Kids update, November

OK, i figured as long as I'm here, I may as well post some progress updates. Will try to keep this short, though, cause my brain is pretty foggy this morning.

Austin
Austin's flourishing in school. As mentioned last month, his creativity is just exploding. He loves to color and is really good at making pictures of just about anything. He has a talent for translating images from his mind to paper. He's also really into reading and writing now; he learns new words every day, and has developed the skills to begin figuring out words by sounding them out. He can pick out several words instantaneously now. I love it. LOVE IT.

Austin got what we think was a sinus infection 2 weekends ago which was making him miserable. He spiked nighttime fevers for several nights, but would feel fine during the day; this continued until last Monday when he got a really bad headache and slight fever at school. I signed him out and took him to the doctor. They gave a flu/H1N1 test at my request, and that came back negative; so it looks like a sinus infection was the culprit. He's on antibiotics and they seem to have done the trick.

Austin's got 2 loose teeth on the bottom (1 about halfway loose, the other somewhat less so) and an adult tooth growing in behind them. I'm hoping the loose teeth are ready to come out soon, I'm very excited!

Jonas
Jonas is Jonas...still a one-man wrecking crew. :) He seems to be calming down a little bit recently, though. He talks more and more clearly every day and picks up lots of words. He can make coherent sentences, sometimes 6 to 10 words long; and can even have fairly extended conversations. He gets complex ideas as well, which is nice.

2 weekends ago Jonas moved from a crib to a toddler bed and is doing very well in it. He still gets up out of it sometimes, but no more often than he did with the crib. I think he's getting used to putting himself to sleep again, though it's hard to tell for sure--usually we have to sneak him into the bed already asleep, but sometimes he'll be awake and will lie there till he falls asleep. Other times, not so much. But i'm working to break him of the habit of getting out of bed repeatedly until Mom and Dad's nerves are shot.

Jonas developed a fever last night, a pretty significant one; it woke him up several times in the middle of the night, but oddly he doesn't act sick. More tired and quiet than usual, maybe, but he's still in a good mood. The only other symptom he displays is hoarseness, i.e. sinus drainage, so we're wondering if he doesn't have sinusitis too. If the fever doesn't break by tomorrow I guess we'll be taking him to the doctor too.

Devon
Devon's doing great. He also has been sick recently; on Halloween he was positively miserable, crying and whining and being generally pathetic all day. Thankfully that was over quickly. He hasn't sported a fever in a while but continues to be congested and snotty, so we think he's got a cold. Other than lots of snot, though, it doesn't seem to bother him.

Devon can now sit himself up--i guess he's been doing this for a couple of weeks--and crawls functionally. It's not a perfect crawl and he can't sustain it very long, but it's more than the army arm-crawl he was exhibiting until recently. It's certainly enough to make him mobile (see the most recent video as an example). He hasn't quite figured out how to keep his knees under him all the time, though, so sometimes he'll get his feet under him and push up until he's in a full bear-walk stance. I haven't seen him try to move in this position yet, and he probably can't, but it's pretty funny to see him do it. And impressive that he can balance himself that way for several seconds. I wonder how long before it'll be before he's pulling up.

Let's see, what else. Oh, he babbles a lot more now, and it sounds like he's trying to talk. I tried to capture this on video (including one that I haven't gotten uploaded yet--hopefully tonight). It's extremely cute. He still has 2 teeth, both lower teeth; we thought for a while he was cutting upper teeth, but I think that was a false alarm.

I think that's it for this edition. More next month...

Videos!

I finally got around to publishing home videos. There are about a dozen (give or take) on YouTube now, starting here: http://www.youtube.com/grover173#p/u . They go from July through last weekend. Most of them are pretty boring and don't show much, but every once in a while there's some entertaining moments. The longest and most recent video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7mFBajd7Dw) is about 7 minutes long...it's a pretty decent watch.

Videos are a huge pain in the behind to upload, I've found out (that 7-minute one took upwards of an hour to upload), so as I record them I'll try to put them up one by one. We don't pull out the video camera very much but maybe we'll try to change that, especially with the holidays coming up.

Enjoy...

October 2009 photos up!

I know it's 2 weeks late, but it's been a crazy month. Anyway, family photos from October 2009 are up and ready on the photobucket site. The album includes candid shots, going to the pumpkin patch, a trip to Cypress Gardens in Moncks Corner to visit the butterfly house, and of course Halloween. Enjoy!

Also, I meant to put up several short video clips tonight, spanning several months' worth of time; but it took me almost 2 hours to get the stupid photographs downloaded, processed, uploaded (this was especially painful, thanks to the piece of s*** that is photobucket), commented, and tagged. It's currently 11:20pm and I'm writing this in the dark as Amy attempts to sleep behind me. So maybe later this month video clips will go up, but not tonight.

Hope everyone is having a good weekend.