hi from FL

First, the promised mattar pics:




Cooking with the cuttable (sliceable?) food:



We're in Flarihdah! Sam at the beach:



At a nature center, in the butterfly garden:


Having just polished off most of two huge meatballs and sauce, some spaghetti, and a couple of rolls dipped in the remaining sauce:

(Doesn't he look at least a year older in this one? weird)

Sam is having a blast with his Aunt L., Grandma, and Grandpa. He's being spoiled rotten by gifts and attention and kisses and zrbtts, loves looking for lizards and pointing out palm trees, has learned at least a couple new kinds of vehicles (tractor-trailer truck is the funnest to hear him say) and is loving the warm, sunny weather.

And briefly, the big news: we liked the condo we saw Friday AM, bid on Monday having heard at least two other people were bidding, and found out Monday night that our bid was accepted!! We're moving in June, pending inspections etc. Pics at some future point. It's smaller and further away than our current place, but has a beautiful kitchen and a nice yard, and is still walkable (ca. 25 min) from work. Whee!

Sam is 2!

Sam is 2!

Omi and Opa didn't make it for the weekend because of the snowstorm that hit us on Friday; they were halfway here in the air when their plane turned around and went back to MN. So we had a slow, restful, somewhat wet weekend, capped by a walk to a burrito joint (Sam loves 'bree-tos' and can eat most of a grilled-veggie-and-bean one, with chips and guacamole on the side). Omi got a ticket to come Monday evening instead, so was here for Sam's actual birthday, but sadly Opa had to work so missed it. Sam opened gifts from them Monday night (we spread things out so he didn't get too overwhelmed, and as wound up as he was Monday night, this proved to be a good plan).

Omi brought a bunch of gifts, and they'd had a guitar sent here. Here's Sam bouncing up and down in anticipation of the opening of the "mattar."



And testing it out, string bass style:



(We attached the strap later, and got video but no still shot yet of him playing it, hands positioned correctly but both hands strumming, bouncing around while singing Happy Birthday to himself. Must take pics to post, and really must figure out how to post video... instructive comments would be appreciated here! this is from a videocamera, not the video function on a regular digital cam...)

Sam's been excited about mattars for a while now, and has been playing guitar on a bunch of his vaguely guitar-shaped toys (push-popper, stuffed giraffe) ever since the music guy started coming to their daycare weekly with his guitar and his fiddle.

The next morning, he opened some books from Omi and Opa, and the pots/pans and wooden cuttable food from us:


He's getting pretty good at unwrapping:


But the trucks and train were still the big winners:



Sam got a lot of truck books this year, including a couple from some friends (thanks, guys! you know who you are). Clearly people are picking up on his obsession... and feeding it, but given that trucks are such salient objects in his life right now-- an outing is totally made by the sighting of a boobozer, for example-- it's not something I was going to fight anyway. It's just: look at him, with his Biiig Truck! in front of his Baskahbaw Hoop! Are we still raising a sensitive, nurturing little guy? He did also seem to like making carrot soup, and likes the general idea of playing kitchen, but cooking doesn't make his eyes light up the way they do when he's scooting along the floor on his knees, pushing a truck in each hand.

We kept Sam home from daycare so he and Omi could enjoy some time together, though I had to be at work for much of the day. Sam opened packages from my grandmother and my aunt, the former including a musical card (ducks quacking "happy birthday" which had Sam entranced for much of the afternoon), and both including Japanese children's books... good for both his vocabulary and mine. Sam knows 2 hiragana (phonetic alphabet) characters and at least a couple of words in Japanese, though with the characters he doesn't seem to get that they're part of a different alphabet: he asks for "ah" letter cookies, for example.

In the evening Aunt S. and Uncle D. came over with another present!


Sam helped put it together (check out the birthday t-shirt):


(This-- the toy, not the shirt-- was the first thing Sam looked for the next morning when he woke up; he was a bit concerned when it wasn't in the living room where he'd left it, but was reassured to find it in his room, cars ready to "yoop-de-yoop" and Little People ready to spin around the Ferris wheel.)

Then we had spaghetti and meatballs, one of Sam's favorites:


... followed by carrot cake with 2 candles. Sam knows how to blow on hot food and how to blow his nose, but since he does the former by making a big "ffff" sound, neither of these two skills helped him figure out how to blow out the candles:



We did end up buying Sam a schmancy push-bar-equipped tricycle, but we're delaying giving it to him until he can use it outside, and there's still a bit too much snow on the edges of the sidewalks for that. So much good stuff: he's a lucky, lucky two-year-old. Another mom on a message board I read noted, of her child's recent birthday, that it's easy to see how one slips into spoiling a kid, given how rewarding it is to see their face glowing with delight. I don't feel like we went overboard this year, exactly, but it just seems like so much stuff, and so much excitement, for one kid. I am glad we didn't throw a friend-party this year; time enough for that in years to come, when he's aware enough to ask for it.

Omi had to leave the next morning-- too short a visit!-- so Sam went to daycare, where he had another birthday celebration. Then yesterday evening he got to open some lovely books from a couple of lovely friends (thank you!). The truck page of the big book, and the two truck books, will get loooots of love around here). We disappeared two of them to save for the airplane, because...

... tomorrow we leave for Florida, for some QT w/Grandma, Grandpa, and Aunt L., some warmth and beach-time, and some more birthday celebrating.

But first, we're looking at an attractive-sounding condo in the morning. A longer walk to work and daycare, but still a doable one, and a pretty neighborhood, if a slightly less urban one. One of the nicest features of our current apartment is that we have most of our needs within walking distance-- small grocery store, pharmacy/drugstore, restaurants, bank, hardware store, even a toy store-- even though our street is relatively quiet. We'd lose at least some of these if we move to this new place. But it's listed for significantly less than we bid on our current place, it has a garden, and it's still walkable to at least some stuff... including a path around a small lake, which would be really nice to be so close to. We may have to bid right away, so cross your fingers for us. And in the mean time, we're in the weird position of having our current apartment shown to prospective buyers regularly, when we have no interest in it selling-- in fact, until we find a better option, an interest in it not selling (so that our landlord returns to our bid). Do we change the poop-smelling diaper trash or leave it there for the day? Do we make the beds before we leave in the morning, even if we're running late? But, if not, can we (me, that is) stomach the thought of strangers seeing 'our' apartment with unmade beds and stacked dirty dishes? Gah. We're walking the fine line between sabotaging efforts to sell the place and doing work tidying, etc., that doesn't benefit us in the least.

Back to Sam: someone on the same message board I referred to earlier noted that many toddlers would fit diagnostic criteria for OCD (obsessive-compulsive disorder), though different types for different kids: there are the obsessive washers, the ones who don't want anything touching their pieces of food, the ones who wear the same shirt Every Damn Day, etc. Sam's latest is that he wants his bagel half to be all in one piece. He totally lost it over the weekend when we tore his bagel-half into two pieces (to make it easier for him to eat!), and kept crying while trying to push the two pieces back together. And this morning he had another meltdown after he himself tore the bagel-half in half... Not sure whether indulging this is feeding the problem, Josh and I have gotten good at mooshing two chewed-on pieces of bagel back "together" into one. It's really striking, though, how all-consumingly important these things seem (to Sam) at the time, and for now, at least, I'd rather help out with the things that can be fixed, and save the Life Lessons for the things that we don't have control over.

sharks

I took Sam and his buddy Manu to the aquarium today. I was a little worried that taking 2 two-year-olds (well, one not-quite-two) solo to a crowded public spot would be a recipe for, at best, exhaustion, but they'd done well at the Science Museum with Manu's mom a few weeks ago, so I gave it a try. The only major concession to the 2-toddler thing was that we drove instead of taking public transit; though Sam always loves the trains, I couldn't imagine hauling two sleepy or wired/running kids across 2 transfers on the way back... 65+ pounds of kid. Anyway, I needn't have worried, they were both so well-behaved, and I didn't get seriously lost driving in either direction, which counts as a major accomplishment for me, driving in this town.

Outside by the seals:


[Note Sam's spiffy new haircut. I love Sam's curls, but most of the winter they're not evident because his hair gets squished down by his fleecy hat and stays that way, so he was looking ragged and overgrown. J. was a fan of the whispies (already living vicariously through his son), but Mama wields the scissors... J. says he looks like a Republican now.]

Making the jellyfish glow different colors:


Climbing on the turtles:


The Big Tank:


Another favorite destination is the Natural History museum, with its cases of faded/motheaten but nonetheless thrilling stuffed dead animals. The oddest animals feature in children's books, and Sam was excited to see 3D pangolins (Tails) an uakari (an alphabet book), and a zorilla (ditto), plus the more-standard bison, elephant, giraffe, etc. Here's Sam outside it recently, sporting his usual collection of not-quite-matched red things:


We celebrated J's birthday last weekend. Sam and I left the house (for a walk to the rummage sale at the daycare) and let him sleep in, then met him for an extravagant brunch out, which we walked off while checking out the boobozers outside the museum and the animals inside it. We hung out at home for a lazy late-afternoon, then Uncle D and Aunt S came for dinner. Now we're gearing up for Sam's, which he'll get to celebrate three times: once early with Omi and Opa, who will be visiting for the weekend of their overlapping spring breaks; once on the actual day with us and Uncle D and Aunt S, and once in FL with Grandma, Grandpa, and Aunt L. Lucky duck! I'm still trying to decide whether to get him a little wooden kitchen (to go with the pots and pans and cuttable wooden food) or a tricycle (which I want to get eventually anyway).

Re. the apartment: our landlord, who doesn't want to be a landlord anymore so is selling the place, decided he wants to test the market. He thinks he can do better than what we bid; we can hardly blame him, of course, but the real estate market isn't favoring sellers right now, and we did our research before making our offer. But the end result is that we're looking for somewhere else to buy (would have happily rented here another 5 years, but this having-to-move made us realize that we don't want to be at the mercy of landlords anymore, especially given that we'll probably be in town another 6 years or so). We'll be moving this summer. Fun times.