February Kid Updates I
Time for another round of posts probably most interesting to the grandparents. . . the girls’ updates will follow shortly.
ANDREAS is 110% boy. The kid is obsessed with dinosaurs, planes, trains, boats, and cars. He adores pushing/flying/driving his little toys around the house.
He frequently latches onto one or another of them in an obsessive manner, meaning that a particular item travels EVERYWHERE with him for a day (or two or three). Interest in that specific object will then wane as a new one replaces it, but you have to be on your toes. A previous “must-have” toy can unexpectedly return to “cannot-live-without-it” status without any notice, and if it is not easily accessible (read: you don’t know where he last put it), panic will ensue. And so, Caleb has received many a mid-day phone call from Nancy asking, “Do you happen to know where ‘Gruenes Flugzeug’ (green airplane) is right now?” or “My life will be markedly improved if you could tell me where the VW is. . . please?!?”
He has recently also begun showing a bit of an interest in arts and crafts. His attention span is growing increasingly longer, so if we put some children’s stories or music on the radio and give him a dinosaur coloring book, we can occasionally buy ourselves a few minutes of (relative) calm. (Warning: he may still knock over an empty chair, color on his sister or Lord-knows-what else, or come up with some other mischief, so this is not a free pass to leave him unsupervised!) He had a lot of fun with fingerpaint recently.
Andreas is going through some typical 3-year-old “mean” stuff: hitting, pinching, teasing, jumping on, and otherwise aggravating his big and little sisters. He comes up with some hilarious but not appropriate insults, so Simona often comes running up to us to report, “Andreas hat mich eben stinkig doof Kuh genannt!” (Andreas just called me stinky dumb cow!). Not sure where he gets these, but I sometimes have to bite my tongue to keep from laughing. We are trying to work on this behavior.
Physically, he continues to be relatively small. He had his 3-year well-child visit in January and weighed in around 31 pounds, which put him in the 50th percentile for weight. I don’t remember how tall he is, but I think it was around 95 centimeters (about 37 inches). Whatever it was, he is in the 20th percentile for height. He also had a bad haircut (I take full responsibility for the unfortunate mishap with the clippers!) in December, so he has spent January regrowing his hair. (These are before and after pictures from December. . . he looks much better now!)
He also had a sore nose (from a late-December cold) that he kept picking at, so it grew into a bigger and bigger scab. We had to enforce wearing a band aid on his upper lip and then had to resort to socks over his hands to allow it to finally heal up, but it’s pretty well healed now.
Despite his wild-man ways, Andreas does have a tender little heart and will sometimes crawl into your lap for a hug or a story- preferably about a train, plane, dinosaur, car, boat. . . He definitely idolizes his Papa right now, which is really cute to see. His laugh is contagious, and he is a sweet boy. He brings so much fun and energy into our lives.
