Happy Birthday Baby!

My little baby turned 2 years old yesterday! How time has flown by.
We were at my parents' house and they have such a slow connection, I thought I'd wait to blog about it today instead. Aidan has entered his terrible twos, though. I mean in the last week and a half or so, his attitude has gotten explosive and he gets very upset fairly often.

Here we go -- the full ride into toddler tantrums and Class-A fits. When we went on a nice day outing the day before his birthday, he squalled for nearly a solid hour. Looking back in retrospect, it was more because he was so tired from the day before due to no nap. How were we to know, though?

He's so smart and very interested in any type of mechanical device, engine, vehicle, boat or aircraft. If it has an engine he's into it. Show him a horse or a cow or a bird and he'll make the animal noise for it and then that's it. His daddy got him a battery-operated helicopter and he can't put it down!

Language-wise, Aidan isn't speaking a whole lot of real words yet, but he's trying to repeat words when you ask him to, whether it's in Thai or English. He understands both languages well and my goal is to enroll him in an elementary school that offers Chinese language classes too. There's no reason this boy can't be tri-lingual. He can repeat the (English) alphabet when I go through the letters one by one, but still has trouble with C, K, F, H, J, S, W, X and Z. One cute thing: when he repeats the letter Q, he touches his eyebrow, and eyebrow in Thai sounds like the letter Q. So cute!

I plan to get him some ABC books and maybe some shapes books and some GOOD crayons with a gift card my Aunt sent to him for his birthday. My goal is to teach him his alphabet, colors, shapes and numbers by this time next year. Let's see what I can do with him! I just finished a book called Top of the Class: How Asian Parents Raise High Achievers--and How You Can Too and found it to be very interesting, despite a few negative reviews. For me and our family, a slightly watered down version of the concepts outlined in this book should be healthy for Aidan as he learns. I'm not going to be some academic dictator or a "helicopter parent" as it goes completely different than my and Golf's easy going personalities.

Anyway, Aidan's birthday photos are coming either tonight or tomorrow - or by the end of the week if I'm swamped since I have to substitute teach tomorrow.