Ryan and Juliet

Ryan and Juliet will be 18 months in 4 days.  We can say they are a year and a half now! Amazing. They’re no longer babies. They now look and act like little kids. What happened? It’s all Dan’s fault really. I knew I should never have let him buy clothes for them past NB. Since then they’ve just been growing and growing!

Here’s what they’re up to….

• Juliet likes to call me Dadda (I think because it’s easier), but when she does say Momma it melts my heart. Don’t be fooled though. She knows very well who her Dadda is and when he’s here, she’s only has eyes for him.
• Ryan sits at the table and eats all that I give him, except vegetables. He will have none of those green things. Juliet’s the opposite. She loves broccoli and fruit, but is not so great about sitting at the table to eat.
• They both play so well together. They share everything and work together to explore and make new discoveries.
• Juliet loves to draw. Ryan will draw a little on the paper, but if I take one quick glance away, he’s off to find a wall or book to draw on. To his utter disappointment, which he expresses with giant tears and his saddest cry, I take the crayons away from him and set him back at the table with his crayons and paper.  Rinse and repeat.
• Books continue to be their favorite toy. Dan and I will neatly put the books on their bookshelf only to have them immediately go and take them all off and blanket the floor with them. They will sit and “read” to themselves, or bring them to us to read to them. Juliet loves to stack them. Ryan loves to unstack them.
• They take one nap a day after lunch between 12-1pm and nap for about 2 hrs.
• They like to sit with their blankets on the couch and watch Curious George, Dinosaur Train, or Sesame Street. They say TV is bad for them at this age, but I just don’t know how else to get breakfast, lunch, and dinner ready. Who are “they” anyway?
• They can crawl up the stairs and down the stairs, just sometimes not at the same time which makes it difficult when there is only me to catch them if they fall.
• Juliet LOVES to dance. She twirls and twirls and has even started to do some ballet moves on her own. I think she comes to this naturally. (Clearly she got this from her mother’s side.) Ryan likes to dance too, mostly by twirling and then falling into things (headfirst of course).
• They sleep from 7:30pm to 5am.  Yes, that’s right.  There seems to be a 5am internal wakeup call. In addition, 4 out of 7 nights they wake up in the middle of the night and I treat them with a small bottle and a short snuggle.  This will be coming to an end quite soon, however.  I mean it this time!
• They know lots of animal sounds.  Dog, kitty, horse, turkey, rooster, monkey, owl, duck,chicken, and likely many more.  Also, they both have an ferocious roar.
• Their eyes have settled into a color which remains nameless. Ryan has the eyes the color of a rain cloud as the sun shimmers through. Juliet’s eyes might appear brown at a moments glance, but look closely and you’ll see they are the color of a maple leaf on an august morning. Of course, if a name is not found, these descriptions might be found a bit lengthy one day for a driver’s license.
• They talk quite a bit, especially Ryan, but they are intelligible only to themselves and possibly each other. We can make out “uh oh”, “kitty”, “Ry Ry”, “Juliet”, “Momma”, “Dadda”, “go go”, “bottle” (pronouced as baou), “please” (pronounced as “cheese” by Juliet),  “no”, “yeah”, “bye”, “hi” and the beginnings of many many more.
• They are trying to count, but instead of saying 1, 2, 3 Ryan says “die, die, die” and Juliet says “tee, tee tee”.
• They walk, run, play peek-a-boo, dance, chase, do Kung Fu, and work very hard on jump.