The Adkins side of my family has a tradition with taking pictures in trees (You may have caught on to this from past posts). Max is still a little young to be sitting in a tree on his own, but we tried our luck last night and came up with a couple of decent shots.
Look mom, I’m flying!
Unimpressed.
And a little scared!
What, you don’t hang out in a tree everyday?
We have been a little obsessed with playing Boggle as a family lately. Ben and I have even been keeping track of score totals and how many games we have each won. (I won’t brag here about who is winning that contest though!) But I do want to take the time to brag on Mikayla a little bit.
She loves to play Boggle with us, but never really writes down words. It started with her just writing down any letter that she knew how to write. Gradually we were able to convince her to write down letters she saw on the board. Then over time, she took it upon herself to write actual words using some of the letters she saw. Here is her most recent attempt at writing some of those words. We were both very proud of her attempts!
We have been a little obsessed with playing Boggle as a family lately. Ben and I have even been keeping track of score totals and how many games we have each won. (I won’t brag here about who is winning that contest though!) But I do want to take the time to brag on Mikayla a little bit.
She loves to play Boggle with us, but never really writes down words. It started with her just writing down any letter that she knew how to write. Gradually we were able to convince her to write down letters she saw on the board. Then over time, she took it upon herself to write actual words using some of the letters she saw. Here is her most recent attempt at writing some of those words. We were both very proud of her attempts!
I realize that we are a little late on this, but my philosophy is better late than never! Since we live in Swaziland, and the Swazi’s don’t celebrate Halloween we did not have a problem with pushing our Halloween date back a couple of weeks. On Halloween, Ben was in town at a meeting and both sisters were in the US. There are only a limited number of people we can ask to Trick or Treat with, and with the three of them being gone it took away about half of those options! So, we just went trick or treating last night.
Last year Mikayla was a princess and all year long she had talked about wanting to be Santa Clause for Halloween. At the beginning of October we asked her what she wanted to be again just to clarify and she suddenly switched to princess! I didn’t want to push the Santa thing because frankly I wasn’t very excited about making that costume. I also wasn’t very excited about her being a princess again so I subtly suggested that she be a wild thing from the book Where the Wild Things Are and that Max be Max King of the Wild Things. She immediately agreed and we got to work on brainstorming costume ideas.
Max was easy. He just needed a white outfit, a crown and a tail. Done! I also referenced this picture of Bella (read here to see the importance of Bella in our naming of Max) for inspiration.
Mikayla was a little bit trickier. She looked through the book and chose which wild thing she wanted to be. From there we started brainstorming ideas on how to make it happen. Of course we "brainstormed" up until the week of our trick or treating and did most of the costume work on Saturday and Sunday (we went trick or treating on Sunday)! Ha! Nothing like last minute preparations. To make her costume I cut out felt in the shape of fish scales and then roughly sewed them onto a pair of leggings. We attached a piece of fabric that looked like animal fur to the butt to look like a tail. Next we chose one of her striped dresses so she could be a mommy wild thing!
The hardest part was the head, but thanks to team work between Ben and I we were able to make it happen. We had a broken fan laying around the house so we took it apart and used one side of it for the face. We used paper mache to outline the face, leaving a large mouth opening for Mikayla to see through. Ben also attached some string so the face would sit nicely on her head. On Sunday morning I painted the face brown and attached eyes and nose made from felt. Ben made some horns from cardboard and those got glued on next. The final touch was adding yarn all around the edges for his hair. I think we did a pretty good job and she was very excited about it. The only unfortunate thing was that we spent all this time putting together her costume for 15 minutes of fun! Oh well, I think she really appreciated it and her mask is now hanging in her room!
She doesn’t look thrilled here, but trust me she was so giddy and excited. She just didn’t want to stop to take pictures, she wanted the candy! She did make sure to roar her terrible roar and show her terrible claws at each and every door.
Here she is showing off her tail. She wanted to make sure everyone knew that she had one.
Showing off her candy stash. This is one of the only pictures we got of her by herself. She was really not excited about pictures!
Max wanted a turn with the mask. I think it was a little big for him though…
It amazes me how much Max is growing and changing each day! He is getting more of a personality. Ben said just yesterday that he seems much happier than Mikayla was, but when he is upset he is really upset! He isn’t usually just chill like she was. He is either smiling or screaming! 😉 But when you get him going he can really be a charmer with his intoxicating smile and giggle! He is also getting so chunky in the face that he is getting some dimples which are super adorable.
Evidence of the screaming monster!
His face is really scrunched up here, but you get the general idea! You can see a little of the dimples here.
Weight – 6.9 kg / Just over 15 pounds
Height – 26 inches long
Head Circumference – 16.5 inches
At about 3.5 months he started rolling over from back to belly. He is much more content on his belly now that he can roll in both directions and put himself there. Plus his little arms and neck are strong enough to prop himself up so he can fully see everything around him. He is very observant! He can sit up unassisted for a few seconds!! This morning he was able to prop himself up like in the picture below and sit for a couple of minutes. His sitting unassisted time is increasing each time. But he does love to hold onto your fingers and be standing. His legs seem very strong!
This morning he actually sat like this for a couple of minutes by propping himself up with his hands.
Sleep is still hit or miss. We are still up 3-4 times a night for nursing. Luckily most of the time he eats and goes right back to sleep so I suppose things could be worse. Naptimes are still inconsistent. He seems to be much more of a cat napper than a long napper. Very rarely will he sleep longer than a 45 minute stretch during the day.
For the last two weeks Max has been a little more irritable than usual. We think he might be teething, but so far no teeth. In addition to being irritable he chews on everything in sight. And if he can get your fingers in his mouth he really goes to town!
Mikayla took this picture of Max with his "grow with me" owl!
Max has also started showing some interest in holding on and playing with his toys. He has always enjoyed his play mat, but is just now starting to interact and play with the toys.
Speaking of playing, the kids at the hostel are still in love with Max. Even the boys are starting to come and take him to hold and play with. I love it! Mikayla still very much loves her brother and spending time with him. And I would say that Max feels the same way based upon the reaction he makes when she lays next to him to play. Mikayla is such a good big sister and I love watching the two of them interact and play with each other.
Max loves sitting and playing/chatting with his daddy!
I can’t remember if I ever posted this picture or not, but wanted to make sure it got posted. This is Simo’s (the twin and Max’s namesake) mom. She was at the guardian’s meeting we had at the hostel back in September.
The month of October absolutely flew by! Not sure why, because we didn’t do anything major but it went fast! We had a lot of lazy weekends where we stayed in our jammies all day and cooked and relaxed! We had talked about taking a mini trip, but decided to just stay at home instead.
Ben and I celebrated our 9 year anniversary during October! Again, we didn’t do anything really, just relaxed at home. Katie and Joe took the kids for a couple of hours and we cooked a nice meal just the two of us, played Settlers and watched some TV. It was the perfect way to celebrate!
Mikayla is clearly very excited about our anniversary.
The most "active" we got for the month was the monthly Portuguese bacalhau dinner. The dinner was held at St. Philips this time so we spent last weekend helping set up and cook for it. We used it as an excuse to get the kids all dressed up looking cute! Mikayla had a blast playing with some of the kids who came that happened to be right around her age. She is not used to playing with same age peers, but rather kids who are older! So it was a nice change of pace for her.
Can you tell she dressed herself?
Halloween came and went, but we didn’t actually celebrate in October. The week of Halloween Ben and the sisters were both gone so we pushed it back some and will celebrate this weekend. I will try to post pictures of the kiddos and their costumes in a separate post.
Love her and her beautiful smile!
Early morning snuggles. Mikayla wakes up almost everyday asking us to bring Max in to snuggle with her.
A few months ago we asked some close friends and family to help us put together a decoration for the kids room. Each person was asked to create a pendant to hang. It could be made from anything and in any design. The whole idea is that we wanted those closest to us to be a part of his room. After all, it takes a village to raise a child, right? We did a similar thing with Mikayla when she was a baby, but we used wooden elephants. Here is a picture of a few of them because apparently I never blogged about it!
Here is the "finished" version. And I use finished loosely because we are still waiting for some and the hope is that it will be constantly added to over the years!
MAX was made by the three of us. M was Mikayla, A myself and X was all Ben (it is hard to tell here but it is a treasure map where X marks the spot).
Mikayla wanted to make a separate banner to hang.
And there you go. Our little village in the bush of Swaziland!