The opportunities for pictures were very slim this week as Josie fell ill on Saturday night and stayed in bed until mid-day today barely eating a thing and not drinking too much. But then as the fever broke she was back to running around, screaming and talking a mile a minute. I was keeping her quarantined to her bed as much as possible and the other kids away from her to try to minimize contamination. Ewan started his fever unfortunately last night and it continued today. What you’re seeing above is him right after nap, when his fever had spiked, I gave him tylenol and also a wet washcloth to the head to help cool him down. I rather like the spiky hair look. He also has decided on new fashion accessories today which were the yellow rain boots as seen above, hand-me-downs from our cousin Harrison, and Josie’s frozen t-shirt. He cried every time someone tried to take his boots off, so we left them on, all day.

Josie and Celia in the background are both examining their science kits they got for Christmas to see which experiments they want to do next. We’ve done several already, but there are more to come. Yesterday Celia made a traditional exploding volcano, and today we made baking soda crystals, which also exploded, but I don’t think that was supposed to happen. Josie was planning to make paper today, but we didn’t get to it yet. One small bonus to being home sick is lots of time for projects like these that are hard to fit around their many activities sometimes!

Celia just finished up her season of ballet for the year. For some reason she only gets two semesters of class while Josie’s goes on for quite some time more leading up to the recital in May. I wish Celia got some more lessons, but I do think it wise not to rope 4 year olds into recitals. For her last class we got to observe and I brought my camera. Celia was rightly very proud of herself for all that she had learned. She moved slowly and carefully trying to pay attention to all the small details. Our own little tiny dancer!

Here’s my kids over the weekend building a crib for their dolls. The same situation happens again and again, Celia and Josie are building, Ewan wants to help, they scream ‘nooooooooooooo’ and we try to help them figure out how to play together. Then he builds with them, as seen in this picture, but only a few seconds later of course that rather unsupported tall skinny tower he’s making topples over, and Ewan thinks it’s fun so he starts kicking all the other walls down too. Complaining begins again… all the joys of one year olds.

While setting up for the monthly shot…

I cannot believe another month has gone by! Compare this to almost a year ago.

If you saw a few blog posts back where Ewan ripped the front off our dishwasher you may be correctly inclined to believe he’s a handful. Like most 1 year olds he’s always on the move, wanting to learn and ‘help’ with absolutely everything. These days he’s coming up with more and more new words each day which is such a joy to see him learn and delight in communicating with us.

His favorite thing to do is ‘help’. If you have something to put away, something to put in the trash or recycling, clothes to move from one place to another, he’s your man. He wants to help with the dishwasher, setting the table, laundry folding and even taking out the trash. He’s devastated when he’s refused with a big crumpled up face and crying. Yesterday he started learning to fold his wipes on his own by copying Celia and using his hands very slowly and deliberately.

Ewan has also very recently started to be interested in books. He loves ‘Where’s Spot?’ which allows him to say ‘no’ as you turn each page, Josie taught him how to read that one. He also likes ‘Buenas Noches Luna’ and to point out the cats.

He also regularly can be convinced to make us pretend tea, he uses the pot and pours us cups. It’s very good for distracting him from something else he wants and cannot have. He also helps to make real tea by filling up the tea kettle.

One of his greatest joys though is of course big motion, running around, jumping, throwing and spinning. He loves to jump, run, and kick, which is tough in this winter weather. He’ll be over the moon (and hopefully a bit more tired!) once we get to play outside again. He’ll play outside in the snow a little while now, but he gets tired off it (and cold) after only 20 minutes or so. He loves our indoor gymnastics sessions. He despises his swimming lessons. The second we show him the bathing suit he starts to chant ‘no no no…’ He is lucky that he only has one more, and then we didn’t sign him up for the next session because the timing didn’t work out correctly, and he hated it. [Edited to add – he actually somehow decided he liked his last swim lesson] So it didn’t take too much thought. He does enjoy free swim with us so we’ll stick with that for now. He also will kick and ‘swim’ in the bathtub! As I type this he is now helping by pulling dirty tissues that fell behind the radiator out and then insisting that I pick him up to the trash can to throw them out.

As for food, he’s extremely variable. Some days he’ll eat like a horse, but a lot of days now he’s refusing most everything we put in front of him except for cheese and rice and blueberries, even things he ate the day before. Clearly he’s trying out where he has free will and what else he can expect to get.

Ewan also insists on being involved in all art projects. The most recent one, where we painted on bubble wrap and then made prints from it, he showed the first sign of actually understanding and wanting to participate in the process as we suggested it to him. He painted, and then he printed, and then printed again and again on the same piece, but he looked at it each time experimenting and seeing what would happen!

He’s wonderfully full of live and love, very happy to greet everyone he sees especially his favorite people. It will be nice though when he can keep his hands out of messy and dangerous things upon request.

• Size/weight: 24month clothes, 25 lbs
• Favorite food: breastmilk, cheese, pasta, blueberries
• Favorite toy: ball, anything he can use as a stool
• Favorite book: go, dog, go!
• Favorite activity: throwing and dumping things
• New game: loves to jump into the pool, even if you’re not there to catch him
• Sleeping: bedtime ~8:15; one short nap at 1:30; gets up 7am
• New skill: tons of words!
• Teeth: 16 and more coming
• Vocalizations: talking in single words, naming objects and learning things like ‘in, out, up, on’

or maybe Queen Elsa, but Celia keeps insisting it’s Jack.

More from my bad mother photo series.

New one coming on Friday, but shopping for a dishwasher was not how I intended to spend our Sunday. I can actually still run it luckily if I jam it shut in place with a chair and I plan to make the controls into a neat electronic dissecting project once we’ve got a new one ready to go!

One of the salesmen at the store tried to sell me on how one dishwasher might be better because it was harder for the kids to open. I just looked at him blankly before telling him that my children are expected to put their own plates in the dishwasher and empty it and therefore need to be able to open the door. I’m guessing he doesn’t have kids and his mother did everything for him.

Let’s hope this is the last major appliance of ours that he breaks.

It is once again too cold to play outside and so we’re inside the house, practicing our flying with a gymnastics pad and two mattresses. It started off as an exercise in practicing vaulting as the girls are back in gymnastics again and having trouble getting the timing right for the vault. They both improved between practicing last week and this week.