The Choo Choo Puffs Back Into Town

We made another Gingerbread Train this year (click here to see our train from last year). We had a few tweaks to our technique on the frosting but it was largely the same, as traditions should be. Last year I told AJ that the hard candies included in the kit to load into the boxcar were candies that could choke him and that he had to be bigger to eat them, which caused lots of upset. This year he remembered about the "choky candies". Five minutes later he asked me to get out the measuring tape and see how tall he was. When I said "40 inches--wow! you've grown!", he asked hopefully "am I big enough now for eating choky candies???"

The Godmothers Part II

As an update to my earlier post about the Godmothers coming and working on Julia's room, here are a couple of picture of the beautiful tree that AJ's godmother painted for Julia's room. While my friends were here I was feeling ambitious and we bought some pink and green paint for me to add some birds and leaves to the tree, but who was I kidding? With 3 kids 3 and under, that was never going to happen. So when I was buying some Christmas gifts at Pottery Barn Kids and spotted some stickers of birds and leaves while I was standing in the checkout line, I decided to cheat on the painting and added the stickers to my basket as well. But I love that the tree and flowers are originals and think of Kim every time I walk in the room.

Now that I have a daughter, I think about what I need to do to raise a strong, confident, happy girl. I like surrounding her with the women in my life who are all of these things, so I want her to spend as much time as possible with her grandmothers, her aunts, her aunties (my friends), and our nanny, Linda. I also chose Julia's godmother, my friend Ali, because she is all of these things. Ali lived abroad for many years in Honduras, Colombia and Paraguay, and loves to travel internationally to see the world. She is a teacher who gets kids to love learning like she does. And she is an avid reader. I hope she will infuse her enthusiasm for these things in Julia as well.

Brothers Behaving and Playing Together Without Hitting

a.k.a. the best 2.5 seconds of my day.

Game Night with Grammas

AJ is starting to get to the age where he can play board games--woo hoo! Playing games of any kind--board games, card games, even the occasional charades--is a big part of my family's culture, so I am very excited about this development. I have fond memories from my childhood of playing games like War, Sorry, Parchesi, On the County, Hearts, Spades, Chutes and Ladders, Monopoly, Yahtzee, and Boggle, and then as we got older, games more focused on strategy like Scotland Yard (referred to as "the Fox and the Hounds" in our family) and Risk. Some of my fondest memories of my grandparents came while playing On the County with my maternal grandparents and all versions of rummy (Gin Rummy, London Rummy, Barnyard Rummy) with my paternal grandparents.

I love games for the time spent with family and friends and the casual conversation that goes with it. My sister, who is an early childhood ed major, also tells me that games are good for developing skills in kids like taking turns and following directions, as well as for developing an understanding that you can't always win and some frustration tolerance (which is always good for the three year-old set). So far AJ can do Chutes and Ladders (provided that the game moves quickly) and a little bit of Memory. Here is a picture of AJ playing chutes and ladders with his grammas on Thanksgiving. I get ridicuously happy just looking at this picture. Let the gaming begin!

Daddy!

The other day I read in a parenting magazine that kids can usually start to draw people at age 3. I have never seen AJ draw a person, so I asked him to give it a shot. This is what he came up with--I was pretty impressed. I asked him who he was drawing and he said "Daddy!" As he was drawing the hair he said "Daddy has a little bit of hair." This observation came with no prompting from me--you really can't make material up that is as good as the spontaneous original :)

Ready for Snow

Winter jammies? Check. Snow boots? Check. Toothbrush? Check. We are prepared and ready for snow at our house.

A Photo Summary of Life at Our House

This photo summarizes life at our house right now. And probably for the next five years or so. Yes, that is a wayward pea smashed under my wine glass.

Two Pots, No Waiting

Papa calls this scene at our house "two pots, no waiting." Don't get too excited--so far, Davey is just playing at potty training, but at least we are in the ballpark.

My Curly-Haired Monster

Look at this guy--how cute is he? As Davey quickly approaches turning 2 at the end of this month, I want to remember little details about him at this stage in his life.

David has this halo of crazy strawberry blond curls that float in the air, a quick smile and blue eyes that turn down at the corners and crinkle when he laughs. He is friendly with everyone he meets and is quick to make buddies with adults and kids. I jokingly refer to him as the mayor of our town because he knows way more people around town than I do from his outings with our nanny to preschool, story time at the library, the local pet shop, etc. More than one time someone has recognized Davey around town and said to me, "Oh, you're David's mom!"

He has an adorable habit of scrunching up his lips and wrinkling his nose when he is mad or doesn't want to do something. The face reminds me of Arnold on Diff'rent Strokes, the tv show from the '80s, when Arnold would say "What you talkin' about, Willis?" to his older brother.

David also has a hilarious laugh. He has been quick to laugh since he was 5 months old and is still this way. His laugh takes people by surprise, though, because the first time you hear it, the laugh is so boisterous that it is often mistaken for crying or him being upset. "What's wrong with David?" someone will ask when they hear it, and we explain that he is just laughing. It is a bit of a maniacal laugh that reminds Joe of the comedian Jim Carey's crazy laugh. It wouldn't surprise me if Davey ends up being a class clown some day.

Davey definitely marches to the beat of his own drum. He is amazingly able to focus on whatever it is that he finds interesting despite repeated interruptions from his brother, and he can play alone for 30 minutes to an hour at a time, content to amuse himself with various toys around the room. I often find AJ imitating some play that David has initiated.

In terms of interests, this one is easy--Davey is obsessed with trains, and specifically with Thomas the Train and all its characters. He knows them by name and squeals with delight as soon as he hears the theme music from the cartoon. He asks us to turn it on for him by singing "deet deet!", which are the first two bars of the theme song. He enjoys music and will often start dancing as soon as he hears a tune. One Saturday he amused himself for a half hour by playing his toy guitar, clapping for himself and saying "yea!!!!" after every song finished. Maybe a future rock star?

He is also pretty people savvy for his age and is focused on making people happy and making sure he is in their good graces. When he gets in trouble, he quickly comes over to whomever is disciplining him and pats their arm while saying "nice, nice" in an attempt to make up for his bad behavior. I think this is partly his sweet, peacemaker temperament and partly the beginning realizations that he can manipulate people with sweetness. If he had a motto, it would be kill 'em with kindness. He is often a peacemaker with his brother and will offer AJ trains and other favorite items in an attempt to calm AJ down during tantrums.

Speaking of tantrums, despite his generally sweet demeanor, David is capable of some legendary tantrums. When he gets going, there is no stopping it. The other day he had a tantrum in music class and was hitting our nanny. She took him in the hall to calm down, then outside, but it raged on and on as David threw himself off a park bench onto the ground and flopped down boneless in the middle of the street. He raged all the way home and after being deposited in his crib, managed to muster some herculean strength from his rage to climb out of his crib and thump onto the floor, still screaming and raging 45 minutes after the tantrum started.

Quirky things that I want to remember about him always include the way he claps his chubby little toddler hands and says "yea!" whenever he hears applause (even if he has no idea what is being applauded), the merry look in his eyes when someone tries to make him laugh, his love for snuggling while rubbing someone's arm, his over-the-top enthusiastic squeals and leg hugging whenever I walk in the door and his obsession with getting "agua" 10 times a day by pulling open the freezer, loading ice into his cup, supervising the pouring of the water and slapping the cap on his cup with deep satisfaction at a job well done. Things I am looking forward to him growing out of include the tantrums, his dogged focus on applying stickers all over our hardwood floors and his drama king tendencies when he is in a certain mood to scream melodramatically when AJ even looks in his direction (it's as if he is trying to say "mom, he's looking at me!"). As he progresses from single words and a couple of two-word phrases into more language in the next year, I am so curious to hear more of his thoughts and to see how he changes and grows.

Stash

AJ has a secret stash. He keeps a pile of trains hidden under a pillow on his bed and guards this stash with his life. If Davey so much as starts up the stepstool to AJ's big boy bed, there is trouble as AJ tries to protect his hidden treasures. He keeps his favorite trains there, which is a little silly because then he can't play with them, but he likes the arrangement because it means that they are his and only his. I guess this is not unlike 50 year-old men who have vintage collector cars that they keep in their garages and don't drive.

Interestingly, having his own private set of trains in his room seems to have made him more able to share other downstairs trains with Davey, maybe because (1) they aren't his prize trains and (2) having his own off-limits toys makes letting go of some others easier. In the past few weeks, AJ has offered Davey the old-but-still-coveted Gordon train on multiple occasions, at least 10, and each time it continues to surprise me because this is a huge, huge, step for someone who previously preferred to take multiple time outs in a row rather than even share one lowly boxcar with his brother. Whatever developmental milestone this is, I love it. It may also have something to do with our nanny's recent discussion with AJ about how Santa takes toys away from little boys who don't share with their brothers and her threats to call Santa on the phone and report bad behavior.

I'm Not New Anymore!

A month or so ago, David gave AJ a big chomp on his back after AJ attempted to swipe a train from Davey. It was a pretty vicious bite, and it left a red mark on AJ and broke the skin. AJ was very upset about the bite, and at first we thought it was because it hurt so bad. But even after he calmed down and no longer seemed to be in pain, he kept wailing "Davey took a chomp out of me! I'm not new anymore!" over and over again. We thought this was a funny idea that he wasn't new anymore, but AJ was very upset about it and kept repeating his lament throughout the day and into the next day or two as well. He was only comforted when he finally got a bandaid for his back and was told he was as good as new.

Yesterday AJ got a papercut on his finger and kept repeating the same thing--I'm not new anymore! I didn't understand why this upset him so much until we watched Toy Store 2 again tonight. There is a scene where the cowboy toy rips his cloth arm and then has a nightmare that he is thrown in the garbage because "he is not new anymore" and is broken. It seems that AJ was worried that he would be thrown in the garbage because he wasn't new anymore! A good reminder for me that he is still learning to differentiate between ideas in movies and real life. I think we will wait a few more years before tackling the scariest movie of childhood, the Wizard of Oz.