![\"Alex](\"http:\/\/www.puckandmary.com\/blog_mary\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/09\/fb_coverphoto_2012_08_21_v2.jpg\" "\\"Alex")
<\/a>Alex (left) and Dom (Aug. 21, 2012)<\/p><\/div>Well, it’s been awhile since I posted on the twin blog–almost a year. During that time I started getting more sleep at night which allowed me to reclaim my brain that had been in hiding for awhile, and I finally finished my dissertation with the assistance of my mom who came out to stay with us for several months while I worked on the final chapters. I’ve been keeping family and friends updated on the boys through long Facebook posts–my lazy blog away from my blog. Now, with my dissertation done, I plan to resuscitate the blog and to transition many of those posts back to the blog.<\/p>\n
State of our Dynamic Duo:<\/h2>\n
Alex and Dom are two delightful two-year-olds right now–full of curiosity and learning more every day. In the last few days, they’ve been really focusing on the concepts of a light being on or off–not just turning it on and off which they’ve done for awhile but relishing their command of the words that go with the actions, and they’ve also started to grasp and use “dark” and “bright.” They continue to love the alphabet and their numbers, and they often ask to play with the foam alphabet (“babet”) we have. They’ve really started paying attention to and testing binaries recently: up-down, forward-backward, big-little, etc. They are also working on the concepts of happy and sad, and they not only identify happy and sad people and objects (like jack o’lanterns) but also pretend to be happy and sad. Dom particularly likes making a sad face and sound, and shortly after I playfully ask, “Oh, are you sad?” he shifts to happy. They love teasing about their age too. They know they are supposed to say that they are “two” when asked, but they enjoy saying every other number from 3-10 and hearing us tell them, “Noooo, you’re not x!” We’ve started doing that with other things as well. I’ll ask them if the car one of them is holding is a variety of colors, and they enjoy shaking their head and telling me “no” until either they tell me the color or I finally say the right one.<\/p>\n
Dom and Alex are very excited about fire trucks, dump trucks, rockets, dinosaurs, and robots right now. Alex declared one of their tow trucks a “robot” recently, and not only has this decision stuck but they have converted a few more of their toys into pretend robots. We also encouraged them to make one of their red airplanes an honorary rocket so that both boys could play with a rocket at the same time. They love watching videos of Curiosity (Like “7 Minutes of Terror<\/a>“), and I believe the tow truck-robot is meant to be a Curiosity-type robot.<\/p>\n We are getting back into our reading groove too, and both Dom and Alex really like one of our new books “Dumpy the Dump Truck.” It’s longer than a lot of their books that we read right now, but they stay engaged through the whole book. We’ve been pointing at the words in books while we read to them, and they are now starting to point along with us and pay more attention to the words. <\/p>\n Dom (left) and Alex enjoy their box seats for a movie. (Dom put his chair in the box by himself.) (Sept. 15, 2012)<\/p><\/div>Last Saturday I was feeling pretty sick (I later figured out that I had my first experience with mastitis), and I had the boys to myself most of the day. Since it wasn’t a good nap day for them, we had a very lazy afternoon snuggled up together on the couch to watch “Puss in Boots” and “Shrek.” I absolutely love the times when we have a little puppy pile. Of course, Alex and Dom also played through some of the movies, and fortunately, they were in very good and pretty cooperative moods. Shortly before bed, they played peek-a-boo using the flaps of their big box–at first hiding inside the box. Then, they hid on either side of the box behind a flap and would jump up with huge grins on their faces to surprise me.<\/p>\n I felt quite a bit better by Sunday, and as the week continued, exhaustion was the main symptom I had left. (That’s two illnesses since I finished the dissertation at the end of last month. I’m ready to be healthy for awhile now!) We’ve had a pretty lazy week–with lots of time spent at home playing with our big box, coloring, reading books, building with megabloks, and pulling cushions off the couches to jump and climb on them. I’ve started helping them write short words (like their names) occasionally when we’re coloring (using whatever hand they have a crayon in), and they seem to really enjoy that.<\/p>\nThe Last Few Days:<\/h2>\n
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