Along with his increased vocabulary, Josh now has some pretty strong opinions. We love seeing his personality come out, even if it turns out he is just like us :-)
Josh and I were at Target to buy an extra hat for him. First he told me he wanted the orange hat, then he saw a green one and wanted that one....so clearly I decided to just get both :-) Sadly, now we get into fights when we leave the house because he always wants a different hat than he has. Hopefully this will be a valuable lesson in not getting everything you want. Or else it will be a valuable lesson to me not to buy 3 types of hats :-)
Josh was happy to welcome his very first first cousin to the world. I was a bit worried that Josh would be jealous when I was helping out with the baby, but so far he has been great. He LOVES his cousin. He gets upset whenever she leaves the room, and wants to follow her. Over the weekend she needed a diaper change and went upstairs with her Dad. Josh decided that he had to have a diaper change too, and had to go upstairs. Josh is going to be a very good big cousin, and we are looking forward to watching their relationship develop :-)
The past week or so Josh has had some major improvements in his manual dexterity. He can now open all of our doors, previously he could just open ones that were easy to grip. Today he figured out how to open our cabinet locks...video below. He has also been climbing on EVERYTHING and enjoys jumping...another video below. He can also open jars and containers of all sorts.
We are going to need to step up our toddler proofing game to stay one step ahead of him!
We haven't done a general Josh update in a while and today he is 22 months old so it seems like a good time. Over the last few months we've seen a dramatic increase in Josh's vocabulary. He knows body parts, animals, and he knows the "Crayola 8" colors among many other words. The big change in the last few weeks has been putting words together to make phrases:
"Mamma all done apple"
"All done mamma phone"
"Over there"
"Night night moon" (Goodnight moon)
He is doing a lot of repeating of what we say so we have to be better about watching what we say!
He can count to two although I'm not quite sure he knows he is counting. He did pick up two of his stuffed monkeys and say "two monkeys".
In addition to the vocabulary has been the increase in opinions. He knows what he wants to do and it isn't always what we want him to do. When he doesn't get his way, he sometimes gets very upset. We believe it's just the precursor to the terrible twos. Hopefully he gets through it quickly.
He's walking very quickly now, not sure you would call it running (although he calls it running). He can also climb shorter steps without going to us hand and knees.
He now sleeps with stuffed animals, a pillow and a blanket.
Our little guy is growing up and it's amazing to watch!
Josh loves doing art projects and playing with play-doh at daycare, so I had the idea that we should make pizza together. I knew it had the potential to be really fun, or a huge mess (or both!). It ended up working out really well! Josh did a great job with minimal help on his pizza, and did not even need a new shirt! He had to taste all the ingredients as he went though :-)
One of the hardest parenting decisions for Margaret and I has been to know when a problem is a big problem and when it is a small problem. When Josh had his first fever I freaked out and called the pediatrician after hours. Since then I've calmed down a little bit and don't always panic. When Josh is sick we call the pediatrician during office hours and talk to a nurse and they tell us if we should be concerned or not. We've had a few trips to the ER after Josh took particularly big falls, after the pediatrician suggested we should get him checked out. In both cases he was fine but I know if we didn't go to the ER we would be worrying about it for a while.
A week ago Saturday night Josh got sick. He woke up several times during the night (rare for him) and was very upset. Recently if he wakes up at night he just wants his blanket (or "buddy") put back on him but that was not working Saturday night. Each time he woke up he was very upset and would take a while to calm down. He finally calmed down and slept a few hours. Sunday night was even worse. He woke up almost every hour, and was clearly upset. Around 2am his breathing seemed difficult and he was very unhappy. He finally slept a few hours until early morning but he woke up very dazed and confused. He would not stop crying or sit still with us, so we decided then it was time to go to the hospital. Since it was 5am, we did not want to bother the pediatrician since we knew they would just tell us to take him to the hospital. We also knew that there was a nasty virus going around that causes trouble breathing and we wanted to make sure Josh got the care he needed.
In this case going to the hospital was absolutely the right call. It turns out Josh had RSV (not the enterovirus that is going around) and needed help breathing. When we first arrived they checked his O2 levels and they were down around 90% (should be 99%). They gave him some oxygen and a drug to help open up his lungs and help him breathe. After a few hours he was feeling much better and running all around the pediatric area at the hospital. We used a nebulizer at home and it really helped. Josh has been sleeping normally and his fever went down after a few days. The medicine he was on made him hyper so he has spent all of last week running around the house at full speed.
Knowing when to take health problems seriously can be difficult. We don't want to overreact or over treat illnesses that are better left untreated. Sometimes a fever is just a fever, and just takes a few days to recover from....but sometimes it indicates something much more serious. Since we know Josh so well, we base our judgement on when he is acting really abnormal, so we know we should take it seriously. Thankfully to this point anytime we have not panicked he has been alright and we're glad this time he has recovered so well.
Sorry for slacking on the blog lately, but I just started a new job Oct 1 (yay!), so we are adjusting to our new schedule which has less blogging time. I'm working 3 days a week, which means I still get to spend 2 days (+the weekend) with Josh :-) But I'm working longer hours, and all in an office...so it is taking some adjustment. Julian and Josh have dinner together and then I get home just in time to put Josh to bed. It has been a lot of change for all of us, but Josh and Julian have been enjoying some father-son time :-) Thankfully we have been getting some extra help from all our parents so that we don't fall too far behind.
Josh is learning more and more words every day, it really is amazing. He is starting to put words together into phrases, which is also fun. His coordination has also really improved and he is doing very well eating soups with a spoon, and has gotten very good with a fork. He loves drawing with markers, or crayons and is getting very savvy with an iPhone. Here are some pictures from the last few weeks.
