Summer is Here!

In Sacramento, summer is a good and a bad thing.Good = sunshine, no school, pool parties, etc.Bad = 104 degrees.But, as with most everything else, you take the good with the bad. The Spring semester has almost come to end (just have to grade some finals for my undergrad history class) so there should be updates galore between now and September 2nd!There has been plenty to report as usual so we’ll get right to the good stuff:Ollie:Ollie turned two months old on Tuesday and he is a firecracker. In general he is probably a pretty normal young man. He started day care a couple of weeks ago and that transition went smoother than I expected. Lola did not start day care or serious bottle feeding until much later so we were unsure of how that was going to go. But he adjusted nicely and although he’s not so excited it seems to take a bottle from me, he does just fine at school.I would have bet money that he is a lot bigger than Lola was at this age but the pictures tell a different story. You can see some comparisons in My Albums (http://web.mac.com/tom_julie/Site/Photos/Pages/Side_by_Side.html) and judge for yourself but I think they look pretty much the same in terms of size - except week 5 v. 6. It must be a trick of the camera though because Ollie has been a good eater and he sure seems like he weights a lot more than Lola did.Julie is a better person to ask about his disposition or what makes him funny so I will get her to sit down at the computer soon to post an update.Lola:Have I mentioned my theory about Inverse Sibling Progress? You may have heard about or witnessed the more common phenomenon whereby the younger child sometimes can develop, walk, talk, etc., more quickly because of the example an older sibling sets. We are pretty sure we saw this with Lola after she entered daycare and was surrounded by older children.Well, ISP is the inverse of that. It seems like Oliver has somehow played a part in Lola’s recent development. To begin with, we have been measuring Lola’s height on the back of the bathroom door and her physical growth between January and March was negligible and then a week after we brought Oliver home, Lola had grown about 1/2-inch.I think I’ve also put a lot of pressure on her to “be a big sister.” For some reason, I’ve aged Lola several years in my own mind and have expected her to be a good example for Oliver or take care of him. Most of the time I have to remind myself that she’s not even two years old yet(!) but there are other times when she has just stepped up and been exactly that.Mentally, Lola has been off-the-charts recently, too. We thought maybe she would digress a little or get frustrated with having to share our timeand attention. (She does get a little jealous when I hold brother.) But she has been amazing. She is getting better at communicating with signs and words; she is starting to put words together to form phrases and she is connecting ideas and thoughts to express herself. There seems to be a fine line between simply memorizing and replaying what she hears and actually understanding the concepts behind the words.For example, the other day Lola and I were preparing a bath from brother and Lola wanted to stick her hand in the water but I stopped her and said, “not yet, we need to get it to the proper temperature.” So she promptly wheeled around, opened my toiletries drawer, and pulled out the ear temperature thermometer I used on her earlier this year when we thought she had a cold!It’s so crazy to watch them do something like that because you look at her and ask “how do you know that? who taught you how to do/say that?” I asked Julie the other day if she taught her about money (coins) because she ran up to me with a handful of change she found on the ground and said “money bottle” because apparently she knows there is a jar in the den that we drop spare coins into at the end of the day.Well, I’ll wrap it up there. (I feel like I’m writing an essay for school.) I will try to be diligent about posting more frequently as these neat little milestones are observed.