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.

With all the snow lately we’ve gotten the opportunity to play with lots of our toys (I did a major cleaning/rearranging of the basement yes!), this weekend Jordi took out his amp for his electric guitar and sang for us all. Celia liked to play with the pedal and Ewan liked the plugs.

Signs of our real life include the laundry baskets piled in the corner, all clean, but still piled up on top of the air filter. I think we’ve got a record four stacked there. If you come to our house and there’s not a laundry basket on the air filter you can be very sure that I cleaned up for you.

We are currently in the midst of another blizzard (yikes 2014-15 winter has been crazy!) and here’s some photos from earlier stuff. I’m not letting the kids play outside in the winds and cold  today.

This is last week’s snow with Josie on the snow pile and Ewan on the porch. Now the snow is level with the top edge of the porch near the porch, and halfway up the front windows for the top part of the pile. Time to hibernate.

Here they are, standing on the front lawn! That’s our porch railing, the one that’s say 7 feet above the ground below them. We’ve been doing a lot of playing in the snow in the front yard that is our giant snow pile that now reaches above the first floor windows.

a.k.a. I’m a terrible mother who puts her children outdoors barely dressed in snowstorms to take their photo, photo series.

This was one storm ago, let it be known that I refused to do it two storms ago when she was sick! You can click on the image (twice) to see it big.

Let’s get back to November, when it was warm and there was no snow! Although actually it got rather chilly in Orlando and rained a lot of the day we went to Disney too. On Monday of our visit Jordi’s parents took us all to Disney World! We amazingly got up plenty early and even parked and arrived prior to the park opening. As we pulled up on the monorail from the parking lot we got to see the cast of characters waiting to arrive by train to the opening gate! We got our first (and only) glimpse of Anna and Elsa and some other characters. We arrive to the main gate, get our tickets checked and the show starts right away complete with song, dance, and fireworks!

We walked straight up main street, trying to see if we might be able to meet up with Anna and Elsa in fantasy-land, but didn’t want to drag the kids in a race and ruin the beginning of the day. So by the time we got to the line it was over an hour and a half. Basically the only way to get to see those princesses is to stay at a disney resort so you can get a fastpass many months in advance, none were available by the time we could set our fastpasses. Instead our first stop was the winnie the pooh ride!

We spent the morning going around from ride to ride, using a few fast passes but mostly things were moving pretty quickly since we weren’t going on the more intense rides (snow white, or space mountain). We got onto dumbo and flew. One of Josie’s favorites was the smaller roller coaster, the barnstormer, I think she went three times with different groups of adults. Ewan was not particularly fond of most things as he didn’t like the dark, or loud noises, or being restrained and he was in a clingy phase as well. We visited the tea party cups too. It was a lovely morning visiting a number of rides, including the driving one, and sending Jordi and his siblings off to space mountain which Josie opted out of riding this time. We also visited Buzz Lightyear and played the space game which Ewan loved, but the girls just hid from. It was very unpredictable which ride would please each child.

Then we headed across the park to frontierland to ride splash mountain. I had to physically drag Celia onto the ride as she was quite nervous, but I kept her safe as she will attest! And Josie hid herself to keep from getting wet too! Then we headed off to lunch and found some great options for us vegetarians at Columbia Harbor house. Then we headed back towards fantasy land and got to see Ariel’s ride before it started to rain on us. We snuck into the Carousel for a quick ride while other grownups went to other scary rides.

Sometime around now, it started to pour cats and dogs, and unfortunately continued for the rest of the day. I think we had short line waits because of the predicted rain, but it did rain on the upper end of what was predicted sadly. So we dashed between rides and the camera didn’t get out much anymore. We saw small world, and the favorite ride for all three kids was Enchanted Tales with Belle. No actual ride, but a cool storytime with real people and animatronics. Javi got roped into being a guard up front, my girls couldn’t be convinced to play a role but hung back with us in the audience.

Belle was nice enough to look at my camera too, not just their professional photographer! Celia was rather wary of getting near any of these characters and had to be convinced to hold hands. We also found that the line for Cinderella and Rapunzel was only half an hour (still over an hour and a half for Elsa and Anna) so we waited to see them.

Ewan kept running to the front of the line and I had to retrieve him. Waiting in line is not a strong point for a 1 year old! The princesses were very kind and friendly with the girls, but Josie and Celia didn’t really know the Cinderella story too well and definitely didn’t remember Rapunzel. We taught them some more stories when we got home, but next time I’d review the stories before the trip so they get a bit more into the ideas! Such lovely costumes and decorations. Towards the end of the evening, all wet and tired we had a nice dinner at the italian takeout place. Then we wandered back toward tomorrowland and enjoyed the laugh floor from Monsters Inc. That was very clever and enjoyed by the adults. Finally we watched the castle which still looked beautifully magical in the rain before we trudged up mainstreet thoroughly exhausted, with a few small shopping errands to do. We got a treat and they spent the end of their Disney money.

The park closed by 7, which turned out to be just right for us as the kids were definitely ready for bed from such an exhausting and exciting day at magical kingdom!