My Bilingual Boys

We recently found a fun playarea close to our house with a special child-sized bowling alley. The bowling balls are smaller and lighter and the lanes are shorter with bumpers on each of the sides. This was Diego's first experience bowling and it was a big hit. We are definitely going back next week when his cousin comes to visit.

My boys are HUGE Lego fans. Usually they just play with the bucket of random Lego pieces and build whatever their creative little minds can think up. Diego, however, received a few Lego kits for his birthday and Christmas and we are slowly putting them together. I don't know how many pieces came with this Toy Story Trash Compactor set but it seemed like a million. Well, it is finally finished! Now a question for other Lego fanactics... What do you do with the large sets after you have played with them for a few days? Do you leave them put together on a shelf to admire? Or do you take them apart to put together another day? I'll admit that the latter option gives me a headache just thinking about it.

Like I mentioned before, Mateo and I do a letter project while Diego is at preschool. This day we made the letter "C" decorated with "corazones" of different sizes and colors. This isn't a particularly interesting or creative project but I took a picture because Mateo decided that he was a bird and insisted that before we started he needed wings. He tore a piece of paper in two and handed it to me. With just a little bit of tape I had a happy little pajarito. Two year olds are so funny.

One of the benefits of Diego being in school two days a week is that I can finally spend some one-on-one time with Mateo. I am sure that it is normal for the second child to lack alone time with parents but it has always bothered me.

My children could not be any different. If one likes an activity, you can be sure the other does not. Diego not like to paint with water colors at all. On this morning I discovered that Mateo LOVES it. He painted several pictures for his Papi who was working out of town.

Now I have to correct myself, the boys do have something in common. They both love to build. Mateo has the best fine motor skills of any two-year-old that I know. He can build anything with the tiniest Legos and manipulate these TRIO blocks that used to be difficult for Diego. In this picture Mateo built an "avión."

By this age, Diego knew all of his letters. Mateo can just now identify the letter "M." We are starting to do a letter of the week project to introduce his letters and to work on his vocabulary and pronunciation. Mateo is seeing a speech therapist for a speech delay and other speech-related problems.

Of course when Diego came home he had to make an "abeja" as well. I love his use of bubble letters. I asked him why he wrote like that because I had never seen him do it before. He told me that he wanted to write that I did on the banner we made for Papi when he went out of town.

It is ridiculously difficult to get my boys to pose for a picture. Usually I have to resort to the surprise attack or just take it even if they are not looking at the camera. That is why, when they request to get their picture taken, I run for my camera.

On this day Mateo found my baseball cap and wanted his picture taken with it.

In line with my children's neverending quest to make sure they are not missing out on what the other one is doing, Diego wanted to wear my cap and have his picture taken too....

and one-uped his brother by having a second picture taken with the cap backwards.

Not to be outdone, Mateo ditched the hat and insisted on a Spider-Man band-aid for his nose and another picture.

Such silly boys.

Just so that I remember in the future: Diego fell at preschool and scraped his nose. It left a huge scab which he, of course, would not leave alone. He hates the sight of blood so we had to cover it will a band-aid. He refused to take it off and looked like that for over a week.