How did it get to be September already?!
Squid is officially two and a half fabulous years old. And what a wonderful little kid he is becoming. He has developed a sense of humor and loves to tell jokes. "What's your name?" "Cars!" "No, silly, what's your name?" "Bugs!" "No, silly, what's your name?" "[Squid]?" "Yes!"
*giggle giggle giggle* or modifies bits of favorite books "Could you, could you...in a grocery store?" "Could you, could you ... in a hot dog?" And he adds all sorts of new lyrics into his songs, "Twinkle twinkle little blue garbage truck, how I wonder what you are..." and "Lou, lou, skip to my conductor train...." He even makes up his own songs - about combinations of helicopters, crocodiles, and piledrivers, mostly, though he has an adorable one about being all done with his food, too. He doesn't like to sing them on command, but sometimes I hear him singing softly to himself in his crib after he wakes up, or before he falls asleep at night.
Preschool is going wonderfully. After a few weeks of crying and "don't wanna go to preschool!" in the mornings (I am reliably informed that he had a great time every day once he got there, though) he has finally acclimated, and the past few days has run gleefully off to play without a backward glance. They have wonderful activities and toys - sand play, shells, painting with hands, trains, dolls, play food, shapes...and he comes home grubby and tired and happy every day. He has two friends already, a little boy and a little girl, and yesterday he said to me at the grocery store on the way home, "I love Alejandro! I love Parker!" He also proclaims that he has "fun with Vashti!" (the director) and "fun with Samantha!" (his group leader.) His group, the under-threes, is called the "Bumbles," and every day I get a little report titled "My Bumble Day" that tells me what he ate, what his diapers were like, how long he napped, what he enjoyed, and what his mood and behavior were like that day. I love it!
I am especially proud that he so often comes home with "good friend manners" circled on his report. (Warning: parental gushing ahead.) He
is a good friend, and he (genuinely, bizarrely) seems to be truly empathetic to others. He gives hugs and kisses freely, and says to everyone he meets, "Hi! How you doing?" He says "please" and "thank you" and "you're welcome" without being prompted much of the time, apologizes when apologized to and when prompted (he's working on context there) and asks, "you okay?" and says "feel better" when people get hurt. His latest is to yell, "good luck!" at everyone - I have no idea where he picked that up - and he tells his grandparents and his Daddy and me and his caretakers, "Love you!"
I swear this is coincidence - this just happened to be his Bumble report for today.We went to a neighbor friend's house for Labor Day and the other kids were having a hard time - lots of pushing and grabbing toys away from each other and screaming "no, mine!" And he didn't engage in any of it. When the little girl melted down, he said, "She sad? Take a nap," very solemnly and went to go offer her a toy he had been playing with. I worry a little bit that bossy kids will walk all over him, because when he gets pushed or his toys get taken away, he protests only very rarely. But I would rather have him be sweet and empathetic and wonderful than combative, even so. Which makes me wonder a little, because I'd worry more if he were an unassertive little girl...but that's me and my gender stuff. He's awesome, truly awesome, just the way he is. Like, he is two, and he is
supposed to be very "no, mine," and instead he is so bizarrely sweet and generous and loving to everyone that it makes my heart grow three sizes, I swear.
He does howl about things, natch, and he spent some time on Monday gleefully telling me that the train tracks for his new wooden train set were, "No! MY TRACKS!" but it's pretty minimal, and we don't give in to it much, if ever, so it doesn't pay off for him. Still, I don't think this is our parenting, though some secret part of me hopes I am wrong. He came like this. We haven't done anything to fuck it up, which, yay, us! But we didn't make him like this. Kids are born with their personalities largely already formed, I firmly believe. Nurture and society can give coping mechanisms and behavior patterns and perspectives and ideas, but fundamental personality is not something parents get a lot of say in, aside from the choice of the gene pool they merge with. We hit some kind of jackpot with our guy, and I am grateful every day.
(Ahahaha. I wrote all of this out and then walked into the preschool yesterday just in time to see him with an ugly snarl on his face, yowling at a little girl and trying to take her train away! He had to be diverted by Ms. Samantha. *facepalm* Pride goes before, etc., but I still maintain that that's pretty uncharacteristic behavior for him. We went to the neighbor's house later that night, and when he wanted to play with the fire truck toy, he asked the neighbor kid, "I have a turn wif fire truck now please?" Good friend manners, see? Just, erm, also two and a half. Can't anybody be good all the time.)
He's also picked up some very, very adorable linguistic tics from us. "Oh my goodness!" he likes to say. Today on the way to school he said, "Oh, my! See the bus!" and "An excellent garbage truck!" Full sentences, like "The frontloader puts the dirt in the dump truck," "I don't want to eat dinner," "We're going to ride in Mommy's car," and "The grandpa bus is scared of airplanes" are commonplace. (The grandpa bus is a small wooden bus that Grandpa brought back from Madagascar this month, after his scuba diving trip to count fish as part of a reef conservation program.) He also has a new range of activities - playing with trains and pretending to cook, playing with his plastic animals and the guy who drives his toy dump truck and making them interact with other toys. Pretend play is amazing - he likes to tell me that his dump truck guy is "in his carseat" or that he is "da conductor on da train!" Sometimes he makes up long narratives about trains and trucks and "hoptopters" that I can't even follow; they may be coherent, but because the words aren't in an order I expect, I don't recognize all of them. He tells the stories with great animation, however, waving his hands about as he explains, eyes sparkling.
We've caught some lizards in the past few weeks and taken them "home" to the outside, and we found a lost puppy dog the other day and returned it to its house. He's very interested now in where things are when they are elsewhere. "The school bus all gone," he informed me this morning, as it turned left and moved out of sight, and later, "I lost the railroad crossing," so we had a little conversation about where the bus and crossing were when he couldn't see them. He tells me that trains and airplanes and lizards and dogs "go home," that Daddy, "goesta work" or "goes wood shop." I'm sort of hoping that this idea of locations and where things are and where they belong will help us, however tangentially, with the beginning/furtherance of things like clean up, staying out of the street, privacy, etc. And maybe someday with potty training, though he's showing no interest in that at all right now, and we're not pushing it.
My parental anxieties are also a little higher these days, though that's probably true of my anxieties in general, and I'm thinking about talking to the ~iatrist about adjusting my meds.
But with activity and independence comes increased risk, and that's scary. He almost fell down a flight of concrete stairs the other day, driving a toy car too close to them - I was barely in time to catch him and if the car hadn't tipped in such an awkward way, I might not have made it. He ran away from me in the grocery store today and I couldn't find him for minutes and minutes; he was finally returned by a store employee just as I was really starting to worry. I made the little ingrate hold my hand through the rest of the store, though he twisted and complained. He fell off a big kid swing when I was pushing him last weekend, secure one instant and in midair the next, and I caught him by one arm and one shoe and was able to break, though not prevent, his fall. I'm also afraid for the future, because I like to borrow trouble, even though I know it carries a high interest rate.
I kind of want to bubble-wrap the Squid against life, and against growing up, and against change. I am so in love with him that I want him to be happy and bright-eyed and enthusiastic
forever and
always. But that's not how parenting works, and bubble-wrap has a backlash too. You just do your best with the knowledge and tools you have at the time, love them to distraction, cross your fingers, and hope.
