They had an “around the world” month at daycare, and at the end of the month brought home a “passport” with stamps in it from each country they visited. Liam, reading off the countries he “visited” and pointing to each stamp in turn, says this: We went to China, Germany, France, and da country wif da wobbly tower dat’s tipping over. (Italy, of course!)
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Jack’s new line is “let’s talk about XYZ.” I’ll be getting a shower and he’ll be bee-bopping around the bathroom, and suddenly stop and say, in a serious tone, “Mom, let’s talk about snakes.” “OK, we can talk about snakes.” Then follows a series of questions: What do snakes eat? When do they sleep? How do they crawl? Etc. And Mom has to call on her encyclopedic knowledge of snakes (NOT) to try to answer them all, while soaping her hair and shouting answers through the shower door. He has recently asked me about snakes, frogs, birds, worms, and a variety of other things (usually some type of animal). Liam has picked up on this and now does the same thing. The other day: “Mom, let’s talk about mouses.” “You mean mice, Liam.” “NO, I mean mouses.”
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Liam had some kind of nightmare last night and was screamy screamy between the hours of 1 and 3. MISERY. I snuggled in his twin bed with him, and sent Jack down to cuddle with Dad on the much more comfortable king bed. In any case, as a result of our rough night, this morning we were talking about dreams. Liam said he’d had a bad dream about monsters. Jack said he’d dreamed he was Rapunzel and had long long hair. He then set to praying, asking God to turn him into a girl. He announced he no longer wanted haircuts, and wanted his voice to change into a girl’s voice, please. After an hour of this, on the way to school in the car, he told me very seriously that he’d thought deeply about it, but he’d changed his mind – he would stay a boy. Then he said, with a world-weary sigh, “I just love Rapunzel so much.” I’m not sure if he thinks only girls can like Rapunzel, or if he wants to actually *be* Rapunzel . . . but anyway, it was a funny little quirky episode. I’m glad he got over his crisis fairly quickly, but I do wonder what was going on in his head.
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Jack is going through a bit of an “I love you I hate you” period right now. He throws several tantrums a day, he refuses to obey us and then flips out when he goes to time out, he challenges us much more often than normal. It’s a bit tiresome. He’s doing fairly well at expressing his emotions during these times – usually “Mom, I feel MAD at you right now” – and my consistent line has been – “I love you no matter how you feel, but you must eat your dinner/pick up your toys/stop hitting your brother, even if it makes you mad.” We give him lots of timeouts and lots of quiet, long hugs. It’s a confusing time for him, I think. He starts kindergarten very soon, and although I feel confident that it will all work itself out, I’m not too sure how those first few weeks in the new school are going to go. For him or for me.
I drop him off these days at a makeshift “classroom” in the back of the daycare gym, which is his temporary room until the main rooms are completely renovated. He can see from his room all the way the length of the basketball courts down to the door where I leave, and he will stand there mournfully, watching me with eyes full of unshed tears until I have left the building. He’s never been one to cry at drop off, not until recently. I truly think he is undergoing an internal battle right now – independence versus still needing Mama. It’s wearing him out, poor kid. Wearing me out, too. It’s only the first of many of these struggles I see ahead of us. I hope we’re handling it right. My overarching message is always “although we will not tolerate poor behavior, we love you no matter what you do or what you feel.” Sometimes after he’s stomped around me for ten minutes, making sure to shut doors angrily or harrumph or otherwise show me he is mad, I’ll get on my knees and give him a long hug. And he’ll just sag into my body for several minutes, relieved to have a break from the work of being his own person, happy to be a baby in my arms again.
I’ll take it.
There’s nothing like lying down in that twin sized bed to really let you know how big your kid is getting. And how desperately you’d prefer to be in your own bed….