Kids update

William:

• Sleeps 4-6 hour stretch consistently at the beginning of the night
• Way more alert time including interest in toys!  At play group he spent about half an hour looking at the dangling toys and smiling and cooing at them.  So, at home, I put the toy bar up on his seat and he looked at his musical frogs for an hour!
• Head at 90 degree angle sometimes during tummy time
• Smiles! Both social and spontaneous. 
• Cooing, mostly vowel sounds
• Switching to less frequent feeding and pooping
• Possibly heard a laugh
• Loves looking at pictures of smiling babies in books or his reflection in the mirror
• Starting to out grow 0-3 or 3 size clothes

Natalie:

• Even though potty training is up in the air, she is still telling us accurately if she peed or pooped
• Talking in sentences consistently
• Some cute sayings: "good choice" instead of yes, clapping and saying "good job" when Mike does things, "that's mommy's" to William sleeping under my blanket
• Very excited about lawn decoration turkeys.  She shows whatever toy is with us on walk them.
• Showing her toys things.  When she shows them pictures in books she puts their face right on the picture.
• She continues to make her toys act things out.  She will make her toys happy or sad, hug and kiss, dance, go potty, sleep, look at things she likes, and sit to eat. 
• Kicking a ball
• Looking out the car windows and commenting on what she sees, like octagons (stop signs) and clouds. 
• Knows many shapes (star, heart, triangle, circle, and sometimes square and octagon)
• Almost jumping
• Dancing with tv shows.  She will say the steps from the dances when we aren't watching.  She likes the part of Yo Gabba Gabba when they go crazy best because she can twirl and "jump."
• Already excited about Santa
• Building with blocks - "castles" and trains
• Loves using a glue stick.
• If I'm nursing, she will go get a snack from the pantry for me to open or will get the tub of wipes for me to clean her hands.  If she wants something while I'm nursing, she will ask if "I'm all done?" or will just tell me to "get up."
• She can parrot pretty much anything we say or that she sees on TV.  She's added a lot of everyday phrases to her vocabulary, such as "be right back" and "I can't wait."
• She loves to retell stories.  She does it sometimes with books she really likes (most notably Max's Ride), but she also does it with TV shows.  For example, she'll tell me Hoho didn't want to try the leechee fruit and wanted to go home, or that Muno's baby tooth fell out when he was eating an apple so he asked Tudee for help.  
• She noticed William's penis and that she doesn't have one.  She looks at her belly button and says "can't find penis."
• She has started to refer to herself as I or me (rather than you).  Started to use her name a little bit, too.  
• She calls William cute, strokes his head, and gives him toys to play with.  
• She likes to sleep with books on her bed.  At nap time, she reads them as she waits to fall asleep.  Today when I went in to get her up, she was still completely asleep.  All her stuffed animals were all over the bed and so were her books.  She had her arm over her eyes still holding baby kitty's tail.  She was completely untucked because she'd gotten out of bed to get a Pooh book.  She was sleeping on top of a Max and Ruby book.