Long Time No Blog

Yea, it's been a few weeks. But, I have been updating the Twitter feed on the right-hand side of the site with pictures along the way, so it hasn't been complete radio silence.

Anyway, things have been great here. We're getting in a good routine with Angie's work and Patrick's school on Mondays and Tuesdays. Angie really likes her new job and Patrick is learning to like school a little more every time.

So far, he's adapted pretty well to being without us two days out of the week. He still cries when I drop him off in the morning but his teachers assure me he quits right after I leave and he mostly has fun the rest of the day. He's still not 100% comfortable, but he's getting there.

The funniest part for Angie and I is to see what behaviors he learns both from the other kids at school and from the reactions of his teachers. As parents of one child, we have the luxury of thinking through all of our reactions and responses to make sure we're steering him towards the way we'd like him to act. So, if he starts yelling for something, it's usually easy for us to make the decision to not react to his yelling and instead wait for him to ask for something calmly. Which is not to say that we always react correctly, just that we have the time to try to. But, when you're a teacher with 5 kids all around the age of one, you don't have that same luxury. They're are likely times when the squeakiest wheel gets the snack. We noticed after Patrick's first two days of school that he started to fake cry when he wanted something, which he had never done before. Then one day when I dropped him off, I saw one of his new friends doing the same thing and suddenly realized where Patrick had learned it.

Of course, he's learned far more really good things so far though. They practice different languages, spend a ton of time outside, read books, do art projects every day and even baby yoga - which is mostly just having the kids put their arms in the air or on the ground. But it's still really cute.

The couple pictures in this post are from our time at the playground last Sunday. We had a blast and Patrick went nuts over the slides. You'll see him sitting on my lap in a few of them coming down the long "tube slide", but he later went down that slide several times all by himself, squealing with glee the whole way. He really has no fear (probably because he doesn't know he should yet).

And I swear Angie was at the playground too, but when you let her pick her favorite pictures to put on the site, she somehow mysteriously goes missing from all of them. Here are a couple more: