December

I’ll lead with our big news this month: You’re going to be a big brother! You don’t know what that means yet, but we hope you’ll be excited when the baby arrives, sometime in early August. We, of course, are definitely excited!

After we got back from our trip to Arizona, we took you to the Edaville railroad to ride the train and see the Christmas lights and you really seemed to like it. You had your first hot chocolate and rode the carousel, but got too scared on the airplane ride you had to go on by yourself and came off before it started. The next weekend, we bought our Christmas tree, decorated and baked cookies – your favorite were the jelly cookies. Dad took you down to the hockey rink in Charlestown where you watched one of the games for the peewee hockey league and you’re still talking about it today. You tell stories in one and two word sentences, like: “Hockey. GOAL! Boys. Helmet. Mask. Hot chocolate. Ice.” We went to the Science Museum with Amy and Max and finished up our Explorers and Junior Gym classes. We went down to RI for Vuono Christmas, where you got lots of fun gifts and got to hang out with your cousins, Gabi, Natalie, Gracie and Jacob. We had our first meeting with “Dr. Nancy,” the midwife, and you made yourself right at home, playing with her box of trucks, play kitchen , her dog and two cats. (You never want to leave and always cry when it’s time to go.) You got a bad cold the week before Christmas, which is the first time you’ve been sick in awhile, but luckily you were ok by the time the holidays rolled around. We spent Christmas Eve in Narragansett with Ra, Papa, Dani, Eric, Gabi and Natalie and Christmas Day at Auntie Sha’s with all your cousins. You only ate desserts (two helpings of ice cream cake!) but we figure one day like that won’t kill you. That night, we drove down to Long Island and spent the next day having Christmas with Grammie, Pop Pop, Jared, Margaret, Ashlyn and Ben. You got lots of trucks and trains and cars and books for Christmas and have loved playing with all of them. We spent a few more days down in NY, then came back up to Boston for New Year’s Eve. We had a repeat of last year’s NYE: parade, fireworks and dinner at the Ninety-Nine, where you had your favorite fish chowder.

This was your second Christmas – and you were SO into it. You loved the Christmas tree and all the ornaments, especially the sports-themed ones. It only took a day or two of telling you, “We can touch the ornaments but we can’t take them off of the tree,” before you got it and then you never took them down again. (I was surprised it was that easy!) You also loved Christmas music and it took about a week after New Years before we could wean you off of it. You would put the iPod on, but then say, “Next song,” over and over until finally we asked you what music you wanted to listen to and you would say, “Christmas tree music.” The changes in your personality and what you can do from month to month have started to slow, but you are more fun to play with now than ever. You’ve started “pretend play,” pretending to eat things and feed us things. You are constantly pointing out the relationships between things – the mommy fish, daddy fish, baby fish. You also like to talk about possession – mommy’s phone, daddy’s phone. You’ve started saying your own name too, when talking about possession, which comes out sounding like “Basha’s.” You point out when there are two of something, and always repeat the word two: “Two two trucks!” You also say “other” a lot, like, “Book. Other book.” Fresh Beat Band continues to be your favorite show (and I think you are going to lose your mind when we take you to see Fresh Beat Band Live in March.) You know all the characters; Reed is your favorite and you call Twist, “Other Shout.” After your bath, you come running into all the rooms to look for me and you always act crazy – jumping on the bed and throwing yourself around until it’s time to read a story and go to sleep. And in bittersweet news, you finished nursing for good this month – not sure if it was the pregnancy that pushed you to be done, but after we got back from our trip, you just stopped asking for it in the middle of the night. And even though it’s a little sad, you still want lots of snuggles before bed and that’s ok with me.

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