It’s virtually all gone now, but this time a week ago, Clan Dillingham was blanketed in about a foot of snow!
We took all the boys out into the wintery weather the day the white stuff was falling. Houston had a blast trekking around with Daddy and making snow angels with Mommy. The twins, who obviously couldn’t play down in the depths of it all, just enjoyed experiencing the winter wonderland from the vantage point of Mommy and Daddy’s arms. Is wasn’t long, though, before we had to get the kids inside to defrost them in front of a toasty fire.
Mommy & Houston get giddy in the beautiful powdery snow.
The next couple of days were more suitable for lengthy outdoor play for Houston and his neighborhood posse. He went sledding with Alyssa and Jamie on a fast course their daddy charted out; then he was off for more sledding down the steep hillside at Dixie and Donni’s; and then he finished things off with lots of snowball-making fun at Maddie’s.
Undeterred by the lame snowman Mommy built, Houston’s favorite thing to do with the snow was make snowballs. While exploring the back yard with Daddy and looking for all the wild animal tracks they could find, Daddy created snowballs of all sizes for Houston. And every time he would drop and break one, he would implore Daddy to make him another. That way, he could have one in each hand at all times. “Chill McGill,” the biggest surviving snowball from their outing that day, is now living safely in our freezer.
Houston is starting to comprehend colors. If you ask him, “What color is this?” he will reply with his standby answer of “green.” But if you point out an object that is, say, red, he is able to name other red things in the room. It’s normal for kids to be developing their understanding of colors around this age, but this milestone is easing our worries that Houston might be color blind … just with his Horner’s Syndrome and all, we worry about his eye sight probably a bit more than do most parents.
Daddy primes the sled for Houston & Alyssa’s slippery ride downhill.
Random but worth noting: After his millionth dirty diaper change, Houston said, “Sanks, Mommy!” As a “domestic goddess” who is elbow deep in doo-doo many times throughout the day, it was a sweet thing for a mama bear to hear unprompted from one of her cubs. Yep, it’s the seemingly small moments like that that make my oftentimes thankless job so rewarding!
Gabriel and Zeke are no longer taking bottles … of milk, that is. See, some time after stopping breast-feeding them around 9 months of age, I began putting them down to sleep with pumped milk, formula and then whole cow’s milk. It must’ve worked so well that first time, getting them all wound down and in the mood to snooze, that it became an unintentional habit. Then a few week’s back, I noticed that Gabriel had stinky breath, so I researched some of the possibilities.
Well, there’s this thing called Baby Bottle Tooth Decay that I actually remember hearing about when I was a first-time mother. But because breast-feeding Houston, transitioning him to regular milk and eventually weaning him from a bottle was so drastically different than has been my experience with the twins, I totally forgot about BBTD. Don’t worry, Gabriel and Zeke don’t have it.
Doing his best Little Drummer boy, Zeke pounds gleefully on brother’s brains.
But reintroducing myself to the issue and its horrible effects on the gums and teeth, I swiftly stopped giving the twins their crib bottles. Since Zeke’s a thumb sucker, he sometimes gets water in a sippy cup in bed, whereas Gabriel either gets a bottle with a few ounces of water or even an empty bottle, since he has come to rely on the bottle as a pacifier. As long as the bottle isn’t filled with a sugary substance (i.e., milk or juice), Gabe’s oral health will be fine, and we will simply have to break him of his bottle pacification down the road, just as we had to do with Houston and his binky and just as we will have to do with Zeke and his thumb.
Zeke has his diagnostic x-ray on 12/23. He was such a good little guy, flirting and talking to people in the waiting room, and even laughing and jigging during the actual procedure (an especially notable fact, considering that this hungry, growing boy hadn’t eaten since about 7 p.m. the night before and his appointment wasn’t till 9:30 a.m.) I haven’t heard from the gastro specialist, who is supposed to call in the next few weeks, but the radiologist said that from everything he could see during the x-rays, he’s fairly certain Zeke just has a bad case of acid reflux and that his puking is not a symptom of something else major. Thank you, Lord!
Other twins highlights:
- Already adept at using the thick, wooden drawer pulls as a ladder, Gabriel has taken to standing in the bottom dresser drawer, in order to reach the radio, humidifier and lamp on top. The resourcefulness of this feat so impressed me that I couldn’t even get mad the first time I saw him pull this stunt.
“So this is what astronauts must feel like,” thinks Gabriel.
- Zeke’s current walking style: with arms outstretched behind him, kind of like wings — Super Man is his alter ego after all — or with forearms pointing up to the ceiling with fingers wiggling. (Houston likes to follow behind imitating his saunter.) Zeke has also gotten as fast as a speeding bullet.
- Gabriel walks with his shoulders shrugged up toward his head, kind of like Frankenstein or a big ol’ brute football player. We do call him our bruiser boy and his manly ambles only accentuate the nickname.
- Zeke has taken to running and dramatically plunging onto Houston’s beanbag. That boy likes to fly!
- It bears repeating that Gabriel seems to be our most musically inclined, instantaneously jamming out to tunes whenever he hears them. That boy likes to groove … anywhere, anytime!
- Both twins are doing the “light” sign and Zeke now does the sign for “cat.”
Click the above photo to check out all the recent December pics. There are also a few new additions in the December – Part 1 gallery. Christmas pics are coming soon. In the meantime, Happy New Year!
