Raising Watsons

In this first picture, I took off Emilia’s nice shirt because I had forgotten a bib.  In her little mesh baggy there is Abuela’s masa de puerco and some yucca.  She sat in Abuela’s lap nomming delicious home made cuban food the entire dinner.  I can’t remember the last time I saw my grandmother so happy.

My father (Abuelo!) gave Tucker a police SUV car with flashing lights and sirens.   He spoke about how a police car was his favorite toy from his uncle as a boy.  Weeks later and this truck is still in Tucker’s top five rotation.  He really really really loves police and fire trucks.

Did I doubt my mother’s ability to put the baby to sleep?  Yes.  Yes, I did.  But in her unorthodox way she summoned the wisdom from my grandmother stating that children love to sleep out doors and created this make-shift pillow cot for Emilia.  Did I nervously check to make sure she wasn’t face down in the pillow the entire time?  Yes.  Yes, I did.

Tucker, naturally, wanted to play-sleep outside too.

All the good hair.

On the other side of Florida at Grammy and Bumpa’s house we enjoyed Birthday party #1 with some fancy hats!

Afterwards we went out on Bumpa’s boat on a perfect South Florida day.

Emilia stayed home with Grammy where she played with new toys and surprised everyone with her new found love of potato salad.

Tucker’s 3rd Birthday party was at the Lomita Railroad Museum on a beautiful early March day. In case you can’t tell from the picture, it was train themed. All the kids had engineer hats and scarfs, there was a train cake, a goodie bag with: train whistles, train lollipops, train stickers and train shaped bubbles. Mom and Dad hand crafted train cars to hold chips and pretzels, which sat on the railroad track runner on the table.

The museum was really cool. The kids got to crawl all over a steam engine and a sleeper car. There was an area between the two trains where the parents could chat while keeping an eye on their children. The museum worker had a tape and would play train whistles and chugging sounds that the kids just loved.

After playing on the trains for a while, we all went to a little park across the street. The park was lovely and a perfect place for the kids to run around and play “red light/green light” which more or less ended up with a dog pile of kids on Ben. Our friend Carmen did face painting (which she had never done before but agreed to as a favor to me) and the kids LOVED it. Nary a child was seen without a star, rainbow or design on their cheeks.

It was a perfect day and a perfect party.

I wrote this blog but didn’t have a chance to link the video until much later.  The video says this was created on Jan 25th, 2013.

Two nights ago I thought I was filming Family Music Night, playing “We Wish you a Merry Christmas” which was requested by Tucker.  And then Emilia stood for what we believe was the first time.  At least, it’s the first time in our presence.

Emilia Stands

A collection of photos in and around Easter 2013.

tiny dancer

Easter egg dying

always sticking her tongue out.

Easter Sunday

And lastly, the Easter lamb.  One of the best one’s yet, the secret was putting some water in the pan and a bed of onions and garlic.

Tucker loves to read the Berenstein Bears “New Baby” book. Whenever we do and we get to the end he likes to improvise about the family and how the “big brother is there to protect the baby sister and stop her from putting things in her mouth”. To be fair, he does a really good job of informing us when she’s doing something, anything, she shouldn’t.

He’s also very attentive to her as seen in this one morning I had my phone handy.

Just another morning eating breakfast…

hey, where’d the spoon go?

I got it!

Aside from being Emilia’s personal retriever, Tucker also gives her his toys all the time.  All but the iPad, that he keeps to himself. 😉

Tucker loves to cook. He completely made kale pesto with me the other day, the rest of these pictures are from school.

First Tucker washed the kale and Mom stripped off the leafy part from the vein.

Next, he put all the kale into the food processor.

Tucker very carefully adds the olive oil.

Hits the button and PESTO!

We thought we had more time.

Disney is just such a big step.  I didn’t think we were ready, but I was proved wrong.  Even Emilia seemed to enjoy the two days in the happiest place on Earth.   There are many more pictures from our Florida trip (that Ben is working on processing) but I figured I’d put up the phone photos from Disney first.

We stayed at a condo with the Watson clan: Bumpa, Grammy, Uncle Dan, Aunt Natalie, Wyatt, Aunt Lindsay and the four of us.  It was a busy house!  Thankfully, grandparents took the kids in the morning.

Mickey’s House.

I love this picture below because something is clearly happening to the right of us that Tucker and Emilia are judging pretty hard.  I’m glad they’re in sync on whatever was happening.

Animal Kingdom.

Emilia spent a lot of time with Bumpa in the park.

We waited on quite a few lines and Tucker really handled himself well.  If this was a year ago, I doubt we would’ve made any of the rides.

Speaking of rides, Tucker loved them.  Thank god for non-drowsy dramamine!

Not the best pictures but both boys were totally into the Electric Light parade.  From what I’m told, that was my favorite part of Disney too.

Lastly, one of Tucker’s dreams came true when he got to drive the race cars.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCTbYKDX7KY

Today we had Tucker’s first parent/teacher conference. Ms. Cami started the meeting saying she wanted us to describe to her our son and she will chime in. Who is Tucker? (MommyDaddy in black, Ms. Cami in amber)

Tucker is a high energy boy and a sensitive little man. Yes, he has very high highs and low lows; he feels deeply. He is very concerned about safety, his and everyone else’s. He’s a bit of a “hall monitor”. Perfect analogy, Tucker does not like when people aren’t following the rules.

This is useful at home as he’s always monitoring and watching over Emilia. Speaking of, he loves his sister, but has an internal struggle about loving her and wanting any attention she might get. Ie: He will squeeze himself between one of us and Emilia to sit on our lap, then turn around and hug her. Pretty normal.

Tucker loves music, he loves to read, he likes to play with friends but also very much likes to have alone time. Is that weird? I actually find it insightful that he is self-aware enough to know when he needs his own space and there are times he definitely needs his own space. But he’s perfectly comfortable playing one-on-one with another child or in a group so I’m not worried.

Overall, I think he’s a normal three year old. Yes, a normal three year old with extraordinary (!) language and vocabulary skills. I have met thousands of three year-olds and he is exceptional in his ability to explain his feelings, tell stories and describe/hypothesize about the world around him.

My concerns, and you cite them on your questionnaire, are about his boundaries and social skills. He has made a lot of progress with learning how to control his volume and feelings (not yell at his friends) over the past year. Recently he’s slipped back into some old habits, most likely due to all the travel and his birthday, but even yesterday he was able to pull out of a near melt-down scenario when he didn’t like the game the kids were playing. We sat down, took a deep breath, and re-approached the situation. He was able to approach the group to play with them and suggested a change in the game that everyone went along with. A few months ago, that wouldn’t have been possible.

We start to go through the picture book of Tucker’s drawings, every month she asks them to draw a person (head, eyes, nose, mouth) on the opposite side of the book are pictures from the month. The drawings mostly look like scribbles, but progressively head-like scribbles. In October, he choose to work on his numbers instead and there’s a very clear “7” among them. There’s a month that’s blank, she said for a month or two Tucker didn’t want to draw anything. (They don’t force art on the kids). We remember this dry artistic spell and comment that he seems to prefer to read. Ms. Cami agreed. He loves to read and to read with his friends, sharing a book was his first break-out sharing moment.

We start to look through the pictures. There’s a picture (below) of Tucker playing on the floor with these magnetic tiles – http://www.magnatiles.com/. THIS. Tucker will play with toys in ways that none of the other kids do. These tiles for instance, we always play with them on the desk and most kids will build structures out of them. One day, Tucker asked me if he could play with them on the floor. I agreed and watched as he lined up the squares in a straight line to make a base and set each adjacent tile vertically (imagine a row of upright dominos) and then he knocked them all down so they fell domino style. (note – we have not yet done the domino trick, but will immediately.) This is just one example, he frequently finds inventive ways to play with the toys that we haven’t seen before.

By this time, we were 15 minutes over and rushed out. But there you have it, first parent/teacher conference down. NAILED IT!

St. Patricks day is big deal in my family.  We’re very Irish.  I, of course, am Irish and Cuban but the Irish side with my seven aunts/uncles and many, many.. many cousins is very strong.  Also, my grandfather Tom Hughes passed on St. Pats which makes this a bitter-sweet family holiday.    But not to the kids, of course!  This year we celebrated by going to a back-yard picnic and concert.

The concert was a small Irish band playing traditional music, jigs and reels!  We didn’t know the owners of the home directly, but through a derby friend that went to school with the husband/father of the house.  Their place was kind of a dream for me.  They had a back yard bar where they were taking donations for delicious home brewed beer, an in-ground fire pit with stone seating, chickens, a goat, a tree-fort and a stage.  I should add, they had a little 6 year-old boy who was running around Lord of the Flies style with about a dozen boys whom I overhead saying – you can only refer to me as “Lord Vader”!  Tucker was a bit young for the Lord Vader crowd, but there was a bubble machine and plenty of younger kids to play with and places to explore.

After the concert we came home and Mom made two corned beef briskets (mustard baked and traditional), braised cabbage and buttered potatoes.   Overall, a great day.