the jellyball family blog

Dear Noah,

Several weeks ago, you turned two years old. Mommy's been a pretty bad girl, because you are almost 25 months old by the time I write this. I could give you a million excuses, but the bottom line is that I am spending all of my non-working time munching on your face so I really don't have time to do much else. This letter is going to have to be both your 24 and your 25 month old newsletter, because I've had to come to terms with the fact that in order to reduce my guilt and stay sane, I'm going to have to start writing these every 2 months until you are 3 years old. Technically you are getting 50% less newsletters in the next year but I promise you that I will be munching on you 200% more of the time.

It's hard to believe that our little baby boy is now two years old. You still have a healthy coat of baby fat on you (especially in your face), which is why sometimes people think you're younger than you are, but the minute they see that you can practically carry on a full conversation, they either think you are your age or you are a baby genius. We think it's a little of both!

We had a great birthday weekend celebration for you, where we invited both sides of the family to come and celebrate with you. You enjoyed a lot of cake.

On your actual birth day, you had chocolate cake.

And then over your birthday weekend, we celebrated with some vanilla cupcakes.

I think "cupcake" is now one of your favourite words. It's certainly one of your favourite things! Your idea of a cupcake is icing with some cake added to it. Once you eat off the top of an iced cupcake, you demand "Un autre cupcake!" (another cupcake), never mind that you are still clutching the bottom of the cupcake in your hands. You simply want more ICING... you just haven't figured out how to ask for it yet.

In the last month or two, you have decided that you no longer need a nap. I was pretty much ready to have you nap until the first grade, but apparently you have different plans for us. Most days you are chipper and fairly well behaved in the afternoon when you are trying to convince everyone that you don't need your nap. Car rides can still be tricky, because you still actually need the nap, you just insist on not doing it. The only place where you will consistently take a nap is during your weekly visit to your grandparents' house, where it somehow still happens to be engrained in your routine. The afternoons when your brother goes to school, you usually fall asleep somewhere on the way home in the car, and your dad puts you to sleep in the living room on the couch or on a pillow on the floor.

You and your brother hunker down for your bedtime around 7:30pm after tooth brushing, storytime, and a glass or five of water, after which point you instruct me to put your glass of water in a designated spot, and that I am to go to my room. At which point I inform you that no, Mommy is NOT going to her room to wait for you to fall asleep, I'm going downstairs to deal with the aftermath of your full-day tornado of toys, do dishes, or finish up my work day. Most days, you vocalize your disapproval of this for about twenty minutes until I threaten to take away your bunny or the two balls you keep in your crib.

You're still waking up a couple of times a night, sometimes not even quite awake and half-sleeping, half-crying. Usually I can distract you by asking you if you want a glass of water, after which point you tell me that you'd like for me to put the glass of water back in the designated spot in your room, and you tell me "Dodo" (sleep) and you're back in your bed. Thankfully there has been very little cosleeping in the last little while, except for the odd morning when you threaten to be wide awake at 5am and we attempt to lull you back to sleep in bed between us, only to get kicked in the face around 6:30am. We take what we can get, sleep-wise, with you.

You are a real cheeky monkey. You really are. You always have this mischevious twinkle in your eye. You will ham it up for the camera on demand! You are playful and engaging, and disarmingly charming - and I think you kind of know it. There are always parts of the day when you are determined to be a big boy - you'll want to go down the stairs on your own or sit without a booster seat at the table or play with scissors. And then there are more tender moments, when you insist on being in our arms ("dans les bras!!!") and refuse to play on your own.

You love to crawl underneath the dining room table like it's your fort, and play under the table. You crawl under the chairs like they're tunnels. Sometimes I look for you and can't find you anywhere, only to see that you are sitting under the table, happily playing with a couple of cars.

Your favourite toy at the moment is a little tractor from the Bob the Builder series called Travis. You're also a big fan of a couple of the race cars from the movie Cars, including RPM and Leakless. You're really good with all the names of the characters, too - you know them all!

You love to watch an animated series called Pocoyo, and continue to love Caillou. You will watch Bob the Builder with your brother, though you don't usually make it through an entire episode. You seem to enjoy Thomas the Tank Engine shows a lot more now that you have gotten more into the characters and all the trains we have at home.

You speak in these cute little sentences - "J'ai peur!" (I'm scared), "Temps de manger?" (time to eat?), "Pas fait caca dans couche" (didn't poop in diaper - usually a sign that you just did, by the way), and my personal favourite "Pas de Frank dans la maison? Frank dans Cars?" (No Frank in the house? Frank in Cars?) which is a reference to Frank the evil Combine Harvester in the movie Cars. Your vocabulary is amazing for your age, and you converse with your brother like it's no big deal. Your brother is still your universal translator - sometimes we have on idea what you're saying and we have to ask Caleb to translate for us. He seems to fluent in Noah-speak.

You love to speak in English. You're able to say hello, goodbye, thank you, and answer "How are you?" with "I'm good!" There are a bunch of English phrases that you know, like "You're it!", "I'm stuck!", "I'm trying!" or "I did it!" and usually if you are asked a question, you answer "Yes." no matter what the answer actually is. I know you are aware of the two languages, because when we are out and about and you are hearing English around you, I can ask you, in French, to say thank you to someone, and you will say it in English instead of French. Sometimes you get really stuck wanting to speak in English, and you will call out to me and repeatedly say "Mommy?" until I have responded to you in English instead of in French.

You're still a pretty picky eater. There aren't many foods that you LIKE, which makes it really frustrating to plan meals around you. You'll pretty much eat anything if it's breaded (fish, chicken nuggets, turkey), occasionally you will entertain roasted sausages, spaghetti is occasionally tolerated although you eat it with your hands one strand at at ime and sometimes dip it in ketchup, and you love anything in the bread/cracker/pastry family. Breakfast is probably the easiest meal with you - you love cereal, waffles, toast, etc. Thank goodness you will eat most fruit, or else you wouldn't have any fresh fibre in your diet. You'll eat yogurt and occasionally some applesauce. Potatoes used to be the only vegetable where you'd eat more than 2 bites. On the rare occasion, I have managed to bribe you into eating 2 or 3 pieces of roasted asparagus or broccoli, but nothing consistent. In the last couple of weeks, you've started enjoying red bell peppers and will pick them out of my salad. I managed to convince you that sweet potato fries are as good as the white kind (Caleb isn't buying it one bit, though). Alas - if only I could meet all your nutritional needs with food shaped like a cookie, you'd be fine, but unfortunately, that's not really the case.

But let's move on from the things you won't do and talk about the things you LOVE to do. You love to dance and sing. You do this great little shuffle dance with your feet that involves a whole lot of dangerous sliding with socked feet. You will sing your heart out, but will sometimes insist that you be allowed to do a solo and that no one else is permitted to sing. You love to read books! Sometimes when your brother is at school, your father will put you in the wagon with a backpack of books and take you to the coffee shop where you will eat an entire cookie and drink two huge glasses of milk, and happily read through every single book in your bag. You are a social butterfly - you love to say hello and goodbye to everyone you see. Sometimes you wave at random people as we are crossing the street or walking through public places. You love to be the one to hand over Mom's credit card when we are paying for anything.

We've been starting to toilet train you in preparation for you needing to be toilet trained by September when you start preschool. So far it's been going well - you've figured out how to pee and if we can catch you in the act of starting a #2, you can usually crank one out into the potty and are thrilled to see the results! We're working on getting you to vocalize your needs and be able to do so before the event and not after it. The reward of mini-M&Ms was a great way to get you started, only now you expect that every time you squeak out a few drops, you get a reward. You will squeak out a few drops, jump with your arms in the air in a celebratory pose and exclaim "BONBON!" (candy)

You are still terrified of dogs up close - you love to see them from far but if one of them gets close to you, you scream in terror and start to cry. The other day you were walking along when a couple of pigeons were minding their own business off by a tree and you FREAKED OUT... I couldn't convince you that they were more scared of you than you were. Caleb took charge of the situation and took it upon himself to scare off the birds by running after them and yelling at them, and then came back to tell you that you didn't have to worry, because he'd look out for any birds and scare them off for you. That's love!

Being two years old, you deal with your emotions in a two year old way. They don't call them the terrible twos for nothing! When you are upset, you will cry and wail and it will be the END OF THE WORLD as we know it. Sometimes it's so hard to shake you out of these crying fits, but I know this is a temporary thing and your father reminds me that Caleb was the same way at this age (I have wiped it from my memory). You are a happy go lucky guy most of the day with the exception of when you have your two year old moments (heck, we all have those, even though we are not two!) - and when you have your tough moments, they're tough, but you get past it, you wipe away those crocodile tears when you're done and demand a tissue to blow your nose. I think the hardest thing I find with disciplining you these days is that sometimes you don't take it seriously - you'll laugh at a punishment, or stomp your feet and declare "NO!" if we insist on a punishment. It's rough being two, I hear you.

Pretty soon you'll be sleeping in the toddler bed. Caleb's already moved into his new twin bed but we decided to hold off on putting you in the toddler bed since you still wake up so much during the night. The thought that you could crawl right out of your bed is just too much for us to handle. We'll work on geting you to sleep through the night, and then we can talk about the toddler bed. That is, until you figure out how to climb out of the crib, which is what happened with your brother.

Noah, you are a real gem. We love you more than you can imagine, and there are days when I wish you were still my sweet little baby, but I have to say that I am really happy you are growing up too, because I can already see that you are going to be a real funny little boy.

With love,

Maman & Papa