We're very lucky.
Jack is the sort of child
we all assume we'll have
when we decide to have children,
and the sort of child
less experienced parents
congratulate themselves for.January and February 2004
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Blogs we read:
2006-03-30 - 16:51
Naps
Jack has hit some milestones since we moved.
He has been struggling to give up naps for months, but since we've moved, he's been taking fewer and fewer and asking me at dinner time almost every night whether I'm ready for bed (a cue that he is ready for bed). A couple of times, he's even announced before dinner that he's "sauce-ted" (exhausted) and has ask me to lie down with him.
I'm wondering whether it might be time to make it official and move his bedtime from 9:30 to 8 o'clock. That doesn't sound like a big deal, but it can make a big difference in the amount of time I get to spend with Jack -- and how easy it is for me to get to work on time in the morning.
With his 9:30pm bedtime, I get to spend three or four hours with Jack in the evening -- we eat, and then write letters, tidy up, do laundry, and generally hang out together, and then we get ready for bed and go to sleep. I end up falling asleep with Jack most nights. Then I get up at 5:30 or 6 and have an hour or so to read my e-mail before I take my shower. As often as not, Jack joins me in the shower, we get all scrubbed, get dressed for the day, and then go downstairs for breakfast. I give Jack his vitamins, then start his porridge, and by then Rod is usually up and on his way down the the stairs and I head off for work. It works nicely. And it means that we don't have to hurry on those evenings when we get together with friends for dinner.
But he needs his sleep, so I guess we'll try it. At worst, I won't check my e-mail until the weekends. It wouldn't be the first time! At best, I'll wake up correspondingly earlier and will get to work earlier, and everything will return to its normal rhythm at a new time.
Jack the reporter
Another advance Jack has made: he has recently been able to give me reasonably accurate and involved reports about "what happened" during his day or in his encounters that I wasn't there to see. That is lots of fun -- and he usually gets the order right and includes a lot more detail than his Dad does.
A budgie's eye view of the day is entertaining and informative -- what he thinks is important and what he doesn't are sometimes startling. Going outdoors to play is almost *always* worth mentioning-- and often in great detail. But other things may not make his radar at all.
Mostly he amazed me with how much he remembers and in what detail!
Toileting
We have also gotten to the point of beginning to figure out why Jack is so reluctant to use the toilet.
He asked me yesterday evening if I had "fallen in" in after I'd used the toilet. I said that no, I was too big to fall in. He said, "But I'm small. I will fall." I pointed out that while he was small, he wouldn't fall very far in, and he could use the smaller potty if he wanted to -- and that Dad and I would help him to use the big toilet without falling in if that's what he wanted.
Aha! So that's what he's afraid of. Well, it's far from unusual.
So now I am trying to figure out whether I should ask him to try sitting on the toilet; not to use it, but just to check if he was big enough not to fall in. Conquering that fear would be good and helpful...even if it didn't immediate result in a toilet trained budgie...
Actually, I think with a trip to Europe scheduled for a few weeks from now, I think I'd rather not have a newly toilet trained child on the airplane. The wait can be LOOONG for airplane toilets, and once he's trained, he's unlikely to take it well if I put him back in diapers.
Food -- ahhh, two is over!
One of the hallmarks of a two-year old is a severe reluctance to try anything that isn't extremely familiar. Jack went from eating anything I handed him, to ignoring anything new or unusual on his plate just after he turned two. Fortunately, two year olds don't usually grow very fast, and I knew that at around three, this trend would probably change. Rod was kind of worried though. (Feeding his first two boys was mostly Christine's job when they were that age.) I told him my take on it, and coached him to arrange the food on jack's plate so that it wasn't obvious what, if anything, had been eaten and to try to ignore it. Kids won't generally starve themselves unless there's a lot more going on that just being two.
We rode it out, reminding each other that Jack was two --and a few weeks ago, Jack hit yet another growth spurt and started pointing out that "We eat to-gedda (together)" and procedure to try everything on his plate. He even asks for seconds of many things! (whew!!)
Our teeny tiny boy is now 35 solid pounds of boy! That means he's moved from the 10th percentile last year to the 75th this year! We haven't measured his height lately, thou comparison says he's slightly shorter than average. We'll have to check that soon. Anyway, it's kind of funny. Jack is "slender" in that he has a light layer of padding over his body, but he doesn't look fat to me. Then I see him with other children his age and realize that he's one solid little boy! He's broader though the entire length of his body than any of the children he regularly plays with.
Big surprise, right?
Nothing like his sylph-like parents, right? (I hear you snickering...!)
Actually, from the time he was born so very, very tiny, this is what we expected, because both of our mothers had commented that we were tiny babies and then "blossomed" at the age of three. If he got that on both sides, it was a pretty good bet he'd do it, too.
Since Rod and I both have strong, muscular, HEAVY frames, we can hardly be overly concerned that Jack inherited that. What we do want to do, though, is to teach him the care and feeding of this physical type. Our bodies require a lot of hard work to be healthy - we are the Clydesdales of the human family. If we don't do plenty of hard physical labour, we will run to fat that is almost impossible to lose. If we get that exercise we are extraordinarily strong and have a great deal of stamina. (Not that any amount of work will ever result in us resembling those Arabians of the human family that grace the runways...but there are plenty of those around.)
So, we provide plenty of solid, wholesome nutrition in the form of fresh whole foods. And now that the warm weather is here, we'll encourage him to walk with us, work the land with us, and learn to love the strength and power of his body! I hope we can help him to see that he is beautiful and right, even if GQ is never going to take an interest. (Plenty of girls already do take an interest, so I think it won't be a problem.) (laugh)
