Happy 2nd Birthday Jake! You turned two last Wednesday. It seems remiss of me that I haven't written about your many achievements since you turned 17 months old. The past seven months have been pretty tumultuous for us all, but I think the light at the end of our tunnel is very, very bright.
I think it is impossible for me to list all of the changes we have seen in you over the past seven months but I am going to try and write about as many as possible because one day you may love to read about what you were doing when you were two well one technically. Oh and just in case you want to know, if you were a girl I really wanted to call you Stevie. Not sure why but the name really appealed to me at the time.
18 MONTHS
Not only has your hair grown since this photo was taken, but you have become much better at listening and controlling your urges to run all over the place to explore every nook and cranny. You definitely still do that, but we can also enjoy sitting down to lunch together because you enjoy the 'adult' experience. I don't know when it happened but you started to self feed around this time. I think the addition of a table and chairs to our life and a nightly sit down at dinner really helped in that department, but it is truly amazing how you picked up these skills because we certainly didn't formally practice them.
Your love of drawing (known as baba to you) also really took off around this time too. You hold your pencil perfectly (something that even I cannot do) and we often spend the whole of dinner drawing. We have two whole scrapbooks that we will keep of your drawing from this time. Your most often requested thing to draw is of course a dump truck with rocks in the back but sometimes your dad adds a lizard or a snake much to your delight. Speaking of lizards you love to do lizard wrestling with your dad and even today after your bath you were determined to crawl around on your knees hissing like a lizard which made me hiss like a lizard too.
19 MONTHS
This photo was taken the day before your dad's birthday so you are technically around 19.5 months here. You are adding the final touches to your dad's birthday card. When you were 19 months old we officially moved to Melbourne from Brisbane. You did great on numerous flights back and forth until we finally found an apartment. Thank goodness for the ergo - I could just strap you on my back and board the plane knowing that you were safe. The next few months involved a lot of boxes and computers stacked on top of boxes as entertainment units and airbeds as sofas, but we managed to finally buy some furniture and put together a cosy little home for us. It was also winter here in Melbourne and luckily we discovered it wasn't nearly as cold as Tokyo. We had fun in that first month discovering all of our local parks. Wow even looking back on photos from about four months ago I see how far you have come. Of course we still get our fair share of tantrums, but you can last a lot longer now without completely melting down. Your nap has also moved from around midday to 1pm which gives us a nice long morning to play or go somewhere fun like the Melbourne Museum, the Melbourne Zoo or the Collingwood Children's Farm - all of which we are now members!!!
So Jake, you may think your mother is very organized considering this long post about you...but the problem is that I am now writing this in January 2010. It has taken me three months to get around to finishing it. At the end of October after your second birthday, I started working full-time and you started daycare four days a week. It has been a challenge for us all to adapt to this new schedule and we are all still learning. BTW you are doing amazingly well at kindy and your language has really taken off. Um BTW - who knew you could count to twelve??!! And you know all of your favourite books off by heart and recently you've come to watch a lot of Dora....I walked into the room the other morning and I heard you say 'soy Dora'. Anyway my sweets, it is 1:22am and your mother has rarely been up at this hour for a few months now and I had better go to bed. I am really, really loving two year old Jake - you are hilarious and so much fun to hang out with.
Below are some photos from your birthday - there were bubbles and frogs and cake and lego and all those good things. You are the best!!
heart mama ooxx
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