Better Make It A Double

three year olds

Three year olds are extremely emotional, moody, and demanding. They can be clingy, saucy, and defiant. As our pediatrician gently pointed out at our three year appointment, anyone who thinks that this all ends with the “Terrible Twos” has another thing coming.  She put it this way: three-year-olds are smarter two-year-olds with a year of experience. And I love this age best of all so far.  

I don’t love it every day, and certainly not every hour, but oh, there are so many good things about this age despite the challenges. I can’t remember ever being so exhausted by their demands and also completely in love with my boys at the same time. Maybe when they were babies, but I think I love interacting with preschoolers even more than I love spending time with babies. Every parent seems to have a stage that they like especially well, and I think this is mine, at least so far. I love the conversations we have, about how things work, places we’ve gone, what they’ll be able to do when they get older, what my life was like when I was a little girl, and how our extended family fits together. I love the sweet, almost shy way they share their affections, with words to back up their devotion. We are still so physically connected – so constantly in touch with each other, more so, in fact, than when they were two. While the clinginess can be overwhelming at times, I mostly love their cuddliness. There are worse things than to be completely adored by two sweet little boys, to have long, sometimes sticky arms always reaching for you.

I love the fact that the books we read now have plots, that they love funny poems (and try to make up their own), and jokes. I love reading a story after naptime, the three of us snuggled under a blanket all in a row—my lap is too small for two boys now—a warm boy on either side of me, leaning against me with my arm around him and helping finish the sentences of the story. I love their enthusiasm for music, mostly children’s folk songs with daddy and hymns with me, many of which are requested by name. I love being privy to their intense and loving relationship—watching the two of them play “storekeeper” or “sailing to America” or any of the many elaborate games they play, saying “I love you, brother” at bedtime. Watching them negotiate with each other, and being able to just wait a moment longer to work things out between them. Far more often than not, they do, using the skills we’ve taught them. They lose their tempers with each other on occasion, getting too bossy or rough, but their motivation is overwhelmingly just to be together, to play in relative harmony. At mealtimes, in the car, or just sitting together, we often talk about important things, about God, the world we live in, what we can do to make it a better place for everyone, what it is to be a friend.  Most of the time, they initiate the conversation. They are starting to show real empathy, for me, for each other, for crying kids at the park.

They amaze me all the time right now – that they know so much, are learning so fast, can do so many things. They climb like monkeys over the biggest playground equipment, run full-stop, somersault, hop, leap, and they jump off anything they ca, landing on both feet, fists clenched in concentration. They are so proud of themselves when they succeed and get so much pleasure out of simple things – watching a tree being cut down, a tractor sweeping the beach, an anthill, a bumblebee, a book full of pictures of sea creatures, a couple of laundry bins and a few feet of rope. No Disneyworld could be better than any of these things.

When we’re not having a day that completely overwhelms all of the above, filled with tears and fits and general crabbiness (and these days do happen), I love being with my three year olds better than anything. Lately it just feels like it’s going so fast, like they’ve grown overnight. I confess that most of the time, I haven’t felt like I wanted to stop time, preserve the stage they’re in. I’ve loved them all along, loved things about all the ages and stages, but I’ve also been pretty excited about the prospect of being able to ditch the diapers, get past the tantrum stage, have a real conversation, be able to run errands more easily, finish a sentence with another adult, and get a break now and then through preschool or school. But right now, I do feel that way. I sit on the couch with the two of them wriggling around me, and I just want to stay like this, just like this, for just a little longer.

 

In between snowstorms:

We go to the park and avoid the dirty snow and giant puddles:

we complain a little

but we make ourselves feel better by trying on last year's sun hat and this year's sandals:

We go on boat rides in the living room. "Watch out for the water, Mama! It's getting higher and higher!

We study for our upcoming trip to Holland:

We grab two bowls from the drawer and two chairs and have "cake" with our blocks.

Mama has her own diversions, some of which involve vegetable seeds, seed-starting spreadsheets and stacks of gardening books from the library::

We join some members of our church (and hundreds of other people from area churches) on the  bridge to ask and pray for peace in Iraq after five years of war.

We get our picture taken with the mayor of Min*eapolis while we are there:

And O falls asleep in the afternoon for the first time in about a week:

On the rare days that are warm and not full of rain and snow, we have picnics by the Mis*sissippi River bluffs :

"Look, Mama! What is that? It's green!"

We put on the snowman sweaters one more time and try Daddy's shoes on for size:

alien mama

Let's see. The cost of jet fuel has doubled over the last year, sending ticket prices through the roof, the U.S. dollar just keeps sinking against the Euro, we have 3 year old twins, and we Americans aren't all that popular abroad at the moment. So what shall we do? Why go to Holland, of course! We are going to visit my Dutch family in June, including my 84 year old grandma. It will likely be the last time I ever see her. I am still a Dutch citizen, though I may become an American citizen as well at some point, if I can get over taking an oath to take up arms if called to do so. Not so sure I can do that (take the oath, definitely can't take up arms). The whole topic makes me a bit sick to my stomach, but I can't say I like being of different citizenship than the rest of my family either.

Now, back to Minne*sota, where we got snow again today after a week's steady thaw. Very depressing. I want to peek under the mulch and I can't even clean up dog shit back there.

I think I've mentioned this before, but breakfast is an extravagant affair around here, at least when J is home. I am usually getting ready for work in the morning, leaving Daddy in charge of breakfast. He cooks any combination of waffles, pancakes, French toast, scrambled eggs, and hot cereal (the good, non-instant kind). On Saturday mornings, O has been known to tell me that Daddies cook breakfast, not Mamas. As you can see, they've gotten quite adept at helping. They can both crack an egg fairly competently, and they love to mix and stir. They're not shown here, but they own two aprons apiece, and wear them every day, so they can grow up to be like Daddies. I love J's approach sometimes - why give them cold cereal then set up an elaborate craft project when you can make breakfast into a craft project and get a really good breakfast out of the deal?

Visiting the coop. The boys still talk about Fanny (who is going into the soup pot a week from Wednesday, when my SIL comes over to help and brings her fabulous chicken noodle soup recipe.) Clara is doing fine, and seems to be at the top of the pecking order all of a sudden. She's docile enough that even the boys can hold her. You can see below that N is spreading scratch, a mix of grains that keeps the girls busy digging since they can't run around much at the moment.

O showing off a watercolor masterpiece. In addition to painting and drawing (which he loves, but only at home) O is really into memorizing all of a sudden. He can say the words to whole nursery rhymes, and then take a little bow. You can't always understand him, though.

Bath-time is a rarer event around here than it used to be, as it gets them kind of riled up before bed now and finding another time of day to do it never seems to work, but it is still a lot of fun. I'm sure that come summer, we'll have to go back to daily baths, but then they should be able to get their wiggles out in the park and not in the tub (and all over my lap as I dare pull the plug).

They were so muddy after this outing that I had to pull their snowpants off before I could let them into the house. We've been talking a lot about how when it's warmer, we won't wear jackets outside, and we'll wear sandals. N is very excited to wear sandals. The other day O said, "and when it's really, really warm, we'll go naked!" Umm, not quite (at least not in the U.S. --Europe is quite a bit mellower about these things).

N is SO in love with the cat. He still gets too excited around the animals and bugs them a bit much, but he's starting to earn more and more moments like this with Orbit.

O was sick and had a high fever a few weeks ago (look at those cheeks and that ear!), and N doted on him. He was so cute--bringing him a bunny and letting him choose which one, asking me if O needed water or a snack, finally just giving him kisses on the head. I let them have fruit juice lollipops when they have coughs, because it's the closest safe thing to a cough drop I can give them.

A couple of days later, O was all better, and it was back to this:

As N would say to everyone under the sun plus his uncle:

GOOD BYE!!!!!!

(Oh, and by the way - that last photo of O was NOT of O's middle finger. It had not even occurred to me that it could look like it was! It was his pointer.)

and now I will dance

If one word could be used to describe how most people would see O, it would be “jolly”. As his parents, we are also privy to a lot of dramatic wailing from this particular boy, but jolly is a good word to describe him a blessedly large majority of the time.

Yesterday I took my jolly good fellow to his 3-year well child visit. Our pediatrician is a wonderfully comforting and knowledgeable woman that is likely already eligible for retirement. She and her patients benefit greatly from her commitment to reading the latest research balanced with by many decades of experience. As the parent, I am so grateful that she is willing to explain her reasoning for various recommendations and leave the final choices up to us.

At the beginning of the appointment, Dr. M  took out a box of blocks and pulled out four and lined them up. He identified all the colors, the shape of the blocks, and counted them for her, pointing out that there were no pink or brown blocks, but that the windowsill was brown and the plastic coating on her stethoscope was pink. She asked him to make a tower, and he said, “I need some more, please”. He pulled four more out of the box, made two towers of four, and pulled out a rectangle and made a bridge across the top. Then he said, “You should not go through this tunnel, Dr. M, because you will bump your head!”. She laughed again, and said that in all her years of doing this little test with 3 year olds, that was a new one. The boys have lots of practice with blocks!

After she did all the usual tooth-counting (19 out of 20 are in), tummy-poking, and ear-peeking, we talked about the asthma. Dr. M was more reassuring about O’s asthma than I expected given his troubles this winter. She agreed with the doc we saw a few weeks ago that his asthma is officially “severe”, but also said that she thought it most likely that the severity will improve to moderate or even mild over the next couple of years. He needs to be on preventative meds until at least a year from this coming May, and we’ll need to work out how to limit his cold-air exposure when he starts preschool (it’s a good thing we didn’t go with the nature-center based preschool we looked at, because they go out for an hour every day unless it’s dangerously cold, and poor O would have had to stay inside an awful lot). After going on preventative medication, he’s gotten through the winter with no more prednisone and stayed out of the hospital, which is wonderful. He has a cold and cough now, and she said his lungs sounded great. Now that he’s three, he can take a chewable tablet, so we’re switching his meds to a non-nebulizer kind. He’ll still use the neb for when he has colds or other exacerbations, but he won’t need the 2x daily 10 minute treatments anymore, which is nice. That actually wasn’t as bad as you’d think – he was very good about it, and it meant that we got in an extra 20 minutes or so of reading with both boys every day. They beg for books often enough anyway that we should be able to stay in the habit, and there’s also bedtime and naptime.

The switch in meds means that we most likely won’t have to lug the neb to Europe, which I was concerned about. We have an inhaler to try with albuterol (the med for acute asthma) the next time he gets a cold, and if that goes well, he should be OK with no nebulizer for the trip. If he’s not quite ready to use an inhaler and mask, we’ll get a special order to rent a battery-powered nebulizer.

During the appointment, O, in a t-shirt and underpants, was asked to hop across the room. His answer?

“I would prefer to gallop, Dr. M.”

She laughed, and he did. And then he said, “And now I will dance.” And he did.

grabby

My camera-to-computer cord is missing. Again. The last person I saw with it was O, while I was on the phone last week and didn’t have much time to monitor whether he minded me when I told him to go put that back.

O has always been one of those kids who is into everything. Even when he was just barely standing unassisted he was finding keys and trying to stick them into locks, putting small toys into the heating grates, reaching waaaaay under the couch for some tiny forgotten choking hazard. I suspect that he has a bit of an engineer in him, wanting to understand how things are put together so that someday he might be able to put them together himself instead of just take them apart. I see much evidence in this with his current Lego fascination, and I think he’ll be very happy when his rather good fine-motor skills start to catch up to his vision. One of his quirks is the habit he has of moving objects to unknown-except-to-him locations, and while occasionally entertaining, it more often drives us a bit nuts. He’s been doing this since he could crawl. I find my toothbrush in a kitchen drawer, my underwear in the bathtub and a bra around his neck (the drawer is in the hallway next to the bathroom), and my keys in my shoes. We lose important items for days at a time until O wanders into the room with whatever was missing, oddly mute when we ask him from where it was retrieved.

N, for his part, is more likely to grab things from high places simply for the feat of figuring out to get to them. He moves along the kitchen counters on his tippy-toes, craning his neck for something interesting. If he knows we’re watching, he’ll refrain from actually grabbing (“I’m not being grabby, Mama, I’m not!”), but instead request something or make some justification for why he needs it. He’s very aware of what he needs permission to do, and while he crosses that line at times, he’s more likely by now to say, “may I” and request things verbally, though sometimes with a hand already reaching towards what he would like to have in his possession. I was seriously trying to get used to the idea that we might be facing a childhood of children that need very close supervision, but these days, I am more likely to know where my toothbrush is, and less likely to find boys on top of the kitchen table or destroying something than was the case of few months ago, and this is a relief.

Still, there are exceptions. Yesterday, I was looking all over for a hairbrush or a comb. O asked what I was doing. I told him, and as N wandered by, he said, “You could take a comb from a chicken, Mama!” They both giggled for a long while at that one, and even harder when I asked which chicken I should hold upside down to comb my hair with. Later, I found the hairbrush in one of my boots.

Both boys are doing very well. They have been a lot more fun to live with lately, after a couple of months where both J and I were regularly having some pretty frustrated days with both of them. They love to draw, craft, and watercolor right now, but their very favorite thing seems to be talking. Rhyming, singing, describing, arguing, yelling, whispering, talking, talking, talking. In two weeks, I will take off for a weekend solitary retreat like I did last year. While I truly love to hear my boys explore language and all its joys and particulars, the silence will be welcome.

O has had a bad cold that started with a high fever, but is slogging fairly happily through it. I did get some extremely unwelcome news yesterday: It turns out that we are on the waiting list at our chosen preschool after all, though we are at the very top 1 and 2 slots. We’d received some verbal reassurance last month that we were “in”, but as it turns out, there were an unprecedented amount of returning families that wanted 5 days for next year. The coordinator was extremely apologetic, and said there is hope, but it means that our fear has come true: we may not know what the situation is until the end of the summer.  It is possible that we may not get in at all, or that only one will, which essentially means neither. We have a call in to look at one more not-so-in-demand school, but most of the deadlines for any schools have passed, and I just don’t know what we’ll do if we don’t get in anywhere. For previously stated reasons, I think that two years of preschool would be a good thing for our boys, both as twins and as individuals. I am a little like N in not liking change and uncertainty, so this is all just a little bit torturous.

 

love and loss

I wrote the following post over a couple of days, before I received some terribly sad news today. When I got home from work this afternoon, I opened my in-box to find an e-mail from our pastor to the whole congregation. A long-time member of our small church was struck by a car and killed as he was walking from his hotel to his mom's house in Fargo, where he had been visiting with his family to be with his mom after his Dad's own untimely and unexpected death. Two untimely deaths in one family in a single week, and the loss of two great men. It is just so unbelievably sad, I can't seem to wrap my head around it; I just kept wishing I could shut the computer and start over and have that terrible message not be there. Our pastor is on her way to be with the family. I am also a bit concerned for her, as she herself lost three members of her family when a boat capsized less than 2 years ago. This must bring an awful lot of very difficult memories back for her. The world doesn't seem to make a whole lot of sense today. Since this post has a lot in it about how much I love my kids, I suppose it isn't inappropriate to post. Just know that I also dearly love my husband and the rest of my family, and that I'm grateful for every day they are a part of my life.

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Oh, I am so in love with my kids right now. They are an awfully big handful at times, maddening even, but my goodness, are they sweet, and the conversations they have with us and with each other just kill me. They are kind of obsessed with rhyming right now, and poems are a favorite. They nonsense rhyme everything, and when they hit upon a real rhyme of two actual words, they are delighted with themselves. We are one language-obsessed family, it would seem. Besides that, what I especially love lately is watching these little glimpses of maturity start to emerge. They can be very polite sometimes, with us and with strangers, and I can’t help but think that this unprompted politeness might become more frequent in the future. Whether it was the 15^th or the 16^th million reminder that did it, we’ll never know, and maybe it’s fleeting, but whatever it is, it’s wonderful and an added reinforcement to our efforts to teach them some manners. Sometimes a stern “no tantrums!” while looking a boy in the eye actually works, before I lead him to the nursery and tell him to have it there or not at all. And the sweetness—these little glimpses of emerging empathy that catch me by surprise and make me swoon with a mixture of pride and relief. I hadn’t realized what a joy this would be—to see your extremely self-focused two-year-old suddenly be able to put himself in another’s shoes a little. After a few years of intense one-way empathy, it is like water in the desert to receive an “it’s OK, mama, let me kiss it for you” after stubbing your toe.

This age, combined with certain issues of temperament, definitely has its difficulties, and I’m pretty darn sure they’re not going to magically go away when they turn 3 in a few weeks. As I was reminded yesterday, when we had to swim in a different pool because the leisure pool at the Y was unexpectedly closed, the boys are fairly good at remembering the rules and sticking to them, but they still lack the ability to reliably generalize a set of rules from one situation to another. At this age, it’s still more about rule-following than actual good judgment. They know, for instance, that they can’t climb in and out of the leisure pool or run on their way into it, but in the new setting, it was like starting all over. It’s easy to forget that and get into the trap of assuming that they should just “get it” and behave in a new situation without our outlining our expectations. Our Early Childhood teacher says that this is a real benefit of the maturing three-year-old, having that ability to generalize from one place to another better. I can’t wait. Hopefully the boys will be a bit further along in this a few months from now when we take them to the Netherlands. .

I think O is really only starting to hit the tantrum phase, and my goodness, can he pull out all the stops sometimes. He had a tantrum last week that left him hoarse for the whole next day. We ignore him completely when he does this, since his tantrums are pretty clearly of the attention-seeking, I waaaaaan’t something sort, and I’m pretty sure that’s helping keep his fits to a minimum, as he’ll often stop when he realizes we’re not paying any attention to his drama. Nonetheless, they’re still happening some no matter what we do or don’t do. This may get better once he’s better able to manage getting through the day without a nap. When he’s better rested, he’s really very charming, all smiles with a sing-songy way of talking that cracks me up constantly. O loves structured group activities, the very thing that tends to be hard for N, and for this reason, we’ve enrolled just him in a tumbling class at our neighborhood rec center on Mondays. He loves it, and hams it up for the whole class with his enthusiastic dancing and competent somersaults. It is such a joy to watch him thrive in a setting like this when he used to have a hard time with gross motor stuff before going on preventative asthma medication. Now he’s not only running well, he’s actually quite good at the stuff they do in class. J and I take turns taking him, and get to then spend some time alone with once boy each week.

N, for his part has an intense need for control that isn’t all part of being two – by now it’s pretty obvious that this is a part of his temperament. He really doesn’t like change or uncertainty, and he deals with that by becoming rigid and resisting transitions. This tendency isn’t always obvious while he’s in the midst of whatever new or different thing, but he tends to fall apart later. At times, this can be very challenging to deal with for both J and I, but we are learning. We’ve been even more consistent with him—this is just absolutely essential with N—and trying to make sure that we don’t throw too much new stuff at him at once. With N, a new person and a new place would be a double whammy that’s guaranteed to leave him upset and difficult to manage, so we would never, for instance, have a babysitter take him someplace he’s never been before. As he gets older, we’ll do our best to help him learn some strategies to deal with change and transitions, and even now, we try to get him to stretch his comfort level and learn to become more flexible. I predict that preschool may be a rocky adjustment for him at first, but the small, nurturing place we’ve selected should be a help with this too. I think that having two full years of preschool will be good for him in learning to better handle transitions and change within a group before the demands of kindergarten.

N also has so many strengths—he’s very imaginative, expresses himself well and clearly, and learns easily. If he’s in his element, he’s generally a delight. He has a tendency to overly direct his brother, and O isn’t putting up with much of that right now. O put up with N’s bossiness without much complaint for months, so this has been a bit of a blow to N’s sense of how things ought to be between them. Sometimes he’s using some great language to try to negotiate with O, and it’s a lot of fun to watch them try to figure it out. He’ll say “O, maybe I will have that in a minute, OK?” About 5 seconds will go by, and then N will say, “O: It is almost a minute, I think.”  Two more seconds go by.  “OK, it is a minute, so I need that now, please.”  O usually relents, but sometimes he runs away. When they fight, it usually amounts to some verbal sparring (and O tends to know exactly how to get N going, telling N to his horror for instance, that he not only wants the yoghurt in N’s bowl, but also the yoghurt in his tummy that N already ate!) or some pulling at a toy they can’t figure out how to share. They thankfully don’t get terribly physical with each other, and their motivation to get along and play together is larger than their frustrations with each other by a long mile. What’s changed recently is that they’re able to really hurt each other’s feelings. Along with this new skill is a realization that they don’t really want to hurt each other’s feelings—part of that emerging empathy—and sometimes they’re very sweet in trying to make things right with each other. The other day, they spent about ten minutes just cuddling together on the couch, giggling and hugging.

One area where our boys are very different is in how they give and prefer to receive affection. I remarked to J the other day that O seems to need as much affection as he demands and N seems to need as much as he puts up with. O demands and gives a lot of affection. I don’t mind that at all—it’s pretty easy to cuddle O whenever he asks for it, and he’s a sweet little hugger and kisser. He’s not usually whiny about it. N’s needs are a little harder to meet. I know instinctively that N needs lots of hugs and reassurance too, but N’s intense need for control often trumps his drive to ask for affection. I’ve always been fairly conscious of this with him, making sure we cuddle when we read books, that I pick him up for hugs and kisses, or rub his shoulders when I talk to him. If I don’t do those things, it shows – he starts pushing at me with his head, or getting wild and uncooperative. Finally, though, at almost-three, he seems to be maturing enough to ask to have his needs met when he wants affection, and this is a bit of a relief. When I drop him off at MOPS (which isn’t easy for him because it’s two whole hours only every other week, not quite often enough for him to really get comfortable with the routine), he tells me he needs two hugs and a kiss, and that the second hug should be a really, really big one. No problem—I am so proud of him when he takes care of himself in this way instead of just getting tense and falling apart later.

Every night now at bedtime, he says quietly, “rock me a little minute”, and we rock in the rocker in his room for a few minutes while I sing him a hymn or two. To be able to do this, I put N in his room after story-time and tell him I’ll be right back, go upstairs to put O down, and then come back onto N’s room, at which point he’s usually sitting on the edge of his bed waiting, sitting on his hands with his little legs swinging back and forth. This time together is so special for both of us, his whole long-limbed body draping over me as I sing to him, both of us relaxing at the end of whatever kind of day we’ve had. The boys  are getting so big, barely both fitting into my lap together at story time, me having to regularly remind them to move their heads further apart so I can actually see the book. These might be the last months I ever rock a child of my own at bedtime, and I’m happy to oblige. Since he rarely naps now, O has been asleep within minutes of his early bedtime, but he just wants an “extra-long-big hug” while sitting on my lap, his head on my shoulder, arms around my neck. Somehow, the time of day that was very difficult a couple of months ago (and still often is, until we get everyone into pj’s) has become one of the best parts of my day.

Since the boys were about 18 months old, I’ve said the same thing to them as they clamber up onto a knee each, ready to listen to the 3 or 4 stories and several poems we read together before bedtime each night. I say “this is the favorite part of my day, sitting here with my boys”. They love hearing it, and wait for me to say it or remind me if I forget. Last night, as I was rocking N, he said, “this is the favorite part of my day, rocking here with my mama” and then giggled at his own cleverness. My heart melted into a puddle on the floor, and I’ve been trying to put it back where it belongs ever since.

 

sealed lips

This afternoon, I was searching for my trusty lip balm, and couldn't find it. I resorted to some lipstick for my chapped lips, and both boys followed me into the bathroom as I leaned into the mirror to apply it. Since my applying lipstick (or even lip balm) doesn't happen with any regularity, O was a bit confused. He said, "Mama is putting a pink glue stick on her lips!" N responded with: "Now she will be silent".

foxes, and puzzles, and trains, oh my!

On the first warm day in ages that we haven't had a pollution advisory, I took the boys to our favorite nearby Nature Center. We've had a lot of pollution advisories here lately, mainly because there's so much snow on the ground, and when the temperature gets above the freezing point it creates a lot of evaporation that keeps the pollution stuck in the air if there isn't a lot of wind. Unfortunately, O's asthma diagnosis has been down-graded to "severe", and that also means that he's really affected by the pollution. So for the last month, it's been either too cold to go out, or too polluted. The boys were kind of unsure what to do outside after nearly a month of going only to and from the car, but they soon got into it, and walked about half a mile before getting back into the jogging stroller.

I don't have any pictures of it, but a really kind woman stopped by and talked with us and pointed out different animal tracks to the boys. They were really excited about this, especially the fox track. They're still talking about it.

Having a hearty snack in the stroller after their walk. I was worn out myself after our walk - it's not easy pushing 70 pounds plus the weight of the stroller in the snow, even in a jogger.

We warmed up in the interpretive center. The only not-so-great part about that was N running into the men's room, and me having to try to figure out how to retrieve him. I was really nervous about going in there and having some guy be standing at the urinal. He did eventually come out when I yelled for him, and when he had a time-out underneath a case of stuffed birds, he said "Mama does not have permission to go in that bathroom. Those birdies say I didn't make a good choice to go in there. "

The boys are still really, really into puzzles, and the other day they took it to a new level by figuring out how to do a fair bit of the ABC train puzzle on their own. Sometimes O sang the ABC song to figure out the next letter to find--not an error-proof method quite yet-- and N tended to look more at the box, but it was really amazing to see them trying to figure it out. There's some confusion about the uppercase and lowercase letters sometimes, but they know most of them pretty well, and they're starting to figure out a few of the sounds. Yesterday, O said "M is for Mama, and moose, and mouse!" Interestingly, N knew all of them by the time he turned 2, then forgot many of them due to general disinterest for about 6 months, and now knows most of them again. They both know all their colors really well, and can count a little, but are not very interested in numbers right now. I don't know if they can recognize any of them except 2 and 3. They are able to group by three or four, though - as in, they can give you between 1 and 4 blocks if you ask for an amount of 4 or under.

We went to our favorite train store on Saturday, followed by Chinese food at the restaurant next door.

N was kind of getting pushed around by a little boy of about 4, and he said "excuse me, please". The boy said "you don't say that to kids, just grown-ups!" I later told him quietly that this is not actually the case!

N is learning to view the merchandise with his hands behind his back. This was a cardinal rule when I was growing up, mostly because my mother had a tendency to frequent antiques stores. I distinctly remember informing my mother that I was old enough to be allowed access to my own hands in a store.

The boys were great in the restaurant - here O was playing with his reusable Tho*mas the Train sticker kit. I cannot believe how much mileage we've gotten out of this little kit. It has two picture boards and re-positionable stickers, and the boys play with it in church and whenever we have to wait anywhere for a long time. They have all kinds of conversations about what's going on in the picture.

We ordered enough for 8 people somehow, and I didn't have to cook the following night either. Heaven!

By the way: O tested "equivocal" for peanuts at age one (when both boys were also tested for celiac disease, which I and my mother have), and so we've been holding off on peanuts. The AAP recently changed its recommendations about holding off on potentially allergenic foods, so now that O is well and while J and I were both home in case anything went wrong, we tried peanuts on both boys today. No symptoms of any kind. I'm so relieved about this, because peanuts are a nasty, dangerous allergy, and it can really limit where you can go and what you can do with your kids. So, no celiac, and no peanut allergies, and while N was indifferent, O seemed to love a good old peanut butter sandwich.

better

Lately, I never seem to know what kind of a day I’m going to have. We’ve had a 3 week snot-fest around here – the kind where nobody knows anymore how many colds that involved exactly and when one ended and another started. At least 2 in succession, maybe three. So one day we have the cranky-cranky, the meltdowns and the whining, but another day the boys are utterly charming, reasonably cooperative, and My. God. they are amazing and wonderful and why can’t I just be home with them all the time? (Note to self: while I often feel that way when I’m leaving for work, I rarely feel that way on Sunday evening after I’ve had them to all to myself for most of the weekend.)

We’ve been spending lots of time swimming at the wonderful YWCA that’s about a mile and a half from our house. They have a warm zero-depth entry pool, and the boys are in no place happier than they are in that water. They’ve gotten really comfortable in it, belly-flopping, going down the slide, rolling around in the fountains and the shallow end pretending to swim. N even goes totally underwater. O likes to walk as deep as he can so that only his mouth and nostrils still stick out of the water, and he freaks out the life guard by lying in the shallow part flat on his back making “water angels”. I think that next year we’ll do swimming lessons in the winter. Or rather, they’ll do swimming lessons, and I’ll sit in the viewing area with a book. The Y isn’t cheap, but it’s worth it to get through our long winters here. We go entirely for the pool and the occasional kiddie movement class, and I quit every Spring and rejoin in the late Fall. While there, we run into lots of people we know, from church and from the neighborhood, from our Early Childhood classes. The Y is one of the places that make me glad to live in this city, and glad to be part of this neighborhood.

The first summer with the boys, I spent hours and hours walking with them in the stroller, trying to get them to sleep at the same time so I could get a mental, if not physical break. It worked, actually – we were remarkably successful at getting them on a nap routine that worked well for both of them, and from about 4.5 months on, they did two two-hour naps per day at the same time, in their cribs. All those walking hours were kind of lonely, but the brightest spots were watching what everyone was doing in their gardens, and the places we could stop and visit. There weren’t many. We have a neighborhood coffee shop with a play area that has always been a good destination for brief visits. It closed over the holidays after a break-in and an armed robbery, but just re-opened. We have a wonderful; bakery in the neighborhood that is run by a real pastry chef, and while I can’t eat the bread, I love to stop in and buy some for J and smell all the good smells. We had, back then, a library that was a less than 10-minute walk from our house, the smallest library in the city. I used to wrangle the Per Perego with its two car seats attached through the doors and pray that they’d stay asleep, moving the stroller back and forth with one hand as I loaded up the other arm. Often, I just picked up books that I’d requested online. Because actually staying to browse was so challenging, I checked out and requested items liberally, often returning half or more of them unread. The staff all knew me by name.

Last year that library closed due to budget cuts. A sizable minority of the library board wanted to close it and two other libraries permanently in order to focus limited resources on bigger libraries. They wanted to take more of a regional approach, with the bigger libraries being open more hours and having more resources and amenities. It made sense on paper, and there wasn’t a funding solution in sight. There was an outcry though, from neighborhood residents, from people like me, who valued the neighborhood connection, where people walk to their libraries, see their neighbors, and know the staff by name. We didn’t need all our libraries to feel like B*rnes and N*bles, all tricked out with coffee shops and electronic services. We wanted to keep our 80-year-old neighborhood one-room library, full of teens getting tutored, little kids with their parents, and elderly residents sitting and reading the newspapers and magazines their fixed incomes don’t allow for. We want to be able to request books online and pick them up right in our neighborhood. We want to be able to send our older elementary kids to the library with the dog, to be able to tie the dog outside, and select books to their hearts desires. That library was one of the things that made me fall in love with our modest little 1920’s neighborhood. I wasn’t able to attend the candlelight vigil that happened the night of the closing, but I was certainly there in spirit.

All during the last year, I remained hopeful, tried to keep up with the various proposals to close or reopen the libraries, and since the boys were younger toddlers during that time, libraries weren’t the easiest place to take them anyway. We have an innovative mayor and a decent city council, and while the library was shuttered for a year, a solution was eventually worked out. The city system was stabilized by merging it with the county system, and this past week, all three libraries reopened, with expanded hours. We now have our little neighborhood library back, as well as a larger, better equipped branch a light rail stop away should we desire its resources. I can’t think of anything you could have brought to our neighborhood that would have made me happier.

This past Saturday was one of those mornings I’d like to burn into my brain for those awful days when parenting seems impossibly difficult. It was finally warm, and we took our time getting ready. The boys were cheerful, and funny, the three of us cracking each other up. We took the double jogger to the library, and when we went in, Lisa, the librarian, said “it’s N and O!” She remembered them from when J took them on re-opening day. The boys are now much more manageable in such a space, and they played and sat and “read” and picked out books happily. We stayed for over an hour, and left with a bagful of kids books in the bottom of the stroller. After that, we went down the street to the bakery, and the boys sat at the window and shared a muffin and I had a cup of tea. We ran into more neighbors, and my ever gregarious N introduced himself to several people. Both boys had all kinds of commentary on the people and cars going by. We went home with the boys taking turns walking along the stroller, and spent another hour having lunch and reading library books before they took a nap.

A simple, peaceful morning like that is better than all I could ever have hoped for when I wanted to become a mother.

 

finger(lings)

Tonight, we ate potatoes, green beans, and salmon for dinner, and as I loaded up everyone's plates, I mentioned that these were "finge*rling potatoes". N looked up at me with his big blue eyes wide open and a scared look on his face. He said, "These are somebody's fingers?"

I was able to reassure him, but he insisted on picking off the skins, and he looked nervous again when I referred to them as skins. I talked about different vegetables having skins and said "The skins taste good, and they're healthy". N tried them and said, "Actually*, they taste like very fancy paper!"

O said, "They taste like socks."

*his latest favorite turn of phrase, along with "Oh! But I thought....." and "I never seen that before!"