I Love You

Matthew has become very good at signing. Even though he is increasing his verbal vocabulary all the time, we continue to teach him signs for various words and phrases. Mostly because it is just so darn cute to watch him sign with his little hands  So our most recent sign we have been working on is the sign for "I love you". There are two ways to sign this. You can sign each word individually or you can put it all together in one sign by folding down your ring and middle finger with your palm facing out, which is what we do.  This requires a bit of dexterity and is hard for a little person who is still developing those fine motor skills and so the best Matthew can do is fold down his index finger. Being a new sign, we usually sign it first and then he copies us. It has become part of our bedtime routine with him and not so much part of our other daily activities.

So the other day, I left Rachel on a blanket on the floor to kick and wiggle while Matthew played around her.  I went into the kitchen for just a moment and when I came back, Matthew was quietly sitting on the blanket beside her, folding down his index finger in his version of the I love you sign.  It was really the sweetest thing to see.

Of course, I couldn't get him to repeat it for me so I could take a picture, so these ones will have to do so you can see that he loves his little sister.

"Hi Rachel!"

*kiss*

100 and counting

We were having a stroll last night with our yuppie-mobile (the chariot) and were enjoying Matthew and his stream on conversation about cars, the various colours of cars, the ownership of said cars etc. That got us to thinking: just how many words does he know anyway? I said that it must be a hundred and Kristine said it was closer to 50. So we started to count. It was pretty fast at first, but then it slowed down around 40, but we steadily climbed past the 50 mark, past 70 and on to 80. We were both pretty amazed at 80, but the words kept coming. We aren't sure if he knew what we were doing, but Matthew started to chime in with obscure words that he doesn't use often, but certainly knows. By the time we got home we were at a solid 96. We executed the bedtime protocol and as I was brushing his teeth I got the last four to push us to 100. Wow. And sure enough, the next day we added more. I think we are at 107 now and still counting. Pretty incredible. Apparently 20 words by 18 months is pretty normal and 50 by 2 years, so clearly language is not going to be an issue for Matthew, or to be clear the lack of language won't be the issue. He is starting to put things together too. He has quite a few 3 word phrases and is getting up into 4 words as well. Of course all this is great except as I write this the little turkey is chatting away in his crib, as he has been doing for the last hour of his "nap".

That's a Great Hat!

Isn't it though? We've had friends, family and even strangers (many strangers) tell us how great it is. Some of those strangers even called from across the street to say so. And why not? He is pretty cute in that hat.

Evelia really likes it too.

We've been everywhere man

Matthew and I have been on some pretty grand adventures during my paternity leave in August. Bike has been our preferred mode of transportation (as Matthew puts it "bie! daddy bie! big bie! bie! bie! reh Bie! bie! BIE! bie!"). We have been through Fort Whyte Alive, out to St. Vital Park, down the Sturgeon creek trail, and checked out the mint. In total we traveled over 200km in August, not bad. Here is a map and some of the pictures of our adventures.

Reading whilst traveling. Standard protocol.

"Gookie!" (which, don't tell him, is actually a rice cracker)

Boardwalk in Assiniboine Forest.

Proof that I was along for the ride too.

BDI Bridge

Out by the Mint.

Over the esplanade Riel

At Fort Gibraltar

cross-reference

Matthew is big into reading these days. Well reading may be a bit of an overstatement; he is big into looking at books these days. We have a number of books that are just pictures of things, and he is thrilled by them. He points out things, names things, describes things, assigns ownership to things, changes ownership of things, comments on the cleanliness of the things, the relative size of the thing and sometimes the colour. Of course all this is within the confines of his ever expanding, yet still quite limited vocabulary. A standard discussion will go like this: we'll take a car as an example.
"Cah!"
[Aside: He has, for some reason, picked up a bit of a boston accent. I am not sure where this comes from, and it doesn't apply to everything, but some some cars in particular are defiantly Boston cars, as in "Coah" instead of the regular "cah". For this illustration we will assume a non-boston car.]
"Cah! Cah! Ye-yo Cah! Daddy Cah! Big Cah! Mommy Cah! Dirdy Cah!"
Most things will go through a similar evolution, like Boat:
"Bo! Big Bo! Daddy Bo! Mommy Bo! MommyDaddy Bo! Ye-yo Bo"

The colour thing is new and developing. He has 2 currently, so things are all pretty much black and white, or in this case, blue and yellow. He gets a bit confused when we tell him that the colour is wrong and will earnestly either switch to the other colour or reiterate the colour that he has chosen. Like-a so:
M: "Bu Cah"
A: "Matthew, that car is green, Green Car.""
M: "ye-yo Cah"
A: "No Matthew, Green. Green Car, this one is yellow, this one is blue, but this one is green"
M: "ye-yo Cah"
Still, colour is cool.

So, back to his books of things. He has many, some that are abstract, some cartoonie, and some with actual pictures. We were reading one the other night and he pointed out Kite, or "Kye". Then he stopped and grabbed for one of his other books and started frantically flipping pages. I had no idea what he was doing since he usually comments on pretty much every page. He flipped through several pages until he finally stopped and pointed triumphantly at picture on the page: "Kye!, Kye!". Sure enough it was another picture of a kite. He wiped that book away and pointed back at the original: "Kye!", then back and the new book: "Kye!". Yep that's my little boy: making daddy proud by cross-referencing is picture books.

Welcoming Rachel

We had made the calls the night before so the various grandparents had time to make their way into the city, so everyone was there to welcome Rachel. Here are some great pictures of the first visits when Rachel was hours old.

Birth Story

The full birth story will be published in Rachel's book (this of course means we need to make that book). However, here are some of the highlights:Kristine's water broke just as we were putting the final touches on Rachel's room. Specifically we were putting up the light in the room. Kristine came and sat down and said "I think my water just broke". We had that hanging moment of a thousand thoughts, then things started happening. We paged the midwife and she came over to check out how things were going. Nothing was moving yet, so we decided to try to get some sleep. It was only about 10pm. If things weren't moving by morning then we would make a plan from there. However, as we would shortly find out, things were moving just fine. Since Kristine had never experienced actual labour before, just the chemically induced kind, we weren't all that sure what normal was. About 11:30 or so we started timing what we though were contractions. They were all in the 5 minute range so we eventually decided to page again. The midwife came over and sure enough, we were fully into active labour - who knew! We activated Luanne, who was to care for Matthew while we went to the Hospital. She came over and Kristine's labour continued to progress. We were quite far along when Luanne got to us. We passed in the door and basically said "he's asleep, we'll call later, good luck". It was about 2:45am. The midwife followed us to the hospital in her car. We found out after that she called ahead to warn emergency that we may need them, and to get the room ready in delivery. We arrived, after a number of minor traffic infractions, and a lot of swearing, with as of yet no baby - so that is good. It was 3am. We did the classic Hollywood flight through the hospital - Kristine in a wheelchair, me pushing and Kristine breathing hard. We had a bit of a barrier at admissions- they wanted all the paperwork filled out, but the baby didn't really care. The midwife arrived and basically took Kristine to the room for delivery and I stayed signing things that I didn't read or even really care about. I ran to the room where they were flagging me down. 17 minutes later Rachel was here. Those 17 minutes (less for me) were pretty blurry, but Kristine was in fine form and the birth was generally without incident. Rachel was perfect, is perfect. The cleanup afterward took far longer, but I guess that is normal. At about 6am we had a little nap and at 8am we had breakfast and started calling people to tell them the exciting news!