punkinhead

Just a few recent pics.

We decorated a Sukkah at Sam's Aunt N and Uncle J’s house (where he got to meet his third? cousin Nate. Aunt N is Grandma’s first cousin, and Nate is her grandkid, so Sam and Nate are the same generation, 3 cousinships removed.

And his pumpkin hat from M. still fits! yay! and his chickens sweater from D. and family, which they gave us when he was born, fits perfectly now! He kept going 'bok bok bok' all day, and also no longer yanks hats off his head instantly, so we were able to get this cute pic:



Sam really likes the program AlphaBaby (and it’s freeware for Macs!) It prints whatever letter key he hits in colorful caps while cuing the computer voice to say the letter out loud. If he hits non-letter keys, shapes come up with a random mac noise.

(And no, we don’t as a rule let him play with the laptop on his own, I just backed up to take the pic.)

He's still a fan of kneebouncers , too, and requests "tains!" frequently when he sees one of us at our laptop (which, um, he sees a LOT. The glowing Apple logo is probably the most recognizable brand in his world, right now...)


What is it with the stuffing-the-mouth-too-full-to-chew thing? Sam does this at least once a meal, and then gets frustrated and spits out the entire contents onto his tray. It’s like he’s so excited to be consuming food that he loses track of the mechanics of it—food into mouth, chew, swallow, repeat- and gets stuck at the first step: food into mouth, food into mouth, food into mouth...




Omi is visiting, cooking us tons of yummy food and watching Sam so his parents can get more work done. This morning we went to the pool together (though it was a bit cold—it took Sam a while to stop clinging to me and shivering—and parking by the university athletic center? nonexistent. So irritating. But I digress...) then ran a couple of errands in pouring rain while Sam conked out in his carseat. Then Sam and Omi played all afternoon, building towers and tunnels with his blocks, coloring, cutting playdough shapes with the cookie cutters, reading books, eating strawberry Pockys (treat from Omi, which he looooves). Then while Omi and I were making dinner, J was inspired by the block tunnel to go one better than his big towers of late—he made an arch. (And Sam ran around afterwards announcing, “arch! arch!” which had to have been gratifying.)

Here's Sam dancing (to "Cows", of course) with his monkey, in front of the arch:

sniff

Sam's overall-clad behind was wet when I took him out of his booster seat after dinner tonight, and I wasn't sure if it was leaked pee (it had been, upon reflection, fairly long since his last change), spilled apple cider that had missed his bib pocket, or something else. J. remembered having sat him on the edge of the sink to wash hands before dinner. So I asked J. to smell it and see if it smelled like pee, cider, or nothing, and J. obligingly got down on hands and knees and sniffed Sam's behind. Sam found this very amusing: "Dog!" he announced, giggling.

We had a beautiful weekend with lovely sunny crisp-air fall weather. I decided I needed a bit of a break, so had resolved not to do research-work or teaching-work, or at least not much, so we just crossed domestic items off the list. It was our turn to clean the Toddler Room at Sam's daycare (it's a coop, which means not only weekly help shifts, but also a cleaning weekend which rotates through all the families-- it works out to roughly once a semester, which feels totally doable), so we did that yesterday. We went to the Farmer's Market, did laundry, had dinner at the home of a colleague. Today J. worked all day and Sam and I went for a bike ride and ran errands. He seems to be comfortable in the bike seat, and the area around our home is very bikeable, so I think we'll be doing that a lot until it starts snowing. We had lunch at home-- Sam's been eating like a horse, protein especially ("chit-ten! meat! more!"). I think he must be growing. Then this afternoon, he slept for an astonishing 2.5 hours, during which time I started-- and finished!-- the novel I got at the library yesterday morning. (I've taken to reading young adult fiction when I have a fiction craving, because it lets me do just this-- finish a novel in, if not a single nap, a nap + an evening. There are some fantastic writers targeting books towards 'young adults'. I loved Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy last year, and just found another couple of his books. Yum.)

Sam's newest library favorite: Leo Lionni's Let's Play . I also got out Tomie de Paola's Strega Nona, which I remember loving, but Sam wasn't so into it-- too many words. And also a Babar book, but every time I read Babar now, it strikes me as oppressively colonialist and patriarchal. I have no problem with elephants wearing clothes in, say, Richard Scarry, or dressed up animals in so many other books (Toot and Puddle!) but in the first Babar book, Babar the King doles out clothing to all his previously clothes-free subjects, a set of work clothes and a set of fancy clothes, and it marks the occasion of the incorporation of the elephant town. For some reason this creeps me out. Maybe I'm just hypersensitive after reading this amazing article about the unintended consequences of human attempts to manage elephant populations.

tay-onz

We survived Sam's bout of fever with much coloring and some videos. I got some closets organized during my enforced at-home time, and we took some walks and ran some errands, and he's all better now. Sam really, really likes drawing. They do a lot of art at daycare, and most days there are pages of painting and stuff-glued-on-paper and occasionally Sam's careful pen scribbles to take home. He has progressed from mostly ordering us to draw stuff to mostly drawing stuff himself, though he still does request specific things a lot: buses, suns, owls, walruses, horses, Daddy, Sam (never Mommy, for some reason), various letters, and always the old favorite, fans. Here he is after I was called to pick him up from daycare last Tuesday, his fever having returned after being down for most of Monday (fortunately, the call came just after I was finishing my back-to-back lecture and talk). We hung out at home for the rest of the afternoon and spent much of Wednesday, during which he felt totally fine and fever-free but couldn't return to daycare because of their 24-hour post-fever rule, enjoying the gorgeous fall weather. (Mind you, I'm not complaining about the 24-hour rule. If it saves us Sam catching just one virus from another kid, I'll happily keep him home an extra day when he's sick himself.)



The past few weeks, Sam has been starting to get into pretend play. He's been putting random things on his head and declaring "hat!" (which is cute when it's a bucket, or a ball, or a mixing bowl, but less cute when it's a fork full of saucy pasta). And he's been playing this game in the bath: he takes his turtle (squeezy bath toy) and sticks it under his thigh, announcing "house!" Then he'll pull the turtle back out, and say "There it is!" (Daydis!) Then back under his leg, "house" or, sometimes, "chair." Then Daydis! He can do this 30 times in a row and not get bored, but it's far better if I'm playing along, of course.

I also realized that Sam doesn't necessarily recognize himself when he's saying "Sam!" in the mirror. He must recognize himself to some extent because he points himself out in pictures, but correctly names the pictures of the other kids at daycare. But occasionally, he'll point to an unfamiliar picture of a baby or little kid and say "Ham!" And on another one of our post-fever Wednesday excursions, to get sweet potato fries at a burger shop after running some errands, Sam spied a bust of Elvis and cried out with excited recognition, "Ham!"