Glad They're Not Mine

A friend of mine had her kids out shopping with her recently. The store had a play area, which the kids had pretended to be happy about. Apparently they weren't, though, as they scattered immediately upon entering the store. As she collected her 2-year-old son and looked for her 3-year-old daughter, behind her she heard "Boo! Boo! Boo!"

She found her daughter - opening random changing room curtains and yelling "Boo!" at the no-doubt surprised occupants.

My, But He's Polite...

Joey is doing remarkably well on the communication front. He's got 4 or 5 signs (they're all animals, but hey, you have to start somewhere) and he's saying more and more words. At this point he says, "All gone" (in the most guttural voice you've ever heard; from a 15-month-old it can be... disconcerting, shall we say), "car", "uh-oh", and -- most impressively -- "thank you".

Even cooler than that, he says it unprompted when you give him things. We haven't even been trying. That's how good our parenting is; it's like some kind of courtesy osmosis.

If only we'd known that we could do it this easily when we had Sam!

Very Metal

I sing to Sam as we're driving to and from pre-school. Sometimes I run out of little kid songs and nonsense songs, and just sing whatever springs to mind. Last week, that song was Welcome To The Jungle, by Guns N' Roses, and I unwittingly unleashed the thunder.

He asked for it the next day, and the next. The day after that, I played the real song for him, and he was hooked. Guns N' Roses' Appetite for Destruction now lives in the car and gets steady play, right alongside the personalized CD Sam has with songs about lunchtime and wake-up routines.

The night after I played the real song for him, he did me proud at the supper table:

"Rock on, daddy," he said.

Rock on indeed.

The New Cool

I've been meaning to post these forever, but hadn't actually found the pictures.

Sam stayed home with Julie and Jen one day in the middle of summer and came to meet me at the office. They'd obviously been having some fun...

He Sounds His Barbaric Yawp Over The Patios Of The World...

Joey - A Tremendous Retrospective

...of the last 3 weeks, anyway.

When we last left our hero, he was busy producing bodily fluids and yelling. Oh, how well we remember those days; nowadays, he's busy producing bodily fluids and yelling.

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It's official; Joey has my voice. Mom, Dad, I'm so sorry. Because that kid is loud. Thankfully, these days he's mostly happy yelling, but still. Damn. (Note the extraneous italics. That's how loud he is.)

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There have been some very cool developments lately, and it's not until this moment that I really realized how much progress he's made in such a short time. At last blogging, he was started to teeter around - I think he'd made 6 steps once. Now he's practically running. Let me state, by the way, that a one-year-old running may be one of the cutest things on the planet. He'll still crawl on occasion, but it's mostly if there's something on the floor that he wants. Then he's right back up.

In other locomotive news, much like Sam, we worked at teaching him the correct way to go down stairs, so that's a significant worry that's been alleviated. Well, for me at least; Julie still yelps every time he goes near the stairs on his own, whether he's aiming for them or not. I guess that's one of the big differences between boys and girls - I see those times as teaching opportunities for Joey. If he goes for a tumble, he'll learn to be more careful around stairs.

I kid. Well, mostly.

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He's now feeding himself partially with utensils. He doesn't seem to be making as much of a mess as Sam did when he started with spoons, but maybe that's a matter of levels of mess; Sam was a neat eater, so the spoon drips and drops were apparent, whereas Joey is a tornado in a highchair. Extra fallout is hard to distinguish. On a related note, watching Joey eat supper has explained to me why so parents have nightly baths for their children. Sure, calming, routine, yadda yadda; I think it's so the bugs don't try to carry them off to feed the colony.

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Joey's now at Brad's house fulltime, and seems to be acclimatizing well. It's gotta be a tough transition for the little guy, especially seeing as I just plain don't have the time to coddle and cuddle him at Brad's place the way I could with Sam. It's one more instance of the second kid getting screwed - I think. The thing is, looking back, I don't know if it was doing Sam any favours to try to gentle him as much as I did into new things. Seeing the differences between the two boys, I can't help but wonder if the reason Joey is as good at playing on his own as he is because he's been forced to, or because if he's been allowed to.

In any case, Joey still cries when I drop him off, but that lasts for a couple of minutes max, and then (as of late last week), he's back to his normal independent self, exploring and adventuring. He's always happy when I pick him up - and happy to see me, which always makes me smile.

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He has started speaking! In two ways, really: his signing is getting much better and more consistent (though it does currently consist almost entirely of animal names, but hey, it's a start), and he's started to use words. His first word, appropriately, was "Uh oh". He has now moved on to "car", "mama", the occasional "dada", and my very favourite: an extremely gutteral "all gone". Like, think 3-pack-a-day emphysema patient. It's hilarious. Because, you know, he's not.

This is where it starts. First it's "uh oh", then it's "why?", then it's "I swear, Your Honor, it's not mine". It's a slippery slope.

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I saved my personal favourite piece of news for last. It won't have the same impact on all of you folk, what with it being the end of a behaviour that started after the last update. However, seeing as it a) was one of my least favourite behaviours so far, and b) was one of the big reasons why it's been so long since the last update, I'm thrilled to be able to report:

For the past 3 days, Joey has slept past 5:20am.

I'm not a morning person. I have never been a morning person (barring Saturday morning cartoons before I turned 14). Having had kids for 3.5 years and getting up what I still frequently consider absurdly early every day has not turned me into a morning person. About 2 weeks ago, Joey decided that sleep was for the weak, and started waking up between 10 and 20 after 5. This, obviously, necessitated me getting up between 10 and 20 after 5.

That was not the best me that can be found.

Even better, after about 4 days of this, Sam started waking up at the same time. Then they started waking in the middle of the night again. Not a lot, but once, maybe twice, each.

That may have been an even worse me.

It lasted about a week and a half. Joey has gotten up closer to 6:15 for the last couple of days, even though I did have to rock him back down at 5:15 one day. I am sad and happy that I have recently discovered how much better a single 5-hour chunk of sleep feels than 2 3-hour chunks.

We've been putting the kids down earlier (aiming for closer to 7 than 8) and it's been working beautifully; they've been going down pretty easy, sleeping well, and getting up later.

I am all for this change.