BABY WEIGHT

Year Two. An Update.

It’s been ages since I have updated this here blog of mine and it has been missed… by me anyway.  I often read back to jog my memories of Evan when he was even more wee than he is now.  My memory is less than stellar.  I’ll record it on here!  You can judge me on my grammar!  Come on, it’ll be fun!

He loves Dora the Explorer.  He calls the show ‘Doda and Boots’ or if he’s asking for it over and over it’s more like, ‘Doda Boooooos, Doda Boooooooos, DODA BOOOOS, MOMMY/DADA!’  He’ll watch the same episodes over and over.  He will use this show as a bargaining tool: ‘Mommy will be in the kitchen, can you be a good boy while Mommy is in the kitchen?’  Him: ‘Doda and Boots.’ (or ‘Fine lady, if you put my stories on’)  At the end of the show, Dora looks at you with her gigantic eyeballs and asks all the slack-jawed children, ‘What was your favorite part?’ Then there is complete silence.  Evan knows he is to fill it.  Every time he says, ‘Ummmmmmmm… bibbit.’  And then Dora says, ‘I liked that too.’ 

Bibbit is his word for frog.  He’ll often point at you and say, ‘Bibbit!’  Sometimes it’s an accusation, sometimes a compliment.  When you call HIM a Bibbit, sometimes he takes it as a compliment and sometimes he spits at you: ‘No, MOMMY bibbit!’  Sometimes it’s like you turned off Dora during the Map’s third repeating of the directions OMG SHUT UP:  he’ll scream and have a tantrum.  Sometimes he will call himself or someone else a ‘Bobot’ (robot), and yes, I’m pretty sure he doesn’t have a speech impediment. 

He was never a baby with a blanky or a binky or a stuffed animal that he HAD to have.  I would often throw something fluffy in his face and insist that he extra love it and then get offended when he could take a nap without it.  Now when he lays down he wants his pillow pet, blanket (blay-blet), elephant (eefant), and Elmo (a puppet he got for Christmas).  He doesn’t extra love it necessarily, he just likes the routine of it and watching mommy and dada search for all the items on demand.

Sleep.  Sigh.  So.  Evan sleeps most of the time in our bed.  There was period of time when dada was working weird shifts and only saw Evan around bedtime.  So he would come home and snuggle on the couch with Evan until he fell asleep.  It was so sweet.  Until, of course, it became Evan’s preferred (only) way of going down for the night.  Most nights, once he falls asleep, I lay him down in his crib and I’m lucky to fall asleep before he wakes an hour or so later.  Then I stumble into his room, pick him up and lay him in the bed next to me.  Some nights, I just bring him right to our bed.  Gone are his newborn days of non-picky-sleeping.

Weekday mornings consist of me turning on the bedroom light, changing his diaper and clothes, brushing his hair and teeth and stuffing him into his coat and into the car all in a 10 minute span.  Most weekend mornings start with Evan sitting up in bed, taking a couple seconds to get his bearings, and then reverse army crawling off the bed while suggesting that I get up, turn on the lights he points to and then giving him a Dora fix.  I’m normally still trying to wake up and half-assed forcing him to say please to make it seem a little like I’m sorta in control.  Kinda.

He’s getting a little pickier with his foods.  I could get him to eat just about anything back in the day, but now he’s grown a palette for all of the toddler staples.  He is a fruit eating champ though so he does get his vitamins.   He also gets a gummy vitamin every day.  Right off the bat I handed him a candy-looking sugar-coated vitamin and said, “This is a vitamin, not candy.  You get ONE A DAY.  ONE A DAY, hear me?  No more.  One.”  It sunk in.  I hand him his vitamin and very day he holds it out and says, “One-day, Mommy!  One-day!” 

He is still in diapers.  He views potty time as book reading time.  The same two books.  Once Upon a Potty & Are You My Mommy (Tiger Edition).  We must both take turns reading them.  He knows the ‘sensation’.  He’ll tell me POOPYPOPPYMOMMY and run upstairs and do nothing.  Then I will put a fresh diaper on him which he’ll immediately soil.  Once he insisted that he did indeed go potty and I told him he did not and lying is bad and then I took him off the potty and we both leaned in for a look and there was a tiny pebble down there.  We looked up at each other in surprise and I sang praises and handed out M&Ms and put a new diaper on him.  Which he immediately soiled.

He is now in 3T shirts.  I was in denial about this.  He is 2.  He should be in 2T while he’s 2.  Ya know?  2 = 2T.  Right?  At daycare he walks up to Miss Di and she comments about him getting too big for his shirt.  It instantly and completely confused me.  ‘Noooo, 2T’, my brain told me.  My eyes saw too much of his forearms and a little belly.  My brain was all: 2T!  I said, ‘He’s two! I have until September!’  Di may have looked at me funny.  I may have mumbled it.  However, I stick to my logic: he should not be wearing 3T anything until September 8^th, 2011.  I have 2T summer stuff for frigg sake.  He has to wear the 2T jeans with the tabby-dos all cinched up tight.  The jeans will become too short on him before they can be let out at all.  He’s a long skinny guy and his back bone’s connected to his leg bones, ‘cause he doesn’t appear to have a hip bone.

He is still a mommy’s boy.  I can soothe him like nobody’s business.  If he has a bad dream I can pat him on the back and whisper, ‘Mommy’s here’ and he’ll slip back into sleep.  I am fiercely cherishing this before it goes away and I become his lame mom.

He is also very protective of his mommy.  Heaven-for-freaking-bid I hold another baby in his presence.  Holy cow!  ‘No!  MY MOMMY!’ Like he becomes completely negated the moment another child touches me.  We went to visit friends with a cute little girl and I didn’t pick her up for hours so Evan would get used to her first.  His attention was focused on something else when I picked her up.  He saw me and wailed and tried to climb up my legs.  This could be an issue if we add another offspring to the fold. 

He talks like crazy.  He’ll hold entire conversations with me.  He won’t let me off with the fake answers I used to give him or the ‘because I said so’ routine.  He has a good hold on concepts in general and knows most of his letters on sight. (He does, however, refer to letters as E-E-Ohs.)  He used to be really on with his colors and numbers but he has been insisting lately that everything is blue.  We’ll go around the house often and I’ll ask him ‘What color is this?’ and he’ll try to figure it out.  One good lesson is watching Biggest Loser.  There are always bright colors on that show.  He spends it saying ‘Waa Color, Mommy?  Waa Color?’  Instead of saying, ‘Shhhhh! Mommy’s watching her show’, like I should be doing, I say, ‘You tell me.’ Then he’ll say, ‘Ummmmmm, bibbit.’ and laugh.