Joshua's Spot

Josh discovers trains

On Sunday, taking advantage of a brief interlude of sunshine in the midst of a couple solid weeks of rain, we joined Liz and Steve and Bela and Baby Julien on an expedition to the Railroad Park in Medford.

This, as it turns out, was a Great Idea.

Josh was so entranced by all the trains - big trains, little trains, medium-sized model trains just big enough for little kids to ride on, huge full-sized trains that you could climb up into - that he went into Super-Intense mode; you know, the one where he doesn't speak, he doesn't listen, he doesn't smile or laugh or even blink, he just watches his Item of Interest with such focus that his whole world narrows down to that one thing. He absorbed every moment of it, from the two rides around the park on the trains to watching the model train go around and around the hyper-detailed diorama that the train nuts had built for it. (Apparently there are 5 different train-related clubs that call the Railroad Park home, each focused on a different scale of train model or some other area of interest.)

To see a taste of our day at the park, check out the web gallery here.

That was yesterday - today, we're back to Real Life (TM), in the form of rain, Felicia at work and on call, and all us boys hanging out together at the house. Josh has been drawing, building with blocks, playing with PlayDoh, watching Toy Story 2, eating snacks, and so forth, all the while giving me a running commentary on what he's up to and occasionally asking me to help him with something. Baby Ben, meanwhile, has been... well, mostly sleeping. He's had several days in a row with little or no sleep during the day, so I guess he's set out to make up for that sleep deficit today.

I'm not complaining. The more boys sleeping, the better, as far as I'm concerned...

Trying to gain potty training traction

The battle has been joined. The Battle of the Diaper Bulge, that is.

Actually, it started several months ago, but with more of a whimper than a bang. See, rumor has it that some people have kids who basically potty train themselves. They hate having a dirty diaper, watch their parents going potty on the toilet, get the idea, and by, like, 18 months, they're basically peeing and pooping in the big leagues. I've even heard tall tales about parents who just let their kids run around naked for a long weekend, and by the end of it, they throw away all their diapers and they're done, period. (I hate to think of what their house looked like - or, more to the point, smelled like - in the interim, but that's beside the point.)

The point is: That's not our Boo.

No, on the contrary, Josh can be walking around for hours with a diaper so full of pee that it drags around his ankles, and he won't care until he trips over it trying to jump off something. Until recently, he would actually fight to hold onto the poopies in his diaper, as though they were something precious and sacred that you'd have to be a heathen to try to take away from him (if memory serves, Freud had something to say about that, but my IQ has dropped too far for me to remember what). He showed no interest in the potty, except as a cool way to make paper (of all kinds) magically disappear. He'd calmly observe as friends his age used the potty, without effect - reasonably enough in Bela's case, since she's been pretty hit-or-miss too, but you'd have thought he would be impressed with Becka, given that she's one of those prodigies who was entirely potty-trained long before her second birthday (and can probably pee on a 1-inch target from 20 yards, blindfolded, knowing Becka - this is the child who was walking at 9 months and talking in complete sentences at little over a year, after all).

But no.

Grandma Kay was supposed to take this on as Her Project while she was here, and to her credit, she came prepared. She figured out the perfect incentive, and came loaded for bear, with about 75 dozen 5-packs of MatchBox cars sent ahead in a shipping container, as many as possible of them (you guessed it) orange. She had us buy pull-ups, she bought books, she inspected our training potty setup upon arrival... I mean, she was a pro. She was da man. She had it down.

One problem: she didn't clear her plan with Josh, first.

Long story short: Josh made one or two pee-pees in the potty, maybe a poop or two, and otherwise was uninterested and remained perfectly happy to load up his diapers to the breaking point without warning, utterly indifferent to the proper uses and benefits of modern sanitation. Given that he's now in Size 5 diapers, and that there really isn't a practical "size 6" without moving on to Depends, it was starting to look a little alarming there.

Plus, he still got all the cars as a reward, which we now have to find a way to garage. Have you ever tried to figure out how to safely stash away 6,213 MatchBox cars in the average American home? Without taking out a second mortgage?

A fair amount of sideline research told me that this isn't terribly unusual, and that there are a few reliable signs that you should look for that will tell you that your child is "ready" for potty training - doesn't like being in wet diapers, can warn you when he/she needs to make a poop or a pee, etc. Most of which Josh just didn't show. The research also said that it does more harm than good to force the issue if your child just isn't ready yet, so we just had to sit by and wait. And wait. And wait.

Well, he started showing an interest just about the time that GRANDMA AND POP-POP ABANDONED ME after getting him all interested in this whole potty-training thing, at which point I kind of sidelined the whole project, given that I had an even less potty-constrained child to deal with. For a month or so, we've only paid attention to Josh's potty training haphazardly, letting him go in the potty when it occurs to us and he tells us he wants to go in the potty, but otherwise letting it slide. (Though Felicia did order some special rewards for him, in the form of some custom-lettered all-orange M&Ms that say "Good Job Boo" on them - you can design your own here, if you have a similar project in mind and nothing better to spend your money on, especially given that moms and aunties alike will wind up poaching most of the damn things.)

Suddenly, though, he's started showing all of the signs at once. To the point where this morning, driving down the middle of the Grants Pass Parkway (a 5-lane road) on the way to gymnastics, he suddenly announced that he'd made a pee-pee and wanted to get a clean diaper - right there, right now, in the middle of the road. I managed to dodge that bullet, barely, and put off the diaper change until we got to gymnastics three minutes later (at which point I could dump the job off on Bubbe, bwaha!), and avoid dealing with any further big-boy bowel issues for another six hours, given that it was Bubbe Day.

But once Josh came home, we had an unprecedented series of Adventures in Bathroom-Going. He made his first-ever (as far as I know) combined poopy and pee-pee in the potty, shortly after dinner time. He did another poopy during bathtime - and, for a first, warned us first, so he could do it in the potty, instead of in the bath. Then he did another pee-pee later. Then, just now, shortly after I put him to bed, I heard him on the monitor, telling Boo Elephant that "I'd better put the pee-pee in the potty, I'll get an enemen" (M&M) - and, yes, he did another pee-pee in the potty, albeit a little one.

(And yes, he did get another enemen, his, letsee, tenth one today.)

Does this constitue critical mass?

On the downside, I am keenly reminded of our friends Meredith and Kelly, who summer before this one just passed, at our vacation on a little lake in New Hampshire, were at a point slightly more advanced than this in potty-training their then-3-year-old, Grace. Kelly spent an entire afternoon hauling Grace from the beach to the cabin (300 yards or so, each way) eight times within a two- or three-hour period when Grace kept telling him she had to make a poopy, with her failing to actually produce said poopy each time. Kelly finally (and rather dramatically, not surprisingly) gave up on the whole process, and left her to Meredith, who promptly took Grace back down to the beach... where she proceeded to poop in the sand.

(Yes, Mere and Kelly, we did notice your pain.)

For the record, I am not looking forward to the "potty emergencies" that strike in the middle of the checkout line at the grocery store, or when I'm stuck at a light in rush-hour traffic (such as we have in Grants Pass), or in the middle of dealing with some little-baby crisis with Ben. Nor am I yearning to clean up the inevitable accidents. But I suppose it's progress, of a sort. No one ever said parenting was glamorous, after all.

Well, except for Angelina and Brad, maybe. But then, I can't just hire an army of super-nannies, either. I am the super-nanny, God help me.

Fear of... fish??

It's more than a little bit belated, but I have to relate a story.

For quite a while before my parents' last visit, Josh, his Pop-Pop, and I were all increasingly eager for Pop-Pop to teach Josh how to fish. It's such a quintessential Midwestern/Smith/little-boy-and-grandpa thing to do, involving all kinds of things that we thought Josh would be soooo into, like digging around in the garden looking for worms, putting the worms into a can and putting the lid on, going down to the lake at the park, watching the bobber float in the water, catching fish... I mean, every part of that sounded absolutely designed to appeal to every last bit of Josh's very boyish personality.

Once Pop-Pop got here, the buildup lasted weeks, and went very well indeed. They went shopping together for just the right fishing pole and reel and bobber set and hooks, and Josh trotted around with it proudly for days. They dug worms together, which apparently wasn't entirely a success, since Josh (as I recall) was kind of tired and cranky at the time and wound up getting threatened with a time out because he wasn't doing what Pop-Pop asked him to do. (Pop-Pop, more than likely, was tired and cranky too, which might have contributed to the whole clash of wills problem, but I digress.) Going to the park with Grandma and Pop-Pop was, predictably, a huge hit as ideas go, and they had no trouble getting him down there.

Everything was apparently going just fine until, to everyone's shock, Pop-Pop actually caught a little tiny fish, in a pond that I had thought to be nothing but a snag-magnet with nothing scaly in it at all. At this point, the whole idyllic picture we all had in our minds of the grandpa-and-little-boy fishing trip shattered against the hard wall of Josh's... fear of fish.

It seems that Josh started crying hysterically and ran to Grandma, and wanted nothing more to do with Pop-Pop or fishing or fishing poles or anything else from that point on. Grandma had to keep holding him and comforting him while Pop-Pop freed the fish, put the gear away, and packed up to leave the park. And that was the end of fishing, at least for now.

The reason I bring this up now, six weeks or so after the fact, is that Josh is still talking about it. Every time he sees something that makes him think of fish, he'll start telling me the story. Just this morning he saw this fish-shaped trivet that we keep on the stove sitting in the dish-drying rack, and he announced "I don't like fish." To which I stupidly (not knowing what he was thinking about) replied, "Well, that's okay, because we don't have fish for breakfast; that would be really weird, wouldn't it."

He looked at me like I'd just said the stupidest, most irrelevant thing in the world, and went on with his tale:  "I cried."

At which point I finally got the clue, and rejoined the conversation. "You did? Did the fish scare you?"

"Yeah. I wanted Grandma."

"And did Grandma make you feel better?"

"Yeah. She held me."

"Why did the fish scare you?"

"I didn't like it. Pop-Pop caught it."

"Yeah, he did. Did that surprise you?"

"Yeah. He put it back. Grandma held me. I cried."

This is how our conversations go these days. (Mind you, I'm editing out a fair number of "ums," halts, repeated words, and mid-sentence revisions on his part. Not to mention a few on my part, too.) What surprised me is that 1) he's still remembering something so many weeks later, and 2) that he's making some pretty distant symbolic associations, like, say, between a fish-shaped trivet and his grandpa catching a fish weeks ago. Intriguing, the way his little mind is working.

Incidentally, he's also discovered the fine art of inflection - you know, that rising note at the end of every sentence that makes Valley Girl talk so, like, annoying? That turns every sentence into a question? This would be really cute and would mark great progress in his speech if he weren't overusing it? And exaggerating it? You know?

How to take 5 years off the lives of a bunch of adults

Josh reduced the aggregate life expectancy of a whole generation of Grants Pass parents yesterday by about 30 years, which no doubt will eventually catch up with him when his Social Security checks run a bit short in about 2070 or so.

We were leaving the music store after his Kindermusik class, around noon. The class is held in the back room of the music shop downtown, in a little minimall with a busy parking lot on G Street, the main pedestrian shopping district of the town. As usual, the post-class gaggle of toddlers was all clustered at the front of the store, banging on the kiddy drums and kiddy piano and kiddy organ in the window, getting their shoes on, running around - total chaos, in other words. The parents were hanging around the front too, trying to have what passes for adult conversation among us these days while simultaneously trying to supervise and herd up our little monsters. I managed to get Josh's shoes on his fast-dodging little busy feet and convince him to go out the door by reminding him that Boo Elephant and his orange hot rod (his current favorite go-everywhere toy, in the form of a very dinged-up little Matchbox car) were waiting for him in the Prius.

As I held the door for him to let him leave the store, another little tyke squeezed in behind him, between me and Josh. And our little Boo chose that moment to make a dash for freedom, laughing and flailing his little arms and legs as he ran away from Daddy... right into the parking lot, in front of a passing car.

There wasn't much I could do to stop him other than scream at him to stop - which, of course, just made him run all the faster and laugh all the harder. Thankfully, two things saved him:  1) the passing car was paying attention and going very slowly, and saw him run out; and 2) he randomly decided to turn left at the bumper of the parked car beside which he was running, instead of heading straight out into the parking lot. I somehow managed to swoop the other little kid out of the way and catch up to him before he got the rest of the way around the parked car, but it would have been far, far too late if he'd actually gone straight into the parking lot traffic.

Needless to say, we had a very serious, heart-to-heart talk about rules for crossing streets and how to behave in parking lots, and what could happen if he ran in front of a car. He spent the rest of the ride home repeating "never ever ever run in parking lot" and "car coming, could really hurt you" and "white car coming" and "never ever never run in street" and "scare Daddy" and so forth. This went on until he went to sleep in his crib an hour or so later, with me agreeing with everything he said ("yes, you really scared Daddy," and "that's right, you never ever run out into the parking lot, you wait for Daddy and hold my hand," and so on) - so I guess he got the message.

Whether or not he actually follows the rules next time he's tempted to run out into the street is a whole different question. But for my sake, I hope the lesson went home. I'm still shaking, 20 hours later. Apparently he scared the rest of the parents in the music store, too, because several of them came up and offered comfort and sympathy last night at gymnastics (most of the same people are in both classes). The image of Squashed Boo was all too real for them, too.

*****

Meanwhile, on a lighter note - here's what Josh looked like when he woke up from a 4-hour nap on Monday. I spent the rest of the afternoon calling him "Einstein."

Schoolboy Boo... or, how it feels to sell one's child to strangers

This past week, our little baby boy took his next big step on the way toward becoming the next incarnation of Sir Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, Picasso, and Mozart combined.

That is, he started school.

Let me back up a bit. We've been feeling for, oh, six months or so now that it wouldn't be long before Josh needed some more structured, intensive input than I really know how to provide for him. He's at the point where he's soaking up information faster than we can pump it into him. He's not only memorized most of the Presidents and First Ladies (by portrait alone, thankyouverymuch), now he's started learning all of his books by rote. Felicia has been reading him Paddington Bear for a few weeks, and for some reason she decided to try letting him finish the sentences and see how much he remembered. Turns out, he knows the whole book. I mean, word for word. Stop at any point, and he'll supply the next word, exactly, verbatim - sometimes the next whole phrase. And it's not just that one book, it's Five Little Monkeys, too. Plus "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star," and the Sesame Street song, and the theme to WonderPets. I could go on.

Okay, okay, not such a big deal in the grand scheme of things, perhaps, but remember - he's two. And just barely, at that. So it seems like a waste to have him sitting around in the playroom with me all day, playing with PlayDoh and running his MatchBox cars around the Brio tracks.

So we've been talking about starting him on some kind of preschool, not just to give him More Input, and more time with kids his own age, but also to give him something of his very own to look forward to before "Flippy" comes along and starts competing for his parents' time and attention. And maybe if he starts it before Baby Ben arrives, he won't feel like he's being shuffled off to school to get him out of his little brother's way.

This is The Theory, in any case. We'd originally been planning on using a parents' cooperative preschool run by the Kids' Coalition in town, given that one of Felicia's partners has had her kids in it for several years and really likes it, and that it comes highly recommended from some other people we know. Unfortunately, Tinkerbell (the school in question) has been going through some trauma lately, losing their building, losing their teacher of many years, losing their registrar (fired, actually, for failing to follow up on things, which isn't a good characteristic in a registrar, really)... So we were kind of at a loss for what to do, since most of the other places around town are glorified day care centers, and many of them not so glorified at all, at all.

Then Felicia came home one night with a pamphlet for an open house at the Montessori School in town, which neither of us had even heard about up to that point. It's not listed in the Yellow Pages, it's in a little converted house on a residential street full of similar houses with no sign to tell one that it's anything other than somebody's home, it doesn't even have a listing on the Montessori organization's website. Since it's limited to 16 students of all ages (up to, I think, 8 years old at this point), it's probably no accident that they leave it up to word of mouth. In any case, we decided to go to the open house, since neither of us know much at all about Montessori - I know one person who went to a Montessori school, and other than that, all I knew about it up to this point was the name.

We went a couple weeks ago, and to say we were favorably impressed would be an understatement. I can't speak for Felicia, but I at least was very nearly giddy with greed at all the Input that Josh could get at such a place. Every "toy" was a cleverly thought-out learning tool to teach the foundation of some kind of advanced math or language or musical skill, from simple counting and measurement up to algebra - the idea of Josh learning trinomial equations at two just kind of boggled my mind. (Sure, they don't really learn that stuff at his age, per se, but the building blocks will be there later on down the road.) Everything was so well conceived, well structured, and organized... I could see Josh, with his particular mindset and need to learn to "do self" with everything and master every skill and figure out every object right now, simply thriving in that kind of environment.

So we decided to give it a shot, for a few hours a week, and see how he does. After all, unlike most kids his age in the modern era, he has no experience with daycare - he hasn't even been left at a babysitter's house, without his parents, more than two or three times in his whole life (not counting grandparents, who are a Special Case - and Josh's grandparents are "special cases" in just about every sense I can think of). It was hard to predict how he'd react to being left somewhere, so we thought we'd take it slow and make the transition gradually.

We spent a week before Josh's first day talking up the idea that he would be starting school, and how much he would like it, and all the things he would learn there. So when his first day came this past Tuesday, he was all primed and ready - though I think he fully expected there to be a big yellow school bus involved somewhere, and was mildly disappointed when we piled into the Prius just like we do every other time we go out. He was pretty tentative and uncertain as we walked up to this utterly normal-looking, un-school-like house, but once we went in the door and he saw half a dozen kids, ranging from about 3-ish to about 6-ish, doing various interesting-seeming things in various places around the inside, all his uncertainty vanished and he went right to a set of blocks and started stacking them like he'd been going to the place all his life.

We'd prearranged that I'd stay for the full two hours at least the first few times, Just In Case - in case he turned out to be one of those separation-anxiety kids who clings to your leg for an hour in a boneless heap on the floor, or who needs to run to Daddy (or Mommy) every two or three minutes at first just to make sure they're still there, or who otherwise would need to be eased into the whole idea gradually. As it turned out, I couldn't have felt more fully ignored and unneeded on Tuesday if I'd turned invisible and developed a nasty case of the mange to boot. It's a good thing Felicia had made me promise to take tons of pictures, since she was all sad and forlorn at missing out on Josh's first day of school - it gave me something to do, even if the other kids did make me feel like some kind of creepy stalker guy, with their repeated questions along the lines of "Mister, why are you taking all those pictures?"

Josh was immediately adopted by a cute little 5-year-old with a shock of bright red hair named Chloey. (Apparently she's the youngest of four at home, and doesn't get the opportunity to do any mothering of little kids herself very often, so when she does get the chance, she's not about to let it go to waste.) She played mother hen to Josh all morning, making sure all the other kids knew he was new and learned his name, showing him how to wash his hands at the sink, fetching him cups of water to drink, making him a nice snack and practically stuffing him to the gills with it, and generally keeping an eye on him at all times and showing him the ropes. He fit in with the other kids just fine, even if none of them latched onto him quite so thoroughly or immediately - though in typical Boo-ish fashion, he spent a lot of the time standing back watching the other kids, trying to figure out what they were doing and how to "do self" as soon as possible.

So given that I was about as needed around there as a fart in a tram, Ms. Marcella (the teacher) and I decided we'd go to Plan B more quickly than originally planned - so on Thursday, I'd leave him there and we'd see how he did without Daddy in the background. Oy.

For the rest of Tuesday and all of Wednesday, Josh talked about almost nothing other than school, and particularly about Chloey. He'd wake up in the morning talking about her, he told his Mom about her, he told his Boo Elephants about her, he woke up from his nap talking about her... It was all "Did Chloey show you what do at school?" (He's in the phase where he always refers to himself in the third person, and everything is phrased as a question.) So it was no surprise when we went through the door of the school on Thursday that the first thing he did was yell "Chloey!" and run up to her and plant a big kiss square on her... chest. (We're going to have to work on his aim with that, sooner or later, or he's going to get in a lot of trouble someday.) Apparently Chloey had spent some time thinking about Josh too, because the first thing she said was "He came back! He came back!" And then she took him by the hand and led him off to join in whatever it was she was doing.

Well. So, I guess that made me chopped liver... After conferring with Ms. Marcella for a minute, I slinked my way back out the door and went looking aimlessly around town for a coffee shop in which to drown my sorrows, feeling like I'd just sold my best buddy into slavery to be taken away to deepest, darkest Peru to work in the bat guano mines.

I was surprised by how depressed I felt - I mean, honestly, I was on the verge of tears the whole time he was at school, which was only two hours, for Pete's sake, people. I really needed to get a grip, I guess. I was sure he wouldn't even notice I was gone until I came back to get him, and the thought left me feeling obsolete, adrift, abandoned... Yeah, I was really feeling sorry for myself. I even called my Mom, who made things oh so much better by saying, "I felt that way the day we left you at Harvard. It doesn't get better when they get older, either."

Thanks, Mom. Kick me while I'm down, why dontcha.

When I went back a couple hours later to pick up our little grown-up Boo, the kids were out in the back yard having "water play" - which in practice meant there were a dozen or so kids racing around the yard in bathing suits, soaking wet, screaming their lungs out in sheer glee as they drenched each other with the hose or tried to splash all the water out of the kiddie pool. In the midst of all the mayhem, there stood my little boy, looking tiny and disheveled with his bright orange bathing suit looking like neon against his pasty pale skin, his hair all bedraggled and pasted to his scalp, watching all the other kids from the side in his usual looking-on fashion. As soon as he spotted me, he said "Daddy!" in this quiet little voice and ran right over to give me a big, wet hug on my knee. One of the other parents, who was volunteering that day, told me that as soon as Josh realized I was gone, he wandered around the school wimpering "Daddy be right back? Daddy be right back?" She was really happy because he'd let her cuddle him and comfort him, which I guess her own kids have gotten too old and mature (at, oh, 5) to let allow her to do for them anymore.

So I guess he's not ready to sell me for scrap just yet. It was nice to be missed.

Incidentally, if you don't know anything about Montessori either, there was a good article on it in Slate the other day. If you want to learn more hard info about it, try the Montessori organization's own site.

Bad Blog-Daddy

I've become such a bad Blog-Daddy lately. You can tell this for two main reasons (I'm sure there are other wet noodles with which I could flog myself if I so chose, but two will do for the moment). One:  if you've tried to check out the blog lately, you've probably noticed that you get nothing but a big ol' empty white space. This is because the site only displays the most recent entries - and the last one is SO OLD that the site has rolled it off, and doesn't have anything new to put in its place. Baaad, baaad Blog-Daddy!

And two:  Josh's second birthday came and went, without a Special Birthday Blog to mark the occasion. Not that he cares (he may be a smart little whipper-snapper, but even he can't read YET), but no doubt my faithful readership does. Both of you. Baaad, baaad Blog-Daddy!

Which is not to say that we didn't celebrate Josh's birthday. And this time, unlike his first one, we didn't even burn him with any birthday candles. We had an enormous party, complete with a big ju mp-house, a clown, tons of balloons, cake and ice cream, fifteen of Josh's closest little friends and thirty-five parents and grandparents and other assorted hangers-on... enough to exhaust even Josh's considerable appetite for running around and jumping on things. It was such a big hit that Josh has been running around ever since singing "Happy Birthday" to anyone who might possibly, plausibly, under some circumstances have had or might soon be having a birthday, somewhere in their family.

I'd like to post some great video of the party, but unfortunately, we delegated the video duties to Grandpa Ken ("Pop-Pop"), who proceeded to spend most of the tape he used either a) taking endless perspective shots of the (empty) jump-house before any of the kids actually arrived at the party, or b) shooting various peoples' crotches, including his own, having forgotten that the camera was STILL TAPING while went around schmoozing with the guests instead of recording the event for posterity as he was supposed to be doing.

Maybe, if I work on it for a while, or get the CIA's video recovery experts involved, I can salvage a few minutes of good film of the party from the wreckage. In the meantime, there will be some good pictures up in the albums just as soon as I finish wading through the 16,724 photos that my mom took while she was here and dumped on me in the form of an all-too-innocent-looking CD-ROM before she fled back to Michigan.

Josh, at his second birthday, is a very talkative, independent, and rather stubborn little person. Case in point:  his first full complex sentence, which he just started using a few days ago, is "I don't want to eat dinner!", which he will repeat ad infinitum wit h increasing emphasis as he runs in circles around the dinner table while everyone else is trying to eat and get him to sit his little butt down. He still has little to no interest in food, but at least he's becoming a slightly less unnatural child, having FINALLY developed a taste for Cheerios and PB&Js (he still has no interest in mac & cheese, but at least he'll eat pasta shells, which is a start). He's 95% vegetarian - it's just so typical that the one type of meat he'll actually willingly and enthusiastically eat is filet mignon. (Okay, so maybe this kid is just a little bit spoiled, and we should farm him out to a hard labor camp every summer just to reintroduce some perspective into his all-too-coddled little life.) He is, of course, fanatical about ice cream, which is about the only type of food that will get his total, undivided attention.

He refuses to let anyone help him do anything - "do self, do self!" - whether it's climbing up onto a bar stool or jumping off a park bench at the playground.

He's also a very affectionate child, thank goodness. He'll spend twenty minutes or so happily playing by himself off in his play room while I'm cleaning up the kitchen or getting dinner ready or doing some other chore, and then all of a sudden I'll here this little miniature one-toddler stampede approaching from the far end of the house and he'll throw himself into a very intense hug around my left knee. He likes to be picked up and held, though mostly when he's around unfamiliar people about whom he's none too sure, and only by his parents. He's fascinated by men and a little bit standoffish around women, including grandmas, which is unfortunate on multiple counts - though probably not surprising, considering the fact that he spends so much of his time alone with his stay-at-home daddy.

Which is not to say that he isn't a horrendous flirt with any female human being between the ages of 12 months and 120 years. Grocery checkout ladies, waitresses, random unattached grandmotherly-looking ladies on the street, any little girl shorter than 5 feet who happens to make eye contact... he'll try to pick any of them up. Which just goes to show that he really is related to his Uncle Marc, in spite of his very un-Cohen-ish disinterest in food.

He's picked up some very unusual little phrases from the various and sundry relatives who have cycled through our guest room in the past couple months. Uncle Marc taught him "Vegas, baby!", which is a sure bet for cracking people up. Auntie Tee-Tee contributed "chop-chop, Daddy!", for which I'm going to h ave to punish her severely someday. Various people have been teaching him not only the words but the tune to the "Happy Birthday" song - probably mostly his mother, judging but his very Felicia-ish total lack of tonality. (My lovely and wonderful wife couldn't carry a tune in a bucket, which is too bad, because she has a very nice singing voice otherwise. Josh, of course, thinks his mother is an opera star, and I'm not about to be the one to break the bad news to him.)

Josh, at two, is fascinated by all the usual boy things - bugs, balls, cars, mudpuddles, dirt, rocks, frogs, trains, dinosaurs, animals... He's also got enough cross-dressing tendencies to freak his Uncle Marc into rushing out and buying him a bunch of sports equipment - he loves his mother's high heels and tends to walk around the house in them any chance he gets (and is surprisingly good at keeping his balance, a trick that any woman in America can readily appreciate). He's really into his mom's makeup case, though thankfully he hasn't drawn all over his face with her lipstick (yet). And then there's that big play kitchen that his Auntie Ray got him, which seemed to be the final straw that sent Marc into fits of macho horror and forced him to put sports indoctrination at the top of his Uncle-ly agenda. (Let's hope Marc doesn't find out that we've been discussing getting Josh a doll to play with, to get him used to the idea of having a little baby in the house.) 

His favorite color, for the record, is orange. Which means we really have to work hard at our shopping - have you ever tried to find, say, orange socks? Tee-Tee has, and she can tell you, it's no piece of cake.

Pretty soon now - in fact, just after Bubbe and Poppy Mike go back to Cincinnati at the end of this week - we're going to start the process of converting the guest room into Josh's "big boy room." The nursery, after all, is going to be taken over by Flippy in a very few months, so Josh has to migrate. There are some very, very big changes coming up in his life, and we'll all be curious to see how the little guy handles it all. Thankfully, he has a great deal of curiosity about little babies - though we'll see how long that lasts when he finds out that this one doesn't go home with someone else at the end of the day, but stays in his old room and steals parental attention that he used to get. Hmm.

The Big Momma of All Catch-Up Posts

The star of this here blog is becoming quite a character.

To pick just two examples among many:

1) This morning, he decided that one of his many little plastic animals - it happened to be a bear - was "naken" (naked) and needed "clean diaper". So off he galloped, arms and legs flying in his pieces-parts-everywhere style of running, bear in hand, to remedy the situation. I followed him just to see what he was going to do about the "naken" situation, and sure enough, he'd pulled a diaper out of the bin and was standing there waiting for me to do what daddys do - namely, change the diaper, already, daddy. So I did my fatherly best to fit a size 4 diaper on a bear no bigger than Josh's foot. Then Josh decided that bear needed to go "night night sleep tight bedbugs bite", which means of course that he had to read the bear a book in the rocking chair first. So he had me get a book out of the crib, and he proceeded to "read" to the bear (meaning he would tell the bear about the pictures he saw on the page). It's too bad this didn't last long enough for me to get the video camera - it would have been precious.

2) We've been trying to get Da Boo used to the idea that he's about to become a big brother, that Mommy's going to have a baby soon - not sure that it's really penetrated his little dinosaur brain yet, but we're trying. In one of these attempts to send warning shots across his bow, we asked him what he thought his little brother's name should be. He thought about it in all seriousness for a moment, and then smiled and said, "Flippy!" (Someday his little brother is going to be veeerrry unhappy with him for saddling him with that one.)

Grandma and PopPop arrived a week ago, to both Joshua's and Gimli's great delight. Gimli has pretty much abandoned our bed in favor of Grandma's for the duration, so we've lost our dog. Joshua, meanwhile, didn't want anything to do with his parents for a few days - he spent the first 48 hours showing Grandma and PopPop every last toy, book, and stuffed animal, not to mention all of his tricks (jumping, dancing, running, throwing - it was like the ToddlerLympics around here for a few days). He'll eat anything Grandma gives him, which doesn't sit too well with his Daddy given how much trouble *I* have getting him to eat pretty much anything, and he loves following PopPop around to see what he's going to do next.

This weekend, for instance, PopPop found a frog (inside the house, thankyouverymuch; this was one very lost amphibian) and rescued it by giving it a new home in our water feature. Ever since then, the frog has been happily croaking away all night long every night, to Josh's great delight (and our mild annoyance). PopPop, of course, had to turn this into a "learning moment," so he grabbed a flashlight and took Josh out to look for the frog. So every now and then, when Josh hears the frog croaking, he'll say "frog croaking" and go grab the flashlight (which is longer than his leg) and go point it vaguely out the window and announce that he's "looking frog". (Given that the frog is about the size of a nickel, and that Josh's aim with the flashlight always seems to wind up with the thing pointing toward, oh, Venus, it may take him a few weeks or months or years to find it. But that's not the point anyway, now is it?)

He's made so much progress in his vocabulary and his ability to form sentences and otherwise express himself that he's really becoming a little boy - he's not our little baby anymore. Felicia plans to remedy this "baby growing up too fast" problem by just pumping out a continual stream of little ones, so we always have a supply of pitter-pattering little feet around the house. I, personally, think video would be a lot cheaper, but hey, I just work here.

So, in other news, since we last visited together, Felicia and Josh and I gallavanted off to southern Florida for about ten days, so I could take a sailing course and Felicia could spend a week with her baby visiting half the population of Greater Miami and Ft. Lauderdale (aka, friends and family; she grew up there). I got drenched and vaguely seasick in highly atypical southern Florida weather - 50 degrees,
rainy, and with choppy seas - but had a great time even so, with two other students and an instructor on a 41-foot sailing catamaran all over the upper Keys and Biscayne Bay. I took six tests in six days, three of them four hours long apiece, and managed to get certified to skipper boats up to 50 feet anywhere in the world, day or night, in any weather, anywhere but in offshore waters. Felicia, meanwhile, was staying with a great friend from childhood who has a 4-year-old and 2-year-old twins, one of whom was in a body cast from the waist down after breaking his leg in his crib. Needless to say, she didn't have a relaxing time, but she enjoyed the visit even so, got to spend more time alone with Josh than she has since she went back to work from maternity leave, took him to the zoo and the Seaquarium and the Discovery Museum and several parks, and got to see a lot of old family friends. It was a good trip, but we were glad to be home.

This past weekend, while Grandma and PopPop watched Da Boo, Felicia took me down to Napa (Yountville) for a series of surprises for my 39th birthday. The first surprise came shortly after we checked into our B&B, when I answered a knock on our door and found Steve and Liz standing there. It was kind of like running into your grandmother in a strip club - they were so far out of context that it took me a shamefully long time to process the fact that it was really them, and they were really there. We spent Sunday doing, well, what one does in Napa, namely tasting wine (that is, Steve and I tasted wine, while Liz and Felicia just sipped and went along for the ride). But the big surprise came Sunday night, when Felicia took me to the French Laundry for dinner. Now, there are two things you need to know to put this in its proper context: 1) the French Laundry is widely considered to be one of the top, oh, five or so restaurants in the United States, and 2) going there was one of the handful of things that I really wanted to do before I die. All I can say about the evening is that it was simple perfection. We had a nine-course meal (not counting the little amuse-bouches that they'd bring by every now and then), assisted by an army of friendly, unobtrusive people, in a very intimate, small-scale, country-style setting - and the food was absolutely astonishing. Every course was an adventure in tastes that perfectly complimented one another, and each built on the last in a way that was not at all predictable but that blended it all together to make everything just mind-blowing. At some point, maybe I'll put our menu up on the blog, if anyone's interested. In the meantime, take my word for it: it was well worth it, even if it cost a small fortune.

So now here we are, back to reality - Felicia's back to work and is starting yet another long weekend on call, I'm back chasing the Boo around all day, and PopPop went back to Michigan to deal with work. Grandma's still here, though, which Josh just loves - even if he gets kind of whiney and antsy every time I leave the room, thinking I'm going to disappear to run errands or whatever and abandon him with Grandma. And he gets all excited when PopPop calls on the phone - he walks around half the day with his plastic pickles, or jalapenos, or peach slices, talking to PopPop on the "food phone."

I have to say, for all the wonderful surprises Felicia arranged for this best of all birthdays, my favorite part of the whole weekend was when Josh got on the phone from home and said "Happy Birthday, Daddy" in his piping little-boy voice, and then said "wuv wu Daddy". It melted my heart.

What you didn't know your Boo knew...

So Da Boo and Da Gim and I were out for a little walk in this rare spot of sunshine, and were playing around in the front yard after plodding all the way back up our long hill. And Josh walked over to the little flagstone path along the edge of the lawn in the front yard, and started hopping from one stepping stone to the next with little tiny hops (which was just so cute, in his little winter coat with its hood flopping with each hop), and talking quietly to himself each time he landed.

It took me a second to realize that he was actually counting. To ten. In the right order. And that he was counting the rocks he was jumping on, not just repeating the numbers at random.

To say I was shocked would be an understatement. I wasn't sure I was hearing right. I mean, sure, we've been working on helping him get to know his numbers, and his mom does a little number puzzle with him pretty often in her evening playtime with him, and he's been watching this Winnie the Pooh counting video occasionally over breakfast, but I didn't think he'd actually absorbed any of it, beyond recognizing the forms of the numbers...

Wow.

I wonder if he could actually repeat the performance, or if it was just a one-time event?

Twenty Booish months...

With a deceptive quietness, Joshua passed his 20-month mark today. He has spent it (so far) in what has become typical Booish fashion, getting into everything - kitchen cupboards, dog food bags, all the drawers in the bathroom while Daddy was shaving, and so forth. Mostly, he has stayed out of trouble, though it was a close-run thing, and the day isn't over yet.

He's entering the phase where he tries to repeat and make sense of everything he hears, whether it's something his parents or other adults say to him, or something he overhears by chance when we aren't speaking to him (hopefully not something unintended for polite company), or something he catches in passing on NPR while we're riding along in the car. He still is kind of hit-or-miss in his pronunciation, and there are certain sounds (and even whole syllables) that he just can't manage yet, but he's putting more complex words and even some short sentences together.

For instance, we all went to get a family haircut last night, and to reconcile him to the idea of going out of the house so late in the evening - a blatant and unmistakeable alteration in The Routine, not that we ever meant to impose any such thing of course - I told him that he was going to see Mary Jo, and that if he was really good she might give him a lollypop. So he spent the entire ride into town repeating "Meh-JO!" and "lol-POP!" Over and over, about a hundred times each.

In the event, the haircut was a bit of a trial (which is not unusual with our little Boo, who does not like to be messed with), and the lollypop wasn't as successful a distraction as it was the last time we went through this particular trial... but he was still repeating "Meh-JO" and "lol-POP" this morning, so I guess he must have forgiven her.

He's starting to show signs of being kind of compulsive about neatness, pointing out any messes we might have around the house and saying "meh! meh!" until we clean it up. (He still can't get the "s" sound on the end of words very well.)

He'll tell you when an outfit is too small - "too tite," he'll say.

He'll also tell you when he has a stinky diaper, by pointing to his crotch and saying "poo!" This is usually accompanied by a big grimace, NOT that he'll let you change it without a big fight and an alarming amount of squirming around on the changing table. (He does a pretty convincing imitation of an octopus Houdini when you try to get rid of a dirty diaper. Which is not very comforting when you're trying to keep him from falling three feet onto his head on a hard wooden floor...)

He regularly picks up the phone and walks around with the handset. If you ask him who he's calling, odds are he'll tell you "Pop-Pop" (aka Grandpa Ken) or "Tee-Tee" (Auntie Christine), or sometimes "Momma" (when she's at work) - although in the past couple days, he's started saying "Bubbie" (Bubbie Jo) and very occasionally "Grrreh" (Grandma Kay, which is a surprisingly hard word to say for a little tyke, which just shows the method behind the madness when Joanne said she wanted the grandchildren to call her "Bubbie"). He also knows how to hang up the phone, which is a good thing - Steve and Liz, for example, are frequently unreachable for hours at a time, because Bela too likes to play with the phone all too much.

Josh knows pretty much all his letters by now - though not in any particular order - and he knows all his numbers up to 10, and can count up to 3, with some prompting. (Those Melissa & Doug alphabet and number puzzles are really great toys, as I think I've said before.)

Oh, and a few weeks ago, Josh walked out of the bathroom one evening when he was in there with his mom, and I caught him chewing on a pregnancy test - the business end, thankyouverymuch, which was a little gross. On closer inspection, I discovered that he'd run off with a positive one. Whether he'd grabbed it on his own initiative, or this was his mother's subtle way of delivering the news to me, I'm still not sure, but it was certainly a... memorable way to learn that we were pregnant again. We did our best to avoid getting too excited, and Felicia scanned herself pretty much every day for a couple weeks looking for a heartbeat, to be sure the fetus was viable and developing normally before we got too attached to the little blastocyst, but a week ago we finally saw the heartbeat on ultrasound, pumping away bright and clear on the screen like the miniature miracle that it is.

So now we're starting to teach Joshua to say "big brother." I don't think he has any more idea what's coming than Gimli did at a similar stage in Felicia's pregnancy with Josh, but hopefully he'll get used to the idea a bit better than the puppy did.

Gimli, for his part, is probably better off not knowing there's another little monster coming along. He still hasn't forgiven us for dumping the first one on him, I think. (Though he's gotten pretty enthusiastic about the occasional food-gifts-from-the-sky, the mooch.)

Da Boo Elephant Goes Trick or Treating

What else should our little boy - he who carries his little blue elephants around constantly (and sleeps with them, and chews on them, and gives them drinks from his very own straw...) - be for Halloween but... a Boo Elephant?

It's not clear to me exactly who came up with this perfect little brainstorm, but the person who actually made it happen was our friend Angela, the better half of Darryl (of EpiDarryl fame), who undertook the job entirely on her own initiative, found a pattern somewhere, sewed the costume, fitted it to His Peripateticness, and got it to us in plenty of time for Halloween. Which is a very good thing, because it took two days and about half a dozen attempts before we were finally able to get the little snot to where it. Something about actually being a Boo Elephant - instead of hugging one, kissing one, carrying one around, etc., etc. - kinda freaked Joshua out, somehow. It's still not clear to us what was going on in that little baby mind of his, but whenever we'd try to put the "hat" on, with its trunk and ears and tusks, he'd just tear it right back off again, getting increasingly upset the more persistent we were. It wasn't looking good there, for a while.

But finally, for whatever reason, he tolerated having me put the whole shabang on him yesterday afternoon, to my great astonishment and considerable relief - so quickly, before he could change his little Boo mind, I whisked him off in the truck to head downtown to the Halloween block party that the downtown businesses host every year for the little ones. There he saw all kinds of other kids dressed up in outfits a lot sillier than his own, so I guess he figured out that this wasn't just some special torture that we had come up with just for him, which seemed to help reconcile him to the idea that he had suddenly acquired, well, tusks, and big ol' floppy ears, and stuff.

After a few circuits of the downtown, and after scamming a free balloon from the local pizza place (a much smarter and tooth-friendly giveaway than the Twinkies and Snickers bars that everyone else was giving out), we met up with Steve and Bela - her Bela-ness all dolled up in a very cute giraffe outfit, made all the more adorable by the fact that her Naturally Curly Hair was escaping from it in all directions. We made another circuit or two, with Steve stopping every foot and a half or so to chat up a patient and his or her parents, and then fled the crowds for Steve's house before either child could have a complete meltdown.

We finished off the evening with a visit to Lisa and Matt's house, which i s on one of those unusual cul-de-sacs in town where the kids come by at the rate of about one every fifteen seconds or so all night long on Halloween, and so Bela and Boo got to see a continual parade of other little monsters and critters and pirates and princesses of all ages and shapes and sizes for the next couple hours.

So, all in all, a much more successful Halloween than last year, when it was all I could do to get our exhausted little baby into his costume for half an hour to get a few cute pictures.

Monday, we took Josh down to a local preschool, so we could check it out and put him on the wait list (they don't start taking the little monsters until they turn 3). It's a parent-run cooperative, which I like - each set of parents has to come in to help out for a couple days a month, and parents make up the board and fill most of the functions like registrar and "chief Playdoh supplier". It strikes me as a great place, and it comes highly recommended from a surprising number of people whose opinions we have reason to take seriously, so it looks like that's where we'll be parking our little guy in another year and a half or so, to start him on the way toward a lifetime of education. I have mixed feelings about it - on the one hand, I think it'd be really great for him to be around a bunch of other kids in a structured environment where he can just soak up new experiences and new learnings to his heart's content; but I'm also going to miss the little bugger horribly.

Not to mention the fact that as soon as he starts "school" - even preschool - both Felicia and I are going to go into shock from "big boy syndrome"...

But we're working on getting a second string onto the bench. Felicia went out and got a top-of-the-line ovulation kit, so she can more closely and reliably monitor her fertility level, and she gets herself scanned by the ultrasound tech in her office about, oh, twice an hour, to see if there are any little eggies floating around in there. As of the latest scan yesterday, it looks like there are three (count 'em, three) cysts forming even as we speak. Which may be too much of a good thing if you ask me, not wanting to be completely outnumbered... but hey, I just work here..