Cute kid things observed on a Tuesday morning:
Liam comes up to me as I do the morning’s dishes, offers me a tangled mess of strings, and says sweetly “Will you untangle dis pweese?” He waits patiently for the ten minutes it takes me to tease the $2 binoculars out of the tangled mess of the 20 cent parachute bunny (kind of like a parachuting army man, only it’s a purple bunny instead of a green soldier – Liam got it months ago in a plastic Easter egg). I finally get it all sorted out, and he hands me the bunny so I can tie the parachute on. “He has a hole in his head, wight dere, so you can thwead the pawachute fwu.” Liam tells me helpfully. Once it’s all set, Liam runs it to the stairs and throws it over the side. As a later-to-rise Jack trudges blearily past him to the breakfast table, Liam asks “I am pwaying wif dis pawachute bunny, Jack. Would you wike to join me?” Adult speech patterns, filtered through a baby mouth that still struggles to pronounce ls and rs and ths. He’s so darned sweet.
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Last night Jack asked me to pull his tooth. This is the first time he has asked for assistance – it’s probably lost tooth number 12 or so (how many do they lose? he’s almost done losing baby teeth, except for the molars). I gave it the old college try, but the thing was not quite ready to give up the ghost, and so Jack ate his dinner whining and yelping at every bite. He went to bed with the tooth still in. This morning at the breakfast table, he called me over to him and held out his hand, the tiny little pebble of a tooth in his palm. I told him to put it in an envelope and write a note to the tooth fairy, and he did, all by himself. “Der toth fary, I lost a toth,” it said in a long string of letters with no space between, next to a picture of a fairy holding a star wand. I will never stop adoring this late invented spelling (as CM told me it’s called). It’s just so charming, and also so cool to see him get better and better at spelling things and sorting out letters and such. Jack’s acquisition of speech was such a tortured and worrying experience, since it was so delayed. Every word, every sound took such herculean effort for him to learn. We know now that his delay is verbal/auditory, it’s with receptive speech (there is some kind of gulf between what we say and what he hears). Learning to read and write has presented no such problems, and it has proceeded with the almost magical speed that kids seem to display as they gobble up knowledge and spit it back out. It’s nice to see something come easy for him, for once.
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Yesterday I arrived home at around 6, driving our “new” minivan (we purchased my in-laws’ minivan, so we could have two cars that both fit all three kids, and we are selling the zippy little hybrid sedan that the Professor used to drive back and forth to his job in New Orleans). Liam took off out the front door as soon as I arrived, and I hollered after him “WHERE ARE YOU GOING?” He turned, asked “Can I just sit in da van for just a widdle bit?” He held up his pointer finger and thumb to show me how little – “Dust dis tiiiiiny bit, Mom, ok?” He squeezed his finger and thumb closer together – “Dis tiny.” He is thrilled by this van, by the fact that he gets to sit in the way back. Jack went with him, and they went out in the driveway and sat in the van for a few minutes, before the Professor went out to make sure they weren’t overheating out there. They were just sitting there. In the hot car. Just kicking it. I mean – why? And also – how cute! The things they find delightful . . .
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I suppose no cute kid update would be complete these days without a story about our little Craig. He’s a typical, jolly old fat baby. He giggles when you eat his cheeks in a sloppy, messy way, nom nom nom. He loves both his big brothers, and gazes at them in adoration whenever they’re around. He’s started to throw fits – to squeal high-pitched and arch his back when he’s mad at you. He has graduated from the Fourth Trimester and is now a full-on Baby With Personality. He’s teething – drooly, shoving everything into his mouth with that fumbly, extreme concentration that is particular to babies who are just starting to figure out Fingers and Arms and that mommy’s hair and earrings are particularly awesome handholds. He will not lay down or be put down in any of his baby-holding accessories – he does sit ups to get himself upright so he can see what’s going on, and will squawk indignantly until someone props him up so he can be part of the family. Fellow MILP Lag Liv‘s third Beab started crawling at a ridiculously young age and is already cruising at 6 months – I have the feeling that Craiggers will be similarly early to move, simply because he wants to be part of whatever game the older boys are playing and we parents usually are not getting him there fast enough.
Anyway, I’m late for work, but I had to catch these things on “paper” before they left my brain. Just a little snapshot of the boys at age 6, almost-4, and 4 months.