What A Polite Boy!

Since starting with toilet training, Joey has become quite sensitive to questions when he's pooping. He's also pretty obvious when he's pooping. We keep encouraging him to go on the actual toilet, but what we get is a grumpy, "Don't talk to me."

It happened tonight. We asked again, and he - full-on angry face - said again,
"Don't talk to me!"

"That's not nice," I said. "We don't talk that way."

He thought for a moment, then said slowly, "Can you please not talk to me?"

Logical

From out of nowhere, Sam says to me, "Blue whales are bigger than elephants."

"...So they have stinkier toots."

Yep.

At Least She Was Third...

We're looking for a babysitter for my office Christmas party. As a gentle way of broaching it, I asked Sam how he'd feel about my aunt putting him to bed. He was amenable, but told me "Aunt Jenny is my first choice." When I asked him his second choice, he said that it might be my aunt.

"Who else might be second?" I asked. He thought for a moment, then replied, "...Maybe her cat."

I'm Closing This Chapter

My mommy always said, if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. I haven't blogged much over the last two weeks.

These two sentences are not unrelated.

Now that I'm officially calling this phase finished, I'll at least mention it. You know, for posterity.

Joey's been... yell-y. A lot. He spent about two weeks completely losing his mind over, well, everything. And anything. And nothing. For weeks. Truth be told, it was awful. He Jekyll'd and Hyde'd most impressively; I mean, literally in the span of two breaths he'd switch between happy and grinning and absolutely howling. At some point shortly (or longly) thereafter, there would be another two breaths and he'd be happy again. It was both incredibly disconcerting and very hard to deal with. Nothing made him happy when he was upset, and anything could make him upset.

Suffice it to say, he was not our favourite person for much of the last couple of weeks.

He's been back to normal for the last couple of days, so I'm calling it an ended phase, but man! I feel like I now have stories from the trenches.

Destructive Tendencies

I think we got lucky, first time around. Sam has always been a careful child, and one who took care of this things. I don't think we ever lost a piece of any toy he ever owned, and it was rare that anything of his got broken.

Then we had Joey.

Joey has always been the tougher of the two, the more physical, and the more interested in how things go together. At least, I ascribe the last to him; it's possible that he just likes breaking things. (To be fair - and this may be the last time this post - he really enjoys putting things together, too.) Seriously; the dude breaks everything. He breaks things that I didn't know could be broken. Case in point: he walked out of our bedroom the other morning with one of those travel floss packs - the little white plastic ones. When I came downstairs a minute later, he handed me a naked spool of floss, the plastic and metal casing thrown randomly on the floor. For the life of me, I can't figure out how he got it apart; I tried to do it and needed a key and some leverage.

The other day he popped open the floss, destroyed a granola bar thoroughly enough that I had to sweep twice, tore a tab off of a foam floor mat and snapped apart a toy alligator. He's a force of nature, and we don't really know what to do with it.

I don't know if he's more typical, or if Sam is, or if it's somewhere in between, but in any case, we were spoiled by Sam. We're not used to having to make sure everything breakable, messable or scatterable is out of reach. Not to mention anything that can be used to break, mess or scatter; heaven help all of us when he gets ahold of his umbrella or Sam's toy broom.

Maybe he's some sort of savant. A master of destruction. I only hope we can monetize it before he wrecks the house.

Uh... Sure...

Driving to preschool this morning, Sam has finished his little bowl of Goldfish. He puts it upside down on his head and announces, "I'm a chef!"

Man, somebody had better start sanitizing his media consumption.

Hallowe'en!

Joey as Pirate, Sam as Pirate Iron Man With A Mustache (yes, it's blue - that's what he asked for).

This was the first year that Joey really got the idea of trick-or-treating, and boy did he embrace it to the hilt. We ended up going for 3 blocks or so (but big blocks, so don't feel bad for the little ones...), and Sam was the one that suggested we stop. He wasn't grumpy or upset, just happy to have been out and ready to stop. Joey, though... I think Joey would have gone for another hour.

They also didn't try to eat their candy. Much, at least. While we were out. That night.

We haven't even ravaged their candy supplies yet, I feel like we're missing most of the stereotypes this year.