Aiden, who is currently obsessed with seeing his own name in print, is tickled by the new Mabel’s Labels on some of his belongings. We bought a Basic Kit with a variety of tags and stickers to put on items that may go with Aiden to preschool. The labels are fantastic!
We have run the Skinny Mini labels through the dishwasher without any fading or peeling. Can’t wait to get more of these – particularly around Christmas!
For Christmas, Santa gave Aiden his very first board game: the I Can Do That Games Curious George – Discovery Beach. The premise of the game is to find hidden treasures. You select cards, look under the panels, and find the matching objects. You shake up the box so that the items always move about to different places on the board or become buried / unburied in the sand.
We don’t follow the rules of the game yet: we let Aiden look under all the panels, not using the spinning wheel, and we don’t collect cards we’ve ‘won’. So far, we lay out several cards for Aiden and he chooses one to look for – he will pull up panels until he finds what’s on his card, though sometimes we have to shake up the box again.
Aiden has a lot of fun playing this game. He loves looking for the cards that are more open ended, “any brown” or “any shell”, and cheers whenever he finds a matching item. He’ll happily sit and play this game with us for a solid half hour.
Aiden loves to read. Without being diverted, I’m pretty sure he’d spend his entire day reading (or rather, being read to). Even at Strong Start, he’ll ask to sit down and read with me several times during the morning and will read until I shoo him away to play. I have many personal conflicts in stopping his reading, which feels like discouraging his interest, but there really is only so much time you can spend reading.
With that in mind, you can imagine that we have a LOT of favourite books. I buy a lot of books for Aiden, particularly at big library book sales. If we go to the library, we would spend a week sitting on the couch reading those books after, so I tend not to take out as many books as you’d expect. Still, our library is quite impressive.
These are some of Aiden’s favourite books at age 2:
Aiden doesn’t read any of his board books anymore, nor does he enjoy the ‘first word’ type books, in general. They were big for a long time. He prefers books with stories or with lots of pictures that can be extensively examined. He has little patience for books by Dr. Seuss, though he will happily sit through Winnie-the-Pooh. From time-to-time he will go back to Mother Goose rhymes (we have many compilations).
I try to rotate books around every 3 months or so, moving books from Aiden’s room to his shelf downstairs and reorganizing his shelf in his room. I try to bring other books to his attention, but he often has favourites that he’ll return to. He’s most likely to explore a new book if it’s in his play area, though if he doesn’t like a book, he’ll stop asking for it very quickly.
What books do your kids like at age 2?
Aiden is a huge fan of the Thomas and Friends franchise. He actually received his first set of Thomas trains when we were still in the hospital with him!
Since then, his collection of trains has grown to include 3 different sets as well as a few extra train pieces. If we had more room, we would for sure have a train table. Until then, Aiden makes do with various smaller configurations of trains on the floor – always featuring at least one hill. He loves hills and bridges.
Aiden’s favourite train is Percy, so we got him a motorized Percy for Christmas. It caused a little bit of initial frustration for Aiden, when he couldn’t push it on his own, so now he has a classic wooden one too.
Aiden’s love of Thomas and Friends includes many toys and books, including:
Aiden may love Thomas, but it’s not yet an obsession. He’ll read about any train; his current favourite train books include Busy Trains and The Little Engine That Could. Additionally, while you’d expect Aiden to watch a lot of Thomas videos, he actually prefers Dora the Explorer.
This past weekend, I went with Nicola to the Modern Mama brunch held at the Brock House for Pregnancy Awareness Month. I didn’t attend any pregnancy events with my first pregnancy, so it was all new to me, in a way. It’s different being pregnant with people you know, that’s for sure!
Check out our complimentary portrait – I also won a newborn photoshoot with the same photographer.
Modern Mama hosts events for to-be or new families on topics ranging from fashion to parenting. For example, they are just about to host an event on sleep featuring the same sleep consultant we used with Aiden.
Despite the fact that I’m not a new mama, and this is not my first pregnancy, I did manage to learn some new things from the set of speakers that were on hand for the brunch. I learned, for example, that belly support after birth does have a more-than-just-aesthetic purpose (thx FitnessDoula). Go figure!
Disclosure: I was invited to the Modern Mama event but was not asked to write a post. I also have a continued working relationship with the sleep consultant featured in their next event.