The New Dad Blog

What's Jude Doing?

As Jude entered the first week of his third year, the big highlight of the week was Thanksgiving. We had a lovely dinner with our two neighbor families and as you can see there was a special kids table for the Thanksgiving feast. Above are Max on the left and Carter on the right. As expected Jude didn't eat much - when he is at parties he tends to not eat much at all. His Thanksgiving dinner consisted primarily of crackers that Marcy gave him, his traditional turkey dinner went untouched.

Jude has started saying "What's Jude doing?" on a regular basis. It is pretty funny because of course, he knows what he is doing, I think it is just a way to get attention focused on him. He also asks "what's Mommy doing?" and "what's Daddy doing?" as well, and that seems to be genuine curiosity.

It has been wonderful being at home for the long four day weekend. The only thing we had on was the Thanksgiving dinner, apart from that we have been home most of the time. It has been cold and snowy so our outdoor options were limited. We had a small snowstorm on Friday night, just a couple of inches fell, but it was the first real snowfall of the year and we dressed Jude up and he spent half an hour playing outside in the snow. Marcy built a snowman for him, but he wasn't really interested in it. He was most happy just playing with the snow shovel and trying to get snow into his dump truck.
 

Jude and I went to the Museum of Nature and Science today. We needed to give Jude a decent outing, and Marcy wanted to go to Target and do some work around our house. So it was just Jude and I, and he had a blast. I told him that we were going to see "the moon and stars" and he got excited. They have a space exhibit there and so we spent some time checking out the moon and stars and Jude learned two new words "planet" and "Mars." We also went and checked out the African exhibit where they had lots of animals that we often see at the zoo. When I was rocking Jude to sleep tonight he kept recounting the things we saw there today. In fact, after he had been in bed for half and hour he called me back in with a very urgent "Daddy! Daddy! Daddy!" call. I wondered what was wrong, but what he wanted was just to keep talking about what we saw at the museum today. It was really cute.

Today we decided to get out our Christmas tree for the season. The last two years we bought a live tree and decorated it, but because this year we will be in Des Moines for Christmas we decided just to get out a small plastic tree that Marcy had in storage. Jude loved it. His his comment was "it's a Jude sized tree!" and he spent a long time just staring at it and touching the lights. I snapped this photo tonight of Jude in his snowflake pajamas in front of our little tree.

Jude Turns Two!

Today was a big day in Jude's life - his second birthday. It started with Marcy, Anna and me walking in to Jude's bedroom when he awoke around 6:20am to sing him happy birthday. We asked him how old he was today and he held up two fingers and said "two." He had some chocolate milk for breakfast with his scrambled eggs, a "very special treat" he kept repeating. Then after breakfast it was time for presents.

From his family in Australia Jude received a battery operated fire truck that he immediately fell in love with, as well as three board books. He was inseparable from his fire truck pretty much all day - he even took it with him when we drove to get some take out for dinner. As you can see in the picture here Jude is hugging his fire truck as he poses for the camera in his fireman's helmet.

We bought Jude some more books, a kids pretend shaving kit which we played with in the bath tonight. He is always fascinated to watch me shave so we thought this would be a fun way to pretend to do the same thing. He spent a good 10 minutes in the bath tonight "shaving" his face. Forgot to bring my camera in so we will have to take a photo of this another time.

The main attraction as far as presents from us go was the new train set. It was also a big hit. Thanks must go to Baba and Grandpa for putting the special train table together when they were out here, and Marcy and I spent last night putting together the train tracks and making an entire train network. He spent a lot of today in the basement playing with his new train set.

We thought about having a party today and inviting people over but Jude really likes it when we the four of us all hang out together and he tends to get overwhelmed in crowds, so we decided against it. We asked Jude what he wanted to do this morning and he said "Zoo, see elephants," so off we went to the zoo again. Jude seemed to know this was his special day as he was in a particularly good mood and he had boundless energy. We took the new double stroller but he only lasted five minutes in that before wanting to run around. And run he did. After checking out the zebras, tigers, giraffes and polar bears he was off. He ran almost nonstop for the next twenty minutes, just laughing and running between all the animal exhibits. Of course, he was exhausted after that. So a quick stop at the elephants and we were off for lunch. One of Jude's favorites is rice and beans at Chipotle so we stopped there for lunch on the way home.

When he woke up from his nap we celebrated his birthday with some cake - actually it was some banana bread Marcy had made with chocolate chips, so it was relatively healthy. He really enjoyed it. The photo below was taken as Jude was half way through his big piece of cake. We had candles and sang Happy Birthday, and Jude helped blow out the candles. The rest of the day was spent mainly in the basement with Jude alternating between his train set and his new fire truck. He went to bed tonight exhausted but we think he had a pretty good second birthday.

"Digger Moves Sand, Digger Moves Dirt"

...and Digger breaks rock! We have heard these words from Jude hundreds of times over the past few months and Marcy and I just realized tonight that they have never made the blog. It is about time. We took a car ride to Boulder yesterday in my car and I found a long lost Digger book in my car and Jude was in heaven. He read that book literally a hundred times yesterday (all the way to Boulder and back), so we heard this say a lot this weekend. He wouldn't part with his book when we got home so it went to bed with him for his nap.

Jude loves his fruits and vegetables, but one of his favorite foods is pizza. I think he loves saying it just as much as eating it - he always says it with such gusto: "pizzzaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa". Today we went to the zoo and we bought Jude some pizza for lunch. As you can see above he really enjoyed it.

Jude has so many fun little idiosyncrasies now. When Marcy's parents were out here they bought him this toy telephone, so he doesn't have to use ours any more. He loves the phone and he is always "making" phone calls, typically to Baba or Lily. But he doesn't hold the phone to his ear he puts it on top of his head as you can see below. We will see him doing this by himself and saying "hello!" and then carrying on a pretend conversation.

We have a new genre of music in our household, it is called the "mommy song." Marcy has been singing to him since he was an infant and he has always liked it. Now, whenever he hears a soft lullaby he says "mommy song." Of course, I have been singing to him as well since he was an infant, but there is no such thing as a daddy song. Marcy much have a more pleasing voice than me.

One other fun thing happened this week. Jude likes to help Marcy in the laundry when she is washing clothes. Marcy was downstairs one morning this week and I was up cleaning my teeth when Jude comes running in to me with a worried look on his face saying, "Oops! Jude did it." I wondered what he was talking about but then I heard the washer going. He had been playing with the knobs and had accidentally turned it on. He gets full marks for honesty.

Jude continues to shower his sister with love. It is so sweet to see. I snapped this photo earlier this week of Jude giving Anna some love.

The Parenting Challenge

We commented tonight that Jude can go from a perfectly happy angelic little boy to someone wild with fury and rage and then back again to happy all in one minute. It is amazing to me how raw and unfiltered a toddler's emotions are. There is no holding back of anything, it all comes pouring out and then in an instant it can change with really very little lingering effects.

Now as parents we have to deal with the fury and rage and somehow manage to not get entangled in it. This is proving to be easier said than done. We have not really come up with a consistent disciplining system yet, it has been a bit haphazard as we try and deal with this new stage in Jude's life. Marcy went to a "Love and Logic" parenting class before Anna was born and I have been reading the book and some of this resonates with us. Obviously the last month has been pretty busy around here with the arrival of Anna but we intend to have some kind of system in place soon so we can manage this transition in Jude's life.

We haven't mentioned Jude's language in a while but it is improving all the time. Jude can now talk pretty much in complete sentences. On Friday I take Jude to music class which he loves and he says this regularly "Friday, go to music class with Daddy". He can not only do seven and eight word sentences like this one, but he is now adding words like "the", "to", and "with" that he would leave out just a few weeks ago.

Jude continues to get along really well with his little sister. He gives her hugs and kisses regularly throughout the day. It is amazing to me how much love and how little jealousy he feels. This morning he joined Anna on her play mat and I snapped this cute photo.

Jude Loves Playing With the Fall Leaves

So we took a ton of photos on Halloween of Jude is his cute bee outfit but unfortunately we will never see these photos. After playing outside on Halloween evening I left the camera sitting outside on our front table and forgot about it. I remembered as soon as I got up on Saturday morning but when I checked outside it was gone. So five days worth of photos were lost including everything taken on Halloween. I was not a happy camper on Saturday morning. Luckily I still had our old camera so we were able to take some photos this weekend.

Jude loves playing in the leaves in our front yard. He plays this game where he "jumps in the leaves" but in reality he just plonks down on his bum. The photo above I snapped as we were playing this game yesterday. He is also a big helper and he loves raking the leaves. As you can see he is very serious about this - below is Jude being a big help to Marcy with the raking.

Apart from raking the leaves this weekend, the big highlight was our new purchase of a double stroller. This thing is huge, it feels like we need a garage or carport to store it, but surprisingly it actually fits through our front door quite nicely. This morning we took it for a spin up to the playground and Jude stayed in the whole time which was a nice surprise for us. It was the first time all four of us went to the Wash Park playground together.