growing

Cole is now 4 1/2 and Joy is 1 1/2 years old. How did that happen? Despite my best attempts to savor every moment while meeting every deadline, time marches on and they just keep growing. Without them, I doubt I'd notice how much time was passing by.

Joy remains petite, but with a much larger presence. She is bold, confident and funny. With an empty bowl or a piece of paper, she's the world's youngest prop comic. She tells knock-knock jokes without punch lines and bursts into big belly laughs for her big brother. Joy sings to herself sometimes and her vocabulary expands daily. Today's word was "look" which puts her at about 4 dozen words. She loves all kinds of food and today she consumed 4 bowls of noodles (nu-nus). Joy's definitely a carnivore while Cole doesn't really like meat at all. Between the 2 of them they can finish 1 full meal.

Cole's doing well at school and still loves to draw and paint and make stuff. He drew business cards for himself the other day so I scanned them, added the phone number and printed them for him. I thought it might help him learn his phone number, but he's more interested in the design right now. He's becoming sneaky which is a difficult issue to manage. I found part of a sandwich under the toy box the other day, and after many meal time battles, I'm changing the approach again. We choose 2 meals a day , and he picks 1. The strategy has helped Cole to try a few new things, and last night he ate noodles willingly for the first time. He also likes my homemade macaroni and cheese, but he won't touch the stuff in the blue box...which would be a lot easier!