Growing a Pumpkin Patch is Hard Work.

Yesh

Sylvie has gotten the hang of "yes" and "no."  Like, if she has a stinky diaper, she'll come tell me there's poop or pee (this blog is about little kids; you can handle it).  It used to be that if she did this, I'd ask her if she wanted a clean diaper and she'd say, "Dipe!"  Starting in the past few days, though, if I ask her if she wants a fresh diaper, she'll look up, nod her head, and say, "Yesh!"  

"Syl, would you like an apple?"

"Yesh!"

"Do you want to go outside?"

"YESH! YESH!"

Alternatively, if I ask her if she wants to take a nap, she'll shake her head and say, "No no no no no."  But she's polite about it, at least.

And you'd better believe I'm capitalizing on this new diaper awareness.  I pulled the little potties out of the basement a week or so ago and she loves to sit on the potty before her bath and after her naps.  She wakes up from her nap dry most of the time (which I'm taking as another early sign of readiness), so I put her on the potty after her nap, too.  So far, we've had no success, but I'm really not expecting much to happen for another six months at the earliest.  But I figure, if she knows she's going to the bathroom, there's no harm in associating that with the potty, and if there's a patron saint of potties out there who decides that Syl's moment is now, I won't be disappointed.

NOW!

Syl is 18 months old, and she's learning how to talk.  The language stage that hits around 18 months is one of my favorites - you start finding out so much about their little personalities.  They're all sponges, but you really get a taste of what they've been absorbing when they start repeating it back to you.

You're also reminded of all of your verbal tics.  I apparently say, "All right!" whenever I finish a task.  A couple of weeks ago, Syl was following me around while I vaccumed the upstairs.  When I finished, I declared, "All right!"  She repeated me - "Aw-RIGHT!"  And now, every time she's done with whatever she's doing, she'll trill, "Aw-RIGHT!"  Chris's is "Oh boy!"  He's usually the one who goes to get Syl out of her crib in the morning, and lately, he's been greeted with "Oh BOY!"

The word she says most often is "NOW!"  As in, "Ahn [I want] outside NOW!"  Or, "Ahn cookie NOW!"  Whenever the sitter comes, it's "Ahn bee-men [basement, where the playroom is and where the sitter takes them while I finish cooking supper] NOW!"  We've been trying to get her to switch "please" for "NOW!" and we've had a little success.  Now (heh), when she wants an apple - which she eats whole, without me peeling or cutting it - she'll say "Ahn app-uh PEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEAAAS!"  

Adam's having a good time teaching his sister new words, and he gets so excited when she repeats something now.  "Mom!  Sylvie said Halloween!" ("Ha-WEEN!")  A lot of the time she has no idea what she's saying and Adam's having fun getting her to say tricky words like "ambulance" and "delicious."  She's also - finally - saying Adam's name.  When she started talking several months ago, she could name all of us - Mama, Dada, Dutch - but she wouldn't say Adam or Brother or anything, really, for him.  Now she calls him either "Bruh" or "Dadam" and he is thrilled.  We're pleased, too, more for Adam than anything else.  It was so pitiful when he'd lament, "When will she say MY name?"  

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Adam is nearly five, and he simultaneously seems like such a little boy, but also so grown up.  He loves reading more than just about anything else.  He's been practicing his writing at school, and yesterday he started copying words from books.  He also loves to color now, something that he'd never spend more than a couple of minutes on the past few years.  His interests have expanded from trucks, trucks, and trucks to include dinosaurs, pirates, knights, weather, space, robots, and science.  He LOVES science.  A lot of folks have heard this story, but it's such classic Adam that it bears repeating.  Several months ago, we had a library book about some cat who called himself a Man of Mystery.  Chris asked Adam if he was a man of mystery, and Adam replied, "No, Dad.  I'm a man of science!"  Man of science, indeed.

Bringing This Back

Every month, Typepad charges my Amex for hosting this blog, and each Amex bill marks another month that I haven't used this thing.  I figured I had two options -- keep paying to keep the content alive, or turn the blog into a printed book so I can have a record of what I wrote and cancel the Typepad subscription.  I was leaning towards the latter but when I started reading through the archives, I realized that I'd completely forgotten about a lot of the things I'd written here.  

At the time of their writing, I didn't see how I'd ever forget whatever adorable/funny/precious tidbit I was sharing, but clearly, life and work and a second child have sucked the marrow out of many of my memories.  And as I know that I am more inclined to write for an audience than I am for myself (narcissist that I am), I am going to make an effort to write here more regularly.  Frankly, I'm ashamed that I've let the first year and a half of Syl's life go unrecorded.  There are hundreds of photos of her over on flickr (click on that rectangle to the right), but she and her brother both do so many sweet, funny, and maddening things each day, and I know now that if I don't write them down, I risk forgetting them altogether.

Take Syl, for instance.  I don't want to forget how, when she was about six or eight (see how my memory fails me?) months old, she started giving us the sweetest little pats on the shoulder when we'd hug her.  I don't think I'll forget that her first word was "Dutch," but I don't want to forget how emphatic she was when she bleated her first full sentence, "I want cookie NOW!"  Or her fixation with shoes -- the child will throw herself facedown on the floor if we don't help her on with her shoes and socks first thing in the morning.  It's been a lot of fun to have some one-on-one time with her in the mornings when Adam is at school.

Adam is a bright, happy, stubborn, sensitive little boy.  He devours books and started reading chapter books a few weeks ago.  He is a self-proclaimed "Man of Science" with a particular fondness for robots and space.  Chris build a rock pit in the backyard earlier this summer and Adam spends hours out there playing in the pea gravel.  He just started his third season of soccer and played his first season of tee-ball this past summer.  He loves to cook, but he's gotten picky to the point that even if he cooks it, he won't necessarily eat it.  He's in school all day, five days a week, and he loves it.  I particularly love that his school provides a hot lunch, so I'm off the hook for putting a lunch together for him every day.

Chris and I are pretty much the same.  We work and drive kids around and manage a complex babysitting schedule.  Our main interest, besides our children, is food.  Thus, we also spend a fair amount of time exercising.  I've been dividing my spare hour or so of leisure time each day between editing the photos I'm always taking, trying to finish needlepointing Syl's Christmas stocking, reading, and sewing (my newest vice).  I cleaned this design up, too - I was tired of looking at the orange and I wanted to try out my very rudimentary photoshop skills on the banner.  

So, let's see how I do with this regular updating thing.

Is this thing on?

This is a photo of Syl kissing the baby she always sees in the backdoor, from the other baby's perspective.

Really, I'm just testing mobile blogging.

Subsurface

Adam has been interested in volcanos lately, and props to the Discovery Kids online volcano game - it does a great job of illustrating how the different types of volcanos are formed and how they erupt.  Still, at 4 years old, Adam is pretty literal, and while he understands that lava and magma are underground, "underground" for him is a pretty catch-all term that includes dirt, worms, rocks, slugs, and lava.

The other day, Adam was asking Chris about skunks - he's also into pretending he's a skunk - and he asked where skunks sleep.  Chris replied that sometimes skunks burrow underground in the winter for a nice warm place to sleep.  Adam thought about this for a minute and then asked, "Wow.  How do the skunks tolerate the lava?"

Four Years!

Adam is four years old today!  He is an amazing boy, and three was a fantastic, fun year.  He truly is a little boy now - his proportions, his actions, and his attitude are all those of a little kid, and not a toddler.  I'll pull him into my lap and tell him that he is my sweet baby boy and he always says, "Moooooom, why do you always call me a baby?  I'm NOT a baby - I'm a big boy!"

Yes, you are, sweet boy.  Happy birthday to my first baby.

Better than the Lizard King, I guess

"Mama! I am King of the Snails!"

"Of the snails?"

"I am King of the Snails!"

"What do you do as King of the Snails?"

"I say, 'You'd better listen to me, snails!'"

"Ah."

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"Mama! At school, me and Ro play pirates!"

"How do you play pirates?"

"We run around fall down and say, 'AAARRRRRRR!"

"Of course."

Santa was otherwise preoccupied.

Adam did not want to go to bed on Christmas Eve. By 9:30 PM, Chris was ready to pull out the big guns, so he told Adam that he was going to call Santa to reassure him that Adam was going to go to bed, so to please be sure to come by to deliver his gifts as soon as he fell asleep.

Chris picked up the phone, dialed some numbers, and talked to Santa.

"Yes, yes, Santa, Adam told me that he is going to go to sleep right now. You want to know what he wants for Christmas? Okay, I'll ask him. Adam, what do you want from Santa? A big rig? Okay, Santa, Adam wants you to bring him a big rig and he's going to go to sleep right now, so don't forget to stop by here tonight!"

Chris said goodbye to Santa and hung up the phone. At which point, Adam looked pointedly at Chris and declared, "Daddy, Santa was not on the phone."

"He wasn't? But I just talked to him!"

"No, that was not Santa. Santa is at the North Pole. Using the potty."

Worst Nightmare

When Adam turned two and a half, he started having nightmares. Developmentally, that's about the age when nightmares begin, so we weren't surprised when he started to wake up screaming. It's the content of the nightmares that's been interesting.

Initially, he had a series of nightmares in which animals (cows, goats at the petting zoo, ducks at the duck pond) would try to eat his fingers. I can see how having a farm animal eat your fingers would, indeed, be terrifying.

Last night, though, he woke up screaming and when we went to his room he was inconsolable.

"My supper! My supper! Don't take my supper! I want one more bite of macaroni! Mommy! Daddy! Don't take my supper! No!"

My son's worst nightmare? That we'll clear his plate before he's finished eating his supper. At least his priorities are in order.

Mr. Breakfast

Sunday night, Chris and I had French bread with our dinner. So on Monday morning, I used the leftover bread to make lost bread for breakfast.

After Adam plowed through three slices of lost bread, he started running the circuit between the kitchen, the dining room, the living room, and back into the kitchen, shouting, "I'm Mr. Lost Bread! I'm Mr. Lost Bread! You can't catch me!" (Maybe I put too much powdered sugar on the lost bread.)

So, Chris told Adam that he was Mr. Pancake, and they chased each other through the house with Adam shouting, "I'm Mr. Lost Bread! You can't get me, Mr. Pancake!"

For the next couple of days, Adam went around calling himself Mr. Lost Bread. He'd dump out a basket of toys, put the basket on his head, and say, "Hey! What's Mr. Lost Bread got on his head?" Or, he'd play in his room after I'd put him down for a nap, saying, "Mr. Lost Bread doesn't want to take a nap!"

Finally, on Wednesday, Adam decided that I was worthy of a nickname, too, so I'm Mr. Toast. So now, we're kind of like the cast of Reservoir Dogs, except more IHOP than Crayola. Except for Dutch. He's Mr. Carrot.