February 17, 2013
Dear Nicholas Porter Williams,
You’ve grown up so much in the last 3 months, I can’t even believe it. While you are still often as wild and destructive as a Tasmanian devil and a whirling dervish rolled into one and you almost never stop moving, your patience and cooperation has definitely developed in the last couple of months. You’ve suddenly started to be really good and patient with your sister again; tolerating her sharing your toys and helping us teach her all kinds of good behavior. You are such a help when she’s upset: either doing your best to be a big boy when I’m focused on helping her out of a temper tantrum or even pitching in and helping to calm her down by coming over and giving her a hug and singing her a song. You’re working on listening to mommy and daddy with mixed results, but I’m confident we’re on the right track.
You’ve learned so many things during the last three months I can barely list them all. You keep adding new words in Spanish – my latest favorites are “bless-yes” (gracias) and “Al-a-me-da-de-las-Pul-gas” (I mean, even I have trouble saying that and you spit out every syllable just perfectly). I’m so impressed that you can be polite in two languages already! You still love to do puzzles and can do a 48-piece puzzle all by yourself now. You’re really good at figuring out which piece you need next from even the smallest bit of picture on the last piece. Your independent and imaginative play has stepped up incredibly over the last couple months and it’s so much fun to listen to you quietly making up stories about the things your toys are doing. The best thing that you’ve started to learn though is reading and writing! You can write all the letters of your name, you can type your name without help, and you know the difference between “Nick” or “Nicky”. You can write a couple other letters like “L”, “T”, “H”, “E” and “F” but you absolutely refuse to try to write a capital “I”, go figure. As with all things, you need to know that you can do it well before you’re comfortable trying (which makes learning a new trick kind of hard!) so I expect as soon as you’re comfortable tackling “I” and the other letters you’ll master them perfectly. You also help me sound out some words while we’re reading and are very proud when you’ve “read” a word, although at this point we go through sounding it out and I give you some pretty big hints about how to put it all together before you get it.
Since your birthday we’ve done a lot of things, including a trip to Arizona for Thanksgiving, a trip to Oregon for Christmas and several trips to the mountains to go skiing. Christmas was so much fun this year because you knew what was coming and could look forward to it. Unfortunately, mommy didn’t plan ahead enough to really make the weeks before Christmas special this year (we barely got the Christmas lights up on the house, didn’t get a Christmas tree, and only had any Advent activities thanks to some very thoughtful relatives and neighbors who sent you Christmas related activities throughout December) but you made the most of what we did do and you were so excited when the big day finally arrived. You also got to go skiing for the first time on our Christmas vacation. You’re a fearless little daredevil so of course you loved it. We’ve gone a couple times since then and you are getting more and more confident. We tried out a ski leash last time and you got such a kick out of the fact that you were “pulling” me that we skied all the way down the mountain instead of taking the gondola down. You had such a blast “helping” me get down the mountain.
It’s been so much fun learning and playing with you the last couple of months!
Love you so much!
Mommy