Squidbits from two years, ten months
The initial shock of the threeness is wearing off, and we are all enjoying one another again. The challenges are challenging, natch, but there's so much growth going on too that it can't help but be exciting.
Christmas was a blast - we had the whole neighborhood over on Christmas Eve, and he rioted with the other kids in a way he's never quite managed before. Sometime in the last two months, since he saw them at Halloween, he tipped over that "big kid" line, and now the three and four year olds accept him as one of them. The amount of destruction four kids can cause to a home is stupendous, can I just say? I cleaned up after them, and I swear they managed to dismantle and scatter every single multi-part toy in the house. I'm just glad we left the Legos until next year.
He made a beeline for the tree on the morning of, but only managed a few presents before deciding he needed to play with his new cars. That's fine. We all had a lovely Christmas - and then I woke up the next day so cranky nobody in the family could stand to be around me and have been recuperating ever since. No, I don't know why. It just happens sometimes. And the holidays - with their chain of multiple days spent in the house with everyone - create a cabin fever that doesn't help. We've been trying to get out to museums, the library, parks, train rides, gyms, or whatever we can to help with the stir-craziness, mine as well as his.
Squid at the Children's Museum
I can't remember what he was doing the other day - something during a diaper change, kicking or wiggling or something, and I told him to cut it out. He looked at me solemnly and asked, "Does it make you nuts?" Which is both hilarious and shaming, because that's totally what I say to him when he is driving me crazy - "Stop that, it's making me nuts!" Things that make me nuts: clinging to my legs when I am trying to walk; asking for food and then not eating it; shoving things in my face repeatedly; breaking down in whiny sobs at the very mention of some disfavored thing, regardless of whether or not it will actually be foist upon one, collapsing bonelessly in public when we need to go somewhere and refusing to move...oh, toddler.
I was apologizing to him in the library for having been so crabby, and I said to him, "Mommy's having a hard time today." "No, Mommy," he said. "You not having a hard time. You want to read the garbage truck book again. You happy, Mommy." If only flat contradiction of reality actually worked. That would be awesome.
His bossypants is in full swing, too. I get told what to do a lot. As do the dogs. As does Himself. As do all our houseguests. We were in the bedroom sorting laundry a few days ago and Himself was, for reasons known only to him, entertaining himself by poking me in the butt every time I turned around. "Cut it out!" I said to him.
"It's okay, he can't see," Himself said. (The Squid was playing in the bathroom, just out of sight.)
"I don't care if he can see," I said. "I care that you are poking my butt."
There was a brief moment of total silence, and then a curly brown head popped out from behind the bathroom door. "You poke Mommy's butt, Daddy? That not good, alright? You have a time out!"
Squid explains the inner workings of a combine harvester
He's getting good at fiction and pretend. He turns random items into spaceships that go "up up up into spaaaace! Blast off!" and then go to the garage and...do something with compost, I don't know. There was a story about a fish, a yellow fish, driving an airplane. He tells me about long dreams about combine harvesters and balers that go fast and go into space. He sings songs about rice, and astronauts, and driving in the car. He has enough narrative ability to be able to tell me stories about what happened at preschool, now with some causal links, though the veracity of the stories is always in question. ("Poppy hit me an' Samantha frustrated. I have a time out." may be something that happened weeks earlier that he's still working through, or a reverse story in which he hit Poppy, or a combination of the two, or something else entirely.)
He also knows what rebar is for ("it make concrete fwexible an' strong"), which is my favorite piece of information to make him recite for other adults. I mean, I didn't teach it to him as a party trick - he picked it up from reading one of our books - but I think it's fascinating that he remembers. I've been doing more and more explaining to him at a high level, because so much of it sticks that I am constantly amazed. I explained to him yesterday on the train that the Doppler effect is the name for what a constant sound does as it moves closer and further away from the listener (okay, slightly inaccurate, but I do simplify somewhat). He didn't pick up on that, precisely, but he can now make the noise of a train passing by - nyoowwww! - and identify it as the Doppler effect. Smart little dude. He likes to read books that have big chunks of text now, and he really listens and understands what is being said.
Like I said, an exciting time.
Squid in the cockpit of a 747 at the Aviation Museum
And now for some only tangentially related observations I wrote down a few months ago and never posted:
I think I kind of horrified another mother at the Squid's preschool when he was first starting. He was in tears as I walked out the door (Nooo, Mommy! Don' wanna go preschool!) and she looked at me sympathetically and said, "That's so hard. The first few weeks I used to drop mine off and then go cry in the car!"
I shrugged. "Well, you know, we're used to it. We have dogs."
She looked at me like I was insane.
"I mean, my dog has separation anxiety, too." I tried to explain, but she started to sort of edge away from me and got in her car quickly. Apparently Good Mothers do not equate their children with their dogs in polite conversation.
But it's true! Dogs really do prepare you for kids.
You learn, for example, that if you come back in and soothe and cuddle and reassure your small being when they are distraught about you leaving that this will actually encourage the behavior and that it will get worse over time. If you say goodbye to them firmly and leave like it's no big deal, after a while, they will learn to be more matter-of-fact about your departures and arrivals. You learn about regular mealtimes, arranging for caretaking ahead of time, and getting up in the middle of the night. You learn that it's more important to be consistent than almost anything, because nothing trains faster than random reinforcement, so giving in "every once in a while" is the worst thing you can do. You learn that physical attention is just as important as mental attention.
And let me tell you, our house? Halfway kid-proofed way before we had a kid. All of our furniture is leather or wood, easy to clean up after spills. All of our floors are wood, because pet hair and stains ruin carpet faster than anything. All of our garbage cans are tall and have tight-fitting lids to prevent rummaging. Almost everything we own is machine-washable because of the pet hair. We stopped leaving the toilet seat up years ago. Sure, we had to put in electrical socket covers, cabinet locks, and doorknob covers once he started crawling, but that was it.
People told me before I had a kid, "oh, kids are nothing like dogs." Which is true! Dogs are smarter than kids, for the first couple of years, at least. And then kids grow up, and dogs don't, and the balance shifts. The differences are legion. This doesn't mean that dogs aren't great prep for the advent of a kid. Because after years of dealing with dogs, a little spit-up and some newborn diapers are like, nothing. I would tell you about the things I've had to deal with with my dogs over the years, but you might be eating as you read this, and I don't want to put you off your food.
Cats don't really prepare you for kids. Too self-sufficient. Fish, rodents, and most birds neither, though some of the larger parrots would be good prep. Horses, no, goats and sheep and rabbits, no. But dogs - dogs are the closest thing you can get to kids before actually, you know, having kids yourself. I'm trying to find the article I'm remembering that said that the best predictor of the childcare labor split in couples with pets was the petcare labor split - which has certainly been true in our case - but I can't find it, so it may have just been one of my crackpot theories.
Of course, this is just me. We did not do attachment parenting, or anything like that, and I am a more boring and rules-oriented parent than I had thought or hoped I would be (I had to give up on drawing with him this morning because I got all freaked out about how he was losing the pens and caps, instead of just letting him, you know, make a mess and create stuff). And maybe if we have another kid that kid will react horribly to all the parenting techniques we've used on the Squid, and I will have to scrap this whole idea altogether. This is just how it looks from here, right now, though that disclaimer could go on pretty much anything I write, pretty much anytime.
The many faces of Squid
Christmas was a blast - we had the whole neighborhood over on Christmas Eve, and he rioted with the other kids in a way he's never quite managed before. Sometime in the last two months, since he saw them at Halloween, he tipped over that "big kid" line, and now the three and four year olds accept him as one of them. The amount of destruction four kids can cause to a home is stupendous, can I just say? I cleaned up after them, and I swear they managed to dismantle and scatter every single multi-part toy in the house. I'm just glad we left the Legos until next year.
He made a beeline for the tree on the morning of, but only managed a few presents before deciding he needed to play with his new cars. That's fine. We all had a lovely Christmas - and then I woke up the next day so cranky nobody in the family could stand to be around me and have been recuperating ever since. No, I don't know why. It just happens sometimes. And the holidays - with their chain of multiple days spent in the house with everyone - create a cabin fever that doesn't help. We've been trying to get out to museums, the library, parks, train rides, gyms, or whatever we can to help with the stir-craziness, mine as well as his.
Squid at the Children's Museum
I can't remember what he was doing the other day - something during a diaper change, kicking or wiggling or something, and I told him to cut it out. He looked at me solemnly and asked, "Does it make you nuts?" Which is both hilarious and shaming, because that's totally what I say to him when he is driving me crazy - "Stop that, it's making me nuts!" Things that make me nuts: clinging to my legs when I am trying to walk; asking for food and then not eating it; shoving things in my face repeatedly; breaking down in whiny sobs at the very mention of some disfavored thing, regardless of whether or not it will actually be foist upon one, collapsing bonelessly in public when we need to go somewhere and refusing to move...oh, toddler.
I was apologizing to him in the library for having been so crabby, and I said to him, "Mommy's having a hard time today." "No, Mommy," he said. "You not having a hard time. You want to read the garbage truck book again. You happy, Mommy." If only flat contradiction of reality actually worked. That would be awesome.
His bossypants is in full swing, too. I get told what to do a lot. As do the dogs. As does Himself. As do all our houseguests. We were in the bedroom sorting laundry a few days ago and Himself was, for reasons known only to him, entertaining himself by poking me in the butt every time I turned around. "Cut it out!" I said to him.
"It's okay, he can't see," Himself said. (The Squid was playing in the bathroom, just out of sight.)
"I don't care if he can see," I said. "I care that you are poking my butt."
There was a brief moment of total silence, and then a curly brown head popped out from behind the bathroom door. "You poke Mommy's butt, Daddy? That not good, alright? You have a time out!"
Squid explains the inner workings of a combine harvester
He's getting good at fiction and pretend. He turns random items into spaceships that go "up up up into spaaaace! Blast off!" and then go to the garage and...do something with compost, I don't know. There was a story about a fish, a yellow fish, driving an airplane. He tells me about long dreams about combine harvesters and balers that go fast and go into space. He sings songs about rice, and astronauts, and driving in the car. He has enough narrative ability to be able to tell me stories about what happened at preschool, now with some causal links, though the veracity of the stories is always in question. ("Poppy hit me an' Samantha frustrated. I have a time out." may be something that happened weeks earlier that he's still working through, or a reverse story in which he hit Poppy, or a combination of the two, or something else entirely.)
He also knows what rebar is for ("it make concrete fwexible an' strong"), which is my favorite piece of information to make him recite for other adults. I mean, I didn't teach it to him as a party trick - he picked it up from reading one of our books - but I think it's fascinating that he remembers. I've been doing more and more explaining to him at a high level, because so much of it sticks that I am constantly amazed. I explained to him yesterday on the train that the Doppler effect is the name for what a constant sound does as it moves closer and further away from the listener (okay, slightly inaccurate, but I do simplify somewhat). He didn't pick up on that, precisely, but he can now make the noise of a train passing by - nyoowwww! - and identify it as the Doppler effect. Smart little dude. He likes to read books that have big chunks of text now, and he really listens and understands what is being said.
Like I said, an exciting time.
Squid in the cockpit of a 747 at the Aviation Museum
And now for some only tangentially related observations I wrote down a few months ago and never posted:
I think I kind of horrified another mother at the Squid's preschool when he was first starting. He was in tears as I walked out the door (Nooo, Mommy! Don' wanna go preschool!) and she looked at me sympathetically and said, "That's so hard. The first few weeks I used to drop mine off and then go cry in the car!"
I shrugged. "Well, you know, we're used to it. We have dogs."
She looked at me like I was insane.
"I mean, my dog has separation anxiety, too." I tried to explain, but she started to sort of edge away from me and got in her car quickly. Apparently Good Mothers do not equate their children with their dogs in polite conversation.
But it's true! Dogs really do prepare you for kids.
You learn, for example, that if you come back in and soothe and cuddle and reassure your small being when they are distraught about you leaving that this will actually encourage the behavior and that it will get worse over time. If you say goodbye to them firmly and leave like it's no big deal, after a while, they will learn to be more matter-of-fact about your departures and arrivals. You learn about regular mealtimes, arranging for caretaking ahead of time, and getting up in the middle of the night. You learn that it's more important to be consistent than almost anything, because nothing trains faster than random reinforcement, so giving in "every once in a while" is the worst thing you can do. You learn that physical attention is just as important as mental attention.
And let me tell you, our house? Halfway kid-proofed way before we had a kid. All of our furniture is leather or wood, easy to clean up after spills. All of our floors are wood, because pet hair and stains ruin carpet faster than anything. All of our garbage cans are tall and have tight-fitting lids to prevent rummaging. Almost everything we own is machine-washable because of the pet hair. We stopped leaving the toilet seat up years ago. Sure, we had to put in electrical socket covers, cabinet locks, and doorknob covers once he started crawling, but that was it.
People told me before I had a kid, "oh, kids are nothing like dogs." Which is true! Dogs are smarter than kids, for the first couple of years, at least. And then kids grow up, and dogs don't, and the balance shifts. The differences are legion. This doesn't mean that dogs aren't great prep for the advent of a kid. Because after years of dealing with dogs, a little spit-up and some newborn diapers are like, nothing. I would tell you about the things I've had to deal with with my dogs over the years, but you might be eating as you read this, and I don't want to put you off your food.
Cats don't really prepare you for kids. Too self-sufficient. Fish, rodents, and most birds neither, though some of the larger parrots would be good prep. Horses, no, goats and sheep and rabbits, no. But dogs - dogs are the closest thing you can get to kids before actually, you know, having kids yourself. I'm trying to find the article I'm remembering that said that the best predictor of the childcare labor split in couples with pets was the petcare labor split - which has certainly been true in our case - but I can't find it, so it may have just been one of my crackpot theories.
Of course, this is just me. We did not do attachment parenting, or anything like that, and I am a more boring and rules-oriented parent than I had thought or hoped I would be (I had to give up on drawing with him this morning because I got all freaked out about how he was losing the pens and caps, instead of just letting him, you know, make a mess and create stuff). And maybe if we have another kid that kid will react horribly to all the parenting techniques we've used on the Squid, and I will have to scrap this whole idea altogether. This is just how it looks from here, right now, though that disclaimer could go on pretty much anything I write, pretty much anytime.
The many faces of Squid
posted by The Stute Fish at 13:23
4 Comments:
You wrote that thing about your techniques not working on another child because you are superstitious, right? I say that kind of thing all the time when I get complimented on something Ada is good about (like going to sleep). Better to ward off the evil eye by saying it isn't really that we are good parents, but that we have been lucky to get such agreeable children.
Well, and I actually believe it. I've known too many difficult kids of awesome parents - and too many siblings who were not at all alike in their ways - to think otherwise.
But yes, also superstitious. Like maybe if I'm honest with myself about how lucky I am and don't take it for granted or credit myself for it, the universe will let me go on being lucky without feeling like it has to smack me down.
I cannot believe this little guy is almost three. Holy cow. When did that happen???
I KNOW, RIGHT? It snuck up on me...
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