i’m finally digging through pictures from the past six months to try to get this blog up to date (it’s not exactly living up to the “wright now” name lately!). but similar to wanting to do a “life snapshot” post here in the present before backtracking on the past, i also want to quickly do a “wright kids lately” post! i have a place on my phone where i write down little things about the children to try to capture and remember what they are like in specific phases / slices of life. (this somehow makes me feel better for entirely giving up on the “baby books” i started for moses and gabriel and haven’t even had on my radar for the twins.) i usually get around to organising these snippets into a blog post before too long, but i think my notes about the kids that i want to put here i started almost a year ago. before they fade away, here’s some things i want to remember about the early childhood of our moses, gabriel, august and eve.

moses @ 4 years old

moses continues to be one of the most expressive humans i’ve ever encountered. ian and i will often look at each other with kind of incredulous looks while witnessing mo display, so vividly, different emotions. moses is thrilled about so much in life and his exuberance is such a gift.

some of mo’s oft used words/phrases (some have stuck and some have come and gone): “luckily,” “for sure,” “allllright,” “commme on!” “yes, sir” (even to people that are not sirs 🙂 ).

moses has a deep love for crafts. he is incredibly creative and always coming up with a new way to draw something or create something. he’s most often creating with just paper and markers, but also often will find random craft supplies or just random things around the flat to add to a craft. he had a phase of adoring cutting and gluing, a brief time when he was really into painting, and right now he is really into following along on the drawing tutorials on “art for kids hub” on youtube.

for a couple months a very signature moses thing was a few quick claps of his hands whenever he was excited or had a good idea.

his imaginary animal friends go with him everywhere (and they can, because they drink magic potion that makes them really small!) and every once in a while moses declares that it is one of the animal’s birthdays. so we (obviously!) have a big celebration!

moses is pretty enthusiastic about drawing things that he wants to do to be more like jesus each week after we take the sacrament at home. he was pretty impressed by an activity we did one sunday when we chose to mimic the example of some people in the book of mormon that buried their weapons of war – we drew what we wanted to stop doing (his was hitting others with sticks) and literally buried our drawings in the ground. since then he often chooses to draw something he wants to stop doing and then he puts his drawing in the trash.

mo loves his friends – his school pals and his buddies that he’s known since before he started school. he is quite social, loves to play with other kids although sometimes he can be shy at first, and recently has made some new friends in our neighbours that frequent our garden square. when he is picked up after school, he’s always hollering out to any kid he sees from his class with a big “bye!” by far moses’s best friend is his little brother gabriel. sometimes it feels like he is constantly bothering / hurting / arguing with gabey, but other times the two of them play so, so well together and really watch out for each other. mo loved going to nursery school with his kid brother for a few months.

mo is working everyday on being kind and gentle; this can be a challenge for him. he has a lot of energy that sometimes comes out as aggression, and he has a tendency for some reason to turn everything into a weapon! he’s been in and out of phases of being better about being kind with his voice and his body, and he’s just still figuring out how to be a human, and a unique moses wright human.

often, moses notices homeless people on the streets of london and he is always insistent that we share our snacks. he is not timid at all in approaching rough sleepers and giving them granola bars and little raisin boxes.

i’m not sure where he first heard of the concept of potion making but moses is really, really into potion making. creating a “collection” when out in nature became creating a “potion,” and then the concoction mixing started happening inside, too. mo loves to get pots and fill them with any random thing i will let him, and after mixing the stuff all together he’s sure it’s magic 🙂

this boy … he is so loud. we ask him to “please stop yelling” or remind him “you don’t need to yell” many, many times a day. all that energy and exuberance just comes out as volume!

if moses has some screen time, he often chooses to watch numberjacks, a little british show with creatures shaped as numbers 0-9 saving the day. he has definitely inherited ian’s mind for maths and often astonishes us with the computations he does in his head.

moses can read! it’s so exciting to listen to him blend letter sounds together and remember “tricky sounds” and “sight words” that he works on at school. his writing is improving and he has started spelling all kinds of things phonetically. he loves to make cards for others and almost always writes “i luv yoo.”

moses adores his baby brother and baby sister. his baby talk and affection is (literally) out of control. he’s a really fantastic big brother and most times is so willing to help with putting binkies in, bringing diapers or wipes, monitoring babies in the car, or just entertaining the twins. he can make them smile and laugh more than anyone else. every single morning he lights up with pure joy and adoration the second he sees one or both of his babies.

“i’ve got it!”

mo lives for treats (he’s in love with anything with sugar…). he is incredibly good at making treats last a long time – he deliberately takes the tiniest nibbles and then really savors each nibble. i have found him half an hour after giving him a gummy worm, still working on the last 1/4th.

one of moses’s best qualities is his optimism. when something goes wrong he immediately springs into encouraging everyone to look for the positive. when i told him through tears that my camera got stolen and that i was devastated to lose the pictures i took of him on his birthday, he straight away launched into: “it’s okay mom. luckily we can buy a new camera! i know! i’ll just want that same type of cake next year on my birthday so we can just take more pictures then!” he’s always reminding us, “well, luckily…” it’s the best.

just in the past week or so, moses has discovered a love for legos. he’s remarkably good at both following the instructions to make the specified creation and not following the instructions to make his own creation. he has an upcoming trip to the lego store with mom and legoland with dad!

gabriel @ 2 years old

learning to talk was slow going for gabriel, but now he is a total chatterbox! it was really interesting (and a little bit concerning for a bit) to observe his process of learning to speak. moses was remarkably verbal from a young age, and gabriel has always communicated differently. he definitely found ways to get his point across before he had the words to do so with talking out loud.

for a while his preeminent and nearly exclusive spoken phrase was “oh yeah!” then he moved on to saying “both hands please!” when asking me to help him walk across a log or jump from a bench. this was followed by the most darling “i love you,” each word prompted in order until he could string it together on his own. when we went to the lavender fields in france last summer he learned the word “purple” and decided it was his favourite colour. the way he said “purple” and the way he said “turtle” were our favourites – so so so cute. one day we were driving in a car and gabriel was waiting for a turn with something moses was playing with and out of the blue he said, clear as day, “two minutes!!,” acting as mo’s timer. we’d never heard him say either of those words but after that he started answering the “how old are you?” question with lots of confidence. then he learned “oh boy, i’ve got joy” at joy school and his little developing voice belting out those words had to be pretty much the cutest thing on earth.

for many months (and still to some degree now), gabriel’s brain just worked so much quicker than his tongue. often, when trying quite desperately to share what was going on inside his mind he would say, “um, um, uh, uh” with the most earnest and adorable look on his face. his oft repeated phrases over months of huge speech progress were “1,2,3,4,5!” “this one,” and “i did it!.” then he started using “actually” adorably a lot when speaking longer sentences. “i don’t want to!” “go away!” and “momo hit me!” have been well-used as well… more recently he’s been saying “but mom…!” and “what about…” a lot.

when i was pregnant with the twins, gabes was determined that their names would be “gogokiki.” maybe gogo for one and kiki for the other, or gogokiki for both – still unclear 🙂 after they were born he migrated to calling them “gus gus” and “mary” (we’re still trying to sort out why both mo and gabe latched onto that one for their baby sister) – now he calls them auggie and evie 🙂 at first gabriel was really timid around the twins – like almost scared of them. that turned into just a lot of pride when he did anything to help them. and eventually he picked up on moses’s vibe and now super adores them. he’s really good at making them smile and he’s constantly saying “oooh don’t worry!” when they are sad or “good job!” when they hold their heads up high in tummy time or roll over.

gabey never wants to miss any of the fun. he’s consistently devastated when he needs to go to sleep if he is aware that anyone else is staying up even a minute longer. he was a really great napper up until just a few weeks ago, when he started having a really hard time falling asleep until close to 10pm some nights. we knew it was time to drop the nap 😦 gabes still falls asleep a lot of days – in the car or in the buggy and sometimes in his bed during quiet time – but as long as we keep the naps short he can go to sleep at bedtime without too much of a problem. he just loves life and doesn’t want to miss out on any of the joy or fun or learning of it.

there was a phase when gabriel did the cutest scrunch nose face and another when his frustrated face was just perfect in representing his emotion.

gabe is a puzzle master. he started doing this floor puzzle we had tucked away in some random toy box and after he’d done it, by himself, probably 100 times, he asked for other jigsaw puzzles for christmas from santa. he figured out how to do those in just a couple days and then moved on to mastering a 130 piece one that ian and i had a hard time completing ourselves! his brain is just wired for puzzles.

gabriel is always the one to remind us all to sanitize our hands. he’s very on top of this, and “sanitize” was one of his first quite complex words. oh, to grow up during a global pandemic…

like his older brother, gabes loves animals. there’s one animal book we have that he just adores called “the long long line.” one day i started reading this book to him and he could name every single animal in the long, long line – including animals i had no idea he knew the names of like tapirs and flying squirrels and porcupines. gabriel is amazing at remembering things, and especially things that are connected to his interests, like animals!

he wants to do everything his big brother can do, and often we have to remind him that he’s only two, and it’s ok that he can’t do everything that moses does. he’s pretty brave, determined to be big like mo, and has mastered fire poles and the huge slides at the big kid playgrounds. he also wants to be able to read and write like mo and he’s learning his letters and more recently has been writing a lot of “g”s (almost exclusively backwards).

gabes is really inherently generous. he’s almost always so willing to share, let someone go first, make a trade, etc. (moses definitely has discovered this and has started using it to his advantage…eek.) at the end of each day i ask the boys what their “happy” and “sad” were for the day and a lot of times gabriel will be really thoughtful about his answer and reply with the time he shared something or helped someone – it’s so so sweet.

gabes is also pretty hysterical, especially more recently. when he melts down he really melts down. he falls apart crying and/or lets out a truly eardrum piercing scream, or yells at everyone to “go away!” he is particular and wants things to be done in a particular way and often it’s hard to figure out if he wants help desperately or if he desperately wants to do it all by himself (when guessed wrong on this, it’s not pretty, and often the preference changes halfway through the process, ha!). he’s just figuring out what to do with his emotions and his abilities and his limitations!

one of gabriel’s very deepest loves in life is the game uno. he would probably play a hundred rounds a day if he could. moses also loves uno but the fact that gabriel asked for an “uno cake” for his birthday tells me he may be the ultimate uno lover in this house. he gets so, so, jump-up-and-down excited when he has a draw 4 card. he’s become quite cleverly strategic and has learned to recognize all this numbers from rounds of playing uno.

gabe has loved going to school. joy school is his favourite but he has also so enjoyed nursery school. january-march he attended the sweetest little school that is housed inside a gorgeous church about a 12 minute walk from our flat. (he continued joy school, which he was doing two times a week last year, on thursday mornings.) next week, on his third birthday!, he will join the nursery class at moses’s primary school, just around the corner from our home. gabriel has always been excited about school and confident about leaving mom and running in to learn and play.

like his older brother, gabey is really expressive. he often talks dramatically with his hands and he has this specific deep voice that he uses when he is super excited.

august @ 0-6 months

auggie is our tiny boy. in the womb he was always the bigger twin, and his birth weight was 8 ounces more than his sister. but in the twins’ first weeks, while evie plumped up, august dropped a couple of centiles in weight. we’ve been having him weighed regularly since birth, just to keep an eye on his growth, but turns out he’s just a small baby (like his brother gabriel, who was in the 0.4% most of his first year). he chugged along on the 0.4% curve for a while and just recently has jumped up to the 2% curve. he’s a very content baby – super, super chill about 98% of the time and hardly ever showing signs of hunger. he’s just our tiny boy! he’s seeming to “fit into his skin” and fill out more and more every day.

august’s brow was adorably furrowed all the time for the first three months of his life – the constant wrinkles on his forehead were so cute and sweet! he looked like a little old man, always pondering something deep and important. he had lots of really dry and occasionally rashy or spotty skin on his face as a newborn and was king of cradle cap. as he’s gotten older it’s kind of like he has just grown into his big brain – smoothed out wrinkles and clear skin.

when august was born, he first came out with his face scrunched up like he was really to let out a huge wail … but no sound came out, i think even after he started breathing. he has done the same face lots of times since birth – an incredibly sad (and unbearably cute) face poised for a big cry, but silent. as a newborn, when his cries did come out they were often very intense and his chin would start quivering and seeing him just simultaneously broke and melted your heart.

yes, as a brand new newborn august was sometimes pretty unsettled, but ever since the first few weeks he has been the chillest baby ever. he is soooo easy going and hardly ever demanding. sometimes while his sister is screaming her head off he just kind of looks at her like, “girl, chill.” if he does cry it’s usually pretty quiet and short-lived (although he’s worked on developing his lungs for sure during sleep training…). he’s slower to smile than his sister but when he does smile it’s just the sweetest and it usually intensifies over a few seconds until he’s super squinty-eyed and making his mouth as broad as possible in a grin.

in his first few weeks auggie had pretty sensitive and very dry skin and he rocked the baby acne and cradle cap. his forehead was always flaky and his face often splotchy. he grew out of that pretty quickly but still benefits from some baby lotion from time to time, and the cradle cap is definitely still present. he also used to be a spit-up king, unloading all over newly-put on outfits with frequency. around month four he started keeping basically everything down 🙂

gus started exploring his vocal chords earlier and more extensively than his sister. there was a few weeks where every night ian and i would sit with the babies by the christmas tree in the evenings (after big brothers were asleep) and just listen to august coo, delighting in the most adorable sounds. he would just chat back to everything we said with his sweet little voice. he’s still such a talker – he just makes all kinds of different exploratory sounds and it is just so cute.

august is a little bit ginger! he’s still quite bald but the hair he does have reminds us of moses’s slight redheadness in infancy and it’s darling.

he loves to look at himself in the mirror. many times when he’s distressed at home i just hold himself in front of his reflection and quite immediately his fussiness is remedied.

we’ve done a bit of shuffling of carseats around our new car, and august has ended up in the very back on his own (the other three kids across the middle row). he’s perfectly content there and basically never makes a peep – just looks out the window or sleeps. occasionally we head some coos from the way back. when we go to get him out of the car he’s either peacefully slumbering or ready to give a grin upon meeting our eyes.

around month five, gus gus found his tongue and was constantly smacking his lips and clicking his tongue. he’d do it more if we’d imitate him.

there were a few weeks when i ended up co-sleeping with auggie from about 4am. we’d snooze together and then when baby boy decided it was time for the day to start i would literally wake up to him just cooing and giggling. can you imagine a better way to wake up?! i’d just immediately start kissing his perfect face 🙂

our august tiny boy! he is the sweetest sweetheart.

eve @ 0-6 months

ever since she came out of the womb, eve has been looking around at the world with the biggest, widest eyes. anyone who meets her comments on her eyes and several people have asked, “does she ever blink?!” she’s constantly taking in her surroundings with bright-eyed curiosity. as much as her developing muscles have allowed she has been (literally) leaning forward, looking around and learning.

evie is a super, super smiley baby. she started smiling early and is similar to moses and gabriel as babies in that you just have to make eye contact with her and seriously about 90% of the time she’ll break out into a huge, open mouthed smile. when she first started grinning, i particularly loved making her smile with her binkie in – it would just fall out with her smile in such a cute way. people always comment about how smiley she is. often it looks like she just doesn’t know what to do with all the joy inside of her little body – she’s trying so hard to express it with huge huge smiles but there’s still more that needs to come out!

she also started laughing pretty early and has given us lots of belly laughs the past few months. moses is the best at making her laugh and it’s so, so adorable to watch that happen. she particularly loves to be startled – that almost always makes her giggle!

she’s very happy, indeed. but when she’s sad ooooooh you know it. it is actually truly amazing how loud her cry is. she makes sure that no one can even hear anything or anyone else until she gets what she needs 🙂

when she was a brand new newborn, my mom gave eve the nickname “my little rosebud.” she had the most delicate, feminine features. she has since become by far our chunkiest baby and we absolutely adore her chub. as the mom of skinny baby boys i never quite understood people talking about how delicious their babies full cheeks and rolly thighs were. ooooh, i get it now. sometimes i cannot stop kissing those cheeks or squeezing those legs!!!

evie was born with a little bit of hair and in her first couple of months it just disappeared! she was pretty bald for a while except for the very back and bottom of her hair – a nice little mullet that is still quite prominent even as the hair on the top and sides and straight back of her head has grown back.

she’s a really bad napper. there was a phase where she literally took four minute naps. now we are up to about twenty minute naps with an occasional long one. she just wants her big eyes open and taking in the world! she’s also basically constantly hungry. i’ll hold her 30 minutes after her last feed and she’ll be tilting her head to the side with a big wide open mouth trying to find a place to latch on.

she has taken to sucking on her hands and more recently sucking on anything she can maneuver into her mouth. she’s still working on grasping skills but has caught on to the idea of “toys” (which right now are mostly food wrappers i hand her in desperation while helping three other small children…).

when eve is laying on the ground, she will often lift her head up (like she’s doing a crunch). we joke that she’ll have a six pack soon. sometimes she lets her head back down a little too abruptly and is sad that she’s had a bonk. but she just keeps crunching up, it’s kind of hilarious! we are working on her sitting skills. she’s always had a bit more muscle tone and body control than her twin and so she frequented the forward-facing carrier and the jolly jumper before august did.

our pretty little baby sis! she’s so full of joy and spunk.