Rub

Last night I could not get the pipsqueak to go to sleep. He nursed for a while, and then wanted to nurse some more (“Other side, please”). Then I told him that it was time to sleep. He was still and quiet for a long time, and I thought he must have drifted off to sleep. I curled up, and then I heard this little voice in the darkness: “Rub. Rub feet.”

So I took his little feet and rubbed them and rubbed them. I could see his long lashes resting against his cheek in the darkened room, so I figured he’d closed his eyes and fallen asleep at last. But no....”Rub. Rub.” I rubbed his smooth little back, his round little stomach, his pudgy little knees, his sweet little feet.

The squeaker used to curl up right next to me, nose to nose, with his little hand woven into my hair and his tiny toes against my leg. Cute, but it drove me nuts sometimes. I could hardly move. And if I did manage to move, he scooted after me – even in his sleep! It used to amaze us that he could do this. I think he was drawn to the warmth of another body. Now, he goes to sleep in his own bed in his own room (by himself even!), though he doesn’t usually stay in his own bed all night.

The pipsqueak seems less dependent than the squeaker was at this age. The pipsqueak usually nurses until I make him stop, and then he rolls away from me, his little round arms clutching his stuffed dog. Sometimes he sits up and looks for me in the night, but he does not seem to have the same need that the squeaker did for constant physical contact. We used to kid that the squeaker would “track” us at night so that he could stay close, but the pipsqueak does not do that. He seems to like his own space.

Part of me is very excited about the night that we will move the pipsqueak to his own bed in the room that he will share with big brother. It will be cool to tuck them in at bedtime and then have time to ourselves without kids around. I like the thought of the two of them snuggled into their beds, each boy confident of his brotherly ally if a monster slithers from the closet. I like to think of them having quiet time together, and waking up ready to play...while mama and papa get a little extra sleep.

But I do not regret the co-sleeping. It is so cozy to hear that tiny little voice in the dark: “Rub. Rub feet.” Someday there will be no more baby feet to rub in my household, so I’ll take all that I can get.

Excited!

The pipsqueak is ready to burst with excitement about his upcoming birthday party. You would think we talk about it all the time, but we’ve actually said very little. He does catch on to the key phrases quickly though. Last night at dinner, he says, “Party. My party. Couple of weeks.”

“Yes, and that’s a good while,” we told him.

“A good while,” he repeated. Then: “One minute, one minute!” (Complete with little urgently pointing finger.)

“No, no. Not one minute. A couple of weeks.”

“A couple of weeks,” he repeated again, very solemnly. Then, “Excited! Excited! Birthday cake. Where is it?” And he squirms around in his high chair, looking around for the birthday cake. I wish I had had a video camera.

The squeaker spent yesterday assembling a book. Over the last week or so, he drew the pictures. Then yesterday, we stapled the pages together, and he narrated the story while I wrote it down as fast as I could (though it was nearly impossible to keep up with him. It did help that he kept getting stuck on particular phrases.). Perhaps I will share a few of the best drawings here later this week. But the book is definitely classic squeaker: it is all about various monsters, and how they are destroyed (and sometimes dismembered) by the book’s heroine.

The squeaker is still very meek when it’s time to get on the bus. Yesterday was a rough day for him. The little girl who usually sits next to him on the bus sat with someone else, and then he got in trouble at school for talking when he shouldn’t have. Both mama and papa were short and impatient with him, probably because we are stressed about other things going on in our lives. Yesterday at bedtime, when I hugged and kissed him good night I told him I knew he’d had a rough day. He seemed so very small and sad. I hope today is better.

Yellow Light Yesterday...But No Tears Today

So the squeaker had a pretty bad day yesterday. By noon, his grandma had called me three times. One of those times, I talked with him, but he was crying so hard that I couldn’t understand him. But it was clear that he did not want to go to school, and he was sad and upset about it. I told his grandma that she had to put him on the bus no matter how much he was crying. I could tell she hated doing it, but she did it.

When he got off the bus later that afternoon, he seemed pretty cheerful. We went inside and I checked his folder, where there is a little “traffic light” that tells me if he was good (“green light”), a little naughty (“yellow light”), or VERY naughty (“red light”). Every day so far, green has been marked.

But not yesterday. This time, yellow was marked, and the teacher had checked “called out.” When I asked him about it, he got kind of upset. He told me he cried about it at school (which made me sad). When I asked him what happened, he said that he had seen a beaver or a hedgehog from the bus, and he was very excited about it. He said that he got in trouble for talking about it in class. That made me even sadder. I hated to think of him being all excited and then getting reprimanded for it, even though I figured the teacher probably did what she had to do to quiet him (he does sometimes talk over people, and trying to stop him just makes him talk louder). My husband asked him if the teacher had warned him multiple times, and the squeaker said that she had. He seemed very sad about it, so my husband reminded him that he needs to remember not to call out and we let it go at that. Later in the evening, he told me he hated school. But I think he was still smarting about the yellow light. I do wish it hadn’t happened since he is already struggling with school, but I suppose it’s also valuable to learn that even when he makes a mistake, it isn’t the end of the world. It won’t just be shrugged off, but it’s also not a great big deal.

He also said that lots of kids got in trouble yesterday. Some kids were apparently reprimanded for playing rock, paper, scissors (which the squeaker described as some strange game that you do with your hands that he didn’t really understand, LOL. He was very baffled by it.).

Today went better, apparently. No tears, though I did get an anxious phone call from him just before he got on the bus. But no tears is an accomplishment.

The pipsqueak, on the other hand, had a GREAT day yesterday, even though he is still jealous when big brother gets on the school bus. Apparently, he told his grandma all about his PARTY. He told her it was “in a few days,” and he named a bunch of the people we invited. I have no idea how he knows this stuff. He must absorb a lot more than I realize.

Get Your Goat

So let’s see, what are the latest exciting things going on?

First, we have a goat on the lam (ha ha). One of the goats (Tom) simply will not stay in the goat pen. I’ll look out the window and see him wandering around the pen, happily munching on poison ivy and other delicious treats that are unavailable to a penned goat. You can almost see him making little sidelong glances at the other three goats who are stuck in the pen, and they oblige him by being practically beside themselves with indignation. But here’s the kicker – when I hurry outside to put Tom back in the pen, by the time I get out there, he’s already back inside, blinking innocently at me like he has no idea why I’m huffing and puffing through the yard in such a rush. So not only does he slip out – he slips back in when he decides that it’s a good idea (i.e., lunch may be on the way because that human is coming out of the house now!).

BUT, yesterday I caught him red-hoofed as he tried to escape, so now I know how he’s doing it. Our goat pen is cattle mesh nailed to a three-tiered split rail fence. Below the bottom rail is a fairly large expanse of untethered mesh, and in some places, there is more slack than there probably should be. By working it with his head (and horns, I suspect), Tom can get the mesh to curl inward a bit. Then he drops to his boney little goat knees, slips his nose under the curling mesh fence, and shimmies out. I guess he probably gets back in the same way. I have no idea why the other goats don’t follow him to freedom. He’s definitely not any smaller than they are – in fact, he’s a bit bigger, probably because he spends so much of his time snacking outside the goat pen. But I have noticed that when I try to slip in the pen to give the goats food and water, they are much more anxious to push their way out than they used to be. Clearly, Tom’s advantage is driving them nuts and they want some outside snacks, too. I wish we could let them because it would be great to clear our land of poison ivy, but I have serious doubts about them coming back into the goat pen once they are all out. On his own, Tom is unlikely to travel far because he likes to stick close to the (penned in) herd. But if they all got out, I think we’d be in trouble. So my husband bought some stakes (not “steaks,” as we explained to the hopeful squeaker) to secure the loose mesh. We shall see if it works. Now that Tom has tasted freedom, he may be a very determined escapee.

Second, the squeaker’s quiet passivity about school seems to have evaporated. Now, school days consist of much crying and complaining of a stomach ache. Yesterday when I put him on the bus, he was sobbing. The bus driver looked skeptically at me, and when I started back up the driveway, she called out the window, “He’s still crying. Is that OK?” And I said yes, because what else is there? I can’t keep him home just because he doesn’t like change. I’ve talked with him to be sure there isn’t some good reason for his resistance to school, like a mean teacher or a bully. And when he comes home, it seems that he didn’t really mind the reality of the school day. But in the morning, when the prospect of school looms, it seems to take on larger proportions than it ought, and he is left feeling very sad but unable to explain why.

It doesn’t help that he does seem to struggle a bit with making friends. I assured him that many, many people find it difficult to make friends, including me. And I told him that it can take a while to get to know people well enough to feel that you are friends with them. He does talk about a little girl who sits with him on the bus, and he also talks about a classmate named Jade. (In preschool, his first little friend was Skye, so I am wondering if he is drawn to little girls with exotic names. Oh my.) Interestingly enough, Jade is the only child in school who the squeaker has told me had to move her name from “green” to “yellow,” meaning that she must have gotten in trouble for breaking some rule. He has also said that she is kind of mean, or at least he said that at first. But yesterday he said he thinks they might be becoming friends. It’s all very curious.

But as for the crying, I do recall a week or so of tears after it sunk in that school was the new reality, so maybe we are in for the same thing with kindergarten. He does talk positively (when he talks at all) about the activities he does there, so I am not too worried yet.

We are preparing for the pipsqueak’s second birthday party. The pipsqueak LOVES birthdays. Not his own so much; since he’s only had one, and as it was half a lifetime ago, I am sure he doesn’t remember it. But he loves other people’s parties, especially the cake and the singing. His interest in books continues to grow. He utters these funny little sentences, like “I like cars” and “I want a brownie.” It just amuses me to hear this little bitty person talk so perfectly. It’s funny that some people, including strangers, understand his speech perfectly, while other people may not even recognize it as speech. Usually the latter are impatient types who aren’t all that keen on toddlers. The best thing is to ask him to tell a story. Then he runs around, hopping or spinning a bit here or there, and babbling a constant stream of words periodically punctuated by “Like that!! And like that!” I’m afraid he also has a very full arsenal of naughty words, and he uses them freely. (“Oh, fuck. Car broken.”) I need to do something about that. When it comes to words, I’m kind of fuzzy on that good/bad stuff, I suppose.

And that is all for today. There is more on my mind, but not yet, not yet.

Talk Talk

A few weeks ago, when we took the squeaker to see Ponyo (a great film!) at the movie theatre, I overheard the father of a very young child talking to the girl in baby talk. I think she was probably two or three years old (a surprising number of very young children filled the theatre, and though I was admittedly skeptical of their ability to sit still, most did amazingly well and were quieter than the squeaker). “Come to da da,” said the girl’s dad, trying to get her to move through the row of seats. His tone, his inflection, his vocabulary were entirely different from his normal speech when he talked to his little girl.

Anyway, it struck me because we have never done “baby talk” in our house. It’s not that I find it objectionable or anything like that; in fact, I’ve read some theories about a positive role it might play in both language development and baby-mom bonding. But for whatever reason, we just don’t do it. We use regular words to refer to things, not baby-ized versions. We eschew “potty,” for example, in favor of “toilet” or “bathroom.” We use the actual words for body parts. We try to avoid referring to ourselves in the third person, Elmo-style.

Both of my boys have been pretty early talkers, for which I am very grateful. I don’t know that anything I did encouraged early talking, but we do talk a lot in our household. Sometimes I realize that I’m narrating pretty much everything I’m doing when the kids are around (and even when they’re not). In the grocery store, I talked to the boys even when they were tiny newborns (“So what do you think, should we have tacos or spaghetti? I’d rather have tacos, but your papa would probably prefer spaghetti....”) So maybe this encouraged early speech, or maybe my boys are just wired that way. Rarely do they make grammatical mistakes like “Me do it,” which I hear from many other little kids.

The pipsqueak’s speech has been very amusing lately. He’s got this new thing about “helping” all the time. If he sees something that needs done (groceries to be put away, toys to be cleaned up), he’ll exclaim “I’ll do it!” or “I’ll help!” (an attitude I hope is a very long term one). He will not be dissuaded no matter how much you try to intervene. So we get treated to the sight of this very small person huffing and puffing while he tries to do some impossible task, such as lifting a overloaded laundry basket or moving a piece of furniture. It’s obvious that it has not occurred to him that he might be hindered by his small size. Eventually, he’ll gasp, “I can’t! I can’t!” He’s become so very talkative!

And he loves talking. When I'm on the phone, he follows me around begging: "Talk! Talk!" Of course, if I put him on the phone, he beams but won't say a word!

Scary Songs and the Ju Ju Monster

The squeaker told me the other day that things had gone "awry" for the pirates sailing across the sea in his game. Where does he get these words??

Recently he's been excited about the Mariner's Revenge song by the Decemberists. He loves when the whale eats up the ships, and he's intrigued by the whole story of betrayal and revenge. Earlier this week, I found a Lego movie version of the song on You Tube, and he thought that was great. The song is definitely not tulips-and-butterflies ("tie him to a pole and break his fingers..."), but maybe the squeaker just has sophisticated (pathological??) taste. He loves songs that tell a story; otherwise, I don't think he has all that much interest in music.

The pipsqueak loves the song, too, though I doubt it makes a bit of sense to him. He made me laugh so hard yesterday that I had to wipe tears away. Unfortunately, it was a moment better suited to video than prose, but I'll record it here because I want to remember. :-)

We often call the pipsqueak "Ju Ju" -- a nickname he also uses when he refers to himself. So his papa was saying, "Ju Ju" in this deep, scary voice, just to be silly. The pipsqueak shook his head vigorously, saying 'Like it! Like it!", which (due to the head shake) means he doesn't like something.

"What don't you like?" asked his papa.

And the pipsqueak intoned in a similarly deep scary voice: "Ju Ju!!"

Now, of course, we want to tease him by doing it because it is so funny to hear him adopt the scary voice.