Happy Birthday, Truman Bekalu!!!

Today is our sweet boy's 2nd birthday, and we cannot believe how fast time is flying! It definitely feels like it was not very long ago that we were in Ethiopia meeting our precious son. We feel lucky to have Truman in our lives every single day, and today was all about thankfulness, joy, and love! I am not sure how we got so lucky, but calling ourselves Truman's parents is such an honor!!!

While Truman probably wasn't aware it was his birthday, he was definitely in a great mood all day long! He woke up happy (as usual) and greeted us with smiles and hugs:


We then had a relaxing breakfast together - Truman insisted on bringing his absolute favorite book, Hop on Pop, to the table:



Next, Daddy brought Truman to daycare - apparently our boy was super excited to get there and happily greeted his teacher and friends. He is such a sweetie! When I picked up Truman in the afternoon his teachers told me he'd had a great day. Once we got home we were able to take advantage of the beautiful weather with a nice long walk outside (Truman loves walks in his stroller!). We followed up our walk with a yummy dinner and then a special treat for Truman - a pumpkin cupcake! As you may know, Truman doesn't really eat 'sweets' so this was definitely something new for him, and he loved it! I don't really have any pictures to do it justice, but Truman was focused on his cupcake and ate a ton of it :-)

The rest of our night was spent cuddling and playing. It was wonderful! Lately Truman has had the tendency to be a bit bossy or demanding, but not tonight! He was happy from the minute he got home to the minute he fell asleep in my arms. Here are some of my favorite shots from tonight:











Happy birthday Truman! We love you so much!!!

Wordless Wednesday

Truman's Sounds

I know I still owe everyone a Christmas post, and I promise I am working on it! In the mean time, however, I wanted to share a video we took this morning. As you all know, Truman has been receiving speech/language services for about 4 months now. As we've been delving deeper and deeper into therapy, I started to feel like Truman might have Apraxia, which is a motor planning disorder that makes it difficult for a person to link the area of the brain responsible for coming up with speech sounds with the muscles needed to execute said sounds. We thought this because every time we would ask Truman to make a sound, he would look at us long and hard and you could see him trying to process it, but then he really struggled to make the correct sound, even if we knew he was able to make that sound in other contexts. So we brought this theory to our speech pathologist. She said that while he's too young to diagnosis with such a disorder, she was on board that this could definitely be a factor in Truman's delays. She then recommended a supplement that is supposed to help with neuropathways. While I'm not super into herbal medicine, we figured it wouldn't hurt to try (and our doctor saw no problem with the medicine, as it's really just vitamin supplements). After a month of this supplement, combined with many hours of practice and patience, Truman is making sooooo much progress! We are so proud and excited for our little guy, and wanted to share this video. Look how quickly he knows which sounds to make :-)

(Almost) Wordless Wednesday

I received this hat in a game of Dirty Santa at my work holiday party - a coworker crocheted it!

Fav Foto Friday

A picture from last weekend's tree lighting - it's kind of hard to see the tree in the background, but I swear it's there! (Also, how cute is Truman's jacket? A lot of people at the 'festival' commented on how adorable he looked :-)

Big Eater and Failed Photo Shoot

So tonight our sweet boy ate a hamburger that weighed 1/3lb all on his own and washed it down with a zucchini burger (made from zucchini, carrots, onion, and feta cheese) - so yes, it seems we are going through another growth spurt!

In other news, yesterday we attempted to have pictures taken for a holiday photo card like we did last year (remember these adorable pictures?)


Unfortunately, our photo shoot this year did not go so well. We walked away with exactly zero pictures (they took about 5 but the photographer agreed they all pretty much stunk). Our boy is typically pretty fearless, but for some reason he was absolutely terrified of the photographer (who happened to be the same woman from last year - she even remembered Truman!). Every time he even looked her way he would stick our his bottom lip and the tears just rolled down his face - it was both sad and adorable. We think he might have been overwhelmed with the big lights and flashing camera. Whatever the cause, it was a bust. We instead came home and decided to make our own holiday cards on shutterfly. They actually came out pretty good! Hopefully I'll be able to post one on here after we get them delivered.

In the end, I suppose we saved some money and have a fun story to tell - every day is a new adventure with our little guy :-)

A Very Belated Thanksgiving Post

Gosh - life seems to be moving a million miles an hour around these parts, and amidst all of the craziness blogging has kind of taken a backseat. Anyways, we were lucky enough to get a visit from Grandma Bernard during Thanksgiving and I wanted to finally post about what a great time we all had!

Grandma Bernard arrived on Wednesday afternoon and Truman immediately recognized her, yelling "Bwah!" (that's what he calls her) and reaching in for a hug and a snuggle (I wish I had a picture or video of this moment because it was super adorable, but unfortunately I don't!). After saying hello, Truman went down for a nap. Upon waking, it was time for more cuddles and fun with Grandma B! (I told you all how much more social our little guy is becoming - he loves hugs, kisses, and snuggles :-)






The rest of Wednesday was pretty much spent snuggling and playing - it was kind of a perfect day! Thursday morning we all woke up early so we could head down to a local park where I had signed up to run in a Turkey Trot (which is just a 5K race run on Thanksgiving morning). It was super fun to have the family there to cheer me on in my first race!





Then we went home and had our traditional Thanksgiving meal. Again, we kind of forgot to take pictures of the event, but snapped a quick one of Truman eating (though you can't tell what he's eating, oh well!). Truman ended up loving everything (turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes), though the turkey was probably his favorite part of the meal:

On our final day we did some quick shopping (the stores were surprisingly uncrowded) and then just hungout at the house. All in all, it was pretty perfect! Last year we all got sick with a stomach bug and hardly even saw each other during the visit, so this year was about 1000times better!


Hope everyone had as great a holiday as we did! This year, we are thankful for family and good health!!!

Truman Updates!

I feel like it has been so long since I've given updates about Truman's progress! So I'm going to try to write this post quickly before my sweet boy wakes up :-)

Growth: Truman continues to be a super tall boy! We're sure that before long he will tower over Shea and myself. At daycare, he is almost a head above his classmates. And while he's skinny, he's solid, so he weighs a lot more than his friends, too. Last we measured him he was up to 35 inches; however, that was a few weeks ago so who knows now!

Language: We've been working with a speech/language pathologist to try to increase Truman's receptive and expressive language abilities. Lately, we've been really excited because he has been making so many more vocalizations and has occasionally started labeling objects without being asked (such as book "Bah!", water "wa-da" bath "Baf!", and he sometimes says hello "Ha", bye-bye "Bah-dah", daddy "Da-da", outside "ahh-sah", all done "ahh-dah", light "lah", and more). In terms of receptive language, we've seen GREAT growth! He understands almost everything we say now, which is super exciting to us. Yesterday we were trying to decide if we wanted to go for a walk - we know that Truman knows the word walk and didn't want to get him excited if we decided not to, so Shea said "Should we go for a w-a-l-k?" and wouldn't you know it, Truman jumped up with a huge smile on his face and ran to the door. I guess we've spelled the word too many times in his presence and he has figured it out! :-)

Activities: Truman's two favorite activities continue to be reading and going outside. In terms of reading, Truman now spends half of his reading time asking us to read to him, and half of it "reading" to himself. He likes to take a book, find a quiet seat in the house, and sit down while flipping through his book. If we try to help him read it, sometimes he gets annoyed with us - it's super cute! In terms of outside, Truman just LOVES the great outdoors. It's kind of funny, because neither Shea or myself really consider ourselves "outdoors people", but we are now! Some of Truman's other favorite activities include: playing the piano, sorting shapes, stacking rings, playing with Oskar, taking things on and off shelves, and playing with his big pillow.

Food: Truman is starting to get a wee bit picky. Whereas before at dinner he would pretty much eat anything we put in front of him, his new thing is to try a food, spit it out, and then examine it to try to figure out why we would think he would enjoy it :-) His current favorites foods include: Any meat (though chicken is probably his favorite), pasta (including tortellini, ravioli, and pasta with sauce), bananas, cereal (Kashi Go Lean is one of his top picks), cheese, yogurt, bagels (any type of bread, really), waffles, and pumpkin muffins. (Notice the lack of vegetables on that list? Yeah, we did, too...)

Social: Truman is truly blossoming in front of our eyes! In the last month, he has gotten really into hugs and kisses, and we LOVE it! If we ask for a hug, he will jump up with a huge smile on his face and run over, jumping into your arms for that hug. At first this was only with Shea and myself, but he's now starting spreading the love to others. When out and about, he's getting very social, often saying hello to others he sees and frequently engaging them in interactions. He's quite the popular boy!


Well, I hear my little boy making some noise so it's time to go!

Reading with Mommy

Happy Halloween! (1 Day Late)

Yesterday Truman participated in his daycare's annual Halloween Parade. It was super cute! We decided to go very low-key with Truman's costume this year as we wanted to make sure he was comfortable and able to move around well. We ended up with some cute skeleton pajamas. How sweet does he look?


For the parade, we loaded the kids into a wagon and off we went! Everyone looked adorable and the kids loved being out and about. Here are a few of our favorite shots:





By the way, how cute is Truman's hat? It's the first hat we've been able to keep on his head for more than 5 seconds :-)