original little hellraisers

dylan: you’re well adjusting to our crazy, impatient and massively disorganized world (lives!) in realizing that the very survival of your little self depends on your mother, you’ve begun to coo at her (and other important women in our life).  drag them in with your cuteness and them, blammo!, you’ll get a free meal.  well, with your mom, you do.  and i know, you’re reading this thinking, ‘whoah — that’s gross — she’s my mom.’  she’s also your meal ticket — it’s biology — get used to it.  you’ve coupled this with your smiles, which are the open mouth baby kind of smiles — super adorable.  if this were d&d, you’d have a charisma of 25/100.

you still hate being naked — at least when we change you — it pisses you off like no other.  you absolutely love taking a bath.  unlike your brother, you may actually like the water when you get older… we’ll see.  you’ve had a few epic blowouts this month — the kind where you have to apply bleach and three runs through the washing machine.  we think it’s funny, but as we learned with your brother, the only people that think poop stories are funny are the parents of the kids and other, sympathetic parents that have experienced the same thing.

you’ve got your neck control now — which is awesome — makes it harder to feel like we’re hurting you.

you’re super patient with us when we’re not able to pay as much attention to you — but it adds up — you get more and more pissy the longer the day goes on and we don’t give you the requisite atttention.  we can’t blame you — you’re pretty mellow otherwise.  it’s just your way of saying — ‘hey! pay attention to me!’  it’s only fair, by the way, that you get to scream once in a while.  when you have an audience of newcomers, you tend to be a perfect little boy.  we’re spending some sort of currency here, as when the party goers leave, you get pissed, pissed, pissed.

i’ve got to say — the amount of juggling you have to do with two kids is incredible.  we’re working our way through it, mind you, but it is definitely not a linear curve of difficulty, it’s something far more mathmatic.

but when the cards fall as they may, you’re still an awesome little man that we could just sit and look at all day.

stay perfect.

owen: you finally started peeing in the toliet.  it goes something like this:

(screaming with joy) ‘peeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee peeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!’ and then you grab your crotch as if to tell us, the adults, where the piss water comes from.  then you run to the toilet, put out your little ikea stool and climb up into your toilet insert.  you use a free hand and point the goods down so that you can pee into the toilet.  you scream with delight, if we’re lucky there is no splash outside the toliet.  and then you, as when you started, scream ‘peeeeeeeeeeeeeeee peeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!’  it’s pretty awesome.  you get two m&ms when you finish.

you’ve woken up for the past three or four nights clean and dry.

we took you to the academy of sciences this month.  it’s a fantastic reason to love san franciso — brand new, with incredible exhibits (including a four story, indoor rainforest with an underwater aquarium level).  you ran in to the ‘africa’ exhibit where there are all sorts of stiff-as-a-board dead animals and ran through them as best you could — you saw a gorilla, a cheetah, a lion, zebras, etc.  at the end of it there were penguins — you ran up to the glass and said, ‘surfs up bro!’ because of your new favorite movie.

that’s okay — because when i took you to see the turtles, you pointed and said ‘what’s up dude?’ because of your former favorite movie.  oh well, it’s effing cute.

your imagination is taking off as well.  aside from the dude things, like driving cars on walls, etc. you’ve taken to some… uh… maternal things.  you see, you have this little stuffed monkey that you love right now and you mimic what your mother does with dylan — including feeding him from your little boy tits (sorry grandmothers, i laughed out loud when i typed that — it stays).  you even rotate boobs like your mother does.  including the action of pulling your shirt down at the collar.

it doesn’t stop there.

you then proceed to burp the little stuffed monkey.  once you’ve determined you’ve gotten a burp out of the monkey, you then lay him down for naps next to dylan, or move to feeding him solids.  whichever your heart desires.

you’ve also started really abusing the word ‘big.’  everything is big.  my favorite is when you see a very large soccer ball.  makes us laugh everytime.

you still count out of order and say your abcs all wrong, but whatever, it’s totally adorable.  you also sang along to conventional wisdom by built to spill — which made us proud — as well as singing ‘twinkle twinkle little star.’  the latter because your lola reintroduced you to baby einstein which i hate with an unbelievably pure rage.  you won’t take it out of your little dvd player.  i want to sell them on ebay to someone who lives in the marina, but your mother won’t let me.  i hate, hate, hate that stuff.

owen’s quote of the month: “mama… (deliberate pause) you (pause) are a (pause) monster.”  he pointed at her and everything.  thankfully he sees monsters as elmo and cookie monster — so he loves them.  it was hilarious though.

you’re a very attentive big brother.  you make us proud.

love you both.