Growth

I don't think I'm going out on a limb here when I say almost every kid brought home from an international adoption is going to be getting better nutrition, better physical activity, more 1 on 1 love, basically everything needed for growth. And I'm talking physical growth as in height and weight. And, again not too much of a stretch (pardon the pun), but most kids are smaller than their peers when they first get home.

So just about everyone you hear about says their kid makes a major growth spurt (larger than a regular growth spurt) 4 to 9 months after being home. Of course it's highly dependent on the genetic height the child will eventually grow to, so some kids are going to only have a modest growth spurt while others might have major ones.

We're not overly worried about Andrei's height because both Stef and I are short so even if he ends up being average height or even slightly below average he'll be taller than either of us.


But really seems to be eating a lot more lately and we've heard that a sign that they're about to get a growth spurt. So we'll see. We've been tracking his height, weight and head circumference since we got the referral. And like most of the Russian kids they start out pretty low on the percentile scores. Andrei was like in the 3rd percentile for both height and weight until we got him home. Although he always had a much higher percentile in head circumference, which was one of the things we were always thankful of. The concept being that the body takes care of the most important organ (the brain) by making sure it gets the lion share of fuel and thus grows the most even when the rest of the body doesn't.

We're nearly at his 2nd birthday (two more weeks, we're getting pretty excited around here) and Andrei has already moved up from the around the 3rd percentile in height to nearly the 15th percentile. So he's definitely growing up to whatever his normal height will be.

Interestingly his head circumference is at about the 60th percentile. But as I said, that was always doing well. In fact while in Russia and his height was around the 3rd percentile his head circumference was around the 45-50th percentile. The bottom line is that what all these numbers mean is that he is growing faster than the normal growth curve due to him catching up with his genetic growth expectation.

And until he levels off (i.e., achieving the same percentile month after month), we won't really know what that genetic growth expectation is. But remembering that I'm 5'6" or approximately the 10th percentile, he's certain to tower over me. As Stef says, "Well, at least someone in the house will be able to reach the tall shelves."

First Haircut

Of course in the orphanage they regularly cut Andrei's hair. Otherwise this referral shot at 14 months wouldn't have shown such short hair.


But we took Andrei for his first real haircut yesterday. One where the person who is cutting your hair actually cares about how you look and tries to make you look cool not like a...well...shaved sheep.

We weren't sure how he would respond to the haircut. First off he had a busy morning as it was the last of his swimming lessons and he was a major handful for Stef. He decided to do what he does at home and play the "Throw the pool toys out of the pool and jump out and get them to throw them back into the pool"...only to continue the cycle over and over again.

He was suppose to be learning things like blowing bubbles and such. But hey, he's a 2-year old so we basically let him have fun in the pool whatever way he wants (as long as it's safe). But on to the haircut. Here's a before shot of his hair on the way to the place.



Well at the hair salon he really liked the car and airplane seats and wanted to go into them right away, so we're thinking this is going to be easy. But after about 2 minutes he wanted out (this is even before the haircut chick, sorry, stylist even came near him). So we went with the sitting on daddy's lap approach.



And he was a perfect gentleman (as he usually is) for the duration. The stylist asked us if we wanted to "spike" his hair because she thought it would look cool. Of course she had tattoos up and down her arms. But, seriously, we do think it is kinda cute for the little ones, so we went with this look.



Which leads to a warning from Andrei to all 2-year old girls out there. "Watch out, I'm on the prowl."

It's not a bird, it's not a plane, it's Terrible Two Boy

We've heard this from plenty of folks (and regrettably experienced it first hand) that the Terrible Two's actually start around 18 months. Andrei was a bit late in getting into those episodes where his new found independence (or semi-independence) leads to some pretty trying behaviors. But he's in it full swing right now and let me tell you they are trying times.

He's actually so easy going and well behaved and even after a situation in which he really pushes our buttons, I feel almost like, "Well, that's good though, he's growing and trying to be his own person."

Of course I feel that may most often after a Corona or two.

But the testing rules is the one that just annoys the heck out of me. Case in point is tonight (about 30 min. ago to be exact). Mom did a diaper change and while she was cleaning up, Andrei and I were waiting for her. He finds the most unusual things interesting as toys and often I'm fine with him playing with them. The thing tonight was my drafting ruler (you know the ones that are triangular shaped).

So he's holding it through the railings (we're upstairs at the time) and then looks over to me. I say "Don't drop that down there, you know you're not allowed to put things through the railings and drop them."

That was all the encouragement he needed, and down goes my ruler making interesting sounds as it bounces several times on the tile floor below.

That lead to an immediate Time Out. Normally we don't use Time Outs ("TO") as the first level of discipline (unless he hits, hitting is an instant Time Out in our house). It is just so irritating when he intentionally disobeys a rule (usually after rehearing the rule). And thankfully the TO did it's work because he was pretty sad that he had to stand against the wall for a full minute. They say to use 1 minute per year of age, but Andrei really gets the message pretty quickly so ours are usually between 1-2 minutes.

Anyway, the really nice part of our Time Out method is that after a short discussion on why he got the Time Out we both say "I love you" and kiss and hug. And Andrei has such a sweet demeanor, that he really means it and feels great after a TO and doesn't really have any sense of holding a grudge. I just wish he had a little bit better memory of these TOs so that he'd at least not try breaking the same rule over and over and over again.

And the "We don't drop things over the railing" is his favorite rule to break.

It's a bird, It's a plane, It's ReadingMan!!!

As the title implies, one of Andrei's favorite activities is reading books, well actually listening to us read him books. As brilliant as he is, he can't read at 23 months - I know, you're all as shocked as I am (so, no he's not actually reading in this shot).


But the boy loves his books. This weekend we got a great set of 10 books called Amazing Machines from Costco. Each book has a story about some type of machine, from boats to airplanes to cars to trains. He loves them but doesn't quite stay put for the whole story so we have to invent a slimmed down version of the story. Sort of the Cliff Notes version.

But he really loves books. We read every night and if it was up to him we would probably read 10 or more books. But I cut it down to just 2 or 3 depending on how long each book is. His library of books is getting so large we may actually need to build him a bookcase just to house his collection. But this is all good (or "good-goood-good" as Andrei would say) and we want to foster his reading as much as possible.

During the day he'll often go over to his stash of books and take out...oh...six of them and head over to either Steve or myself and plop himself down and have us read to him. There was some study done that showed that children that get read to are able to learn the alphabet at earlier ages and we can see Andrei looking at the letters, almost realizing, that they stand for something. He even likes looking at our books (which of course don't have pictures).

We don't really push him into doing anything fast. So the toys we give him are for his age, because we want him to have that sense of accomplishment. But at the same time we do try to lead him towards good habits (very little TV, more reading, more outdoor play, etc.). And it's pretty cool (and makes us feel great) that he'd rather go and grab a book than ask for the TV to be on.

Quick Sandbox Update

The sandbox is a huge hit!!



Just one quick statement - Toddler, Sandbox, Yorkshire Terrier = not a good combo!


[Steve's comment]: So the picture is after we took Chianti (our dog) out of the sandbox. As Stef says he's a Yorkshire Terrier and thus has long hair. Well, Andrei thought it was cool to pour sand over him.