.

Loves to watch the show Mighty Machines.  He calls it "sheens."  He loves it when we see construction equipment when we're out and about.

Wants a hat if we're going outside.

Gabe understands everything we tell him and his language has exploded over the last few months.  He puts sentences together regularly and speaks very articulately.   While I was in the hospital with Toby, Gabe started repeating the last sound of words.  He'll saying something like, "Read-d-d-d-d book-k-k-k-k-k."  He's been doing it for about three weeks now, so we'll see if he stops on his own.  It's pretty much just with hard consonants or blends like b, d, f, g, k, p, s, t, sh, ch.