These days, Dave and I spend our time with Tau either trying to keep our wits about us or shaking our heads in disbelief. Three recent conversations …

1

Lying with Tau at bedtime, as he rearranges his lions. “Uh … I needa my dog!”

“Dog isn’t here, honey. Hold this lion.”

“I. NEEDA. MY. DOOOOOOOOG!”

Sigh. Knowing full well that Dog is on the back seat of my car, I go the path of least resistance: “I don’t know where it is.”

Long silence. “Probably is downstairs. Probably is inna kitchen. Or probably is inna garage!”

Yes. Probably.

2

And we are now in love with Band-aids. Whenever we fall, we NEEDA a band-aid.

The other day, after not listening and not watching where he was going, he trips, fall and bumps his right shin.

“Waaaaaaaaaaa!” Deep breath. “Waaaaaaaaaa! I NEEDA Band-aid!”

Unsympathetic mother: “Come here, lemme see. No, you don’t need a Band-aid. There’s no BLOOD. We only do Band-aids for BLOOD in this house!”

3

And we are the Ruler Supreme of last-ditch attempts not to have to go to sleep — especially where we are EXHAUSTED and should have been asleep ages ago.

Lying in the dark. “Mommy?”

“Yes, Tau.”

“My diaper is coming loose.”

When did he learn loose? “No it’s not. I just put a new one on.”

“It IS! Is coming loose.”

“Lemme see.” Flip him on his back, zip down his PJs to check the velcro and make sure the fit is right and straight. “No it’s not loose.” Ziiiiip! “Come, let’s tuck you in.”

“Mommy? My diaper is giving me owie.”

Sigh. “Really?”

“No.”

I can hear him grinning in the dark. “OK. Go to sleep now.”

“Mommy? I need to go potty.”

“No you don’t. You need to go to sleep.”

“I NEED to go POTTY!” Silence. “I. NEED. TO. GO POTTEEEE!!!”

“OK. Let’s go potty.”

(And, yes. He really did need to go potty.)

Aimee has launched the very first Kid Art Auction for Earth Day 2008.

How does it work? Your kid makes art. You post it to the Kid Art Auction Flickr pool. And you tell all you know about it so that they can go and bid on the lovely pieces our kids have made. When bidding closes, the parent ships the art to the highest bidder. Simple and fun, yes? All proceeds go to We Can Solve It, a project from the Alliance for Climate Protection.  

Family overseas, sorry, but the bidding is only open to those in North America. But friends with kids under 17 in Canada and the US? Get those kiddie fingers busy.

Here is Tau’s first effort with scissors, markers and glue. Isn’t Happypillar sweet?

Today I bought Tau his first set of kiddie scissors.  We spent lots of time practicing and when I was confident he understood how to cut the paper and not his fingers, I let him go at it.

So I’m in the kitchen and I hear mutter, mutter, mutter coming from around the corner.

“What’s that Tau?”

“I cutta the carpet!”

The cream nouveau shag that looks like mini-noodles. Could have bet big money on that.

We spent Easter Sunday yesterday with Dave’s sister Trish, her husband Bruce and family. Tau loves haves having his teenage cousins Greg and Jess around to play soccer with him and do Thomas the Tank puzzles (thrilling for them, I’m sure!).

It was so hot here that the Easter Bunny had to drop his eggs off very quickly after brunch and we ran out and find them before they melted into globby, gooey little messes.

Pics are over at Flickr. Enjoy!

This morning I woke Tau up by opening his blinds, the sun streaming in on his bed.

“C’mon sleepyhead. Time to get up.”

Sits up, fuzzyheaded, rubbing his eyes and squinting up at the light. “Iz-zat Mr. Golden Sun?”

Mitch, Tau and AJ at Omaha Beach House

It amazes us that even after two months back from New Zealand, Tau still raises things that we thought he would have long forgotten.

When we catch and hold his swing in mid-flight at the playground, he knows that saying “AJ’s password” (”Love ya, AJ”) is the only way to get the swing going again. He also remembers that the “AJ hug” requires a “tap, tap” of his hand on our backs.

The third thing he “remembers” cracks me up: I recently told him on the way home from daycare that Mommy would be home when we got there. “What are you going to say to Mommy when you see her?” I asked. His response? ” Hello gorgeous!” I almost drove the car off the road. He tells me AJ taught him this.

Tau has some pretty strong memories of New Zealand.

“Who did we visit in New Zealand, Tau?”

“AJ-Julie … Jaimey-Mitch?”

“And what was the dog’s name?”

“JAPPA!” (their chocolate lab, Jasper)

“And the cats?”

“Tormie and ‘fasa?” (the Persians, Storm and Mufasa)

“And the other dogs we saw in Nelson? Sam and?”

“Sam ‘n ZOE!”

And on the subject of indigenous culture …

“And what did the ladies do with their hands at the dancing?”

This one takes a bit of coaxing but eventually he’ll do the soft hand vibrations Maori women do when they dance and sing, and then elaborate. “An’ the ladies … dancing with the white balls … and the sticks …” he tells us.

Yes, the ladies danced with the white balls and sticks. He sat on AJ’s lap — motionless, just soaking it all in — the full half hour of the performance.

“And what about haka, Tau?”

Sticks out his tongue and bugs out his eyes … “WHAAAA!” I tried to get a good picture but he didn’t want to perform for the camera!

The haka is a definite favorite on You Tube at the moment. The other day, Dave caught him, wandering around the house, muttering Ka Mate under his breath.

Getting out of the car this morning at daycare.

“I wanna take turtle in?”

“Hmn. I don’t think so.”

“Wanna take turtle IN.”

“If you take turtle in, all the other kids will want to play with him.”

Silence.

“You want the other kids to play with turtle?”

Brief pause. “Yup.”

“You want the other kids to play with turtle? If you leave him in the car, right here on your seat, then he’ll be waiting for you when I come to pick you up. And then you can hold him in your carseat.”

Scrambling out, placing turtle in the bucket of his seat. “Bye turtle …”

We wouldn’t normally post the contents of our kid’s nappy on the Internet but this has to be seen to be believed.

When we got home today from daycare, I checked his diaper by peering down the back of it, only to see a few small wood chips.

The two-year-old class playground at daycare has a fabulous pit filled with wood chips and diggers and dump trucks and such. Tau often comes home with chips in his hoodie or pockets.

So I thought to myself, “Hmn. That can’t be very comfy. Better change him, or at least remove the offending particles.” And opened the diaper to find …

Click to enlarge

Three days we’ve been back at daycare (only a few hours each morning, I might add) and already Tau has a runny nose streaming, no-holds-barred cold. Bah.

Silver linings:

1. Being away the whole month of December, we figure we’ve missed at least half of the worst of the cold and flu season. Figure.
2. Being sick today, he took a nap this afternoon. Which gave me time to do housework. Quite the novelty.
3. Transition back into daycare has been super smooth. Is it that he’s just that little bit older and more resilient? Or that he knows I pick him up at lunch time and we get to play all afternoon?

And speaking of play, Tau and I went out to buy his first bat and ball set yesterday.

He has been hitting balloons and balls with sticks and ferry boats for weeks now and battling to connect. I figured a toddler bat would give him a better chance of actually hitting the ball.

Well, Nanny left dollars to buy him something he needed and as luck would have it, we found the perfect set yesterday. Actually, it was a toss up between the Go, Diego, Go! set and the Spiderman set. But once the boy saw Spidey, poor Diego was banished back to the shelf.

Needless to say, he fell asleep with the bat and ball tucked under the blankets with him last night. (Added Friday: And of course it had to come to daycare this morning.)

… somebody told his first fib.

We were in our hotel room in Paihia with me trying to get him to nap. Tau hid his new Little People Christmas Flap Book behind the gauzy curtains. No idea that it was clearly visible through them.

“Tau, where’s your book?”

Poker faced response: “I dunno where is …”

Sigh.

After our recent crib-jumping escapade we decided it was time to move Tau to a toddler bed.

So, after hunting the Internet high and low, we decided on the KidKraft Modern Toddler Cot because it could take Tau’s existing crib mattress and looked to be the lowest to the ground of all the beds we saw.

As Tau watched Dave assembling it, we talked about the new BIG BOY BED (!) and how wonderful it was and how he didn’t have to sleep in the crib anymore because that was for tiny babies.

Quite sweet and gullible, our child. He has taken remarkably well to sleeping in the bed and has only slipped onto the floor once in the month or so that we’ve had it. Dave found him, still wrapped perfectly in his blankets, on the floor in the middle of the night.

He does push his luck some nights by getting out of bed before he falls asleep and walking to peer over the railing to see what we’re watching on TV. But generally, a firm “Get back in your bed, NOW! please …” sends him back under the covers.

In addition to the yellow sheets I originally made for the bed, I bought a cute Safari fitted sheet from Target to match the Safari monkey pillow and lamp already in his room.

Had to move the lamp up high recently when Tau burned his hand on it. He decided it would be a good idea to touch the light bulb to see whether Mom was right when she said it was “HOT, Tau! Don’t touch!”

And so begins knowledge of the fact that Mom is usually (always?) right.

Oh, and in case anyone is planning on sending Tau a lion for Christmas? A subtle hint in the picture above. Let’s just say the zoos and wildlife preserves of the world have been calling, requesting the return of their beasties.

A bit blurry but here is Tau walking a mile — OK, a meter or two — in his dad’s slippers.

Note that even though he is very clear on which is his left and right foot, he hasn’t yet clued in to the fact that shoes are shaped to fit the left or right foot. Hence the shoes on the wrong feet!

He wears his own slippers inside Dave’s so that his feet don’t slip out right away.

And it’s hard to tell in this picture but he was so chuffed with himself — to be wearing DADDY’S SLIPPERS!

I mean, the swagger! Like, hey Mom, look how big I am!

One night last week Tau and I are snuggling on his bed before sleepytime, reading Five Little Monkeys.

This book works, by the way. All of a sudden our kid knows that jumping on the bed is a BAD BAD thing. The monkeys? They get owies when they jump on the bed. The fact that Tau cut open his head and had to have his arm in a cast for two weeks, even though we told him repeatedly not to jump on chairs and beds, means nothing. But NO MORE MONKEYS JUMPING ON THE BED!? Apparently that works.

So we turn to the first page where the five little monkeys are all sweetly tucked into the one big bed by their mama.

“Look at all the baby monkeys Tau. Let’s count them … one …”

“Uno! Dos! Tres! …” Quick little finger stabbing the page. “Cuatro! Cinco! Seis!* …”

This boy, he can count in English to around 14 — the number of steps between our downstairs and upstairs floors at home — and to roughly diez en Español. But I thought it was cute that his first instinct was to count in Spanish!

———————–
* Usually counts to more than necessary for the number of objects.

Halloween art from daycare

Sometimes life gets in the way and I don’t get to report back on a major event. Like Halloween.

Which for Dave and I is neither here nor there, not having grown up trick or treating and so feeling no real connection with the holiday. In our pre-Tau days, we were the people who turned off the lights and curled up in bed early with a movie. Or went out for dinner so that we could see everyone dressed up but not have to wrangle with the challenges that Halloween presents.

Like how many pieces of candy to give each trick or treater. And whether you hand the treats out or just hold out the bowl and let kids help themselves. And what kind of candy is deemed acceptable anyway? All that and gauging how much candy to buy upfront, so that you don’t have a mountain of Kit Kats and M&Ms left over. Not that that’s a tragedy in my opinion — I can always find a way to dispose of Kit Kat bars.

(more…)