Raising MONSTERS: August 2013

Rowan is officially 2 years old ... and officially the size of the average 3 year old. He had his 2 year check-up a few days ago - he is just over three feet tall and about 32 pounds. The doctor said "people might look at you weird and wonder why your three year old is acting like a baby." Oh well, Rowan is plenty charming and he still has quite a baby face.

He put the red dot on his nose.

At the bakery with the Cookie Lady

Rowan is getting better and better at communicating his needs and wants and we keep pushing him to use words as much as possible. This has resulted in some adorable, if slightly incorrect, sentence structure. He relies heavily on the phrase "I can have." For example, he might say "I can have peanut butter?" but he also says things like "I can have some hold hands?" He also tends to answer his own questions quickly and with the answer he wants, while mimicking Ben's and my own speech patterns ("I can have some peanut butter? Ok, fine, have some peanut butter!")
A major point of pride for us is his ability to spell his name: "R! O! W! A! N! Rowan!!" It's super cute. He also still loves counting, especially in Spanish. He tends to fall back on counting to ten in Spanish when he is showing off. We are also very proud of how good he is getting at recognizing letters and numbers. Ben has been reinforcing the letters with the sign alphabet and that seems to be helping.
Rowan also really likes to help, so we try to include him as much as possible. He MUST ALWAYS close the microwave and press the button ("I want to press the beep!!!!"), he likes to grind the coffee beans, and the other day I sat him on the dryer and handed him clothes to throw down into the washer. He got a HUGE kick out of that.

Helping Daddy make baguette

We made it down to the farm again on July 12th. Rowan took a little more time to warm up to the place this time, but eventually he chilled out. We picked lots of cherries and some raspberries. Kevin took us to the far field and Rowan had a wonderful time rolling around with Mary the cat. (Sadly, I didn't have the camera or my phone with me.) Lauren made some fresh tomato soup which Rowan happily ate (and some grilled cheese that he declined, as usual.) Rowan also spent quite a bit of time playing with some of Kevin's drum collection. I hope we can squeeze in another trip before the end of summer.

Heeey ... what's this lady trying to rope me into??

Awww nice daddy :)

Goofing around in the garden

Jamming with Uncle Kevin

Rowan's birthday party was good, relatively low-key, and similar to last year. The party was loosely based around the theme "art" since Rowan is so into drawing and painting. Since he's never been really wild about cake but dives at ice cream any chance he gets, we decided to do a make-your-own-sundae bar in lieu of a birthday cake. And we went pretty wild with it. Lauren and Ben made almost three gallons of homemade ice cream - french vanilla, green tea with fresh mint, and green tea with candied ginger. I made a sundae bar of fixins' including homemade sauces and Amy made brownies from scratch (she was nervous about messing them up but they were delicious.) We didn't snag as many pictures this year, but at least Rowan didn't cry into his birthday dessert (probably because we didn't try to sing this year.)

Fun sundae bar with the BEST salted caramel sauce.

Rowan was definitely pleased.

Rowan was all about water last year - it actually made us nervous, because he tried to dive out of our arms in pools and lakes, and we didn't feel comfortable just letting him go. I know that parents are starting to teach kids to swim really young and that babies often have natural abilities, but without any training or experience, I didn't want to just "let go." Sigh. Now of course this year, now that he's even bigger and stronger and I've taught him the basics in the tub, he REFUSES to go near any pools or lakes. He was still willing to use the sprinkler back when it was super hot in early July, but even that has lost it's shine a bit. We tried to go to Kershaw Park in Canandaigua a few weeks ago and he LOST it. Just hated almost the entire visit and wouldn't go near the water. Siiiigh, I know that soon enough I won't be able to drag him out of the water, but this new revulsion has been very frustrating (although thankfully the last couple weeks have been a lot cooler.)

On hot days, he cools off in paint.

Smeary-smeary

We spent a few days at the end of July staying at Family Camp at Barton with Ben's parents. Rowan actually did really awesome with camping. And he even lifted his own personal water embargo and played a little at the edge of Cayuga Lake (it's possible the seclusion helped a lot - there weren't really any other people around.) He seemed really happy to just run around and play at camp - I think he felt like - Cool! So were just going to live at the playground? Sounds good to me! He had a little trouble sleeping at night, but it was pretty chilly the first night and he has really outgrown the travel crib we brought. But we made do and he took a good nap in the cabin the second day, so he wasn't to worn out. We actually went back to Ithaca the following weekend for David and Liz's "Baby-Q" - again he did reasonably well, but by the end of that excursion he was DEFINITELY exhausted.