Holiday Light

December 18th, 2010

Since we haven’t been posting as regularly as we ought, you don’t yet know how much I love the Holiday Lite. I mean, the holiday lights. (93.9, the “Holiday Lite”, is our local easy-listening radio station, which plays nothing but Christmas music from mid-November through January 1. We’ve been listening to it pretty much non-stop since Henry became obsessed with all things Christmas. If I hear Mariah Carey singing “All I Want for Christmas is You” one more time, I’m gonna, I’m gonna…do something.)

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.

Completely Excellent from Start to Finish

December 4th, 2010

The day began with a family snuggle in our big bed. As he wiggled in close, Henry said, “Mommy, I love to see you.” We could hear the wind and snow scratching at our bedroom windows.

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.

What We’ve Learned: Month 27

December 2nd, 2010

If I could describe Henry in one word, it would be “poop.” No, no. I’m kidding. The word would be “sweet.”

Henry is a really sweet little kid. He is nice to other boys and girls (reluctantly and not without some gentle reminders he will share toys), he is polite (he’s gotten the pleases and thank-yous down pretty well), and he’s even been coming up to Kristen and I and telling us that he loves us or that he wants a hug or a kiss. He takes well to our friends and our neighbors and is always smiling and laughing.

Like I said: sweet.

This sweetness has come with another trait recently. That would be timid.

Lately, Henry has become very easily spooked, to the point where he even jumps a bit when he hears Cecil lumbering down the hallway. He hides from anything that is even remotely different. He is reluctant to try anything new. He’s scared of everything, it seems.

This isn’t an observation so much as he tells us that he’s scared. “Daddy, I’m scared of big pumpkins.” “Okay, Henry.” “Daddy, I’m scared of dolphins.” “Okay, Henry.” “Daddy, I’m scared of John Boehner.” “Okay, Henry.” (Note: I made one of those three things up.)

This is likely a phase, and we’re all okay with it. Although I have to admit that I get somewhat concerned when Henry seems to be afraid of even wonderful things, like Santa Claus or Big Slides. What’s a big slide, you say?

A couple of weeks ago, an ex-co-worker invited us to her daughter’s third birthday party that was to be held at a suburban Pump-it-Up. What’s a Pump-it-Up, you ask? It’s one of those places that have large inflatable bouncy rooms and slides where kids eat a lot of cake and then bounce for hours and, hopefully, not throw up.

Henry and I drove out to Schaumberg (oh, how I hate the suburbs), and after watching a short safety video (that Henry and all the other 2-, 3-, and 4-year-olds just were enraptured of), we headed off to the room where all the bouncy things were. The room was big and a little dark and very loud from all of the fans keeping the inflatable things puffy. And within 10 seconds of entering the room, Henry’s head was buried in my neck and he demanded that we go home immediately.

“Daddy, no big slide. No big slide!”

“What’s wrong, Henry?

“Big slide is scary. It’s scary! Let’s go home and play cars.”

And so we went out into the waiting room, called up Kristen, and Henry explained to her that the big slide was very scary and that he’d much rather be at home playing with his cars and trains and parking garages and perhaps even take a nap.

So that’s what we did. (He didn’t even allow me to go back inside and say goodbye to my friend.) This isn’t the only time that he’s refused to do something because he was scared of late. We saw Santa Claus (who we’ll talk about a bit later) at a local mall recently. We didn’t see him as in get on his lap or anything. We just saw him. But that was enough for Henry to make the widest arc possible around him.

I hope that this is just a phase, but if it’s not, that’s okay, too. We’re not going to force him to do anything he doesn’t want to do, and that means likely no visit to Santa this year and no trips to Pump-it-Up for a while either.

But even if he does grow out of it, I hope he still retains the sweetness.

So, other than Henry being a shy, what else have we learned?

We learned that Henry is in the middle of another growth spurt. We cannot get enough food down the kid’s throat of late. Pasta, potatoes, soup, yogurt, hot dogs. You name it, he’s eating it with ravenous gusto. (Everything but fruit. He still doesn’t eat fruit.) This growth spurt has meant that everything about him has gotten larger. He seems like he’s grown 6 inches in the past month. He’s really heavy to carry. And his feet are gigantic. We’ve had to buy new shoes twice in the past three months, his feet are growing so fast. 2T shirts no longer fit, and 3Ts are even getting a little short. (His pants are another story. Because he’s still really skinny — regardless of how much he eats — and his butt is really flat, pants that are the right length fall off him and pants that are the right waist and high-waters.)

We learned that Henry loves the idea of Santa Claus a lot more than he loves Santa Claus. Kristen and I started talking about Santa a few weeks ago, telling Henry that he’s a big fat man with a beard who comes once a year and gives good girls and boys a few presents. Well, presents is one thing that Henry likes even more than pasta, so he quickly embraced the idea of a fat man bearing gifts. He’s already got his list: cars, trucks, and a skid steer. A skid steer, people! At first, Henry was up to going up and asking Santa for these things. But after seeing him in all his glory at the mall, he’s decided that I’m going to go up and sit on Santa’s lap and tell him what Henry wants. Heaven help a mall Santa who has my girth on top of him. But Henry needs not worry. We’ll write a letter.

We learned that Henry remembers things. Not regular things, like the names of his cars or his stuffed dog. But he remembers things from six months ago, like friends of Kristen’s we saw when we were in Florida last. Or other people that he’s met only once. I don’t know why this is astonishing to me — but remembrance seems to be such an abstract thing, and it’s neat that he’s grasping it.

We learned that Henry’s getting really good at talking. Really good. Like to the point where he starts talking and won’t stop. And he’s started to understand how past tense works and how to make a word plural. Sure, sometimes he’ll say “feets” instead of “foots” or “mouses” instead of “mice”, but he’ll get there. (Our favorite is instead of  “hugs”, he’ll say “hugses”. Nothing cuter than that, is there.) He can count up to 12 and he’s pretty good with the alphabet. Now all we have to work on is colors. Henry, not everything is purple. Remember that.

We learned that Henry loves visits from his grandfather. Opa (Kristens’ father) came for a few days over the Thanksgiving week, and Henry liked nothing more than dragging him around, showing off all his toys and books and signing his favorite songs.

And we learned that, even after two haircuts, there are still some curls left. Not as many as before his first cut, and even less than after his second. But when wet or when it’s humid outside, his golden locks reappear. And there’s nothing better.

Bedtime Antics

November 12th, 2010

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.

Lists

November 3rd, 2010

Things Henry is scared of (he actually starts conversations with declarations like “I scared of…”), from least to most scary:

  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)

What We’ve Learned: Month 26

November 1st, 2010

So I’ve been quite the slacker of late, eh? No posts in nearly a month, people unable to get their Henry fix, dogs and cats sleeping together. It’s anarchy! ANARCHY!

Well, September through November is always a busy time for me at work, as I travel a lot of weekends and spend a lot of nights at home doing work instead of updating everyone on Henry’s activities. And I’m sorry. And I can only blame myself (and my inability to knock these posts out).

Anyway, this will be a long one.

Last Saturday, Kristen, Henry, and I went out to dinner at a local BBQ joint. (Kristen likes this place a lot, and Henry enjoyed his chicken, macaroni and cheese, baked beans, and mashed potatoes that we had to shovel into his mouth at about three spoonfuls a minute.) At the table next to us was a family — mother and father, two kids (one about 4, the other Henry’s age), and a grandmother. Anyway, as they were waiting for their food, I noticed that the mother pulled some flash cards out of her purse and started going over them with her two-year-old. Flash cards. At dinner. In a restaurant!

Immediately I began to worry — not for the kid being forced to identify a blue bird or a yellow duck instead of eating some starches — but for Henry, and whether he will be so far behind the learning curve and unable to get into the best elementary/middle/high schools, as well as being rejected out of hand when he tries to get into Harvard. Or Yale. I’d take Yale.

We read to Henry constantly and we sing to him and we talk about everything (I think I’ve answered the question “What is that?” about nine million times), but I’ve never thought about flash cards. Is anyone else doing this? Or is this just some crazed North Shore parent (we were in Evanston) that is too concerned with their child’s upward mobility?

I have to admit that when Henry gets things wrong, I’m worried. We’ll talk about colors, and he sometimes gets them all wrong (purple being his favorite catch-all color), and we’ll count things and he’ll keep going even after we’ve assigned every bus or car a number (“Five, six, seven, eight, nineten’leventwelve!!!” “No, Henry, there are just three doggies there.”) He’s a great kid, and he knows enough, and I’m just paranoid that he just doesn’t know enough. Right?

Last night, Kristen went to this open house meeting where there was a speaker talking about the process of getting into the good Chicago public schools, and while we knew it will be a harrowing experience, she came back pale and worried. Chicago is a big city (duh) and has scores of elementary schools, most of them quite terrible. There are magnet schools and gifted schools and classical schools, and while most of those are very good (some great), they’re not easy to get into and will require Henry to take some tests. Tests… at four years old!

So now, maybe the right thing to do is to start on flash cards, so that by the time it gets to be time for that test, he’ll be rarin’ to go and fully immersed in the proper ways to count and color. Or he’ll fail the test, get stuck in one of the horrible schools in the city, and live with us until he’s 45. (Although that wouldn’t be so bad. We could talk about hockey and comic books and watch bad movies on TV while I gently try and push him to send in that application to Arby’s.)

It’s a good thing I don’t overreact to these things.

So other than Kristen and I failing to properly educate our toddler, what else have we learned this month?

Well, we learned that Henry’s vocabulary is growing at leaps and bounds (and not just when he’s describing his poop in the potty — “Look, a tree!”). He’s talking in full sentences — compound, complex sentences — and, when the moon is right, he’ll talk so much, it’s difficult to get him to stop. He’ll chatter away, not just about the things he loves (cars, planes, ice cream), but about things that he sees on the street on in stores. The best is when he asks, “What’s that, Daddy?”, pointing to something. And when I answer, he’ll just start blabbering away about that thing. So if it’s a can of beans he sees in the grocery store, he’ll say, “It’s a round, blue can of beans.” I don’t know why, but that makes me really happy.

We learned that Henry has been telling us that he loves us. Every once in a while, unprompted, he’ll walk up to Kristen or I, wrap his arms around our neck, and say, “I love you.” Boy, that’s heartwarming.

We learned that Henry is slowly but surely learning some manners (not the easiest thing for a two-year-old little boy). While sharing has been, is, and probably will be something we work on for a while (he talks about sharing a lot more than he actually does), he has been good at saying please when asking for something, thank you when he’s given said thing, and even a you’re welcome or whenever we thank him for doing something. What a good little boy.

And we learned that Henry had a terrific October. Between trips to pumpkin patches, two — count ‘em, two — pony rides, a camel ride, Halloween parties, tumbling and music classes, and daily trips to the playground, I think we’re all a little jealous of his life.

Trick Or Treat

October 31st, 2010

So, Henry was completely terrified of the teenagers in masks and facepaint who roamed the neighborhoods trick-or-treating with him this evening. We ended up covering one enthusiastic block of decorated homes in Edgewater Glen before we had to give up for the night. He was pooped and thoroughly terrified, yet completely enamored of his small hoard of candy.

Lounging with lollipop loot:

This weekend really couldn’t have been any better. I have the best family!

Happy Halloween!

October 31st, 2010

Shark BoyWe’ve had so much fun already this weekend, and we haven’t even gotten to the trick-or-treating yet! Yesterday, we went with Lillian to a children’s festival at a local garden center, where Henry had fun riding a pony and petting every animal in the petting zoo about 36 times. Later, we went to a Halloween party at Vivi’s school. Henry was initially a little freaked out by the flashing lights and ghoulish decor, but by the end he was chomping Twizzlers and bopping around with Vivi. Seriously, I don’t think he stopped smiling until he hit the pillow last night.

Later this afternoon, after Henry’s nap, we’ll hit the Rogers Park Parents Meetup group’s annual Halloween party and then do a little trick-or-treating. Can’t wait.

Happy Halloween

Face Painting

Shark on a Pony

Feeding the goats

Goats goats goats

Like Cloud Watching

October 27th, 2010

We’ve been slowly potty training Henry for some time now. Silvia started sitting him on a potty before he was a year old. She was working on potty training Vivi, and Henry wanted to do what Vivi did, so he did a lot of potty sitting. Sometimes he went in it, too.

Fast forward 12+ months. We’re at basically the same point we were way back when, only now Henry demands an M&M candy every time we plonk him down on the pot. Sometimes he goes, sometimes he doesn’t. He won’t tell us when he has to poop, no matter how much we beg and plead, and oftentimes takes a dump right after saying “no poop” in response to one of us asking if he has to poop.

We all had a good chuckle the other night because in exasperation, I asked Henry why he refused to potty-train. He looked puzzled. I don’t think I’ve ever used the phrase “potty train” when speaking to Henry. So he slowly repeated “…Potty…train?” And you could see the wheels turning turning turning as he said “Potty train?” again, because you know he knows the word TRAIN just like every other dedicated Thomas-the-Tank-Engine-loving little boy but he just couldn’t figure out what that had to do with the hunk of red plastic he sits on for hours a day.

With all that sitting, we do occasionally manage to get Number Two in the potty instead of in the diaper. And when that happens, Henry takes the time to really check out that which his body has so graciously produced. And then he interprets what he sees. And that is funny.

After one look at a particularly large deposit, he pronounced it “Big Fatterpatter”, which is his way of saying “Big fat caterpillar”, which is a line from Eric Carle’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar. Another time he called two small-ish chunks “laylaybugs” (ladybugs). There’ve been worms, stars, and flowers. You name it, he’s probably pooped it.

That’s why I love having a two-year old.

We had a great weekend

October 10th, 2010

Tell you about it later…so tired.