Just Kid Stuff

I think the kids, for the most part, are settling in. We have an interesting challenge ahead of us in February when they'll both start going to preschool half-days - I wasn't planning to put G in school so soon, but after visiting the place I kept thinking - he's going to love this. They have an arts and nature focus, and own a farm outside the city that I think Valerie will love visiting - there's even a llama, apparently! I think G will enjoy the music workshop they do with all kinds of musical instruments. It will still be an adjustment for them since they haven't picked up a whole lot of Spanish yet - but I expect that will change soon with immersion.

The kids are both growing like weeds. When we arrived, G didn't have to duck to go under the rail that surrounds the playground near our house - now he does. Sleeves that were overlong last summer are now just right. And I keep having to trim the hair out of their eyes.

G is talking a mile a minute, he's a natural mimic so picks up a crazy amount of vocabulary from us and his sister. There are still adorably "baby" things he says - like reversing word order ("Where's my little own toy!") or sounds ("Pliget" instead of "Piglet"). Another phrase he says that I love is "no many" (e.g. "The dog is sad because it has no many friends.") He's also really into mamas and babies - every toy he can, he puts into big/little pairs that are then Mama and Baby - like mama and baby tow trucks, mama and baby cement mixers, mama and baby helicopters. They must then stay together or they get sad.

Valerie continues with her acrobatics - she has excellent balance. Yesterday she climbed on the back of the couch to get more traction for pressing play-dough flat on an end table - her feet in the air, her middle balanced just so on the couch, one hand on the play-dough. She loves monkey bars and basically climbing anything and everything she can. She often talks about Tirana but tells me she likes it here and is happy.

We've had opportunity this month to check out some kid-friendly fun things in Bogota, including the children's museum, a huge park surrounding a lake in the middle of the city, and exploring a big mall in hopes of finding an indoor play area for rainy days. The park was pretty awesome, you could buy fish food for the carp in the lake, as well as all kinds of other finger foods, and there was a huge playground for the kids. The Children's Museum and Mall were both pretty expensive, we thought (my parents have been kind of shocked at food prices here as well, compared to Peru). So I'm not sure how often we'll be doing those things. But the park was great. Anyway, I do have photos of all those things just not on the computer yet, so I'll save them for a future post.

Our sitter has been on vacation for about a month so we've been relying completely on grandparent care! I don't know what we'd do without them!