Friend's Birthday Party

Yesterday, we attended a birthday party for one of Truman's friends from daycare. The birthday party was thrown at a park, and we were lucky because it was beautiful outside! It was nice to be able to see all of Truman's friends (and their parents) outside of the daycare setting. Truman enjoyed the playground, but he was really nervous about the slide and swing - he definitely preferred the small slide to the big kid's one! However, his favorite game involved bringing me two bubble wands and then having me lift them up - we could not figure out why he loved it so much, but every time he brought me the wands he would start cracking up and just could not contain himself! We wished we'd brought our video camera, because we're not sure we've ever seen him laugh that much. Our little guy is the best :-)

Grandma Bernard Visits!

Three weekends ago (yes, I am once again very behind in posting!) Grandma Bernard came down for a visit. We're lucky because President's Weekend matches up closely with Truman's birthday, so this is the second year in a row she's been able to come down and help celebrate our little guy's day with us! Truman was, of course, thrilled to see Grandma B! She arrived a little before naptime and when we asked who he wanted to put him down, guess who he chose?


The rest of our day was just spent playing and cuddling (we didn't really take any pictures because we were too caught up in the fun - oh well!). On Saturday, we decided to throw a tiny little party - our only 'guests' were Grandma Bernard and LeeMarie (Truman still gets a bit shy/overwhelmed around new people, so the small size of our party was perfect!). We bought Truman a cupcake but he wasn't too into the candles. In fact, he decided to read a book rather than listen to our song!



He wasn't super into the cupcake either - he was more interested in putting it on his head than in eating it :-)




After the cupcake, we all just kind of sat around and played with our little guy. Here are some of my favorite pictures from the party:




Our final day with Grandma B was spent just like our first - playing, cuddling, and loving up on one another. Again, we kind of forgot to take a lot of pictures as we were enjoying each others company too much - We all had such a great time together! Love you Grandma B!

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 :-)