I’ve spent the last week trying to catalog of all the profound changes going on in Henry’s life and how wonderful it is to bear witness to it, but I’m so zonked right now, I can’t think straight. Let me just say, he’s a great kid with an amazing, sweet disposition and a healthy curiosity. He’s articulate and adventuresome and a pain in the butt. He’s my Hanky Pantser, my Noodle, my Mister Bister, my Monkey, and he’s THREE. Unreal.

Since this is Henry’s last birthday as an only child, we kind of spoiled him a bit this year. Here are some photos from today’s celebration.

And one photo from yesterday, because I  like it so much:

Happy birthday, Henry. We love you more than can be expressed in some silly blog post.

We’re now plotting how to tell Henry about Number Two. We haven’t told him yet because we didn’t want to stress him out before it was really necessary. I suppose it’s still not entirely necessary yet, but we’ve ordered some picture books about babies and when the time feels right, we’ll talk to him about the impending arrival of his new baby sister.

(Not the greatest ultrasound image, but it was the only one that didn’t make her look like a roast turkey. Apparently she’s taking that whole “fetal position” thing very seriously.)

Sometimes, not very often, but sometimes, it’s actually sunny here. And Henry stops to smell the peonies. (The rain destroyed them the day after they all bloomed. Damn you, rain!)

Here he is in the big boy bed. As you can see, it’s just his crib with one of the sides replaced with a short rail. We talked the big boy bed up for a month or so before actually making the change. Henry was super excited about the whole thing. The first few nights, it took him a long time to calm down and just sleep, but once he fell asleep, he stayed asleep. He had similar problems at naptime, and spent about two weeks ill-rested and cantankerous. He’s doing better now, though.

Henry’s very proud of the big boy bed and will show anyone who expresses interest just how he climbs in and gets under the brand-new Lightning McQueen-themed bedding. It’s an exceptionally cute display.

However, now that we’re almost three weeks into this big boy bed business, I think he’s having second thoughts about being a big boy. He wants nothing to do with sitting on his potty (just when we thought his poopy diaper days were behind us!), he doesn’t want to walk up or down stairs anymore, and he’s constantly asking either me or Raphe to, as he puts it, “picky up.” I am slightly concerned about how he will react to being moved into a new bedroom later this summer, and then to his new sibling later in the fall. Oy vey.

Henry has boundless energy and sure does love to run. Sometimes when we pick him up in the evenings after work, he runs down the block instead back to the car, forcing us to chase after him. The kind of funny thing is, he still does his bouncy toddler happy run that’s he’s done since he could run at all. That is to say, he doesn’t have a very even gait or look terribly coordinated when he’s doing it. (Indeed, I’m often worried he’s going to topple over while running.) I attribute this to the fact that he is very tall for his age and must have a very high center of gravity. Note that in the photo to the right, he is the same size as four-year-old Zoë.

Now that we’re going to be a family of four, we need a larger vehicle. As it is, Henry kicks the front seats of the Forester when sitting in his car seat. We would never be able to drive anyone else around if we had two car seats in the back. Plus, Suzy Subaru is going on 10 years old, and has needed expensive repairs each of the last two years. It’s SO time.

So we’ve been hitting up various car dealers to find the right car for the expanded Cheli family. Raphe is vehemently anti-minivan. I am trying to keep an open mind. My must-haves are heated seats and a sunroof. Raphe’s must-not-haves are sliding doors. Henry’s partial to anything that features lots of buttons and hidden compartments. We’ll see how this all pans out.

It’s farmers market season again, which means we spend Saturday mornings in Evanston perusing the goods. Henry is excited about the prospect of more garlic cheese, which he hasn’t had since last summer. Unfortunately, the Wisconsin cheesemonger he adores so much has not yet turned up at the Evanston farmers market. Luckily, we are able to distract Henry from his disappointment with brightly colored flowers and mock threats of making him eat strawberries.

Let’s see…what else can I tell you about. It’s not very exciting (unless it’s your kid, I guess), but Henry has been experimenting lately with using time words. By that I mean, he’s trying to sort how to express when things happened in the past. According to him, pretty much everything that has ever happened to him happened either “yesterday” or “when (he) was a little baby”. So, although he went to Zachary’s party more than a month ago, it was “yesterday” as far as he’s concerned. And although we’ve been reading him Each Peach Pear Plum since he was about a year old, he says “I was reading this when I was a little baby”.

OK, I’m outta gas. I can’t think of anything else interesting to write about tonight. You are all going to have to nag Raphe now to update you on things. It’s been, what, like six months since he wrote a What We Learned post? Get on his case, willya? He doesn’t listen to me anymore.

He has always favored Kristen over me, and I can certainly understand this. She’s “mommy”. She’s loving and caring and smells a lot better than I do.

But, of late, it’s gotten worse. I am no longer an acceptable giver of hugs and comfort when he’s crying. When he wakes up at two in the morning because he’s had a bad dream, I cannot calm him down. When he’s in a bad mood (which, of late, has been more often), I cannot make him happy. Only Kristen.

This past weekend was the worst. On Friday night, a grumpy Henry joined Kristen, me, and our friend Amanda out for dinner. Twenty minutes in, however, I was carrying a screaming toddler out of the restaurant and driving home. (We get to see Amanda only every 3 years, so I wanted Kristen to at least enjoy her company.) He was belligerent and ornery and wanted only to sit on Kristen’s lap (whilst squirming like a greased weasel). And as I was strapping him into the car seat (oh, the joy), there was nothing I could do to calm him down.

On Sunday, we had planned another outing, this as a thank-you to our friends Kyle and Meghan (and daughter Vivi) who have been more than nice to us this past few weeks. That never happened, as we were never able to get pants (or underpants or even a diaper) on Henry. I can only imagine what Meghan heard on the voice mail as Kristen was apologizing for canceling at the last minute — the shrieks and wails from Henry were legendary.

And through all this, I’m not good enough.

When it’s just the two of us, it’s okay. (I try to have at least one daddy-Henry outing each weekend.) On Wednesday, I took a day off and went to the Museum of Science and Industry (oh, the trains!) with Henry, and all was great. The minute Kristen walked through the door, however, I was tossed to the side like yesterday’s news.

And while it seems like I’m being funny about this, it’s really starting to get to me. It breaks my heart when he runs to Kristen instead of me or when I can’t console him after he gets upset. Yesterday I was really upset, noticeably so. It’s very frustrating and makes parenting not at easy.

Sigh.

Anyway, Henry’s been watching a lot of Dumbo lately, although we fast-forward over the scene where Dumbo and Timothy the mouse get drunk. (Also, I’m troubled by the scene with the crows, but the racism flies several feet over Henry’s head, so…we’ll deal with that eventually.) You may not remember this, but in the movie, Dumbo’s mother, Mrs. Jumbo, gets locked up in a solitary trailer away from all the other animals after she attacks some people who were teasing Dumbo (“She made a bad choice in the heat of the moment and got put in time out,” is how I explain it to Henry). Later in the movie, to cheer Dumbo up after he messes up a performance, Timothy takes him to see his mother, who pokes her trunk out a barred window, gathers up Dumbo, and gently rocks him. It’s a scene that will make even the most hard-hearted melt.

And it’s the scene that Henry wants to re-enact daily. “Mommy,” he says as he takes me by the hand, “I want to go to your room. Come rock your baby elephant.” He curls up very small in my arms (no mean feat, considering he’s the size of a four-year old now), and I rock him and sing very softly to him. Sometimes it makes me a little weepy. And then he realizes that he’s been calm and quiet for a bit longer than his toddler brain can handle, so he busts out of my arms and says, “Mommy elephant, I gonna find a hammer and break you out!” I interpret this whole thing to mean Henry’s a little ambivalent about growing up.

***

We have to remind Henry nightly to eat like a human at the dinner table. He’s taken to eating like a goat (his words:  “Mommy, I eating like a GOAT”), which basically amounts to him putting his face to his plate and snarfing up whatever’s right under his mouth. He hasn’t yet figured out how to tilt his head so he doesn’t get food all over his forehead while doing this, so it’s incredibly messy. It started with him eating sunflower seeds out of my hand and then morphed into this ridiculous scene at the dinner table. We have to keep reminding him that he has to respect his fellow diners at the dinner table and that he can do silly things like that when he’s anywhere BUT sitting at the dinner table. This message has yet to sink in. We get strange looks when we take him to restaurants. Ah, well.

Christmas:  My mother came to visit. She was only supposed to be with us four days, but there was a ginormous snowstorm back in New York and she ended up staying for a week because she couldn’t get a flight back. This could have been a disaster (I fully buy into the old “fish and houseguests” adage), but it was actually great. Henry had a lot of fun with my mom, and Christmas morning was a blast. There is even a little bit of not-very-exciting video from Christmas morning, to wit:

Yes, I am snapping photos while operating the Flip video camera. Shut up. It’s not like anyone else in this family takes photos or video. Besides, if I wasn’t snapping away, we might have missed some of these moments:

I think Henry pretty much loved Christmas. He keeps asking where the Christmas tree went and when it will be coming back.

The Neighborhood Parents Network had a New Year’s Eve Eve party for kids at one of the Lil’ Kickers facilities here in the city. Henry was terrified of the guy in a bunny suit who walked around all evening, but other than that, he was in heaven. He really liked playing parachute games. We couldn’t help but notice he was almost a head taller than all the other kids in his age group. He’s going to be a giant someday.

My mom left on New Year’s Eve, and on my way back from driving her to the airport, I picked up a celebratory cake, per Henry’s instructions. (We were celebrating  the New Year, not my mother’s departure, although it sure was nice to go back to being slobs once she left.) That’s right. Henry asked for cake. He’s SO my baby.

Here’s the cake:

The teenager working the counter at the bakery looked at me like I was stupid when I asked her to inscribe the cake thus. She had no sense of humor, that one.

Here’s Henry’s face when we told him he could not have more frosting to eat:

He was pissed, I’ll tell you what.

Mid-January, we went down to see my dad in Florida. All of us desperately needed the sunshine, even though it wasn’t super warm down there.

Henry loves those swings at Clearwater Beach. The giant inflatable slide, however, is his arch-nemesis. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to listen to him talk about being scared of “big slides”. I’m worried my child is going grow up to hate fun the way his daddy does.

However, Henry loves Thai food, and flowers in his hair. Maybe all is not lost.

At the beginning of February, we had our own ginormous snow storm here in Chicago. Almost 2 feet of snow fell in 24 hours! And Raphe flew out to San Francisco the day before it started and missed the whole thing. I missed two days of work and spent them playing with Henry.

A week later, we joined Zoe at an Evanston Park District ice rink to celebrate her birthday. Henry was game enough to put on skates and get out on the ice, although he begged us to pick him up. (We didn’t, reasoning that it was too dangerous.) He’s been talking about ice skating ever since, so I guess we’ll have to go again.

Nothing exciting has happened since the ice skating party, unless you count a toddler haircut exciting. Oh, wait. THIS is exciting:

Something every parent longs for:  when their kid wears underpants more often than diapers.  Here’s hoping we’ve bought our last case of Pampers. Then we could get another cake to celebrate! Maybe I’d even let Henry eat extra frosting.

Anyhoo.

Here in Chicago, some neighborhoods go all out with the Christmas lights, and this evening, we took Henry out to see some of them. Since Christmas lights and inflatable snowmen started appearing on front lawns a few weeks ago, he’s constantly asking to drive past houses that are lit up. Tonight was pure heaven for our little boy.

By mid-morning, we were all outside playing in the snow. We helped Henry build a small and somewhat pathetic snowman, which he later stomped to bits. Our little boy is not particularly sentimental.

Late morning saw us choosing our Christmas tree, something a gazillion other families were also inspired to do. Henry was more interested in looking at the already-decorated display trees. We made a quick decision and got the heck out of there. The guy that tethered our tree to the roof of our car said he thought the snow was responsible for how busy the garden center was.

After lunch, Henry took a nap and I loaded up my iPod with kids’ holiday music from Kiddie Records Weekly. When he woke up, we ate some homemade chocolate chip cookies and danced to “I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas”, and then hopped in the car to meet Vivi and her family at the Lincoln Square Christkindlmarkt.  The day ended with dinner at a favorite Italian place in Andersonville and a thoroughly exhausted little boy.

It was a really, really good day. I’ve never really been sure what it meant when people said their hearts felt full, but I think today I figured it out.

Lately, Henry sings along when I sing to him at night. So while he asks for “Happy Birthday” to be sung to 36 different people, he’ll join in each time. But wait, it gets better. The past few times I’ve sung “You Are My Sunshine” to him, he’s hugged me tight and exclaimed “I HAPPY!” after we sing “you make me happy”, and then hugged me again and shouted “I LOVE you, Mommy!” after we sing “you’ll never know, dear, how much I love you.” This is some good shit, my friends. I keep singing this song at night just to get the extra love. And I feel like I’m walking on clouds.

***

We’ve been working on getting Henry to ask nicely (with “please” and “thank you”) when he wants something. Tonight I put him down in his crib to sleep for the night and realized on the way out the door that his blankie was on the floor in the other room and not scrunched up under his face. Since Henry was quiet and seemed to be on his way to fast asleep, I decided not to risk waking him by opening his door and chucking it in his crib. Instead, I hopped in the shower.

So of course he fully wakes up once he realized the blankie is not in his crib. And I’m in the shower with my hair half-washed, and can’t just jump out to bring it to him. I hear him through the baby monitor wailing “MOMMY. MOMMY. Mommy, I NEED BLANKIE. MOMMMMMY.” It took me a few minutes to finish scrubbing and rinsing, during which time there was a marked change  in the tenor of his pleas. No more moaning and ordering. Suddenly, he’s all sweet. “Mommy, PLEASE BLANKIE. Please blankie, MOMMY. PUH-weeeeez.”

Once wrapped in my bathrobe, I scurried to his room with the blankie in hand. Henry was standing at the corner of his crib waiting for me. “I’m sorry, Henry,” I said, and explained that I’d been in the shower. “I sorry, Mommy,” he said, rubbing his cheek with the blankie. “I love you, baby boy,” I whispered as he lowered himself to the mattress and curled up around the blankie.

1. Having to share with other boys and girls when playing with the Thomas the Tank Engine train table at Barnes & Noble.
2. Skeletons
3. Spiders
4. CC barreling down the hallway at full gallop
5. Big Pumpkin (???)
6. Dragonflies
7. “Mister Tato Head” (Oh, how he despises Mr. Potato Head. He screamed when he saw one at Costco a few weeks ago.)

Things Henry has recently asked to talk about at bedtime:

1. Water
2. Kangaroos
3. Trucks
4. Trucks
5. Butterflies/Fatterpatters
6. Lollipops
7. Sky

People/objects/other to whom Henry has asked to sing Happy Birthday:

1. Vivi
2. Silvia
3. Bedroom
4. Cars
5. Trucks
6. Daddy
7. Mushroom (he can’t pronounce her name, so much to her chagrin, this is what Henry calls Anisha’s mother)