Jack at the drive through:

So what have the boys been up to recently? Here’s a small pictorial gallery for you:

And some videos:

Alex just getting the hang of walking

Chasing Alex around Nanna Robyn’s kitchen

Playing with water at Nanna Judy’s place

Going down the awesome slide… Jack has to remember to keep his paws up!

So we have been trying to train the boys to give up whatever they’ve got in their hands nicely whenever we say “Ta”, and hopefully they say “Ta” back. Jack’s taken this idea and run with it… or at least, runs away chuckling every time we say “Ta”…

Hey all,

So as usual, the boys are doing amazingly well

They’re such smiley, happy little fellas that generally they’re pretty easy to have around. Well, there are some lows, of course, but the smiles make up for that.

They’ll spend lots of time making each other laugh, crawling around and hiding behind things, then spotting each other and laughing again. Both boys have been crawling for the last couple of months, with Alex getting quite fast, particularly if there’s an open door into a room that he knows he shouldn’t be in. Jack isn’t far behind him though, and has a slightly different crawling action to Alex but is still pretty quick to scoot around – his leg isn’t causing a hinderance.

Alex started pulling to stand about a month ago, and is now balancing for some time on his own two feet of his own accord, usually with a giant grin on his face. Jack, of course, is a touch jealous of this and has been making efforts to copy and is now successfully pulling to stand as well, on one leg… quite the feat. He also does a good carbon copy of the giant grin too.

They’re also taking to solid food well – Alex is an eating machine and will take anything you can shovel into his mouth, and even fed himself some Vegemite on toast yesterday. Jack is doing great too, but seems to be a little more sensitive to the texture of food. For the longest time he only wanted highly pureed stuff, but he’s coming around now and was even sighted chewing on some vegemite on toast today of his own vollition.

We’re in the process of trying to get Jack’s first prosthetic on the go, and it will be made locally here in Launceston, while we’ll have to go to Melbourne later on for any more serious prosthetics or surgery which may be required to revise the stump for better fit with a prosthetic. Once Alex is walking and Jack’s showing that he’s very keen to do the same, we’ll fit him with the prosthetic as before then it would probably just bug the hell out of him and he wouldn’t want to wear it, which would be a bad thing later on.

Anyhoo, enough chat, more videos.

Here’s a quick one of Jack pulling to stand. Alex also has a little fall… don’t worry though, that’s not happening too regularly these days.

Hanging out in Nan & Grandad’s kitchen

Partaking in a bathing session

Quick video of Jack in the tub earlier today… Hilarious stuff!

New pics up soon, everything is going well

So we’re finally back in Tasmania again after what seems like months of preparations, planning, packing, moving and boy wrangling. Hence the lack of regular updates on here!

The trip ended up taking us about 31 hours or so, which is normally not that fun when traveling as a single, however the addition of two 7/10 month old boys makes it more interesting! Josh & Janelle, Nat’s sister and her husband, flew to Canada a couple of weeks ago for a bit of a holiday and helped us out with the journey home and I don’t think we would have been anywhere near as successful if it wasn’t for these guys. I think we probably would be still trying to move out of our previous apartment…

They boys were great on the flight though, and if one was freaking out (usually take off/landing) the other was always calm and content, so that left us with a little bit of sanity saved. The other sanity saving part was that we had two collapsable bassinets which we could put the boys in while they were sleeping, provided there wasn’t any turbulence.

Testing out the bassinet

Mawning, who brought the toothpaste?

Probably one of the funniest moments was in LAX, when nat was entertaining Alex with a 1L plastic water bottle:

He was drawing quite the crowd of sneaky onlookers by the time Nat gave up hitting the bottle

Eventually we got home and it was nice to see all the family again. It’s strange seeing so many houses and actually living in a place that has more than 4 rooms. The boys even got to have a play on the grass!
Alex wasn’t too sure about it though…

As you might be able to tell from the videos, both boys are really on the road to crawling properly, with Alex able to crawl on his knees and get into a sitting position from crawling and back again. Jack is a little way behind but is certainly not far off, getting up on his knees every now and then, but is just as happy dragging himself around the room chasing after things.

Here’s some other interesting pictures from the last week or two.

Boys asleep in the back of the minivan that we rented for our last few days in Vancouver.

Going snowshoeing in 60cm of powder!

Bath time in the rental apartment!

Trying to break into one of the bedrooms in the rental apartment. “Dude, you slide it.” “Nah man, you slide it!”

Asleep on the plane, belted in.

Catching up with Wicked Step Great Grand Beryl in Sydney

Testing out some new handmedowns in Launceston, home sweet home.

Aunty Janelle with Jack in the rocket pack… he loved it! Pity it was bucketing down outside and we couldn’t go for a walk.

The Grand Vizier

Alex: “Yo. Sup?”

This is the very first time Alex started actually intentionally making forward motion. Not long now till he’s all over the shop…

Alex has worked out how to sit up in the bath tub, to much hilarity and splashing. Looked almost like he was going to pull himself up and walk off wrapping a towel around his waist…

Here’s a quick little timelapse of the boys doing their thing on the floor. Taken over about 20 minutes at 1 frame per second