Ben grows more and more animated with each passing week. He is extremely vocal: squealing, laughing, babbling, and ALWAYS moving. He's constantly reaching for and grabbing anything in sight and remotely within reach. If it's not within his reach he engages his newly acquired skill of getting his "roll" on. He's just ITCHING to go places. You can almost see that in his mind he's speed-walking around the house, but his 8-month-old body is hindering him. By moving tummy to back,though, he's starting to get places which makes mommy more vigilant about what toys are laying around. He also loves to gnaw the living daylights out of whatever object is unfortunate enough to find itself in his grasp. It is absolutely glorious to watch, and I feel like I can actually see his mind turning things over, working things out, etc. With a little bit of support yet, the Benj is also doing some pretty strong sitting. Currently he has stalled at two teeth, but that's good enough for us.
Jeran. What can I say about Jeran? He is my firstborn, strong-willed, stubborn child. In a word, he's: me. I feel I so easily fall into the trap of being negative where he's concerned. It's true that in recent weeks I feel we've regressed about a year and a half back, behavior-wise, experiencing fits, tantrums, and defiance that have not been seen in this house to this degree for many many months. It's also true that he's all boy: loud, busy, destructive. But there are also the facets of his personality that I love and treasure with all my heart: his boundless energy (when connoted negatively - busy, I guess), his enthusiastic love, his outgoing joy, his curiosity, playfulness, numerous hugs and kisses, cheezy smile, giggles (especially when they are directed at Ben and cause him to laugh too). From the very beginning I vowed to cherish every moment with him, even the hard ones. And that was an easy promise to make to myself when his adorable infant self occupied most of our time with sleeping. Now, when the rubber meets the road, I want to remember that in the blink of an eye, he'll be graduating high school and embarking on his own road of life, and I want no regrets when that moment hits.
Anyway.....I feel so blessed to be having this summertime with him (two days a week of tutoring notwithstanding) and even more blessed that I will not be returning to full time teaching come the fall so that our summertime can linger on. Today we've had a great morning of romping outside in the sprinkler and attending an outdoor "concert", with music provided by Jeran himself. An eclectic mix of tunes including but not limited to "Old MacDonald" and one of Vivaldi's "Four Seasons" (which he heard on one of Ben's toys). He's had SUCH a hard time entertaining himself lately for some reason, but the rest of his morning has been spent building with his train tracks and blocks and coming up with little scenarios involving his trains and cars. It's been so fun to listen to him using his imagination, and it has allowed me some one-on-one time with Ben which doesn't often happen.
One other interesting factoid about Jeran: we have officially entered into the time of "why"? "Because why"? is something we hear following any instructions/requests/demands/explanations that we give. The challenge I'm finding is to give more creative answers than "Because I said so".
By the way, his week of VBS was great!! The end of the week program? Hilarious followed by mortifying. The photo below is the only one I got of him clearly visible and standing still. He was a terror! Climbing the front stage steps and jumping off, over and over; running back and forth across the stage, with some singing and dancing thrown in. I finally just yanked him off since it quickly turned into the Jeran show rather than a program meant to display what the kids had learned about Christ that week. Whoops. Clearly too young for that sort of thing yet. Live and learn. 
Jeran is the second kid to the left in the bottom row, next to the cute blond with the sundress.
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