poor little Z.  We've nicknamed Ike "the destroyer".  Like I've previously mentioned, he finds great joy in obliterating Zeb's tracks, car shows, block towers, etc.  Here is Zeb in the aftermath.  Hands over face, completely heartbroken.

And the thing is, at age 11 and a half months, I feel like Ike's actions are rather deliberate.  Luckily his calculated annihilations aren't meant to devastate Zeb- they are simply meant to destroy his carefully orchestrated plans.  Unfortunately Zeb doesn't understand the workings of an 11 month old and takes it VERY personally.

Really- Ike just walks up to meticulously arranged train tracks and wreaks havoc. He kicks and grabs and chucks and just waves his hands through the toys until there is no resemblance of Zeb's creation.  It's pretty funny.

Zeb has gotten pretty good at suggesting to me that Ike needs timeout or that it's time for him to go down for a nap.  He's also pretty good at running to his room to play and slamming the door shut.  Let's hope Ike learns to play nicer down the road or the next 17 years could be long.

In the meantime we've been trying lots of activities that put Zeb up high or that include both kiddos. Lately Zeb is a reading fiend and that's helped a lot.  Any suggestions for teaching toddlers how to read?  I'm not sure he's quite ready, but I may as well work with him.  We work on starfall.com and small book programs from the library- and I've requested the leap frog "learning to read" dvd from the library, but we'll see how it goes.  He knows all of his letters- and even many letter combos like ch, sh, th, etc., but he doesn't love to put letters together yet.  He's great at word recognition (he can read words like mom, dad, stop, go, walmart, meijer, etc)- but I want to work on putting new letters together to make words.  Any suggestions from seasoned parents would be much appreciated! thank-you thank-you!