A huge "thank you" is owed to my sweet and talented sister, Julie, for taking some family pictures for us this fall. While she was fun and efficient and it was pretty painless, this face really sums up Jack's feeling about the whole day.
Life will soon be very different as I send my baby boy out the door for school next year. It's hard to believe that he's already 5. He is such a tiny little bean that I still carry him around like I did when he was two. I will truly, madly, deeply miss these days of my life. He has been a joy -- and well worth any effort it took to get him here.
Okay, so Jack has got to be one of the tiniest 4 year olds in the world. He still wears 3T clothes and even some 2T. He talks like such a little grown-up that he really surprises people. They usually think he's 2 or 3. Lately, however, he's been having CRAZY growing pains in the middle of the night. The kind that wake you up out of a sound sleep and make you cry. Thank goodness for Motrin. Maybe there's hope for this little guy yet! However, he is living proof that great things come in small packages.
What's the point of having a little brother if you can't use him as your own personal Ken doll from time to time?
I always forget how quickly Jack's birthday sneaks up after Kate's. Only 11 days between them. I was preparing for a trip to San Francisco, Spring Break, recovering from Kate's birthday/baptism and was completely caught off guard by it! Luckily, we had made some plans for a birthday cake a few weeks before and Jack was pretty clear on what he wanted for his birthday. "Trains and cars" -- yep, we can do that!
What a fun, energetic, smart little whip of a 4 yr. old he is. He's a joy to have in our home and he completes our family in a way no other person could. We love you Jack-a-Boo!
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Lately I've walked in on the kids several times laying in one another's beds (sometimes all three kids!) reading stories together. It's a really sweet scene. Jack loves it so much when the big kids take the time to read to him. It's strange that he allows them to do it since he's in a really independent phase right now. Periodically we hear quite a bit of yelling and screaming when things don't go his way ... these little moments of respite are heaven sent.
The past three weeks have been so action-packed that I really did little more than turn the water on in the garden and hope for the best! Surprise, surprise ... the kids came in last Tuesday so excited because there were 'TONS' of beans in the garden. :) I went out to inspect and didn't get back in the house for a couple of hours. Not only were there tons of beans, but also beautiful bell peppers, zucchini, yellow squash and yummy raspberries! Gardening is not my thing, it's really just an exercise in obedience at this point in my life ... but I have to say it was a pretty fun surprise to find all that food ripe for the picking!
He is such a special, fun, sweet and opinionated little man! Most of the time he keeps us laughing -- but he does have a streak of independence which erupts into a fit at least every day or so. Luckily Kate and Todd are old enough that they just put up with his "three-ness" and soon he's back to his sweet self again. That stubborn independence will serve him well in the future if we can help him channel it in a healthy direction.
Jack is so smart. His language skills are terrific. You can understand darn near everything he says and he can mimick nearly every sound now. He has come such a long way over this past year. This time last July he wasn't saying more than 3 or 4 words, now he talks non-stop. We're so proud of his hard work!
So, obviously, I've fallen off the blogging bandwagon, but I'll attempt to climb back on! While there are many fun activities and experiences that have occurred over the past couple of months (end of school, piano recitals, baseball, swimming, parties and festivals, etc.) I'm just going to pick up from here and see where that gets me. Too overwhelming to go back right now. :)
The BEST NEWS ever that I have to share right now is that Jack is POTTY TRAINED!!!! (I think.) We've been working on it on and off since February, but he was not ready so I decided not to push. However, in May I decided that he was very capable and just needed to figure it out. So I promised myself that I would not put him back in diapers, or even in Pull-Ups ever again. Let me tell you something ... he went for 3 entire weeks and NEVER made it to the potty even once. I'm not even kidding you -- not once. Yikes. Let's just say I said a lot of prayers for patience and understanding and eventually (finally, last week) he came to me and said "Mom, I need to go potty in the toilet." I said, "Yeah, you sure do." (as I'm scrubbing the 1017th potty spot off the carpet upstairs). And next thing I knew he was in the bathroom doing it all by himself. As long as we're in a familiar place he does great!!! No accidents. The only time he's had a problem is when we're in a store or someplace where he can't see a bathroom. He doesn't like to tell me that he has to go because he wants to do it by himself. :) So typical Jack. What an independent boy he is. This stubborn streak he has will serve him well in the future. (At least that's what I keep telling myself.)
Anyhoo, major milestone at the Wilson house. No more diapers!!!!!!
Jack is doing an absolutely stellar job at speech therapy. I can't believe how quickly he has picked up on many of the sounds. He says p, b, d, g, t, c initial sounds almost all the time without prompting now!!! He is still working on f, j, th, s, sh, but those are coming as well. Amazing what a great speech therapist can accomplish in a short amount of time. Suzie (his therapist) is wonderful and she just adores Jack. Last week she proclaimed that Jack was the cutest client she'd had in all her 23 years of experience! He gets so excited every time he succeeds. It is definitely adorable, you can't help but have your heart melted by that little guy!
As I mentioned above, he is not able to say his f's at the beginning of his words very well, so the other morning when he came running in to my room I was a little perplexed to hear him yelling "Mom, change me ass, ass, ass!" It took me a minute to realize that he was TRYING to say, "Mom, change me fast, fast, fast!" Yikes.
Today he brought me his little red backpack and in true Dr. Seuss fashion said "Mom, put Jack-Jack packback on Jack-Jack back!" Oh, I love that little guy! :)
One last funny thing: We bought Jack some really rockin' Lightening McQueen undies in the hopes that he would show some small bit of interest in potty training. That was a month ago. No luck. This afternoon he found them in his jammy drawer and brought them downstairs to show me with a very excited face. "I wear McQueen, Mommy?" I said, "Sure, but you have to go potty in the toilet if you wear these cool undies, OK?" After a long pause he replied "I put them back, Mommy, K?" So much for that awesome plan. It was good for a laugh anyway.
As my friend Amber observed, I wonder how long Jack has been saying these adorable little things and we just couldn't understand him. Poor little dude, learning to speak has got to be a huge relief!
I happened upon Kate and Jack the other day playing together. I asked them what they were doing. They replied, "We're playing 'Science Guy'". Hilarious. :)
We visited the speech therapist yesterday for the first time (just an initial evaluation). She was great with him and helped me understand some issues that I hadn't related to his speech troubles before. Basically, he has a speech pattern called "H substitution" -- it's considered a unique (rare) impediment, but she assured me that every child she's ever worked with who has that particular problem has been able to fix it without too much difficulty. She asked me a series of questions about his eating preferences and habits, and I was amazed to realized that the reason he often spits out giant mouthfuls of food is because he has a weak tongue which makes it difficult to chew. It's simply not worth the effort to him to struggle through the chewing in order to get the food down. He's done this (and been a great frustration to me) since he was tiny -- and I could never figure out why. Now I know, and it's so wonderful to have a way to start to help the problem. So far they've just given me a few suggestions of ways to help him strengthen his tongue. Eating peanut butter is a good way, also licking ice cream, sticking out your tongue, and holding a smartie to the roof of your mouth. Weird (yet fun) huh? I'm very thankful for knowledge and for people who study these things. I know this therapy is really going to impact his little life for the better.
No picture I snapped could adequately do justice to the sublime happiness of our little Jack-Jack. Daddy's boy through and through!!!
Jack has had a veritable word/sentence explosion lately -- unfortunately it is still fairly difficult to understand. So with a little help from my visiting teachers (both of whom have had children with the same types of problems) I was able to contact a childhood development center that could help Jack. They came to the house and played with Jack for about an hour to evaluate his cognitive/motor/language abilities. They were so great with him! He had a ball playing with them, showing off, and really trying to mimic everything they said and did. It was so cute to watch him have such a fun time. They just loved him and kept saying what a doll he was. In fact, they ended up staying and playing with him about twice as long and they usually do because they were having so much fun with him. :)
At the end of the session one of the therapists said he is SO smart. Cognitively and in terms of fine and gross motor skills he is way above his peers, but he is just having difficulty with articulation. I had basically thought the same thing, but it was good to hear from a professional. She referred him to an articulation therapist at Cassia Regional Hospital in Burley. We will be going there for an evaluation tomorrow morning and then should be able to start therapy very soon. It will be so good for him to have something intensive to help fix this problem before it becomes an issue for him. He's just getting to the age where he's starting to be frustrated that I can't understand everything he says. I think if I ignore this problem he'll become a very unhappy/unpleasant little boy. A lot of behavior problems in children come from frustrations about learning or communication difficulties.
I'll update after our appointment tomorrow.
I inadvertently broke Jack's heart yesterday. I was washing all the bedding in the house, but he was downstairs when I stripped the beds. Later in the morning he went upstairs and completely wigged out because his bed was NOT right. He just kept crying and moaning, "ma ed, ma ed" and "a-keen, a-keen" (that's 'my bed, my bed' and 'McQueen, McQueen' [as in Lightning McQueen from Cars] for those of you who don't speak Jackanese). I had to take him downstairs and let him watch the sheets and blankets roll around in the dryer so he could catch a glimpse of his beloved bedding before he could calm down and start laughing that sad, happy, overemotional laugh we all have when we've just had the scare of our lives. What a drama.
Kate decided that Jack is her own personal dress-up pet. Luckily he was in a generous mood and seemed to enjoy being dressed up and dragged around by a jumprope as much as she enjoyed doing it.
