Snapshots

At some point, I don't know when, I took Jack's hand and told him to be brave. Maybe we were entering his room in the dark, or walking across ice or something. Anyway, he has adopted that as a saying of his own, if we're going out in the yard or downstairs or sometimes even in the living room to play with his toys. He takes my hand and says "Try to be brave." OK, Jack, I will.

The other night Jack woke up wailing in the middle of the night. We have to gauge these things -- ignore it and let him go back to sleep, go in and give him a soothing pat, etc. In this instance I went in to check on him, and he asked for a story or a song or somesuch -- it's 3 a.m., or so. So I say, no, it's the middle of the night, everything is fine, go back to sleep. I left the room and his wails grew even louder. And now they were specific:

"I HAVE A BOOGERRRRRRR!!!!!"

I went in, wiped his nose, and he dropped back down on his stomach and went to sleep.

Not sure how much I've written about the potty thing, perhaps nothing. We've started with the potty training and having him sit on the potty each night. And he's gotten into it, and has gone potty several times, always to much praise, at which he beams with pride. It's great, really. Of course, frequently he'll spend 10 minutes sitting on it like it's all a big game, doing nothing, but saying "I need toilet paper," and "It's coming out!" (It's typically not.) "The poop is coming OUUUUTT!" (No, it's not. Still nothing in that area.) But I admit his little voice piping up, "It's coming ouuuutt!" is very entertaining.

He likes to sit Mr. Potato Head on his sink step stool when he's on the potty, so he can watch him, and then he likes to put him on the sink when he brushes his teeth. He likes Mr. Potato Head.

His favorite song these days is one his grandma sings, "California, Here I Come." Jack sings it too: "Open ... up that ... gol ... den GATE ....Cal if ornia here I come."

He has a dinosaur book which I go through with him naming the dinosaurs. One page had sea creatures. "Is that a whale?" He asked about one. "No," I said, "that's an icthysaur." It's now his FAVORITE animal. For a couple of days he'd say to me, "Do you want to see the ikkysaur? Let's go see him. Do you want to see the ikkysaur?" Sometimes he even says, "ikkythasaur," which is pretty close, all things considered.

He's really into his thick, colorful fleece blanket these days. He's had it since he was a baby, and never really cared that much about it -- until now. Now he frequently likes to have it downstairs with him, and when I go in at night, sometimes he's hugging it tightly to him. I think he has a song about it too. I'm not sure of the exact words, but it's something to the effect of, "My bankey....my bankey...."

He rode a horse outside a store today, one of those things where you put in 50 cents and it shakes a bit. He loved it; I of course didn't have any more quarters. Anyway, later we saw Aunt Cathy, who mentioned they went to the library -- where we'd gone after the horse. Things had evidently run together in Jack's mind. He asked her pointedly, "Did you ride the horsie? Did you go on the horsie?"

Kind of funny, at the end of the day I mentioned the horse to Emily, and she said to Jack, "You rode horsies today?"

Jack said, "No. Just one."

Random Thoughts

Jack has woken up at 4 a.m. the last couple of mornings, and what does he do? Cry? Call for Mommy and Daddy? Go back to sleep? No, lately, he's been SINGING. This morning it was pretty much steady for most of the next two hours: "Twinkle...twinkle....lit-TLE...STAR!!!! How...I...won-DERRR...WHAT...you....ARE!!!" and "Old MacDonald," and "A B C D E F G.... H I J...." and "ROW ROW ROW your BOAT!" Needless to say, I'm tired and this blog will be a short one.

When I picked him up at daycare today he was in this toy boat that rocked, wearing a large train engineer's cap. It was down over his eyes, so he couldn't see me. But he heard my voice and arched his neck so he could sort of see me underneath the brim. Then he smiles, gets up, and runs over to me, me worrying that he's going to trip and fall since he clearly can't see anything.

We head over to his play area, morning or evening, and he leads the way, and then stops and turns. Holds out a hand and tilts his head slightly. "Do you want to play with my cars?" Or: "Do you want to play with my trains?" I may have mentioned this before, but it's still a riot.

He's finally gotten into his Mr. Potato Head. For a while he only wanted him with a nose and feet. For some reason he didn't want him to have eyes, a mouth, or other features. Now he dresses him to the nines, with arms, a hat, eyes, a mouth, glasses, and even a flower on his wrist. And he wants him to hold a bat from another toy. This weekend, in fact, we played ball with Mr. Potato Head, with Jack standing at one end of the rug and Mr. Potato Head and me at the other. Jack would throw the ball, and I would then use Mr. Potato Head's arm to throw it back. This delights Jack. "He DID it!" The game continues for a while.

Speaking of throwing a ball, the kid's got an arm. We play with a little sticky ball about the size of a golfball and a mini nerf-type football. He can throw them. What's funny, though, is he has no grasp of how to catch them. He'll hold his hands out, like we tell him, but he has no real concept of what he's supposed to do. Raise them to catch the ball? Hold them out more? He's like a statue as I gently lob the ball in a perfect arc to where his hands are, and it bounces harmlessly off them to the floor. Again, this delights Jack no end, and he'll grab it and throw it back. We'll work on the catching thing, though.

Now that it's getting warmer, we're playing out in the backyard. Thus far (aside from a mini-meltdown today when he didn't want to come back after running into the neighbor's yard, partly a result of him waking up at 4 a.m. and being extra cranky I suspect) he's pretty easy to please in this form of entertainment. He just wants to run around. He doesn't care about having a ball, or a toy, or companionship really. It's enough to run up the slight hill at the back of the yard, stop, beam at me, and then run down to the bottom. And then go back up again. And hey, that's fine. Until he does a face plant in the wet grass, which seems inevitable, it's plenty of fun for me, too.

Sweetness Addendum

When I wrote the below blog, I actually FORGOT the main reason I wanted to write about "Sweetness" in the first place. If you lie down, or yawn, or drop down to an elbow on the floor while playing with Jack, he says, "Are you tired, Daddy?" Followed by, "Do you need a pillow?" (And he sometimes rolls his "lls," so it comes out "piyyow," which is even cuter.) And before you even respond, he runs over to the couch to get a pillow, which he bring out and puts down on the floor "for your head. You can lay down on this piyyow, Daddy." And then, "Do you need a blanket, Daddy?" And then he runs off and gets you a blanket, too. So you're laying there on the pillow, under the blanket, and he lays down next to you for a few seconds, before saying, "I'm awake," and getting up to do whatever. While you lie on your piyyow and watch him play.

Sweetness

You hear a lot about little kids before you have your own, and you form your own opinions based on the ones you see, in malls, restaurants, on airplanes, etc. Generally you think most frequently of adjectives like noisy, whiny, fussy, demanding. And other less than flattering terms which usually relate to how much of a pain they can be. What you don't hear as much, or at least I didn't, was how sweet they can be. Jack, at least, is showing us that on a regular basis.

- Before running off to play with something, he invites us to join him. "Do you want to play with my cars, Daddy?" "Do you want to play with me, Mommy?" "Do you want to play with my trains?"

- So we're playing with his farm or somesuch, and he says "Which horse will you play with?" Well, Jack, I'll play with the white one. "No, I want to play with the white one. You'll play with the brown one, okay, Daddy?" All righty then. "Which car will you play with?"

- His earnestness is similarly entertaining to us. If there's a story, or toy, or concept he hasn't encountered before, he'll say "I never never heard of that before." Or, "I never never saw that before." I'm not sure this is as funny in print; maybe his slightly wide eyes and sincere voice help make it.

- The other day I was holding Jack as Aunt Taffy, Uncle Ekan, and the girls were leaving, and Jack wanted to hug Ekan goodbye. It became a big 3-man hug, which I dubbed the Man Hug. Well, Jack committed that one to memory, with the result being that on occasion he'll just throw out his arms toward me and say, "Man Huggggg!" It was particularly amusing when we were eating a pasta meal, which invariably results in him having pasta sauce all over his hands, face, and shirt. He threw his arms out to me, droplets of tomato sauce spraying everywhere. Through a red-cheeked smile, he said, "Man HuGGGGGGGGGGGG!!" Um, I said, trying not to laugh too hard. How about after dinner, huh?