It's been a busy quarter, with much progress on running, talking, and motor skills, the first two mostly from Tristan. Austen's on schedule and as big as Tristan was, so he should be fetch a good price in a few years when he's old enough to mine salt. He's begun teething, and like his older brother showed great neck control and lots of interest in his surroundings. Unlike Tristan, Austen sleeps very solidly through the night; we've had to sit up with Tristan in the middle of the night at least as many times as Austen this past quarter.
Austen has a sense of humor, which will doubtless help him cope with life. He's ticklish and likes to laugh at Tristan's antics.
We are advancing into the crabby twos, compounded by Tristan's reluctance to eat. When he finally accepts the inevitability of entropy and endothermic physiology, he's generally quite well- behaved, and in particular he rarely demands attention when Austen is crying. He's quite coordinated, so clearly there are some throwback genes surfacing in him. His strength carried him to the top of Enchanted Rock in February, entirely under his own power, though he needed some help getting down again.
Intellectually, he consistently counts up to eight or so, and recently he's begun making comparisons: this car is "like daddy's black car;" a picture of a Dalmation on a fireman's helmet is "dog is pretending to be a cow!" As Tristan's speech becomes more complex and easier to understand, he's had a few quotable lines: he identified a feather as a "piece of bird," and insisted that Christie take it outside so she could fix the bird "with glue." On a windy day, he reported that the wind was trying to pick him up and make him go boom. This extends to conversations between his toys: "Hello, chicken, where'd you come from? I was hiding in a house." In proper toddler fashion, he extends the English language as he sees fit; when corrected to say "today" rather than "tonight", he rattled off "today, tonight, to-morning!" Can't argue with that.
Praise be to the Carters, for several of the best shots in this set are from them. Mad camera skillz!
