Little Brother Getting Bigger

Lately, the boys have been playing together much more actively, with Leon ready to copy everything that his big brother is doing. He wants to sit exactly where Dari is sitting, do exactly what he is doing, and play in exactly the same way (which is an exercise in patience for everyone). Still, when we went biking on a late winter day, recently (and I mean winter; it just would not go away this year) the dynamic ended up somehow causing them to switch their respective vehicles and be perfectly fine with it all.

We are now working on teaching Leon to assert himself a little more, which should be especially useful when Dari does something he is not supposed to (of course, with the hope that Leon follows suit and it is even MORE fun). The plan is for Leon to sort of discipline Dari by taking some of the fun out of it, while starting to make some independent decisions. For example, he could remind him that we do not walk on the back side of the couch, rather than trying to accomplish the same even more dangerously. This has been successful some of the time and will likely work a little better when Leon can express himself more eloquently.

What has worked much better, has been Leon telling Dari "no thank you!" whenever he does something that displeases Leon, like snatching a toy or playing rough. This is a major improvement over indiscriminate crying, which clearly was not getting Leon anywhere and was adding unnecessary decibels that, as you can imagine add up over the course of a day, or a weekend... Way to go little brother!

The vast majority of time they are getting along very well and can be super sweet together. For some reason, Dari has taken to calling Leon "squishy face" and giving him lots of hugs periodically. I think some of this might have been the unintended effect of one of Dari's classmates being very expressive in her love for "Leon the baby" (to the point where Dari's teachers had to intervene to get her to go easy on the hugs virtually every time we picked Dari up or dropped him off). This, by the way, is Leon ready to go collect big brother at school:

It was kind of interesting to see Dari get very protective, possessive, even, of Leon as this was happening. Thankfully, the happy bond is mutual. When Dari went on this trip to Disney with Daddy, Leon missed him tremendously and was super sweet about always sending him a good-night kiss (via pictures that I then sent along, so we now have this precious collection :).