Ryan: 4 Years, 1 Month

Ryan had a busy and fun October with football games, Pumpkin Land, a trip to visit Emily and Lincoln, and Halloween fun.  We don't have many leaves at our house, but he loved playing in them at Emily and Lincoln's. We had some beautiful days to play outside on the swingset and also race remote-controlled cars.

Indoors, Ryan has been more interested in coloring lately. He is satisfied with crayons (and seems to always be searching for "peachy") but also likes markers and color-wonder markers. He has a few standard drawings, usually dirt, grass, sky, sun, and then a picture of himself with whoever he's drawing the picture for. Or, sometimes he'll attempt a house or flowers. As you can see in the previous post, he's improved a lot in the past month or two, going from scribbling an entire page with one color to attempting to put one color in each section.

Ryan has become more independent and taken on a few "chores". He can sort the silverware from the dishwasher, clear his place, wash up his hands and face after a meal, go to the bathroom, brush his teeth (but it's a bit messy), change into pajamas/clothes by himself including all the buttons, take recycling items to the bin in the garage, open the safety gate on the stairs (good & bad), feed Cohen a bottle, put Nika on/off the leash, pick up toys, get himself out of his booster seat and the van and close the door behind him. Now if he could only reach to buckle himself in!

We continue the habit of reading 3 books every night before bed (and before nap on the weekends) and he wondered one night how long it would take to read "ONE HUNDRED BOOKS!" so now we are making a list and writing down any book we read that's not already on the list. This has been a great way to review counting, number recognition and letter recognition because we talk about which number comes next, what letter the words in the title start with, etc. We hope to be to 100 by Christmas!

I don't think his favorite foods have changed much except his current breakfast of choice is "peanut butter and jelly sandwich with 1 slice of bread, folded over, not toasted." Not that he's particular! He always asks for chocolate milk if we have it and regular milk if we don't. He will eat apple slices at every meal if they are available, loves carrots with Ranch and steamed broccoli if it has a little shredded cheese sprinkled on top. Besides the usual kid favorites of mac & cheese and pizza, he asks for "chicken and bean soup" which is an easy slow-cooker chicken taco stew with black beans, pinto beans, kidney beans, corn, Rotel, etc. His favorite dessert lately is ice cream (half vanilla, half chocolate with 2 kinds of sprinkles) and once when I asked what he wanted for dessert, he replied, "If you give a Ryan some ice cream, he's going to want some sprinkles to go with it."

Ryan can be quite imaginative and will come up with entire plot lines for us to act out (mostly as characters from Jake) and will devise all kinds of things to use as props. I love watching his mind whir!