Month: September 2015

Development

Most of the last half of this year has been taken up by two things: work & kids. And in both cases, the thing that’s been absolutely wonderful is the progress that’s happened. Work is work – if you wanna see what’s up there, go to wonderspark.co.

IMG_1227But both kids are really … blossoming. Over the last few months, K has gotten to a point where he can articulate fairly complicated thoughts. Where he used to mimic everything that anyone said around him, he’s now expressing ideas about things that aren’t just repeating others, and it’s really fun to have little conversations with him about things. He wants to do so many things, and he’s getting to a point, I think, where he can do a lot more, rather than just want to do a lot more.

Seeing J&K play together has been really fun, too. It’s not just J wants X and K does it just because, now there’s some push and pull as they try to figure out how to play together when they both want to play, but don’t necessarily want the same things. Of course that leads to some conflict, but so far they’ve actually been really good about working through things & compromising.

IMG_1043As K’s gotten better at verbally expressing himself, J’s gotten to a point where he’s doing a lot of reading and writing. The other day, he read his first non-trivial book cover-to-cover (Dinosaur Dig – he’d read some BOB books before, but those are all like, “Dot hit bob. Bob ate Dot.”), and he’s able to sound out & write down a lot of stuff. Yeah, this is the age when that starts happening, and it’s clear that he’s made a lot of progress because of Kindergarten, but it’s still magical to me to see this progress.

Both kids also seem to really be getting a kick out of going to the pool. Last year was the first time that they seemed to really enjoy it, but this year’s the first time that J’s actually been making significant progress swimming. K’s spending a lot of time jumping off the edge of the pool, and he has absolutely no problem going underwater, which is something that apparently surprised a lot of the lifeguards last year when he was a lot smaller, but now he’s big enough that it’s not particularly weird.

J’s made huge strides this year – he’s getting the hang of side breathing (though he breathes to the left), and he can swim across the medium pool without stopping. He’s not quite at the point where he can go the whole long way of the big pool, but that’s fine. It’ll happen when it happens. The other day, the deep end was open for rec swim, and I figured we could try diving, and that it’d probably take a while, but from literally the first try, he was fine – I held his feet for one dive, and after that, he wanted to dive again & again. So that was neat.

IMG_1207K calls the arrangement in the following photo, “Bread, meat, happy salad, and other bread.” He’s the happy salad. Seems like an appropriate nickname for him. He’s almost always so cheerful and curious. And finally, both kids are sleeping through the night, together, the vast majority of the time. K’s making progress on getting out of diapers, which will be a nice change, and something it’ll be nice to be done with until one day Ei-Nyung & I are old and need ’em. 😛

But yeah – that’s really about all that’s up. Our clothes washer fatally broke, so we got new ones, and that same week our bathroom faucet sprung a fatal leak, so that got fixed. The other day I tried to put a suction bird feeder on a bathroom window that had a small “bullet hole” like crack (from a rock that was kicked up by the lawnmower years ago) and the whole window shattered into huge shards. Fortunately, they all fell “in”, and nothing say, sliced my arm off. So that’s getting fixed. Someone backed into the front of one of our cars and smashed it up a bit, and it’s at the shop getting fixed. So lots of little repairs & upgrades & stuff.

Mobi’s still doing well. He’s definitely getting older, but there are times when he still acts like a big, dumb, excitable puppy. What a goof.

All in all, things have been great. Really just totally great. 2015 is such a massive step up from 2013-14 from a work-happiness perspective that it’s just mindboggling, and I’m so glad to be working on a project I’m super excited about, that I can’t wait to have people play, with a team I love working with every day. Good stuff.