2 1/4

I've been blogging a lot more lately. You're welcome. You should know, though, that it is at the expense of more important things, like reading my Bible and showering. I kind of don't care. It seems to be rare for me to feel the impetus to write these days, so I'm just going to do it when the desire arises. You never know when another slump will occur. I can cleanse my mind and body then.

So I know that 2 1/4 years of age is not really a "milestone" age to write about, but Ben is just so rad right now that you need to know about it.

Things that Ben does that make my life infinitely better and more interesting:

1. He plays pretend. All day long. And it's hysterical. He'll grab his dump trucks, they will say hi to each other (they all have names, and they have families). Then they will greet a family of something else, like blocks or Toy Story toys, or Manny's tools, or whatever. Then they will cart around the other toys, usually on some kind of mission. They talk all along the way, saying things like, "come on! go faster! follow me! I got you! What you name? here you go!" and so on and so forth, ad infinitum. This kills me. He will play like this for a solid hour, and I just sit and watch the magic unfold. Sometimes he grabs one, hands it to me, and says, "play this one!" I try, but I can't keep up. Usually the conversation between the toys goes like this:

Ben's lion: Hi! I'm Lion. What you name?
My elephant: I'm Elephant. What's you're name?
Lion: Lion. Roooooar! This my tail!

And then he roars again and knocks over my elephant and we keep replaying the same scene over and over again. It is awesome.



Sometimes he puts a toy on time-out, saying "time out! two minutes!"

Another favorite game is Baby Bear. I will let this video speak for itself.



2. He talks non-stop. And quite well. He often uses proper syntax, with subject-predicate-complement. He also uses all of the parts of speech, often correctly. He often mixes up word orders, but all the words are there and the sentences can get pretty long. He loves to tell stories. If you ask him what he did during the day, he will tell you EVERYTHING, complete with gestures, facial expressions, and sound effects, and the descriptions often involve tattling on someone. I love to hear him talk; he's very expressive. When he's eating something he likes, he says, "Yum yum yum yum. This is delicious!" When he's eating something he doesn't like he says, "I don't like it. No thanks."

3. He loves to count. To eleven. Sometimes he gets all the numbers in there, sometimes he doesn't, particularly when he's really excited, which is a lot. He also knows a lot of his colors, although the only ones he always hits correctly are orange and purple (random--you'd think he'd pick the more common primaries). The others are sometimes correct, sometimes blue, which is his default. He knows a few letters, like O and Y.

4. He loves to read, and he's super cute when he does it. He'll go to his bookcase, pull out a favorite (right now that's The Sorcerer's Apprentice and Wall-E), and "read" it. He knows a lot of it because we read them all the time. So he'll "read" the whole thing, complete with voices. Sometimes he'll hand it to me to read to him, sometimes he'll pick a different one for me to read. Unfortunately (for me) he leans toward the longer books, ones that are not at all age appropriate, but he loves them, will sit through the whole thing, and memorizes them after a couple of readings. Sometimes I cheat and turn five pages together and skip whole parts. He doesn't notice on newer books, but he does with familiar ones. Lame. One of his other favorite books is his Bible. Sometimes he calls it the Bible, sometimes "God Book".

5. He loves to sing and dance. He can sing "New York" from Madagascar, "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star," "Jesus Loves Me," "Good Night Sweetheart," the intro song from Cars, and several songs by Ingrid Michaelson, Otis Redding, and The Killers. Sometimes he sings them like a dinosaur. And of course the dancing. Oh the dancing.



6. He has favorite destinations that he constantly asks for and recognizes when we're halfway there: mainly the mall, the park, and the bookstore.

7. He says please, thank you, bless you, I'm sorry, and I love you.

8. He loves to cuddle and watch TV and movies, though we limit his daily screen time. With only 30-60 minutes a day, he still manages to memorize them. Favorites shows are Dinosaur Train, Thomas, Chuggington, Handy Manny, Mickey Mouse Clubhouse, and Bob the Builder. Favorite movies are Toy Story 1 and 2, Madagascar, Horton, Cars, and Finding Nemo.

9. His latest obsessions are animals, dinosaurs, and baseballs. We don't own any of the latter two; he considers our couple of tennis balls his baseballs, and the dinosaurs he plays with at stores.

Okay, I've now wasted most of my morning with this. I really need to get ready for work for reals.

Under Where?

I'm not going to belabor the point, but suffice it to say I've never had a good attitude about potty training. I've blogged about it before, but I think I deleted it. It seemed to cause a flurry of excitement among my mommy friends and family that made me so stressed out, angry, and frustrated I wanted to break up with everyone I knew. We've walked down this road before, and not without the bitter sting of a complete lack of support and the even more bitter sting of the smell of poop. Our potty training began with Ben talking nonstop about going potty and trying to climb into the toilet so that he could and ended with me cleaning poop off the bathroom floor. He was displaying "all the signs of readiness" as outlined in numerous books, and despite the fact I was fairly certain he was too young and not at all ready, I went for it because, hey, I could be wrong. I was not. So we put away the seat and the underwear and that was that. Every now and then he asks to use the potty. We pull it out, let him sit on it, and he never goes. He sits there for two seconds, points out Elmo on the potty, then says "all done!" I don't push it. I'm in no hurry. I mean, it would be nice to be able to stop buying diapers. But I also am not super eager to begin the accident phase, and the phase where we have to drop everything and sprint to the bathroom at the mall or Disneyland or whatever. And I've heard horror stories of people who have had to endure potty training for upwards of a year. Shoot me. I want to do it when Ben is unequivocally ready so it takes one hour. I'm kidding. Kind of.

So imagine my excitement when Ben wakes up Saturday morning saying "underwear, Mommy! I want to wear underwear!" Since it was a rainy weekend and we didn't have much going on, I set my reservations aside and said, "sure." I had a feeling that he just wanted to wear underwear because his friend does, not because he's biologically ready. But he refused to wear a diaper, so I kind of didn't have a ton of choice. There's a certain technique where you just put them in underwear and encourage them and it's over and done in three days. It's obviously more involved than that, but that's the gist. It's not really the route I was planning on going, but it seemed to be the route Ben was leading me down. I have a friend who did it and her poor little girl didn't poop for a week because she was so afraid of having an accident. But again, Ben reeeeeally wanted those underwear. He poops like clockwork, so I figured I'd have some cleaning to do, but it would be manageable. Right? Wrong.

All day I followed him saying, "do you have to go potty? tell mommy when you have to go potty." Obviously he didn't. He sat on the potty a million times, but never went. I expected that. But I was still annoyed. I even pulled out the little potty so that he had two choices when he decided to go. It took a couple of hours for the first accident to happen. When it did, I cheerfully responded to his concerned look and boldfaced lie ("Ben, did you go pee?" "No, mommy.") with an "It's okay, buddy. Everybody goes pee. Just tell Mommy next time when you need to go so I can take you to the potty."

The first poop happened shortly thereafter. It mostly stayed in the underwear, except for the bit where he stuck his hand down there. I cleaned him up, put on a fresh pair, and sent him off to play. "Mommy, everyone poops in underwear." Sure, buddy. Sure.


We had some character underwear and some of the training kind with extra padding. The training ones were nice because not much ended up on the carpet. Which was handy because he peed three times and pooped once that day. He finally let me put a pull-up on him for his nap. When he woke up it was dry, so I left him in it while we ate dinner and played for a bit before church. Around 5:20, just 10 minutes before we were supposed to leave (Matt was already gone so it was just the two of us), he peed in his pull-up. I took it off and he wouldn't let me put another one OR underwear on. I figured, hey, he just peed, he doesn't poop until 6:30. I'll just let him run around naked for 10 minutes while I get ready.

Wrong.

10 minutes later I pick him up to put clothes on him. I set him down, and we were both covered in poop. I asked Ben, "Where did you go poop?" He pointed to a spot on the ground that had a speck of poop. I knew that wasn't it. I asked him again. He insisted. I searched the house. Searched. No poop. By now we should definitely be on our way to church. But I'm not leaving a mystery pile of poop behind. I noticed our bedroom closet door open a bit. On a whim I grabbed a flashlight and looked. There it was. A big. pile. of. poop. in. my. closet. He pooped in the closet, y'all.  I sighed and said, "there it is." Ben clapped his hands and said "Yay! My turn flashlight find poop!" Um, no. This game is over.

I cleaned it up (and had flashbacks of cleaning up after my cat), cleaned B up, cleaned myself up, forced him into a pull-up, put clothes on us both, and headed to church.

Day 2.

I was pretty sure we were done with the underwear. At least I was. But Sunday Ben woke up once again asking for underwear. Sigh. Fine. This time I doubled up on the underwear, which made clean-up really easy.

Here's the thing--he didn't care that he was swimming in his own filth. He simply said, "Clean up, Mommy!" He had no awareness of the fact he needed to go. He stopped asking to use the potty. In fact, he refused to go near it except to put his toys on time out it in ("two minutes, Woody!"). So we're done. I quit. After I cleaned up my third poop of the weekend on Sunday afternoon, I told Benjamin that he had to wear a pull-up, that he could tell me if he needed to use the potty, and that he could have his underwear back when he started going pee and poop in the potty.

Side note: we went to the pumpkin patch with our friends that evening, where Ben, on at least three occasions that I know of, put his hand down his pants and said, "Just checking!" At least he didn't publicly try the other trick he invented over the weekend: pulling his Ben Jr. out of his underwear and saying "Ta da!"

Thank God for Little Boys

This evening the B and I went to the park for our weekly date. We ran and played. B made a new friend, a little boy just his age. They played together for a little bit (so cute) then B went to play with a few "big girls" (they were like seven). They were gathered around the little bouncy dolphin holding up small twigs. B smartly grabbed himself a twig, walked over to the girls, said "hi!" all cheerfully, then tried to sword fight them. One of the girls looked at him and said, "um, could you please go away? we're trying to do something." Ben grinned from ear to ear and cheerfully said, "stick!"

Eventually I was able to guide him away from his besties. We then ran in the big field. B found a tree branch, which he brandished along with his stick. He ran and ran, so full of joy. All the way over to the couple making out in some sleeping bags under the tree. Then I joyfully guided him back, where we ran into our neighbors, B's true besties, who were having a picnic lunch. While they ate B found the nearest giant puddle (and when I say puddle I mean Lake Orange County) and ran through it. Over and over and over again. Like he was in Disneyland. Eventually his girl finished her sandwich and joined him. She was barefoot, so she was slipping and sliding all over. Ben started imitating her. Eventually her brother finished eating and joined them. Within minutes there were three two-year-olds rolling and splashing in the mud like it was the best day of their lives, laughing so hard they were probably peeing. Good thing they were wearing diapers.

 

Unfortunately my camera died right when the fun started. But seriously--cutest. thing. ever.

Multiple Choice Test

The air is filled with screaming and wailing. There are bone-chilling cries of "oh my God!" People are running and screaming, desperately searching for cover and reprieve, often at the expense of others. People are getting trampled and crushed as hundreds sprint, flailing their arms and crying out for a savior.

The above is a scene from:

a. The sinking of the Titanic
b. The bombing at Dresden
c. A terrorist attack
d. Kristallnacht
e. A rainy day at an Orange County Middle School



The answer, of course, is e.

It's a Confusing Life

I'm having one of those weird days/weeks where I'm feeling unsettled. Which is odd partly because last week I was having one of those days/weeks where I wouldn't change a thing about my life. Today I want to change large chunks of it into an impossible, unrealistic thing. I think my outlook on life depends on my weekends, because this weekend was a stark contrast to the last. Last weekend was one of those idyllic ones. You know what I'm talking about--you'd have a montage of our smiling, laughing family frolicking in the park, cuddling on the couch with a movie, and generally behaving like we were high on life, maybe with a song by The Fray. This last weekend would have been a different montage.  One in which my sick husband moans in bed with a "fever" of 99 and watches old movies on his iPod while I cook every meal, clean every room, and entertain a toddler who seems to be some bipolar version of himself, maybe with "Annie Are You Okay" or "This Woman's Work". One minute he's being the cutest he's ever been, and the next I'm searching his hair for horns I'm positive must be in there somewhere. If he's not singing "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" like a dinosaur he's acting like one and flinging his toys across the room. It was exhausting. I found myself more than once (or more than ten times) longing for those pre-parent days where I could sleep in, curl up on the couch with a book for seven hours, alternately sleeping and reading and eating whatever crap I wanted at whatever time of day, and go to bed late because I didn't have to cook or clean or manage a small human if I didn't want to. I actually wanted to go to work on a Monday morning because I needed a break, ironically enough.


Side note: the rainy days don't help. Rainy days compel me to curl up on the couch with a blanket, some hot chocolate, and a good book.

Then I came to work this morning. It's not that work is bad--it's actually great. My students are awesome, I'm enjoying what I'm teaching, I'm actually being quite productive and not feeling too overwhelmed by the massive pile of essays and other papers that threaten to suffocate me daily. I've knocked out most of my to-do list already and it's only lunch-time. And I've somehow managed to do this without taking away from spending time with my students or feeling at all stressed. I'm not sure how it happened, but I seem to have mastered my Zen and the Art of Classroom Management philosophy. I'm living the dream, so to speak.

But I miss my little dinosaur terribly.

So this is what I'm asking for. A life where I have no children and I'm a stay-at-home mom. That's not so hard, is it?

Oh wait. It's physically impossible.

Sigh. Back to the drawing board.

October...So Far

Happy Birthday to my Mama!!!

 

Morning cuddles

Family park day

 

Seriously, kid. Enough with the face in the grass. You're killing me.

He re-discovered his blocks in a big way.

Another family park date.

He is obsessed with pumpkins. He picked this one out at Henry's.

 

Sammy came home from Ghana!!!

 

Yes, ANOTHER evening park date.