Catching up

So, looking back, it's been a little while since I have posted a Trey development update. We are at such a fun stage. He seems to learn new things every day, whether we teach him or not. Here are a few things Trey enjoys:

- Letters. Ever since receiving sets of foam ABCs for Christmas, Trey has been fascinated with letters. He knows most upper-case letters, missing only J (still calls it "jump"), N (calls it M), R (calls it A), S (calls it 5), V and W (turns them upside-down and calls them A and M respectively), and Z (calls it 2). He seems to be utterly confused by lower-case letters. I wonder how to introduce those?

Here he his in his favorite activity - taking letters out of a bucket one by one, naming them, then throwing them across the room.


- Climbing. Trey was blessed/cursed with my short little legs, and though he has wanted to do a lot of climbing for months now, his legs are just now getting long enough for him to get on couches and chairs. Lately we've found him sitting in my glider in his nursery, rocking hard back and forth, chanting "Wok! Wok!"

- Conversation. We have gone to 3-word sentences fairly easily. And he's at the stage where he repeats anything you say. It has been a lesson in self-control for us to turn our former "shoot" type outbursts to "oh no", or something a little more kid-friendly. Who knows where this stuff will come out.

But it's so funny, sometimes Trey will look at us and mumble, rambling on and talking with his hands the way we do. No clue what he's saying, but it looks important. This is so amazing to me.


- Sleep. Or anti-sleep. The Lord truly blessed us in that, after Trey started sleeping through the night at around 7 months, he has been a great sleeper. He enjoys self-soothing, and seems to prefer to have the time alone in his crib before naps and bedtime. But these self-soothing times have grown longer and louder recently. He doesn't get upset or anything, but he talks and yells and jumps for up to an hour before going to sleep. And each night he'll fixate on someone in the family, yell their name repeatedly, and sometimes turn it into a song.

I can't fight the twinge of guilt when Trey calls for me and I don't go to him. Though I know it would probably screw up the nice little bedtime routine we've got going, I want him to know that when he needs me I am there. Then I try to convince myself that I know the difference between the where-are-you/can-we-play call and the urgent/upset call. The bedtime shouts usually fall in the first category.


- Arts/music. Trey is still a dancing fool, but has grown more particular in what songs he will dance to. He has learned how to play a CD and skip through the songs on his CD player, and we tend to listen to "Joshua Fought the Battle of Jericho" and "Father Abraham" over and over. And he has learned to sing the alphabet song. Or his version of it. I've been trying to get it on video - it's so cute. It goes A -- B -- A -- B -- A-B-A -- B.

We have also started finger painting in the last week. Aside from when he stuck a gob of it into his mouth, he's done quite well.


- Loving. I know I've posted on Trey's man love toward his stuffed animals before - the hug/body slam combo. And he still wrestles his stuffed animals all the time. But Doggie and Quackers, Trey's best friends, are starting to receive more hugs than body slams. He'll walk around the house holding them, repeating their names ("Goggie", Kakoo") and nuzzling his face in them.


And he has a soft photo album where I recently put old pictures of him so he could flip through. We look at it together, and I coo over the pictures. When I say very sadly, "That used to be Mama's baby!", he will crawl in my lap and give me a hug. Makes me want to cry.

- Food. Per instructions from the allergist, I've tried not to judge what I feed Trey by reading labels. (The allergist said to use common sense and just avoid things that very obviously contained milk/cheese/cream.) Of course I still read the labels to know whether I should be on my guard when I feed him a certain thing. We don't eat a ton of processed stuff anyway, keeping mainly to the basics.

But over the last couple of months I've fed him several things where the label said "contains milk", and we've had no vomiting! Oh how I pray this means he's outgrowing the allergy. We will do fine living with it if we have to, but I'd much rather have him not be a "special case" at school by having to be so careful with food.

Oh, and a few weeks ago I found soy yogurt. He loves it! Actually there's not much he doesn't love. I'm telling you what, the kid can eat. His meals tend to be about the same size as ours.

So anyway, there's Trey in a (rather lengthy) nutshell. I know we are biased, but he is sweet and smart and funny, and brings so much joy into our lives every single day.