Ted Returns! (and Not a Moment Too Soon)

Fans! Brigade! No doubt you've all been waiting with bated breath to hear how this evening went down with only one hand on deck. The low point was probably when Julie found Clara eating dog food, shortly before Clara pitched herself down the two back steps, all within the same five minutes! Two birds may have been in tears (though Clara only cried over the dog food when it was fished out of her mouth). Julie has been assured by Sara that eating dog food is a rite of passage. And come to find out, Bird has eaten dog food on Ted's watch, too! And stair tumbles. . .They remain very, very near the top of Julie's list of Top Fears in Life, but if we had a nickel for every time Joe has tumbled down the stairs, we'd be able to get. . .Well, something anyway.

But besides these fraught five minutes, things went rather swimmingly, all things considered. We hung out on the porch. Clara double fisted Joe's socks she found on one of the chairs after getting a boost to a stand next to it. She also went after the paper in the shoe trays. Joe moved his rocks around (the rocks he collected on "the journey with you, Mommy"), dispensed coasters, and made like a prize fighter with his blankie. We ate a dinner of veggie burgers, sweet potato fries, and pears in companionable silence. Julie managed to nurse Clara with minimal distraction. Our Hero really did admirably for his age. He was cutting at the table, and stickering with abandon (and on the paper), for a very long time before asking, "Mommy, are you done nursing Clara?" about every. . .oh, say 10 seconds. (Again, no sense of time.) After we got Bird down, Joe and Julie did some dusting before bath. In the wake of Miss Che's evenings with us, the bath time routine now includes the elimination of residual bubble bath bubbles via the shower. (Julie is not a fan of this addition and can practically guarantee Ted will also be much aggrieved to learn of it.) All of this is to say that Our Hero was a mite later to bed than usual, but he didn't eat dog food, so all is not lost.

Bird in Profile

She's most fabulous, isn't she?

The Moon

As Julie was coming back in tonight after running out to the garage, she noticed the moon was really full and bright. She'd just put Joe down so she dashed back inside, went into the bambini's room and told Joe she had something to show him. He's seen a full moon before, but the theme at school this month is the sky, and they had just read a book all about the moon today (lessons gleaned: astronauts go there on space ships, no water and no oxygen, we could not live on moon). So he crawled into her arms and they went to the porch and looked at the moon. As they turned back to head for bed, Julie told Joe he could tell Neeky and the birds what he saw--and he did. After Julie had deposited him at the foot of his bed, he scampered to its top and said, "Neeky! We see a moon last week!" (See, no sense of time. But hopefully a sense of wonder.*)

*Here Julie was channeling A Private History of Awe, Scott Russell Sanders, and a Billy Collins poem called, appropriately enough, Moon. Good stuff.

Letters Joe Knows

Keen-eyed observers will note the presence of alphabet matching cards in the last picture of the last post. Joe is quite fond of them these days, loving, as he does, a match, and a letter. This morning on the way to school, he correctly identified all of the letters on the stop sign. He then promptly pointed out the next red octagon and crowed, "THAT'S SO SILLY!" Ever since the day of 12 thousand snow plows and its attendant "That's so silly!" refrain, anytime Joe spots more than two of anything is an occasion to bust out, "That's so silly!" Here are all the letters he knows, with their most commonly associated sort of mnemonic device, if present:

A

B

C

D*

E: J-O-E for Joe! Also: E for elephant.

J: J for Joe!

M: M for Mommy!

O: For Joe! (All the letters in Joe are for Joe.)

P

S: S for Sophie Stone. (A girl in his class. S is very much all the rage right now.)

T: T for Ted. Also: T for Teddy. (There is a Teddy in his room, and he knows Ted's name is Ted from having heard Julie call it out sometimes.)

W

*The alphabet is collectively referred to as ABCD (rather than ABCs).

The Porch Home Opener?

But how about the end of day circus, you ask? Fans, it's been o-kay, due in no small part to the fact that Julie engaged Miss Che to come over between 5pm and 7pm for the prime time fun. Fans, she does the dishes! She also makes sure the toys are put away before Joe decamps to the bath. So after Clara and Joe have been put to bed and she has left, there's no picking up to do! Awesome.* We have had but two small breakdowns, one each day, prior to her arrival:

1. Yesterday, Joe requested his mittens upon reaching the porch steps. No doubt you remember the inaugural mitten moment which has itself been repeated, as well as undergone permutations--mitten moment riffs, if you will. The mittens were shoved inside the sleeves of Joe's coat which he was holding (as instructed) high above his head (to avoid sloshing it in the puddles). There was no easy way to get them out and on, and in any case, it's spring (finally) and has been in the fifties by day's end the past two days. Julie explained that we do not often wear mittens in the spring, and certainly not when it's in the fifties. Joe begged to differ.

2. Today, when Julie pulled out into traffic after having been stopped next to the Trader Joe's for some time. This is a tricky intersection where cars are flying by from the left, and other cars are trying to make a left across them, as cars next to the Trader Joe's trying to make a left are playing chicken with both of these streams of traffic. The watchwords here when it comes to greeting the Trader Joe's and bidding it adieu are: "Time is of the essence." Sadly, toddlers have no sense of time (of which, more later) and so it has become many a day that Joe breaks down in wails as Trader Joe's fades into the distance because he did not say goodbye to it. And lest you think, "But remind him!", we hasten to point out that one must remind him to say hello and goodbye and sometimes, he will not dane to say hello until it is time to say goodbye and it's all too fast, but it's not a moment to linger as time is also of the essence when pulling out into traffic at this particular intersection. Good times, good times.

Today, when we got home, Julie thought the good times might keep on rolling when Joe spied a helicopter up in the sky after getting out of the car and demand to see another. Julie suggested going to the porch to helicopter watch, and thankfully, Our Hero was game. So, we headed for the porch, and as you can see, the gang was all there, with the door to the house and living room open. Hooray again! Joe and Clara tore it up. (Clara was thrilled to finally crawl underneath the furniture out there.)

*Sadly, she cannot come tomorrow, so Julie is already brainstorming what fantastical thing she can dream up for Joe to do so she can nurse Clara without him bounding about in a way that is charming, but distracting. She is searching for something novel, and that seems illicit and as though it might be forbidden, but that will leave the house and its contents intact and undamaged after it is done. The goal is not to resort to giving into the impulse to allow him to continue using the Sharpie marker, even on a really, really big piece of paper, to stave off a temper tantrum as she once did when she and Joe were both home sick (and Julie was very sick indeed), when he still managed to get some on the top of the dining room table. Julie's fault, Julie's fault. The Sharpie was taken from Our Hero, who promptly pitched a fit. And so. What did we learn? There is no paper big enough for a toddler with a Sharpie marker, and one must be ever vigilant when making up the rules like "Sharpie markers are Mommy Daddy only."