heavy tummy, heavy heart

Just as I'm ready to start processing the fact that Luke has been in school for a year now, we get the devastating news today that Luke's beloved Miss Beverly is leaving and today is her last day (well technically tomorrow, but Luke's not in on Fridays). Miss Beverly was the cornerstone of everything we liked about the school; from Luke's first day there she was a constant source of patience, comfort, affection, love, and auto-harp playing. She's moving to another school in the area, and even though I wouldn't just yank Luke out of his comfort zone at school at this point, the thought seriously crossed my mind. I told Dave that it must be pregnancy hormones that are making me so sad about this; he disagrees because he's equally sad. Luke will be sad at some point in the future, most likely, but for now, he, like the other kids, doesn't really know what it all means when she tells them she is going to another school.

It's strangely similar to another big change that Luke can't grasp entirely - the addition of a new person at our house. For the past few months when I'd tell him I had a baby in my tummy he just wouldn't believe me and he would laugh it off like the most ridiculous thing he'd ever heard. Lately he's started to take it a little more seriously. He is really fascinated by the "Your Pregnancy Week by Week" book and especially loves the diagrams of babies curled up in a tiny mommy-tummy space. I think the fact that several of our friends have just had babies as well makes it more interesting. When I told him that Robert's mommy had sent us pictures of the new baby she just had, he couldn't wait to get to the computer. We scrolled through the whole pile: baby, mommy and baby, Robert and baby, grandma and baby, etc. Finally Luke said in exasperation, "Mommy, I want to see the pictures of when he came OUT of her tummy!" I had to tell him...hmmm...They don't really take pictures of that part, or at least I hope they don't share them.

Luke is signed up for what seems like an excellent sibling class at our hospital. They ask the kids (ages 3-5) to bring a baby-sized doll and they will teach them to rock them, change a diaper, feed with a bottle, etc. Then they watch a movie about being a big brother/sister; then they all walk across the street to the maternity ward to look at all of the new babies. Trouble is, the earliest we could get in to the class was the end of April. With this massive clothes-stretching tummy, I hope I make it long enough for the class to be relevant. At least by then it should seem a little more concrete.

Luke has been bothering us in the past few months with an unfortunate tendency to wake up in the middle of the night and want to sleep in our bed. He calls it *his* red bed (our sheets are burgundy/red). We thought we had solved the problem at least temporarily when we got him some bright red sheets and he was beyond excited about his new red bed. But last night Luke was a wildman at bed-putting time: Dave couldn't get him to sleep until a ridiculous hour; he woke me up at 3:45; and he woke up for good at 6:40 this morning. Could it have been the fact that he didn't eat dinner until 8:15 at night and I let him have a half-cookie at 8:30? Could it be that the red sheets are too stimulating? Could it be some kind of radar that he senses something big is about to happen and can't seem to relax until he understands it? I don't know, but Dave is committed to putting him to bed again tonight, to maintain a consistent routine. Right now they are downstairs "building" Nut a "doghouse" and I hear them laughing about something. Let's hope it translates into a happy night.

Oh, and by the way, we went to the beach on Saturday and we ultimately had to leave around noon because it was too *hot*. Yep, that's right. But think of all the things I had to give up to move out here: decent pizza, hoagies, cheesesteaks, family. So it's the very least I deserve...right?

The curse has ended

Looks like we've finally ended the curse of Valentine's Day. For reference, the last three have been marred by 1) year one, sleepless with a screaming baby, driving around aimlessly looking for a place to have a nice dessert that would be tolerant of a screaming baby; 2) year two, Luke's eye surgery; 3) year three, weaning combined with painful hand-foot-mouth disease. Somehow Valentine's Day had become the Day of Misery.

But this year I was happy to be greeted in the morning with a soulful rendition of "Clementine" with guitar accompaniment, of course (picture Luke strumming while sitting in his little chair in front of his new guitar stand/microphone). Later he entertained me with a new song he composed for the guitar: "No hitting/No hitting people/Mommies say no/And they get mad." Verse two: "No pushing/no pushing people..." etc. etc.

Later he completely blew me away with one of his memories. We were reading a book that mentioned termites, and he asked what a termite was, and I said it was a tiny, tiny bug that liked to eat wood. He thought about that for a moment and then asked, "Did a man come to look for termites in our old old beach house?" Whoa. I mean, that was more than six months ago! Who knew that little nugget was still lodged in his brain? So the day turned out pretty well, all things considered, especially given the amount of sugar.

One thing that I increasingly love about Luke is his confidence about asking adults for what he wants. When we went to the library yesterday, Luke and I went looking for his favorite library book -- the Berenstain bears go to the dentist -- but the book was nowhere to be found. "Well, we have to go ask the lady then," he announced, and marched straight up to the reference desk and asked the library lady, "Where's the dentist book?" (Further investigation revealed that both copies were checked out.)

Then at McDonald's for lunch, while I was cleaning up our table, Luke went back over to the counter and started chatting up the cashier about the cookies on display. I didn't hear the conversation but I know it had something to do with how much he liked cookies and how much he might want one. I also knew that he had already had candy that morning, plus cupcakes to come at our V-Day party later, so I ushered him out the door without a cookie. I was actually congratulating myself for having dodged a bullet because I was thinking that at least at a super-corporate place like McDonald's, the employees can't be talked into giving away the food. It was to my huge surprise then, that we were halfway out the parking lot when the McDonald's lady came running after us with a cookie in a bag. "Wait! He said he wanted a cookie!"

Something tells me that if we fast-forward 25 years, we're going to see a guy who is holding on to an America West ticket from Boston to L.A., but he decides that he really would rather fly United, and so he pokes around and asks a few questions, and a few hours later he is flying home first-class on United. Who does that sound like to you?

Spag-a-weenie

I think we can agree that the worst days are not when Luke is totally under-napped, or over-sugared; they're the days like yesterday when he is a total wet noodle. Luke spent the majority of yesterday throwing up, due to some stomach virus or something, and it was sad and extra-hard. The worst of the worst is when all he wants to do is eat or drink something, then it comes back up again, and then we have to convince him (!) to wait for a reasonable two-hour window before eating or drinking again, ha, ha. I can only listen to the whimpering and moaning for so long before I give in to caregiver exhaustion and have to turn it over to Dave for a while (which I did, and he used the time to take a somewhat cheerier Luke to Home Depot, ending in a car splattered with bananas). Anyway. At least Luke has the good sense to start these things on Friday night so we have the whole weekend to work it through together.

Luke's wet-noodle condition was so extreme that I was able to sit next to him on the couch yesterday, cutting out little red paper hearts for valentines, and his only reaction to the scissors was a labored glance of a glazed eye over in my direction, then eyes back to the TV (compared with typical reaction: "OH! I need the scissors for a project!!") At one point I suggested using the shredder (a favorite activity) and when we found out the shredder was broken, he simply stared mutely in my lap for 10 minutes while Dave and I discussed what might be wrong (compared with typical reaction: "What happened to the shredder? Why is it broken? Who's going to fix it? What do you think Daddy might say? What do you think I might say?")

The only time we got him to crack a smile was when we were watching the Food Network and Emeril couldn't get the spaghetti pasta-maker to work and he had to make fettucine/linguini, and he called it "spag-a-weenie." That got the weakest little sick-person laugh out of Luke, and it was a rare moment of sunshine in an otherwise wet noodle day.

Today he's cheerier but he had the meltdown of all meltdowns when we went to the store and I told him no, we are not going to buy the Yard of Gumballs. We finally made it back home after a detour for a green popsicle and now he's telling us his ear hurts. So we could be back to the drawing board tomorrow, but I'll take an earachey guy over a throw-uppy guy any day.

Call me Mo

No one loves a new word as much as Luke. He'll turn it around in his head for a while, then try to find every opportunity to use it. Example: In a new book, where a kid slides down a banister, Luke wanted to know all about banisters. A little while later, he announced that his name was Banister. The next day he decided that he wanted a dog named Banister and a cat named...Manister. And so on.

As a somewhat unrelated aside, he'll decide what he wants us to call him on any given day depending on who he's been playing with or what he's been thinking about. For a while after he read "Knuffle Bunny" he wanted to be known as Mo (the author's name) and there were a few moments when somewhat inexplicably, he insisted on being called Picnic Mo. Lately he's been insisting that we call him Chef Sam Nikita. But it's OK, because Chef Sam Nikita took it upon himself to rustle up some breakfast in bed for me this morning (a slice of banana bread).

In our latest book there's a scene where a boy makes a face at drinking a warm can of what is labeled "budget cola." Luke wanted to know all about what the soda was called and what budget cola meant. So I told him, "Budget cola means that it is cheap soda."
"What does cheap mean?"
"It's something that isn't very good, but it doesn't cost very much money so you don't really mind. Like things at the 99 cents store."
"I like the 99 cents store!"
"Right, I mean it's just something that maybe doesn't taste as good as a soda that costs more money."

Shortly after this conversation Beatriz and Felipe came over and Luke announced to them that he was drinking budget cola for breakfast. "Budget cola is cheap soda, like you get at the 99 cents store," he informed them.

Of course they had no idea what he was talking about but I had a good laugh at Chef Sam Nikita's expense.

What do you think I might say?

Life is strange, living in the subjunctive tense. Every day Luke has new issues to examine, new possibilities to consider. Like when Ferdinand the bull sits on the bee: "What do you think Ferdinand might say?" "What do you think the bee might say?" Further contemplation is necessary about the idea of Luke sitting on a bee: "What do you think I might say?" "What do you think you might do?"

Or if we go to a park with some particularly appealing toys: "What do you think some boys might do?" (take the toys) "What do you think I might say?" (Noooooo!) Or if I'm getting ready to leave for work: "What do you think I might say?" (Goodbye mommy) "What do you think you might say?" (Goodbye, Luke, I hope you have a nice day). "What do you think you might do in the car?" (Feel sad about leaving) "What do you think I might do when I get to school?" (Have fun, I hope)

Luke's teacher tells me that he's the king of all questions, and it's true - it's an all-day affair. By the end of the day on Friday, I was just on question-answering autopilot, but it must have come to a shock for Dave to come home to Mr. Non-Stop Subjunctive.

Truthfully, Luke and I have a pretty good rap down these days. I'm not so completely exhausted that I can't deal with him, he's been taking naps again with some regularity, and we're working together (two steps forward, one step back) on the potty thing. Dave is gone for two nights this week, which two months ago would have been inconceivable, but now seems like it's just routine.

Unfortunately, Luke has this new devil-child-freakout thing that he does at bedtime where he won't make a move to cooperate getting ready for bed; then he gets mad when you try to do anything for him. Last week I had to strong-arm him to get him to brush his teeth, then I dumped out the "old" water standing in his cup and put new water in for him to drink. This resulted in a 20-minute flip-out session ("I want to drink the OLD water! Not the NEW water!") that was ultimately resolved by Dave reassuring him that when you dump the old water down one bathroom sink, you can get it back by turning on the faucet in the other sink. We've managed to avoid the devil-child-freakout by starting bedtime preparations a little earlier, but it's still dicey enough that I'm hoping to avoid it for the next two nights.

We asked the doctor at Luke's three-year appointment about his focus on small motor skills (read: tools and guitars), possibly to the detriment of large motor skills. It comes up every now and then, like when he can't seem to get the hang of the tricycle or Big Wheel. But the doctor has reassured us that it'll all catch up in time, and for now, he's focused in what he's interested in.

I guess it makes sense, then, that while in the past it had never once occurred to him to do anything but ride in the cart at the grocery store, the story became completely different when donuts were involved. Yesterday when we got to the store, the donuts were the first thing he saw, and he nearly had a coronary. "Oh! Oh! I have to get out of the cart!" he said, as he wriggled to a standing position and appeared to be preparing to jump out. He studied the donuts for only a moment, then very authoritatively grabbed the kind he wanted and tossed them into the cart. For the rest of the time there, he rather huffily insisted on walking and pushing the cart, as if I might somehow make another ridiculous error like failing to pick out donuts.

I'm weighing the idea of giving him a donut tonight. On the one hand, I know he'll ask for it. On the other hand, there's sugar-induced craziness. So I think I'll put it in the simplest terms: Donut, yes, but only if there's no follow-up freakout. And then the questions will begin: "What do you think I might say?" "What do you think I might do?" "What do you think you might say?"