Happy 14 months, Brothers!

We took The Brothers' 14-month pictures on Sunday... nearly two weeks late, whoops. They had just woken up from a nap and Grant was running a fever (in fact, I stayed home with both of them today), but we seized the moment anyway.

Here's Reid:

And here's Grant, who wasn't really feeling up to smiling for the most part:

And you can forget about getting a good one of them together! After the 13-month pictures were such a breeze, I should have known this one would be a goat-rope. 


At any rate, here are The Brothers -- you can see they started off really happy to be there:

Fourteen months is funny, and tough. The boys are talking more and more -- Mama, Dada/Daddy, bye-bye, hey (Reid), uh-oh (Grant), and their favorite: no-no-no-no-no. They say "no-no-no" to us, to each other, and my favorite, to themselves when they're about to do something they know they shouldn't. Grant adds a vigorous head shake most of the time. When they hear the back door open, their heads spin around and they say "Dada? Dada? Dada??" When they are unhappy about something, it's "Maaaaama! Maaaaaama!! MAAAAAAAMA!!!!"


Aside from the no-no-no, you can tell they know when they're doing something wrong because they'll look right at you and grin, as if they can just cute their way out of trouble. But to make up for it, they love blowing kisses and giving slobbery open-mouthed kisses both to real-life people and to book characters. 

Their favorite toys right now are their corn poppers (so much so that Ryan had to make an emergency Toys R Us run this weekend to pick up a second), see-and-say, big boy chairs, activity cube, balls (Grant) and Scout (Reid). And they LOVE books, which thrills me to no end. They like to hide behind the chair in our living room with a pile of books and just flip through them and babble to themselves, and several times a day they come toddling up, hand me a book, and crawl in my lap so I can read to them. It's pretty stinkin' sweet.

They definitely throw temper tantrums here and there, and the fastest way to provoke one is for one brother to try to take a toy away from the other. They steal toys equally (and often), and it's not uncommon for the attempted robbery to result in a hand to the face of the perpetrator. 

Reid is going through a clingy phase, and hooooo boy, is he opinionated. He is not happy when you first put him down, and he loses his mind if he watches us walk out of a room. It was flattering the first 57 times. When I do something he doesn't like, he is quick to fuss at me, nose scrunched up, eyebrows furrowed, with clearly unhappy babbles flowing freely. And I thought Grant was going to be the strong-willed child... actually, he might still be. I'm sure they'll change places again by next month (and probably hundreds of times in the years to come).


I'm their mom so I think everything they do is the cutest ever, but for real, watching them toddle around on their little legs melts my heart every single time. Grant is on the verge of full-out running and it KILLS me. He rarely crawls anymore... it's like we blinked and he was done with it. Reid is still cautious, but I know he'll be hot on Grant's heels in a matter of weeks. And actually, it's really funny to me that he's so reserved about it, because he definitely is NOT cautious about most other things. He climbs/stands/sits on our hearth, scales the slide, attempts to somersault over their chairs, and flops all over the couch like he's incapable of falling.

I can't wait to see what 15 months brings!