Liquid diets don't help you gain weight.

We weighed the kids a couple days ago. Since taking Jake off his liquid diet (last January) he's gained 20% in weight.*

Mason's still growing, but he's slowing down. Now he's only in the 60th percentile. Still big for his age though.

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* Moved from 30th percentile on the down syndrome growth chart to 50% approx.

5 Things Jake's better at than me.

1) Flexibility. He can bend his feet way past he head if he wanted.

2) Resisting junk food. He can easily resist chocolate, chips and ice cream.

3) Sleeping. He's a much better and deeper sleeper. He can almost sleep through anything.

4) Friendly to strangers. He can approach strangers, hug their legs and asked to be picked up. I'm much too shy.

5) Dancing. He's got some great moves. I wouldn't be able to attract as much attention as him if I danced.

Jake doesn't like to hold hands anymore.

Jake used to like holding hands when we walked.

Then I started letting go of his hand, encouraging him to walk on his own.

Now he hates holding hands.

If you hold his hand, he will tantrum by boxing his ears, standing in front of you to block your path, whining, sitting in the middle of the street, or throwing himself on the ground.

When Jake gets angry.

When Jake gets angry or frustrated he takes his baseball hat and off his head and throws it as hard as he can on the ground.

Like a baseball player losing his temper with the umpire.

It's funny, but you can't laugh. Other people also find it funny.

Switching Jake's schedule.

We changed Jake's schedule to a later one and he's happier.

He used to wake up at 7am. The last two days he slept in until 9:00am.

We used to put him down for a nap around 1pm or 2pm.

Now it's 3:30pm.

He used to go to bed at 8pm. Now it's 9pm.

He seems to like it better. The only problem is we have one hour less time for ourselves at night.

Cougar at Jake's pre-school.

A few months ago when we were enrolling Jake in pre-school for this coming September, the teacher told us that the kids often go outside and feed the goats. A couple goats neighboured the pre-school.

A couple days ago in the paper I read that a cougar killed two goats in Maple Ridge. Conservation officers were hunting it. Guess what? It's the same two goats that Jake would have been feeding.

The owner came out at 9:30am in the morning to feed them and they were dead. She saw a cougar poke its head out of her barn.

Later, a professional houndsmen treed the cougar with his dogs and they shot and killed it. The city wanted it killed because they didn't want a dangerous cougar hanging around a preschool and daycare. Well done city!

Mason is one week old

Mason is now a week old.

He does three things. Sleep. Eat. Cry.

He poops a lot, but I don't count that. He also looks around a couple times a day.

He's a night owl - meaning he's awake all night and demanding to be held. He sleeps all day.

We have to somehow reverse this, but all the books say you can't do much about it for a newborn. He also, at one point, fed 11 hours a day. Yesterday it was down to 9 hours a day.

Jake kissed him for the first time yesterday. He kissed Mason's back, after I prompted him. So cute. Also, Mason has very light, cute blond hair all over his body. I like to tickle it and kiss it.

Jake lied.

Cindy caught Jake in his first lie.

He was playing with the kitchen drawers and he got his finger caught in the drawer. He started to cry and ran over for a hug.

A few minutes later he went back to the drawers. Cindy was watching him. This time he faked hurting himself and ran over for a hug.

My son has discovered the joy of lying.

***

Another cute thing he does is direct our gaze by pulling our face in the direction he wants us to look- which is mostly at him.

The other day he was sitting on my lap while we watched Youtube. I guess he was signing for a certain song and I was watching the computer. He gently grabbed my face and turned it toward him so that I could see his signing.

Our babysitter can't handle Jake.

So we found out this weekend that our babysitter can no longer handle Jake. This was the person we were planning to have take care of Jake for a couple days when the baby is born.

She could handle him when he was one, but she doesn't seem to be able to handle his terrible twos phase.

We dropped him off at her house over the weekend and when we came back 7 hours later, he hadn't eaten or drank anything. He has been balling his eyes out. He had been inconsolable.

What happened? Why didn't he get fed? She said, "I didn't want to upset him anymore." Apparently he went on a hunger strike and she didn't push him.

Well Jake needs to be pushed. A lot. Sometimes downright forced. We often need to "help" him eat by holding him still and putting the food in his mouth for him.

We don't expect our babysitters to do that, but we do expect an attempt. How can we drop him off at her house for 2 days? He needs food and drink, and we don't want her hooking him up to the feeding pump.

Grrr. So frustrating...

Jake gets too excited for bed time stories now.

We realized a couple nights ago that Jake gets too excited when we read a bedtime book. It actually wakes him up.

For bedtime, we want him to be drowsy, not alert. So we've had to cut out the bed time books. (He does get plenty of books during the day.)

Instead, we let him watch a signing dvd on the computer. He doesn't blink much and the tears run down his face.

It puts him in a daze and he goes to bed easier - plus he learns some signs.

Jake poured water down his shirt and pants.

This morning at breakfast I gave Jake a cup of water. I filled it with too much water though and when Jake drank, he dumped it down his shirt and pants.

He did this two or three times. A bit of water went in his mouth but he choked on it because he's more used to the sippy cup.

I went upstairs and got a new shirt for him so he wouldn't be cold for the rest of breakfast. After breakfast Cindy had to change his pants and diaper.

Double strollers are beasts.

We went looking for double strollers last weekend. We're definitely going to need one. Jake can walk pretty well now, but he often asks "up" every 5 minutes or so because he gets tired out.

Double strollers are huge and heavy. They won't fit in our regular car. They barely fit in the minivan. Pushing the thing around is like driving a truck.

When you buy one, you need to take into account your baby car seat. Does it fit in the stroller? You should hope so or you have to buy another baby car seat.

***

Other boring stuff about strollers:

We went to three stores. Walmart, The Bay and Sears. Walmart only had one stroller, chained up to you couldn't even roll it. Plus it seemed crappy.

The Bay had a good stroller that we wanted, but it was cheaper at Sears.

So now we'll just wait for a sale.

Jake is officially out of daycare.

Well it's official. Jake is finished daycare. His health is simply too fragile to risk going back. He's been in daycare only 2.5 weeks since January. The rest of the time he's been home sick.

He's very skinny now and has lost all the weight he gained in the Fall. Poor guy. The last time he got sick from daycare we said we'd give it one more try. He lasted 3 days and then was sick again.

So it's over.

Now the hard part is for Cindy to look after a two-year old at 30 weeks pregnant. Yikes. We might be able to get in-home support from the local association who funds Jake's daycare, but we'll see.

Disposable diapers are a marvel of engineering.

A couple days ago I posted a message about how I hate sippy cups because they were over-engineered and still crappy.

Well, today I wanted to say how impressed I am with disposable diapers. I'm shocked at the amount of urine and poop they can hold. The diapers are pretty small to start with, but as they absorb liquid, they get huge.

One time we didn't plan on swimming and Jake only had a diaper, but we took him in the lake anyway. When he got out, the diaper was hanging down to his ankles. It was like a huge water balloon.

I had measured the lake water and it had receded 5 cm.

On the box it says that one diaper can last for 12 hours. So, in theory, a child really only needs 2 diapers a day - making disposables suddenly very cheap.

When you're a new parent everyone urges you to buy reusable diapers. Yeah right!!! What a waste of money and time and inocnvenice that would be. Imagine changing the diaper every hour. Imagine the leaks and accidents and extra wash you'd need to do because the clothes would be soiled.

Imagine throwing a poopy diaper into laundry with your clean clothes. I say stick with disposable. They're cheap, easy to find, easy to do up, come in a variety of sizes and brands, often go on sale, and come with coupons for other products.

Tell me one thing wrong with disposables!

Sippy cups are over-engineered.

I hate sippy cups. They're expensive, over-engineered pieces of crap that only work 50% of the time.

When they do work, they break after a couple of weeks.

Unfortunately, right now Jake can only drink from sippy cups - so we have to buy them. We have about 20 of them.

We tried a new one yesterday and Jake wouldn't drink from it. I started getting mad at him. Then Cindy gave me the cup and said you try to drink from it; I tried and did not have enough sucking power in my lungs to get any liquid from it.

That's ridiculous.

Each sippy cup comes encased in a monstrous plastic shield that can only be removed by a chainsaw.

They come in a million different pieces, and you have to read instructions on how to put it together. Invariable, once you've assembled the cup, it leaks.

You can't wash it in the dishwasher or it will warp the sensitive plastic. The nipples are cheap pieces of crap that break when your child bites them.

Can you buy nipples separately? Yes - for the most part. But some sippy cups require that you buy a whole new cup every time the nipple breaks. (!)

Each piece of the sippy cup looks like it could fit in any other sippy cup. So, if you're using and washing 2 or 3 different sippy cups, you have a jumble of pieces that may or may not fit correctly together.

I've taken a picture so you can see this for yourself.

Tough day for the little guy.

The little man had a hard day yesterday. Not hard like heart-surgery hard, but tough enough for a two year old.

First, he began getting sick. By the night he was crying and coughing and throwing up and dry heaving. Cindy had to sleep with him in the den because he was too upset to be alone.

At lunch he had no appetite but we didn't yet know that he was sick. It just so happened that today the behaviour analyst came by and when he was resisting, she wanted to play hardball by not offering rewards unless he swallowed. The poor guy lost it and started crying and hitting his head.

It was easily the worst meal in the last 6 months. A huge setback.

Last week was his first healthy week since December. We kept him home from daycare for two weeks until he recovered. Now he's sick again.

Poor guy.

Schools don't teach this anymore.

One great thing about working in a school is that I get to talk to teachers about problems in the school system. Today I learned that schools in this province no longer teach printing or handwriting.

This means that there are many grade 5 kids who literally cannot write basic sentences or paragraphs. Because they never learned how to form letters, their brains are busy thinking about letters rather than thinking about what to write.

These are called "output problems". The cure for these problems is to teach children how to properly hold a pencil and form letters. Schools don't do it anymore.

Good to know. We'll add this to the list of things we need to teach Jake.

This pregnancy is going much faster...

I was telling Cindy how much faster this pregnancy seems to be going. It's only months away before we have another child. That blows my mind. I keep telling her we need to set up the car seat and buy a stroller, but she's more laid back than me.

Why is time going so much faster this time around? I have two theories:

1) We're distracted by Jake. He takes up so much time and energy right now that we don't often sit around and day dream about the future. When Cindy was pregnant with Jake, we had nothing else to do except day dream about the future (and buy a house and move to Maple Ridge). So time went by much slower.

2) We told people later this time around. Which means people have spent less time asking us questions or talking about this pregnancy. This makes it seem like it's happening so fast.

Jake carries things in his mouth.

Jake is going through a phase where he carries his stuffed animals in his mouth as he walks. He does this most often with his bear "Scout"*.

The problem is that as he walks along, holding the animal in his teeth, he can't see where he's going. So he will often trip or fall forward onto his face.

When we randomly pick up one of his stuffed animals it will often be wet with his saliva. Sometimes the stuffed animal is stained a strange colour. We realize that whatever he was eating at the moment had dripped out of his mouth and stained the animal.

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* Scout has a USB port. We plugged him into the computer and downloaded some new songs and told him Jake's name. Now he says out loud "Hi Jake". And uses Jake's name in the songs. When Jake first heard this, he sat up straight in surprise and pointed to himself. We said, "Yes, Scout is talking to you." Toys are insane these days.

Jake gives people high fives as he walks past.

Last weekend at the mall I noticed something hilarous. Jake likes to give people high fives as they walk past.

He's so short that they don't see him, so he ends up hitting their knees or legs. Then they look down in confusion and see a toddler walk past.

The best was when he did it to a high school student. The guy was like "what the hell?" I was trying not to laugh.

It's pretty funny. I let him do it for the most part.

Also, at the food court he walked up to tables and touched people who were eating. Some people ignored him. Others turned to him and said "Hello!" enthusiastically.