This is my boy, Sebastian.When he first came along, we were very hopeful that our wishes for a more laid-back baby (after our very wild little Alec) were coming true. Alas, it was not to be. He is every bit as wild and loud and rambunctious as Alec. Of course, we don’t actually mind. It’s so fun to watch the two of them, especially when they’re not actively fighting. Two charming, adventuresome, grab-life-by-the-horns little boys.

Sebastian does seem to have a more studious side than Alec though. He gets lost in thought sometimes, and his smile isn’t always as quick to come if he’s pondering something. It’s awfully cute to see such a little boy be so serious sometimes! He's also very polite. He's been saying "thank you" very consistently and promptly since he was a year and a half, and he also often says "excuse me" and "you're welcome" appropriately. I'm not sure I had much to do with that, but I'm proud of him nonetheless. 🙂If Alec’s first love is trains, Sebastian’s is dump trucks and excavators. Thankfully, we own both. He is kept busy running to the window throughout the day, making sure that the dump truck he heard out on the road isn’t one of ours coming home. We sadly don’t park the trucks on our property regularly anymore, but whenever one comes, Sebastian climbs up on a chair, looks out the window, and takes it all in. One day he even had a fit and cried after Alex had come and gone with one of the trucks. At first, he was very sad, crying, “Where’s Uncle Alex? Where’s Uncle Alex going?” And when Alex didn’t come back, he got mad and said, “I don’t like Uncle Alex.” Only in Sebastian voice, it would be, "Where's Uncle A-yex go-yin? I don't yike Uncle A-yex." Those "y"s instead of "l"s are just darling to me. It's "A-yec" instead of "Alec" as well, and he says "f" for anything "sp." "Fank" for "spank," "fit" for "spit," and "Fencer" for "Spencer." I hope he doesn't grow out of that any time soon! But I digress.

When there aren’t dump trucks or excavators to be seen, Sebastian looks at the auction magazines that we get regularly, full of every kind of equipment and machinery. He gets so excited every time a new one comes in the mail. "Bulldozer magazine," he calls them.Although the boys often play separately, Sebastian does usually want to do whatever Alec is doing, be it coloring or playing with trains or going outside. With the days getting warmer and with the backyard newly fenced in, they’ve been playing for hours outside! As I said in my previous post, they fight a lot, but they also play a lot. Sebastian hardly knows what to do sometimes when Alec isn’t around! If he gets up before Alec at naptime, Sebastian often cries and tells me to go get Alec.One of Sebastian’s mommy-instilled quirks is being clean. He’s gotten so used to being wiped clean even while eating that when he’s dirty, it really bothers him. For a while he would chew on his hands cause he’s trying to get his two-year molars, and then when his hands got all slobbery, he would cry and come to me saying, “Hands dirty!” I finally showed him how he could wipe them on the kitchen towel all by himself, and then the “hands dirty” crying gradually got less. He’s come to accept that being outside means dirty hands, but every once and while they’ll get too dirty even for outside, and he’ll come to me, whining about it. "Poor guy!" says the mother who made him this way.I will now treat you to a collage of what we call Sebastian’s “pig-face.” I’m not even entirely sure how it got to be called that, but for some reason it seems fitting. 🙂If you’ve ever wondered how the mind of an almost-two-year-old works, here’s a good glimpse into one. 🙂 It’s part-alarming, part-hilarious, and mostly very intriguing. The following snippets are things Sebastian said as he was supposed to be going to sleep one night. With the exception of a few comments from me here and there, a few repetitions, a few missed sentences, and maybe even a few missed “mama"s (unbelievable as that may seem), this is how it went for a few minutes: “Where’s Uncle Alex, mama? Where’s dada, mama? Where’s Alec? Where’s Uncle Drew? Where’s Anne? I watch Uncle Alex unload the dump truck, mama. Where’s our castle, mama? I like your dress, mama. I’m ready, go to grandma’s, mama. Are you looking out, mama? (I was adjusting the window curtain.) Are you okay, mama? Call Uncle Alex. I call Uncle Alex. I dig dirt. I poop, mama. I’m sad. I like to taste them, mama. They’re good. They’re yucky. They’re yucky, mama. I’m fine, mama. I’m okay, mama. I’m a dump truck, mama. Whoo, whoo, I’m a train, mama. I’m a train. I’m a crocodile.” And on and on it goes, sometimes for a literal hour until he goes to sleep.

Speaking of crocodiles . . . Sunday evenings are always terribly eventful for us, usually in a bad way, and one evening when Eric was up front talking was no exception. Being unable to keep both boys quiet upstairs, I had them downstairs in our church basement, and we were sitting on the floor under a speaker so I could catch at least a bit of Eric’s talk. Sebastian suddenly laid down on the cold concrete floor, licked it, and said, “I’m a crocodile.” (Only he says it “croc-dile.”) He and Alec burst into the loudest, most uninhibited laughter ever, and I couldn’t help laughing, too, just not so loudly.

The language concepts that Sebastian grasps and knows how to articulate are just amazing. Alec had something he was calling a tomato, and Sebastian held up something else and said, “Tomato, too.” Another time I was going to help Alec with something, and Sebastian came over and said, “Help me first.” One time he called his popsicle a lollipop and then immediately corrected himself. “Popsicle. It’s not a lollipop.” His ability to switch demonstrative pronouns is almost better than Alec's. Pardon the graphic example, but Alec told Sebastian, “Poop in that corner,” and Sebastian fired back, “No, Alec, I poop in this corner.”Sebastian still goes to sleep holding my hand, and I’ve been trying to get him used to me going out in hopes that he’ll start falling asleep without me. One night I went out for a while, and he was being quiet, and I thought it was going well, when all of a sudden he half-roared, half-cried, “Where’s that mommy? I forgot that mommy!” He is very attached to “that mommy” these days. Sometimes when we’re out and about and other people want to hold him, he says, “I want Mommy.” He even says that to his dad sometimes! I don't usually mind. He's such a squishy, affectionate little boy, always ready to give hugs and kisses and cuddles. I call him my "sweet little raisin boy." 🙂He can sing the whole ABC song when he wants to and will often sing along with other songs as well. He can count to five, but he almost always skips the number three, so I guess technically he can only count to four. 🙂 He’s learning a few of Alec’s memory verses. I hadn’t really thought about starting to teach him yet, but one day after Alec said a verse, Sebastian said, “I will say it,” so I taught him a few. Once after properly saying, “Honor thy father and thy mother,” Sebastian said, “Honor thy father and thy bumpy,” and laughed. I'm so glad both our boys have a sense of humor.Sebastian likes coffee, but only if it’s not too hot. I had some, and he said, “Want coffee, Mommy.” I told him it was hot but let him have a sip. He jerked away and said, “That’s hot! My tummy hurts. I don’t like coffee, Mommy.”

Once again, some of the funniest things he says are while he’s supposed to be going to sleep. One night it was, “Want different mommy. Want Uncle Alex. Want two dump trucks. Want different grandma.” Another time it was, “Should we go out, Mommy? Should we go out?” One gem that he’s been repeating over and over again is, “Are you okay, Mommy? I’m okay, too, Mommy!”

Just like his mother, he loves Simon Khorolskiy and will go around in circles for the longest time listening to his favorite songs. He asks for “Onsa,” “the boy song,” “the girl song,” and “I Wonder as I Wander” (“Spring Again,” “Do Not Grieve,” “Pereklichka,” and of course “I Wonder as I Wander” respectively). He even differentiates properly between “wonder” and “wander!”

It’s so much fun having another talker, even if it means more talking back. Sometimes Sebastian will obey a simple “no,” but more often when he's told not to do something he’ll say, “I like to” or “I say yes,” which is terrible and funny all at once. He’s not even two!

We do love our boys. And while I miss all the free time that I used to have, I honestly don’t know what I’d do without them. It’s such a cliché thing to say, but I guess there’s a reason there’s clichés. 🙂