Friday, January 23, 2009

Wish I'd been there...

Check out this amazingly cool picture. Zoom in and scroll around till your heart's content. I would have loved to have experienced firsthand all the joy, thrill, and hope that must have been flooding Washington for the inauguration. Instead, I had to settle for watching it at home by myself. Mizz chose to play in his room and D was sleeping. Still, Mizz came down and sat on my lap for Obama's swearing in. Even though he may not remember that particular moment, I am very glad that his first remembered president will be Obama.

Thursday, January 22, 2009

Mr. Cranky Pants


For the record, I am referring to D this time. In the last month, since he has gotten super mobile, D has decided that he would prefer to not sit still for diaper changes. Which is unfortunately timed with the fact that now that he is eating solid food, he needs a lot more diaper changes. Of the stinky kind. Of the kind that sometimes takes a good minute to neutralize. D is also not fond of getting dressed, gettng his face wiped, or getting strapped in or out of the car seat. Aside from these grave injustices though, he is one happy, relaxed baby.

My mind is reeling

Reeling to keep up with the whirring brain of my three year old. During "quiet time" today Mizz proceeded to put every toy, and I do mean every toy, into his bed. Picture a landfill of toys. It seems to be quite an impressive feat being that he is rather short and the pile is rather tall. Upon seeing his masterpiece, I cracked up and jokingly threw an errant shoe on top of the pile. Mizz immediately removed it and sternly told me that shoes and sandals belong on the floor because they are dirty. True enough. Pictures to follow.

Yesterday at the OMSI, while eating in the cafeteria, Mizz pointed to a black box on the way and asked what it was for. I replied my usual answer of "I have no idea", and after a moment of thought, he said maybe it was to put cups of pee in. It took me about 30 seconds to realize that he had compared the box to the cabinet in the bathroom at the doctor for urine samples and decided that they probably serve the same purpose. This is an example of what I was trying to get at the other day while talking to a friend. Mizz is very smart and continues to impress me and others with his knowlege of letters, math concepts, and building. Yet, just as often he blows me away with all that he doesn't know. It is pretty staggering and I would imagine why preschoolers are pretty cranky/obstinate a lot of the time. The world is still a pretty confusing place when you are only three years old.

Saturday, January 17, 2009

I'm stunned

Mizz just turned down the opportunity to help me a make a cake so he could keep checking out tools in the garage with Dave. Yep, that's right, Mizz gave up an opportunity to eat cake batter in exchange for some dusty safety goggles and nine hundred screwdrivers. I suppose there's still hope for D... Actually, it was pretty cute watching Mizz and Dave work on their project (a bunch of screws in a board). Mizz was taking it all very seriously. And really I am not surprised. This is the child that spends more time taking out and arranging crayons and markers than actually drawing with them. Mizz and I did have fun with a recent painting project though, paint apparently calls to him more than drawing implements.

Saturday, January 10, 2009

My little linguist

A recent conversation with Mizz while playing with stickers:

"Can you help get the onion out?"
"I can, but that's actually a coconut sweetie"
"Well, that's a coconut, but you can call it an onion if you want."

And then today:

"Are Steve and Ava coming?"
"That's Keith, Mizz"
"Yeah, you can call him Steve, but mostly it's Keith"

Note to self

Never, ever, ever, get pregnant again.

Reason #342

Dave and I have recently downgraded the dinners wars to a low level squirmish. After too many angry dinners, we have finally swallowed our egos and decided that we can not prove a point to the Mizz with loud, negative reactions to his increasingly bad behavior. At three years old, he is well aware that dumping milk, throwing waffles, and upending cereal bowls is not acceptable. So, we are taking the wind out of his sails, hopefully, by either ignoring or calmly redirecting him to another task. My fear is that since he is used to some serious reprimand, he will continue to raise the stakes. Which is what he did tonight by purposely dumping my glass of water AFTER Dave and I matter of factly dealt with his tossed pasta. Fortunately the chair caught my glass so there were no shards to deal with... I keep reminding myself that this is a phase, every other phase that I worried would never end did in fact end.

Reason #343

All this follows up all day trip to Corvallis today which was for the most part quite lovely. Once again though, I am reminded that just because kids FIT in a car, doesn't mean they should GO in a car. At least not for more than 20 minute increments. I am not sure who feels more caged, me or the Mizz. In any case we made two stops on the 80 mile trip going up and endured about 30 minute of crying/whining on the way back, but with no stops!!!

Wednesday, January 07, 2009

D turns 8 months!

D's eight month birthday is tomorrow and apparently he got the memo. Yesterday he cut his first tooth (why a little speck of white on his gum line is so adorable I don't know...), started eating food with gusto, and also began pulling himself upright to a standing position on Mizz's train table. He is started to crawl on all fours the majority of time and is (knock on wood) sleeping really well. All the "firsts" have been just as thrilling this time around, in fact maybe even more so, since they weren't proceeded by a whole lot of questions about the whens and hows.

Sunday, January 04, 2009

Mizz gets philosophical

The other day Mizz asked where he was before he was in my tummy.   

Yet another post about slow blogging

I had to laugh when I started reading all the recent articles and postings about the new movement in the blogosphere of slow blogging.  Besides the obvious joke that I may have invented it, I think it is a fascinating indication of the pace of communication in our society. Some people claim that slow blogging is a backlash against the new faster ways of communicating every one's thoughts, opinions, and general happenings.  I suppose these blogging purists think that crafting a well thought out blog post weekly is a more meaningful and lasting form of communication.  I also suspect though, that some of those that have joined the slow blogging movement may be simply have gotten busy, stressed by the constant need to produce, and/or sucked into the highly addiction time suck known as Facebook and Twitter.  Who has time to write when you can get minute by minute updates about 300 of your closest friends?   

I actually started this post because I keep finding that blogging is too slow a format for what I intended it to be--a record of Mizz' and now D's  development.   Mizz is constantly making so many connections about how the world works --some of which are even accurate!   Almost every hour something absolutely hilarious or breathtakingly innocent pops out of his mouth and I want to remember it forever.   I think I am going to have to resort to the very low tech method of writing these quotes down on slips of paper and collecting them in a box--a method my former boss used while her daughters were growing up thirty years ago.

D Money Sleeps

D slept fourteen hours last night. And that, my friends, was after four long hours of napping during the day. I can't believe I waited this long to get this kid to bed on his own. I have spent weeks dreading the sleep training process (which for the uninitiated means putting your kid in bed and letting them cry until they fall asleep). At least that's the version that we use.   Somewhere in all that crying they learn how to soothe themselves, which comes in handy for, um, the rest of their lives.  D cried for 30 minutes at his morning nap, 20 minutes for the afternoon, and 7 minutes before bedtime.  That might sound like a like of crying, but to put in in perspective, D will often spent 10-15 minutes crying/protesting while being rocked by Dave or one of his teachers.  So, at this point, we are doing alright in the sleep department.   As for eating, we have had a modicum of success with bananas in various states.  But really, D shows very little interest in eating anything other than milky, milky, milk.  Sigh.   It would be great if at least one of my kids ate food.   D's area of expertise continues to be his gross motor skills.  In two days he has gone from army crawling to crawling more and more on his hands and knees.   He is also bound and determined to get over most obstacles in his way and will pull up/drag himself pretty much anything.   So we will lower the crib to its lowest setting today so we don't have any early escape acts.   This also means that most of Mizz's toys are now within reach of Dillzilla.   I predict some serious rumbles soon around Mizz's train set ups.  Mizz and I just had a talk (as D was rearranging track) about how babies like to grab everything because they are so curious.  Mizz thought about it for awhile and then asked if I could put D to sleep.  

Thursday, January 01, 2009

On a lighter note...

Mizz and D reaped the benefits of being the products of an interfaith marriage and celebrated Chanukah and Christmas to the fullest extent of the law. For the first time, we introduced the notion that some people only celebrate Christmas and some people only celebrate Chanukah. We still need to do a little work, because on the last night of Chanukah, he asked "Can we open more presents?" and then proceded to run to the Christmas tree to see if any more presents had magically appeared. The big present from Mom and Dad was a kid tough digital camera. He has had a great time taking pictures with it and then printing them to add to his portfolio. The image quality isn't top notch, but then again neither is his framing or subject matter sometimes. Dave and I finally got with the program and got ourselves a rechargeable battery system after he went through a set in one day. The other big hits recently were not one but two cranes for this increasingly more complicated train set ups. I don't think I am exaggerating when I say that his ability to design train tracks has surpassed mine, although I can still troubleshoot better than him. He is also in love with his new Fisher Price Computer Cool School. He spent an hour and a half today drawing, playing math games, and tracing letters. It appears to be a very sweet design although the math game is a little too slow for me. D is pretty taken with everything he can get his hands on, and since he is a second child, that means pretty much everything. A few days ago, he managed to crawl through the exercise bike and rocking chair and wrap himself up in a cord in two split seconds. Needless to say I have made arrangements to procure a Johnny Jumper so D the crawler doesn't get into too much trouble.

Happy New Year?

Like most folks that I talk to, I am ready to say goodbye to 2008 and am cautiously optimistic that things will be better in 2009. I realize that the changes I am hoping for won't come easy, but they are certainly going to be more likely as of January 20th. Still, there is no denying the pit of worry caused by happenings in Gaza, bombs and bomb threats in the Portland area, and the continued fallout from the economy. In fact, I can't help but connect them together (admittedly somewhat tenuously) because as the economy worsens and the safety nets fray, I am guessing that there will be more violent and desperate acts everywhere. I hope that I am worrying too much (it won't be the first time) and that the changing economy will help America reprioritize and redefine how it does business and takes care of its people.