My Favourite Age

So Sam is at what I'm guessing is going to be one of my favourite ages. Yes, he's frustrating as all get out some -- ok, a lot -- of the time, and yes, he's getting to be fiercely independent (but only at inconvenient times), but he's finally made it to that fabled parental time: the age when reverse psychology works.

"Eat your dinner."

"I don't want to eat my dinner."

"Did you hear, mama? Sammy can't eat a super big bite of dinner. He doesn't know how."

"YES I DO!!" *chomp*

"Let's go pee."

"No, I really don't want to pee right now."

"I'm going to beat you in the race and pee first!"
"OH NO YOU'RE NOT!" *zoom*

I don't know how long it's going to last - he's clever enough that it probably won't be that long - but I'm going to enjoy every minute of it, especially seeing as it works every time. Ahhh... I can still outsmart my three-year-old. It's a good day.

HE CRAWLS!!

As of three minutes ago, Joey is officially a crawler! I don't know what the impetus was, but after a couple of weeks of trying, he has just now starting real, honest-to-goodness, hand and knees crawling.

Julie is, of course, ecstatic; Sam came rushing into the den when he heard her commotion and starting hugging Joey and giving him imaginary treats.

It was a good four minutes.

Safety Minded...

Whenever I drive somewhere, Julie always tells me, "Drive safe." It's one of those little married-people things.

It has been adopted by our little mimic.

I was heading to work this morning while Sam was staying home with Julie. "Drive safe, daddy," he said. "Thanks, little man," I answered, heading for the door.

He wasn't done.

"Don't drive your car into another car."

"Wear your seatbelt to be safe."

"Don't have any accidents."

"Have a good day, and have a good day at work."

... I drove to work with a smile on my face.

The Squawk

Sam spent a couple of pre-talking months screeching like a pterodactyl; Joey is taking a different course of action. I really shouldn't be surprised. Sam has a voice like Julie's, whereas Joey seems to have inherited mine.

This means, of course, that Sam will have trouble ordering in crowded restaurants, and Joey will get in trouble in virtually every class he's ever in.

But I digress.

Joey, in the last couple of days, has been practicing a new sound that can only be described as a squawk. Actually, I'm lying; it can also be described as "piercing", "impressively loud" and "please-stop-doing-that-I'll-buy-you-a-pony".

I hope he loses it soon. I'm not confident that he will, but what's life without a little hope?

Well, I Never!

Sam and I were driving to the grocery store this afternoon, and he asked me where mama was. (We'd left mama in the sunroom with Joey not 3 minutes earlier.)

"Where is she?" I asked.

"In the sunroom with Baby Joey," he replied.

"If you knew, why did you ask me the question?" I answered.

"I didn't," said the boy. "You did."

[Aside: I'm still not quite sure what to do with blunt denials of reality. He doesn't seem to have a problem with them, but I don't know how to respond.]

"You did!" I countered.

"You did!" he gleefully riposted.

"You did twice!" I said, launching fully into the game.

He paused for a moment, then, with dignity, murmured, "I'm not talking to you anymore."

I think I hurt myself laughing. (He found it funny, too; we then spent 10 minutes eating cars in the grocery store parking lot.)

I Wish I'd Thought Of That

Sam frequently has to poop right about dinner time. He signals this by telling us his belly hurts. Tonight, he piped up, just like clockwork, "My belly hurts..."

"Do you need to poop?" mama asked.

"No," he said. "I think it needs to have some ice cream in it."

Some Days, You Just Can't Win

Sam brought a new friend into bed with him tonight (Marcus the dog). As I was tucking him in, Sam was complaining that Marcus was barking. I said no, he was just panting. Sam was sure that he wasn't panting, so I suggested that maybe Marcus would just go to sleep.

"Pretend dogs don't sleep, daddy," he told me in his what-an-idiot voice.

"Why not?" I asked, genuinely surprised.

"Because they're just toys," he explained patiently.

...*sigh*

Poop, Poop And More Poop

This isn't my story, but it's too amusing not to tell.

My friend Wendy's kids can be a handful. Unfortunately, James, her youngest at almost 2, decided to be a handful at her recent birthday party.

It was a beautiful weekend, so the party was, quite naturally, outside. At some point, James followed their dog Henry to his preferred, er... defecation location. When Henry finished his business, James waded right in.

Wendy found him covered head-to-toe in dog poop.

She brought him inside dangling by an ankle and went through the arduous task of cleaning up an uncooperative 2-year-old. When she was done, she realized - unfortunately by the smell - that she had missed a spot. Said spot happened to be all up one side of her outfit; she then got to clean herself up.

The real horror comes next:

Turns out James was not unoccupied while she returned herself to a presentable state. Turns out James went into the garbage and pulled out the plastic bag that Wendy had used to scoop up what was left of Henry's business. Turns out James tore the bag open and proceeded to repeat the first act in every excruciating detail.

Happy Birthday, mama.

(Have I mentioned lately that I love my kids?)

Excess: A Story In 2 Parts

Today was Easter. It was a good day, filled with all the things you'd expect from Easter -- including, of course, chocolate.

Sam loves chocolate.

He's got a general sweet tooth, really, and he asks for an awful lot of treats. He gets maybe 2 a day (things like a gummy worm, or a chocolate egg), and truth be told, I think that's saved us a lot of grief; when it comes to things like his birthday cake, he nursed a single piece for three days. I think that because he's used to sweet things, he doesn't crave them. Consequently, he doesn't binge on them.

Normally. (Can you see where this is going?)

Part 1:

We figured that, seeing as he's getting older, we'd loosen up the chocolate chains a bit today. Sam ate accordingly. We tried to make sure that he balanced the crap eating with real-food eating, but he still had a bunch more chocolate than usual. It still didn't seem really excessive, though I will admit that I don't exactly know the normal tolerance for a 3-year-old.

I was wrong.

After the afternoon egg hunt -- spread happily over the three Compound houses -- Sam complained that he needed to go to the bathroom. Well, he was right about his belly being off... I swear, I'm starting to think that we go over to Ian and Nancy's house just so Sam can throw up. Needless to say, he felt much better after that. Also needless to say, he didn't get any more candy today.

Part 2:

Sam, as you may have understood, got a lot of chocolate. A lot. One thing that a lot of chocolate can do is throw off the balance of your system, making you sick. Another thing that a lot of chocolate can do is make you bounce around your dinner chair like some kind of giant Gummi Bear, possibly flailing your arms and yelling.

(That happened, by the way.)

Happily, we were eating outside on Ian and Nancy's deck, and Sam was feeling very biddable. So we did what any good parents would do with a hyper, willing child: we ran him. Run to the tree! we told him. Run and touch the downspout! we told him. Hop like a bunny! Go backwards on tippy-toes! Anything and everything we could think of we told him, and he did it. It was great; we had a post-dinner show, and he burned off most of the sugar high.

I'm pleased to report that he crashes like a timber falling in the woods. I expect him to wake up sometime tomorrow afternoon.

I'll Say It Again...

I am not the first to discover this, but I have discovered it: two kids is exponentially harder than one. Even if I didn't know it from the rough times, I know it from the easy times - whenever it's just one parent-one kid, Julie and laugh about how easy it is to handle one. I can still remember (just barely) the days before Joey when she and I would collapse after putting Sam to bed, exhausted. Now if we have a day with both of us and just one of them - heck, even a couple of hours - it's as good as a break.

Well, almost.

Sam's Imaginarium

We frequently wonder at the things Sam tells us. How much is he actually seeing versus how much is he making up completely? When he's telling us about things that aren't there, does he realize that they aren't really there? And most of all, where does he come up with some the stuff he says??

Julie was telling me about a conversation that she and Sam had the other day about wolves, I think. (He's very ... I don't know if fond is the word I'm looking for ... of seeing wolves about the house, along with Swiper the Fox from Dora the Explorer.) Julie was telling him how to handle that particular wolf situation and Sam looked at her, in deadly earnest, and said, "Mama, there are no wolves here. I was just 'tendin'."

Another bedtime story: one of the things we do at Sam's bedtime is remove all the scary guys (or maybe that should be Scary Guys) from his room. It started with monsters, and has evolved considerably since then. When Julie collects all the scaries, she throws them out the window. Sam always asks who went the fastest. One day, she said, "The teeny tiny little scary guys."

Sam (wide-eyed): "But, mama! They have no feet!"

... Just who are these guys? What is this kid seeing?

Sleep, Tooth, Tooth, Sleep, Sick, Tooth

Joey's sleep schedule for the past two weeks. Oy.

Grace

We say grace before meals, and we've taught Sam to do the same. It's a bit of an adventure, honestly -- though really, what isn't it with him? -- we never know how it's going to go. There are a couple of main flavours of SamGrace:

• regular - we say grace
• hi-test - everything done at maximum speed volume. Entertainingly, this also entails Sam smoking himself in the head and stomach when he crosses himself.
• true Catholic - sobbing

On top of the main variant, there are a couple of bizarre idiosyncrasies that we can't seem to get rid of:

• for the longest time, he had a real touchstone with the word "bounty". Often, grace would start with bounty, we'd stop in the middle when we got there (and then normally have to each say it -- including Sam's high-pitched "bounty!" for Joey), and end with at least one "bounty".
• he has never - not once - touched both shoulders when crossing himself. At least, not with the same hand; he frequently hits both shoulders at once.
• until about a week ago, he wouldn't say "we are" (as in, "we are about to receive"). He still won't say "through".

We say it, though. I'm sure God understands; it's the idea, not the implementation.

He's A Keeper

Supper tonight was, predictably, chaotic. (Predicting chaos on any given night would rarely go amiss.) At one point Joey pulled over a water glass, dumping it on both the table and Julie's lap. I jumped up to get a towel, and as I brought it back, Sam came trotting back to the table as well.

"Here, mama," he said. "It's for Joey's hands."

And he handed her the kleenex he'd run and gotten.