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Sharing Everything
The fun continues at the Ricks residence. Avey stayed home from school one day this week after she complained of a sore throat and not feeling well. We suspect that it may be allergies, because her energy was pretty normal and the symptoms never got too severe.
In other medical news, I took half of Wednesday off so that we could take all of the boys in to the doctor. The two oldest were there just for shots, and Merritt had a checkup. Carver did really well modeling to Hakan how to just hold still, even though the shot hurts. Hakan survived, but needed quite a bit of cuddling.
Carver remains a model big brother over the last few weeks. We don’t know what clicked, but he has been a champ at sitting at the table and focusing on eating (Normally he takes about 5 minutes in between bites, and gets up from the table as often as he can.). I suspect that it has something to do with his recent realization that Hakan is his number one fan, and watches him constantly. He’s started to understand the responsibility that comes along with such power. As a result, he and Hakan have been frequently inseparable recently. They play together often, and it usually goes quite well.
Carver is our best sharer, and he usually uses that skill to bond with his little brother. However, it’s gotten a little weird recently. For one thing, Hakan wants to be just like Carver even in wearing underwear. Carver frequently allows Hakan to wear some of his underwear over Hakan’s diaper. Hakan continues to wear Carver’s much-too-big-for-a-two-year-old pajamas at night. Twice in the last few weeks, Carver has even shared one of his most intimate activities; after completing a bowel movement, he has twice offered to Hakan that they can flush the potty together, both putting a hand on the lever and pressing it down at the same time, then waving “goodbye” to the toilet’s contents. It’s simultaneously cute and disturbing.
Merritt is growing in both size and adorableness. He is often content to just lay and play with one of his many toys. He seems to want to work on standing unassisted more than sitting up by himself. He’s in a new phase where he refuses to take a bottle from me. That’s not usually a problem because Kira does not typically leave him for very long, but twice in the last couple of weeks he has been hungry but turned down the bottle milk. It’s still breastmilk, but there must be something about the whole experience that disgusts him. If this pattern persists, it’s going to be especially awkward when Kira starts taking clients again. The plan was to have her gone one evening a week during which I would feed him a bottle, so maybe he caught on to our scheme and decided to throw a wrench in those spokes. At least the other times he has not been too terribly fussy about his hunger. He eventually drank a portion of the bottle and then lost interest, but was in generally good spirits until Kira came home. Perhaps he’ll grow out of the phase before too long.
We are looking forward to a spectacularly mild week (in temperature, anyway). We’ll try to enjoy it before the winter frost attacks.