Growing kids

Our sweet Noelle is growing up! We really feel like we brought home a different girl than the one we left with a month ago. She's in the season of new words spilling out of her little mouth every single day. In the last few weeks, she's surprised us with quite a few. The ones that come to mind are - pocket, cozy, Noelle, lizard, pray, body, beach, diaper, church, breakfast, and Isaiah claims he heard her say 'mulberry bush'. She is very interested in naming items with the possessive, so we spend a lot of time figuring out what belongs to whom. She'll go through everything in the room saying - Mommy's shoes, Daddy's juice, I's book, Noelle's dress, etc. She's still very much enjoying music and rhythm and I think she's been able to mimic some beats. She loves to "sing" with her little lips moving and her little head bobbing back and forth. There is sometimes sound and sometimes just a lot of really cute lip movement :) Her "singing" reminds us of the "reading" Isaiah did at about the age whenever he saw written words. She's starting to spread her little independent wings a bit more, too, wanting to dress herself without any help at all, which she can't really do yet. Luckily she doesn't yet have opinions on what she wears, just how it gets onto her body. When threatened with a "next time it's time out" warning, she happily puts herself in time out, grinning with pride. I don't know if she thinks she's beaten us to the discipline or if she's just confused. And the other night Luke was telling her to come. Her little eyes sparkled as she worked her way around the room without coming to Luke. He told her time and time again to come and she made her way to Isaiah, hugged him and started kissing his back. It was funny to watch her little wheels turning. She's having more frustrating toddler moments with tears and squeals when she can't communicate or get what she wants or control the universe. But, those moments are tucked in between so many fun, precious toddler moments that she's pretty delightful these days. We love our baby girl!

The other day I was telling Noelle what a big kid she was. Isaiah said "Yeah! And I'm an even bigger kid!" And he is :) He's growing fast! Since turning 4 a few weeks ago, he's very proud to tell anyone who asks how old he is. He's hungry almost all the time and sometimes eats more than I do in the course of a day. Since June he's grown at least 2cm, and some of the shoes that were too big for him in January are almost too small for his big puppy feet. We've just started homeschool preschool with him this week, and so far so good. Luke and I take turns doing it with him each morning. The Sonlight curriculum we're using takes about an hour, so we can do it early before Luke goes to work. He's very happy to sit and listen to stories and we're working on careful listening and enagaging what we're reading. He's able to do computer games by himself now, he fills out a chore chart - an loves it, and he can work his transformers without help :) Spending the days with me and Noelle doesn't offer him a ton of 'boy play', but when he gets to play with his buddies Preston or Josh, the boyness oozes out of him. They instantly turn into superheros or enter into battle, or run around catching bad guys. It's fun to watch him in his superman costume, shouting and running and engaging in these big boy missions and then bringing his little foot to me and asking for a kiss where he bonked it on the table. We're enjoying our big boy!