Our 2 little Men: 18-month check-up (S), Painting with yogurt (S), losing a tooth (M), playing in a blanket fort (M+S).

First, Sean had his 18 month check-up. He is developing really well, and he is SO TALL! At 36.5 inches tall (93cm) he is the size of an average 3-year-old. He weighed just under 29lbs (13kg), which puts him in the 85th percentile for his age... but below the 10th percentile for his weight-to-height ratio! The doc was not at all worried about this, Sean eats well, has healthy round cheeks, and cute little dimples on his arms and legs. In my Mom's words, he's just "a very looooong drink of water."

Mark has early release from school all of this week. Thanks to all the wonderful WA rain, I'm having to get creative with finding things to do indoors! Yesterday I took Mark, Brady and Sean to eat gelato at Chuck's produce. I pushed all 3 of them all over the store in a shopping cart (together they weigh almost as much as I do!), and then they each got to choose 2 flavors. Anyone who knows me well knows that we hardly ever eat sweets... so this was a treat.

Today we did some art together after Mark came home. Drawing ("daw! daw!") is Sean's favorite thing to do. About 100x a day he announces "daw!" and climbs up onto one of the 'big' chairs at the table, helps himself to some pencils, markers, or crayons, and starts scribbling on the paper I leave there for him. I always stay with him to ensure he doesn't run off to "daw" on walls, clothes, or kitties...

I've tried painting with Sean in the past, but he kept trying to eat the paint. While it is supposedly non-toxic, I wasn't thrilled at the idea... so today I decided to try letting Sean paint with plain yogurt that I added some blue food coloring to.

"before" painting - not quite sure what to think of it, especially since I wasn't letting him sit in his usual "daw" spot...

blue yogurt "paint" and some white paper

"Hmmm. This is kind of cool."

Mark had fun drawing - it is so fun for me to see how much concentration he musters while working on a project!

Sean tasting a little of his paint. He doesn't usually get to feed himself any really messy foods, so this was extra fun for him.

It was nice to have some extra time with Mark. I kind of feel like I never see him, since he normally has school until 3:35 every day.

I painted a little stick boy for Sean

Sean really started getting into the whole thing at this point: he SWISHED the yogurt all over the paper and the tray, he SCOOPED it up in his fingers and SQUISHED it between his hands. Of course he also fed it to himself by the spoonful.

What are you looking at?

Mark proudly presented his finished art project

He explained the details to me

At some point Sean abandoned the use of utensils to feed himself the yogurt by the fist-full

Mark continued drawing for a while

"after" painting with yogurt. Sean was so happy!

Ok, so at this point Mark announced that his tooth is REALLY loose, so I suggested he bring me the floss so he could try pulling it out. I tied a loop of floss around his tooth - it was so loose I was able to see part of the root when he wiggled it - and with a good YANK Mark pulled it out.

Eek! Blood! (Mark was a little worried about tasting the blood)

Mark pressed a cold wet wash rag against the empty gap for a few minutes to stop the bleeding

Proudly showing off his gap

Once Mark's tooth stopped bleeding, and once Sean had been washed off, we went into the living room and built an awesome blanket fort. I don't very frequently actively role-play with the boys, but this was fun! We took a rocket ship to a variety of planets, got stranded, rescued, caught some space pirates, killed some aliens, and had a lot of fun in the meantime. Sean got really into it, and Mark had a lot of fun narrating and enacting.