Winds of Electronic Change

As you can see www.gagehymas.com is now redirecting to hymaslife.blogspot.com. I have also moved to picasa web as my photo album for the time being. It may take me a little while to get things running smoothly again. I wanted to thank my good friend Paul for hosting www.gagehymas.com for so many years free of charge. Paul is transitioning over to a totally mac based network and his old IIS server was down to only hosting my site, so it only made since to pull the plug. Once again Paul thanks, you were the host with the most.

Catching Up

Time has gotten away from me this year (and its only Feb!).

Since my last blog, Evan is now crawling everywhere (hardly uses the army crawl anymore) and pulling himself up to a standing position everywhere he possibly can. He is an active and busy guy… and keeps us on our toes! He can entertain himself quite well, but does prefer to have others around him. He is starting to use some sign language, but also seems like he is trying to say the words at times. So not sure if he’ll take to signing the way Ryan did, or if he’ll be more motivated to start speaking the words earlier. The sign he uses most consistently is “more”. He’ll verbally say “mama” and then sign “more” meaning either more food or more drink. Despite the fact that he doesn’t have many ways to communicate yet, he can usually get his point across with non-verbal communication (body language and vocalizations). Evan uses vocalizations A LOT! I think he is going to be a talker like his brother & Uncle Justin.

Ryan is doing great as well. He continues to enjoy preschool and learning more about his surroundings. Ryan asks a lot of questions and talks a lot as well. Uncle Justin used to have a “catch phrase” of “Hey… Guess what?!” before he’d start into a story (which was about 30 times a day!). Ryan has also developed a “catch phrase”… his is “Do you remember…??” The only problem with Ryan’s catch-phrase is usually the person he is telling the story to was never there, so of course they don’t remember.
At times Ryan is using more & more “back-talk” as he stretches his wings and tries to become more independent (and tests Gage & I). Most of the time (as parents all know) this is frustrating, but a few times has been pretty darn cute! One day we were in his room and he verbally corrected Evan. I told Ryan that he didn’t need to worry about that since I was here and I was the mommy… that he needed to let me be the mommy. He then told me, with seriousness and a hint of disappointment, “But I want to be the boss!” Another time he had been in the corner for making a bad choice. I called him out, asking him to come to me so we could discuss why he was in the corner (the bad choice) and what he could do differently next time (what the good choice would be). When I asked him what he should do next time he said “to not do that again”. I told him that was correct and told him what he could do differently next time, then hugged him and told him I loved him. He then sat up and said “you don’t do that again either!”. I asked him what he meant and he proceeded to tell me that I should not tell him to stand in the corner again.

Since the last post we’ve had a couple “weekender” trips as well. We went to Sunriver, OR (near Bend, OR & Mt. Bachelor) where both boys got to go sledding and do a lot of playing with other kids (the kids of some friends of ours). Then this last weekend (Valentine’s weekend) we went to the beach and had a great time. The weather was GORGEOUS! Quite a nice surprise given the time of year.