Squidbits

When the Squid wants something, he says, "Please oh please oh please?" and gives me big pleading brown eyes. It's very cute, which means it has much higher odds of working. I appear to have promised him dance lessons in a fit of weakness the other night. And then I started looking at how I might make that happen. Holy crap, are they expensive. I think I might wait until he is at least four and can go to the cheaper, friendlier studio in town; $65 an hour for group lessons - for a three year old - is so ridiculous I can't even begin to comprehend it. I miss his dancing, though - he'll chair-dance now, but he doesn't boogie like he used to, and I'd be thrilled if he got into it again. We went to the local cafe where he used to dance this morning, with a friend from out of town, and all the staff still recognize him and call him "the Little Dancer."


Squid and my mother read a book.

He does something that my brother used to do that drives me nutso, which is to start sentences with the word "no." Do I do that? Did he get it from me? It's so knee-jerk negative and it feels like being corrected all the time, so he probably did - those are the icky sorts of personality traits that totally show up in unconscious speech patterns. So now I'm watching both of us on that, trying to eradicate it. But the Squid (who probably needs a different Internet Name one of these days, but I can't think of a good one) has been more negative in general, lately. Doing what he is told if he doesn't wish to has really come to a fairly comprehensive end, and everything must involve a carrot, a stick, or a distraction. Good news is that we are getting better at that sort of parenting. Bad news is that he's fast and wily and getting heavier by the day, and so the "good old days" of being able to bodily schlep him to where he needed to be and keep him there are almost gone.

We had a ten-minute standoff in the grocery store the other day, in which he fell on the ground and refused to move another inch. The irony of it all being, of course, that if he'd come with me, the errand he was protesting would have taken approximately two minutes, rather than the fifteen that it ended up taking, but there is no arguing with a three-year-old. In a safer environment I would have left him sulking on the floor and done what I needed to do, but the store was very busy, so I went a few aisles on and waited. And waited. And waited. At one point I disappeared around the corner of an aisle and watched him through the cans, to see if he'd freak out and come running to find me, but no luck. Of the dozens of shoppers who stepped over and around him, not one asked him where his parents were, and very few even checked for me visually. Only one teenager, who happened to be next to me, did ask her mother if she should find a store person, because maybe he was lost. I praised her instincts after letting her know that no, we were just in a standoff and I was right there watching. Bright girl! Soon after, he scooted over to me, and after just a tiny bit more jollying he was ready to finish our errand and leave, cheerful and cooperative like nothing had happened.

It feels like he's on fast-forward again, into everything, brain and body buzzing and humming with new ideas and impulses. Yesterday we had our first Fun With Poison Control moment, after I sent him to the bathroom to wash his hands for dinner, and checked up after a suspicious silence to find him eating the watermelon-flavored toothpaste we'd bought him a few days before. As I suspected, you have to eat a lot more than that for it to be a problem, and he was fine, but grrrrr. To be fair, nobody had ever specifically told him not to eat the toothpaste. I never know if it's better to tell him not to - and plant the seed of the idea where it might not have otherwise come up - or to remain silent and hope it doesn't occur to him. Unfortunately in this case, he is a very creative little dude. Many things occur to him.

The up side of that is awesome fun with Legos. We are building many many things - we don't really have kits (we have a few, but he's not really old enough to follow directions, so we're saving them mostly) so we make shit up, which I think is way better for learning play anyway, and he builds excavators and planes and helicopters and all kinds of stuff. Legos are awesome, and they've only gotten more awesome since I was a kid. I surf eBay and drool over the lots of special colors (pink! orange! lime! light blue! purple! teal!) that we didn't have back then, and that you still can't get in most standard kits, and over extendible fire ladders and scoops and lots of windshields and wheels and rotating pieces that let you make all kinds of cool vehicles. We got all his Legos secondhand, so we don't have the prettiest, most newfangled bits in our collection, and I covet. I am turning into a Lego geek. My partner says, "He doesn't need any more Legos" but I secretly think that there is not really any such thing as too many Legos. They are kind of the best toy ever.


Squid crashes the flight simulator under the supervision of friendly museum staff.

He is still trying to parse families. He told me this month "I have two fathers! Uncle Mark is my father, and Daddy is my father, too!" I told him I thought I would know who his father was, and that he only had one. He did not believe me. He also has been telling people a lot about his brothers and how they are coming to visit. Except for how he doesn't have any brothers. So I asked him what his brothers' names were. "Their names are little teeny guys who swim in the pool like fish with arms swim in the ocean with they tails and they fins," he informed me. Well, that clears things up. How many brothers do you have, I asked him. "Oh, LOTS," he said, confident and cheerful. Perhaps best of all was the pronouncement, "When I grow up I will be a Daddy and you can be the Mommy, Mommy!" Ooookay, Oedipus. Time to finish that "family tree" project, I think, as a visual aid for how all this stuff works.

Though maybe it's just a larger part of working out how your family is still your family when you grow up. I wrote that up and then he told me in the car yesterday, "When you grow up to be an aminal, I will be a farmer!" I asked if he would take good care of me, and he assured me that he would. Well, there's the retirement plan sorted, I guess. Less reassuring, when I asked him what kind of aminal I would grow up to be, he said, "A cricket! And a conductor!" Um, what?

His focus on sadness continues. He sees sadness in his books, in other people, in himself, and notes it where he doesn't call out other emotions. Lots of kids' books contain some sadness - it's the narrative precursor to the "lesson" of whatever the book is about - but his attention seems to sort of stop there, not really moving on to the part where it gets better after. I thought the move to the older class at preschool might help, because it's more developmentally appropriate and his friends are there, but our dropoffs have been even worse and more dramatic since the switch. "I miss you!" he sobs to me, clinging to my leg. "Don't leave! I'm so sad!" I try not to encourage the sadness, and to do more talking about happiness and other emotions, but I'm not as consistent about that as I should be. I don't know how to help myself with this stuff, so how can I help my kid?

He's still making up lots of words - "Stickoff!" he cries, running around the Aviation Museum. "Spack!" he says, when asked what he wants for breakfast. He's also picked up the noise I make when I'm frustrated (imagine "augh" sort of roared out of the back of the throat) and his usual smattering of odd vocabulary; "hoist," "stubble," "cantaloupe," "tentacles," "detect," and "demolition," among other words not usually in common usage among the preschool set.

I made a friend this month, I hope. I always thought it would be easier to make friends once I had kids, but not really; other moms who seem cool have kids too old or to young to play with the Squid, or I'm too shy to go up to them (seriously, I can be shy) or when I do and I hand them my contact info they don't call, or they live too far away to see regularly (with a kid who still naps, this is pretty much anywhere over half an hour's drive). I tried so hard when he started preschool, giving my info to the moms of his favorite play friends, asking for play dates, inviting them to birthday parties, but they never called/came and I eventually either gave up or took the hint, depending on how you want to look at it. But anyhow, we went to the Aviation Museum, and after a casual comment or two during sign-up for the preschool tour, another mom introduced herself to me, and we shook hands, and then I looked over and the Squid was shaking hands with her son, introducing themselves to each other just like we were! The boys are roughly the same age and get along like gangbusters, and she and I work in similar fields, and I really liked talking to her. We had them over this weekend and then had another playdate, and next weekend we'll go to the zoo. Making friends is hard; wish me luck!


Squid and his swim teacher in a lesson.

We started potty training this weekend, too. Thus far, disastrous. In a four-hour period yesterday, he did not manage to listen to his body once. I said to Himself, "I'm not sure he's ready for this," and Himself said, quite accurately, "I'm not sure you're ready for this." I'm not! I get so frustrated when I ask the Squid repeatedly if he is listening to his body and he says, "Yes, it is saying I don't have to go pee" and then wets himself the next minute. Unfortunately, only one of us is going to manage any leaps in maturation any time soon, and it isn't me. So I'm trying to be patient and not show my frustration and be positive and encouraging. But if he's still having accidents by next weekend, I'll be taking more drastic measures; my friend K emailed me a program for recalcitrant potty-trainers that is sort of the "next step up" in potty-training strictness.

...I'll let you know how it goes.