Mommy's little helper

Gavin has become interested in watching me cook. He has started pulling up a chair to watch almost every time I'm in the kitchen lately. I let him help here and there, but I have to admit it tries my patience. Example: I let him shake cinnamon into pancake batter recently. He ended up touching the shaker to the batter, creating more of a mess for me to clean up. The last couple days Gavin has been sick and I've been making him keep his hands off the food, which he isn't too happy about.

Who needs toys?

Gavin's comment: "trick or treats"

dirt

There is a bare spot in our yard where the previous owner parked a trailer. Gavin made good use of it this week with his trucks.

Thank you Uncle Tom

 We keep the nativity figures in this plastic bucket. Gavin carries it around and calls it his "trick or treats."

Captain Feathersword

Gavin uses our fireplace hearth as a stage to perform dance routines he learned watching the Wiggles

Santa's on his way

We've been busy lately, and I haven't taken any pictures. Still unpacking. Christmas parties. Play dates. Fixing Stuff. Hanging pictures. Cleaning. I've spent at least 3-4 hours cleaning the jetted tub in our bathroom, most recently using q tips to scrub the jets. My advice to anyone building a house - don't put in a jetted tub! They really suck to clean. Gavin started back up with speech therapy. His therapist did an evaluation to see how he's doing. For expressive language he scored a 75, with an 85 being within normal range, putting his speech at a chronological age of 2 yrs 2 months. I'm happy with that. And he scored a 98 on his receptive language, which I expected. He has never had a problem understanding what we say to him. He even has started to understand the whole Santa thing. When asked what he wants Santa to bring him he says "choo choo." Always the same thing, except for yesterday when he was eating smores dessert pizza at the pizza buffet and we asked him what he wanted Santa to bring him. He pointed to the pizza. The last 2 mornings I have found Gavin looking out the window in his room when he wakes up. I asked him what he's looking for, and he said "ho ho ho. choo choo." Gavin has a word for almost everything now, it's just hard to understand what he's saying. It took me a while on Sunday to figure out he was calling the goodie bag he got from nursery "trick or treats". He still prefers to use sound effects a lot of the time instead of words. Instead of naming a type of animal he'll make the noise the animal makes. Instead of Santa it's ho ho ho. And he's still making all his truck sound effects. On the afternoons its been warm enough to go outside he likes to walk or ride his trike around our street picking up rocks, then puts them in his dump truck on the front porch to play with. He enjoys watching the teenage boys across the street from us skateboard, and does his own version by running sideways and jumping. Yesterday Gavin got his Christmas present from Uncle Tom - an unbreakable kid's nativity scene. Gavin flew the angels around for awhile, then noticed the 2 shephards with staffs, which he promptly used to attack each other and all the other nativity people. Jake called it the Quentin Tarantino version. And then Tyler tried to eat the baby Jesus. Welcome to my world. And Merry Christmas!

Baby Jesus

Tonight I got out Gavin's little nativity scene and I explained who everyone was. I pointed out the gifts the wise men were bringing to Jesus, and told him they were bringing them because Christmas is Jesus' birthday. He picked up the wise man and said "Merry Christmas!" Later I asked him what the wise men say, and he responded, "Ho Ho Ho."

 After we played with the nativity awhile Gavin decided to play with his Christmas singing dog. He sat it on the ground and then moved all the nativity people to face the dog while it sang:

 Tyler likes the Christmas dog too:



Creating a Gavin-proof Christmas Tree

This week

It's been cold here this week and Gavin has been spending a lot of time in his footed pajamas. The non-slip soles on them work well on our wood floors, and Gavin likes to wear them, especially his super hero pajamas:

He continues to be obsessed with big trucks, and carries this one that my mom gave him around with him most of the day:

 (the huge bug on the window kept Gavin occupied for quite awhile that day)

Last night Gavin tried on a couple pairs of new shoes, these "boops" were his favorite:

Meanwhile Jake hung our special order blinds on our front door last night. The front door was the only window in the house without blinds, and you could see right in from the street. It will be nice to have complete privacy in our house now.

Gavin looks super cute dressed for church, but was not in the mood for pictures this morning. He was upset because Jake had gone outside without him to heat up the car.