2 Years Old!

It hardly seems possible but today is Wesley's second birthday. When I was pregnant and stuck in the hospital for six long weeks it seemed like he'd never get here. Now it's hard to remember a time without him!

So here's my little Wesley tribute for his second birthday...

Wesley is a fun child to be around. That hasn't always been true of him this year but it's really true right now. He really dealt with some serious separation anxiety and wouldn't let me out of his sight for a long time. Fortunately those days seem to be over and he's generally a happy little guy now. He's got quite a sense of humour and he loves to laugh. And when he's laughing, everyone around him is laughing too. He's got this crazy, infectious laugh that I could listen to all day long.

Wesley loves his stuffed dog, pictures of dogs and books about dogs, pretty much anything to do with dogs. Unless of course he's around an actual dog. Then he freaks out. Any sort of pretend dog is A-OK though.

He also loves trucks, tractors and cars. His favourite activity right now is "driving" the car. If we would let him, he'd sit in our car by the hour pretending to drive. I think all Nick did after supper last night was sit in the passenger seat of our van while Wesley "drove". They had a blast.

Wesley loves his sister. He wants to be wherever she is, doing whatever she doing, even if she's playing dress up. I got a great picture of him in one of her dress up gowns the other day. Hilarious. Whether Darcy is doing something good or bad, Wesley wants to be right there with her.

Wesley is small for his age. At 2 years old he weighs 21 pounds, less than most one-year olds. He eats well (we've recently discovered a passion for chicken drumsticks) but he doesn't put on any weight. He doesn't like milk (which could be part of the problem) but would drink apple juice from morning to night if he could.

His speech is also a bit behind schedule for a two-year old. He doesn't have as many words as he should and he's not yet putting any sort of sentences together. We know that his hearing problems earlier in the year contributed to this. He is making improvements but we know he's not yet where he should be. So we continue to work with him on this and in the meantime he is a championship signer. He uses sign language for a lot of stuff so we have no trouble communicating with him but people outside our immediate family might have some trouble. One of his favourite new words is "movie" (he says, "oovie") which he picked up after our recent vacation and his exposure to the DVD player on the long drives. He also likes to do a high-pitched shriek when things aren't going quite the way he'd like them. Not cool.

It has been an eventful two years and we've loved almost every minute of it. He is just the cutest little guy and we love having him as part of our family. Happy birthday Wes-man! We love you.