Jamberry

We're slowly trying to get things ready for Baby No. 2, and one part of that entails trying to steal all the things from Jack that he's had since he was a baby so we can give them to his coming sibling. Step 1 was moving him out of his crib into a bed, and that went fairly well.

(As an aside, Step 1 was probably boxing up all of his baby toys, some of which we'll eventually give to his sibling, but we have no illusions there -- as soon as he sees them he's going to want them anyway. In fact, he and his Mommy had the first chat today about whether Jack's toys were going to be in jeopardy from the newborn, something Jack seemed pretty concerned about, so that's going to be fun.)

Anyway. Today I extricated the glider / rocking chair from his room, which we rocked him, read stories to him in, and sang songs to him from basically when he was a newborn until a few months ago. That was when we moved him to the bed, and since then he's pretty much been content to read stories there. So he's not really going to miss it, but of course, I knew he would. So I wanted to try to decorate that area dramatically enough that he wouldn't mind the missing glider.

I put up a poster from a Natural History Museum I went to in New Mexico, with pictures of dinosaurs on it, and then I drew a big picture of a dinosaur and an Ichthysaur (probably misspelled, sue me). There was still a big space, so I pulled out another big piece of paper and tried to figure out what to draw.

My eyes fell on his Jamberry book, this great book that he's loved on and off since he was very young, of a boy and a bear dancing and singing through fields of berries -- raspberries, blueberries, blackberries, etc. Great book. Using his markers, I spent the next 15 minutes or so recreating the cover of the book, the bear in brown (with his purple hat of blueberries) and the boy in his blue shirt and pants, also holding a hatful of blueberries. It was a pretty accurate likeness, if I do say so myself, all colorful and happy. So I put it up on his wall and everything seemed good. I put his big monkey chair in the spot the glider used to be.

So Jack gets home and ultimately we go upstairs to see his new room. He sees the pictures and runs over to them, standing there to marvel at my efforts. He looked pretty happy, and Emily came in too, saying, wow, it's the bear and the boy from Jamberry, isn't that great, Jack? And he's smiling and I'm thinking, yeah, that worked out pretty well. And then he turned to look at us.

Jack: "Where are the strawberries?"