Tanner is definitely a mamma's boy. It's really sweet. If Kirk's holding him when he's crying, he actually counts down from the second he gives Tanner to me until he stops crying and he rarely gets past 2 or 3. It's almost instantaneous. I'm completely charmed and flattered that I'm so comforting to him, even though it gets a little tiresome sometimes. And he looks at me so adoringly sometimes, that I said to Kirk yesterday that babies are God's gift to mothers of older children. After the daily emotional battle of parenting older children (getting homework done, chores, conflict resolution, sharing toys, etc.), there is nothing better than getting the cuddles and the pure adoration of a baby. It fixes everything.
He's almost 10 months old and he's finally starting to act like he's going to start to crawl. Sometimes I laugh that my 10 month old baby isn't even crawling yet, but then I remember chasing my 8 month old walking Anthon around the house all day and trying to keep everything from complete destruction and I'm grateful. I want him to stay a baby as long as possible, and so far, he's being very obliging. He has taken a few teensy steps with his arms toward a toy or Kirk, so we're making progress. I refuse to encourage it. For the reasons I alluded to already, but also, because as soon as he starts crawling, I'm going to have to be a lot more careful about safety issues. Eventually, he'll crawl regardless of what I do or don't do, and that's the beginning of the end, as far as I'm concerned. So I'm enjoying the remaining days of a relatively stationary baby.
Oh, and he's finally starting to eat food that isn't pure mush. He ate bits of banana yesterday, and he likes the soft part of bread. His favorite is still pears or sweet potatoes.
Erilyn is a lively, sweet, girly little girl. She loves friends, dancing, and anything princess-related. She says the cutest things, has the most amusing sense of logic, and still has the best control of her facial expressions of anyone in our family. She's athletic and feminine at the same time. I've started officially teaching her the letters of the alphabet, and she loves doing her "homework." We usually do it in the morning with some games and crafts, but then we practice writing in the afternoon when Anthon's at the table doing his homework. She loves it.
Anthon is developing some serious problem solving skills. After many long tests, he's been recommended for our district's gifted and talented program. His teacher said she's not surprised. I have mixed feelings about it, but he seems to look forward to the extra work we told him it would entail, so we'll see how it goes. I'm mostly glad he'll be more challenged and mentally stimulated.
He reads like crazy. He brought home The Diary of a Wimpy Kid the other day from his school library, and knowing other kids who'd read it and loved it, I didn't think anything of it at first. Then, later that night, after he'd already read the entire book, he asked me to start over with him and read it out loud. I didn't get very far before I realized it was too old for him: worrying about acne and getting girls to like you is not 1st-grader appropriate. We had a talk about how just because you can read something doesn't mean you should. Now he has to let me look at any books he checks out of the school library before I'll let him read them. The problem is, he's really running out of reading material. He's read all of The Magic Treehouse series, A to Z Mysteries, The American Chillers, most of Encyclopedia Brown, and a whole bunch of others that I'm forgetting the titles to. At our library, all there is left is Junie B Jones which I think he's resigning himself to, though he's read at least half of those as well. I found Homer Price, and The Great Brain books for him, which he's almost finished with, and he's listened to all of The Secret Seven books our library has on CD, which is the only format they have. He's read a lot of random chapter books, and most of the research guides that go along with the Magic Treehouse books, as well as a ton of non-fiction books about pretty much anything you could imagine. I think he's going to have to move on to longer classic children's novels like Charlotte's Web, and Where the Red Fern Grows. Kirk's read some of those out loud to him, and he loves it. I'm going to have trouble keeping up with him as he gets older. It's a bit daunting.
Time for a Sunday evening stroll. The weather is a delightfully cool 64 F.
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