Bowman West

I just might swallow these kids whole one day...

I mean seriously, Charlie is constantly trying to chew on Sarah Jane's little cheeks and I have to act like I have no idea where he gets that from. There's a slight chance he's learned it through modeling. These poor kids are going to grow up with the longest lasting oral fixation ever because their mom can't keep her mouth off their little faces, necks, arms, toes... Well, I stay clear of Charlie's stinky big kid feet now but you get my point. I've long argued that God makes babies so cute so we won't eat our young when they anger us. I still want to eat them though!

Ok, moving on. We're working on milestones at the Bowman house. Charlie was well on his way to reading sentences when SJ was born and then everything fell of the edge of the Earth for a few months. Now we're getting back to the grind. Our good friend, Amber, clued us in on an oldie-but-goodie reading program (www.iseesam.com) and we started it this week. The problem we're having now is getting him to stick with the program instead of blowing through it a few books at a time because he's excited to read. Now if we can just get him to sit down and write!

Also on the Charlie front is his speech & hearing. He failed his 4-year-old hearing test because he had massive amounts of impacted wax (nasty). We finally got tired of waiting for it to resolve on its own so Andy irrigated the heck out of his ears. That solved it. And it was nasty. So I now have hopes of his speech improving but I feel that his speech seems quite a bit behind that of his peers. There are often times that I can't understand him and even more so for others. He says "th" as "z" or "s", can't says l's & r's, among others. I've worked with him a little trying to show him mechanics and tongue placement (I have no idea what I'm doing) but it's like his tongue is not capable of moving in that way. I only worry because he was born tongue-tied and there's a higher incidence of those kids not growing out of speech problems without intervention. Any advice (I'm talking to you, Amy S.)?

Now for Baby...Charlie better watch out for this one! The other day he took a toy from her her and she flat out yelled at him. I cracked up. She's a sassy little baby and I love it. She doesn't get fussy much but when she does she really lets you know. She has this crazy screechy yell when she gets really mad -- it's awesome. SJ is working really hard to crawl and when she does I think she'll never stop moving. She gets so crazy in her bath that I've started just putting an inch of water in and sticking her in there with nothing else. She kicks, splashes, rolls around, and just goes crazy. I laugh so hard!