The Wrigley Kids

Monday, January 28, 2008

I love Katey!

So I was reading through my last update, and I must say that Katey is completely different now. In the first few weeks of December she melted right out of the horrible, frustrating phase I was describing and flowed into being a perfectly adorable, almost 2 year old. She is great!! I feel like I am just in love with her! It's like the whole world is better when your children are behaving. In fact, she is gone to the "yes" phase (as opposed to "no"), and wants to help with things all over the house like clearing her dishes (she watches Kyle do this), putting on her clothes herself, brushing her teeth, etc. It's so nice to see so much enthusiasm for everything! Especially since Kyle's new thing, when asked to set the table, is "set the table, AGAIN? Oh, I just hate setting the table!" All this said while he rolls his head around as though he's in agony and slump walks over to the table.

Katey is still talking all the time. She loves to repeat phrases. Just about anything we say during the day is said twice by the little parrot who follows us around. Her favorite phrase of all is "Let me do it!" with the accent on the word "Let" which I find amusing since most kids accent the word "me". It gives a funny lilt to the sentence. Anyway, she is even counting to ten! She doesn't always get there correctly and she needs a lot of prompting, but she's pretty good for her age. I discovered this early in the month when a friend came over and was showing how her 3 1/2 year old was learning Spanish and was counting to 5. All of a sudden to both her and my surprise, Katey just starts rattling off the numbers, 1 - 10, in order (she skipped four, though, and still sometimes does), right out of the blue. I remember my friend asking how long she'd been counting and I had to laugh because I didn't even know she could do it. I always count out loud to her, but never asked her to try since I assumed she was too young yet!

So Kyle is still going with the poo poo, pee pee humor thing, but in the last two months or so has added variations of "chick-a-mama, baby-mama, mama, gramma" - you get the picture. He thinks it's funny to string a bunch of words together, like "mama-baby, poo-poo, mama!" Then he giggles and asks it it is funny. Recently, he was saying that some of the kids at his school was telling him that he wasn't funny. I felt badly for Kyle, but Jeff likes to tell it how it is (which is good), and just told Kyle that he didn't think that stuff was funny either. So now we're working on teaching him some very easy kids jokes, so if you are favored with a joke from Kyle, don't let on that you know the answer even if you do. It helps him practice!

Since Katelyn is my little darling again, Kyle has coincidentally slid into another "stage" of course (if it's not one kid driving you crazy it's the other!). Anyway, he seems kind of moody and frustrated all the time. He explodes if you tell him "no" to a request. And it really is like a little volcano going off - tears, frustration and anger, usually to very simple things. We're working on it, but I can tell it's going to be a little while with this one, too. When he is good, he is very good. When he gets angry or frustrated, it's difficult for him to pull himself back.

Kyle is completely infatuated with Star Wars. We have a Lego Star Wars video game he likes to play (yes, it's Star Wars animated using Lego blocks). When he was younger he used to say Mickey Mouse and Tigger were coming over to the house to play, but now of course, it's Han Solo, Chewbaca, Luke Skywalker, etc. coming over instead. He loves all the ships and the characters, from both sets of movies. He seems to like Anakan and Obi Wan just as much as Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia. It's fun to play Star Wars with him, since we saw the movies and played it when we were growing up, too.

Tonight, Kyle, Katelyn and I were playing Mr. Potato Head, and we were pretending to walk to the mall and sing songs. So he starts singing in this raspy voice, and I asked him if his potatoe head has a sore throat. He tells me no, that his potatoe head is just an old man. And, he adds, his name is Daddy! Which of course, had me rolling on the floor!