Solidarity

The preschool teachers took this photo of Tate recently:

They said he came running out of the playroom with a ball under his shirt yelling, “I have a baby in my tummy just like Mama Meeka!” Apparently, by the end of the day, at least two or three other boys had joined him.

I love how our kid is already playing the baby simulation game. Good times. On that note, I can’t believe we’re a scant eight weeks away from our due date. My head is sort of exploding right now. It’s not helping that a significant portion of our house is still torn up and I have no idea when it’s going to be completed. Don’t these guys know that it’s not possible for me to give birth until they fix the gaping holes in our walls!?!?! I’m about ready to pull the pregnancy card, and I won’t be faking the hysteria.

I’m really ready to meet this guy. We’re getting another ultrasound in the next week or so to ensure that the baby isn’t growing too quickly. The doctor is concerned by how big Tate was and though she knows I don’t want to induce, she also knows that giving birth to a baby too large for my body is no good either. Personally, I feel like the simple fact that babies come out larger than apples is a little much for my body. But whatever, I’ll have to take that one up with God. As for right now, I’ll just have to keep relying on the sympathetic and amusing attentions of Tate.

Fireman Tate

It’s been a couple full days of Halloween fun around here. Tate had his preschool Halloween party on Friday, where he and all his cohorts got to come to school in full costumed regalia for a day of treats and fun. The thing they don’t tell you about preschool parties, is that the treats and fun end there, you as parents are left to deal with tired, overly stimulated, extremely over-sugared kids. This is a lot for any kid, but for our kid, who doesn’t even drink juice – well, I’m surprised his face didn’t explode.

Tate in full costume with the pumpkin he painted at preschool. (Acquired during the pumpkin patch trip from hell).  He is so proud of it though that it pretty much made the whole thing worthwhile:

Today was a little more moderate. We’re now proud members of the Zoo, so they were having a big zoo scavenger hunt and we headed up there around 11:00 a.m. The weather was perfect, no rain, with moderate temperatures, so we ended up going through the entire zoo. Tate walked pretty much the whole time. Its’s pretty hilarious to watch him tromping along in full fireman regalia. The nice thing is, that with the raincoat and boots, he’ll be able to wear it the rest of the winter. Hurrah for clothes that multi-task.

Someone wasn’t quite tall enough:

After we got home and took some naps, Ryan decided to carve our pumpkins. We had two big ones, kindly given to me by my mom, without whom I would never have any holiday decorations. Tate helped Ryan scrape them out:

More accurately, he helped for like two minutes before he wanted to go back inside and eat goldfish, so I helped Ryan out with the rest. Ry got super ambitious and printed out this whole Thomas the Tank Engine stencil from the Internet because Tate loves trains so much. He’s a good dad. I took mine and drew three triangles on it (eyes and nose) and a jagged mouth with teeth on only the top because I couldn’t figure out how to match up the bottom teeth with the top and cut it out. I think Ryan was as worried I was going to cut off my hand with my free-wheeling pumpkin carving as he was that Tate was going to get too near the knife. Ryan’s turned out really well:

Tate loved it and told Ry, “It looks just like Thomas!” Which is a sign of success. Mine was good too. Tate spent a lot of time laughing at it.

Overall Halloween went well, though as you can see from the photos, we’re having a lot of work done on the house and for the second time in the three years we’ve lived in this house, we had no porch light. Regardless of our success rate, I still buy 300 pieces of individually wrapped chocolate every year from Costco. I think I gave out about 75 pieces this year. Maybe. We’re keeping the dream alive though. If for nothing else than because this guy gets such a kick out of it all:

Happy Halloween!

 

Fall happenings

Pumpkin goodness

We have taken one trip to the pumpkin patch this year. It was last Friday. And it was very wet. By very wet I don’t mean that there was a slight bit of dampness in the air and there were clouds. I mean that it was so wet that the goats didn’t even want to come out of the lean-to in order to score some corn from the kids. Food or shelter. Shelter won out. We went with the preschool and so it was a bunch of parents and a bunch of preschoolers. And a bunch of wet goats. For the life of me I don’t know why they waited so late in the year to go. It was raining all the way there and by the time we left, there were driving sheets of rain and wind gusts so strong that Tate kept getting dragged around by the umbrella. Hurrah for fall! We did get two cute pumpkins out of the deal though. I would apologize for not having photos, but honestly, I don’t think it would have been one of those inspiring photo moments.

And then there was birthing class

Ryan and decided to take a birthing refresher course through Legacy. By decided I mean that I signed us up and Ryan came along. My dad was nice enough to come over and hang out with Tate while we took it. Overall I think that it was worthwhile. We were certainly not as hardcore as some of the parents (shocking I know). Two examples, one being that all the other women went and got salad from the cafeteria during the lunch break. And then there was me. Guess who was snarfing down a cheeseburger with sweet potato fries? Got to get my daily calorie count in! Then there was the guy who kept referring to himself  “As a coach.” Example being, “As a coach I really felt that it was helpful to have the blah, blah, blah so that as the nurse was checking the baby, I could be sitting there and looking through my notes to get ready for the next phase.” Inspirational, dude, but let’s just remember that at the end of the day, there’s only one of you who’s going to provide a 10 cm portal into the world for another person’s entire body. Let’s not exaggerate our own importance. Ryan was actually more annoyed with him than I was. This is why we get along so well.

Disappointment leads to some good times

When we got home we tried to take Tate to the zoo. We got him all hyped up there and when we walked up to the gates, they told us they were closed. Tate was so disappointed that he started crying. He wasn’t having a tantrum, he was just crying because we couldn’t go in. It was about the saddest thing ever. Seriously. So, we wracked our brains and finally ended up at a park in NW Portland near where we used to live. New play equipment totally cheered him back up:

 

Other amusing things about Tate

Tate’s now at that age where he says hilarious things all the time. He has this weird voice he does too. For lack of better words it’s a total boy voice, kind of loud and monotone. And he says “Sure” a lot. As in, “Sure I can” or “Sure you should.” Today in the car as we drove up the preschool he said, “There’s Brady.” I responded with, “Oh, that’s Brady?” Tate looked at me and said, “That’s what they call him. Brady.” His teachers also report that he came out of one of the playrooms today with a basketball stuck under his shirt and announced, “I have a baby in my tummy! Just like Mama Meeka!” Indeed, just like Mama Meeka.

 

Independent

At some point over the past month, my baby stopped being a baby. Two and a half is still very young, but at least in Tate’s case, not so much a baby at all anymore, sometimes he barely feels like a toddler. He’s almost potty trained, he’s eating more like a normal person, he talks constantly, makes up jokes and silly rhymes and asks full questions. Plus, there’s that memory. Oh the memory of Tate. I’m hoping this lasts him at least until he gets out of school.

Tate is kind of astounding me lately. I know that’s ridiculous, but when he can spend almost a full Saturday up in his room, by himself, making up stories, playing with his trains, looking at books and looking through his toy box, well, astounding is about the only word that comes to mind:

The past two Saturdays we’ve even let him take his PB&J upstairs so he can eat it while he’s playing with his trains. Indulgent, I know, but I do remember being little and how nice it was sometimes just to be on your own, doing your own thing. And a little jam never hurt anything. Though I’m like a one-woman bio-hazard clean-up team when he’s done, looking for crumbs and wiping jam off of all surfaces.

We check on him regularly and ask him if he wants to come downstairs with us, but for the most part, the answer is no. He mainly just wants to hang out and play by himself. We figure that being surrounded by 15 other preschoolers for more than 40 hours a week  probably takes its toll. I’d want some solitude too. I can hear him talking to himself and making up stories, many of which come directly from the one Thomas the Train book that he owns. There is quite often a “crack in the track.”

Last weekend we did run out to the park between rain showers to get some fresh air. Tate wore his new fireman boots. He even managed to climb the web with them on. Little dude was pretty proud:

As I get larger and slower and more exhausted, I’m completely embracing this independence thing. It’s so nice to just ask him to go wash his hands for dinner and have him do it, or come downstairs with us in the morning and just want to cuddle. After two years, it’s getting so easy. And we’re having another one in a little over two months. Just about the right time, since the haggard lines of sleeplessness were just starting to ease up.

Oh well. What I never realized until Tate came into our lives, was how having someone this small, could make it all worthwhile:

Success! Sort of

So after the playdate dinner I realized even more keenly that we have about the pickiest eater ever. They say that there has never been a toddler that willingly starved him/herself to death, so that’s some small comfort, but it has been vexing to have someone in the house who literally only wants to live on four things. We’ve tried not to make a huge deal about it (who wants to fight about food all the time?), and I can say that Tate beats out pretty much every kid I know at being a great sleeper. Selfishly, I’d rather he eat PB&J forever, then refuse to go to bed at night and never nap. That might actually be my version of hell.

However, it’s still super annoying to make dinner and have him refuse to even consider it. But something must have switched in his brain over the weekend, because on Sunday night, this is what happened:

This is it, oh happy day, Tate eating a taco with meat, cheese, sour cream and a corn shell. In fact he ate two of them before he was done. I just kept staring at him – who are you and where is my son the bean and cheese eater? Ever since Sunday he’s been eating what we’re having for dinner. I’ll confess, this has had mixed results, none of which have been as successful as taco night. There have been some tears, time-outs and a few macaroni noodle casualties, but at least Emma is always on hand to provide clean-up.

The important thing is he’s trying. He even put a piece of broccoli in his mouth tonight. He chewed it up and spit it out, but at least he tried. I’m not picky, I’ll settle for trying. I think it’s finally hitting us that he’s old enough to understand needing to eat what’s in front of him and occuring to him that his tummy hurts if he doesn’t eat dinner. So, here we go. Perhaps by Christmas we’ll have expanded his repertoire to eight items, none of which will come in a can.

Best friends

It was a busy weekend for us. We’re not huge socializers on the weekends, simply because it’s nice to just be together as a family and we know that there are very few years before sports and classes and friends fill our days, every day. But this weekend a family from Tate’s daycare was gracious enough to invite four other families over for dinner and a playdate. All the boys are around the same age and went John’s Landing, even though now they’re sort of scattered between several locations. It was fun to spend time eating and talking to other adults while our kids fully entertained themselves:

I think Tate ate a total of about four pieces of fruit and two pieces of chicken for dinner. Two of the boys ate two full plates. It was astounding. They all had a great time together though, just running around chasing each other was good fun in itself.

We’d already scheduled a trip to the zoo this morning with Tate’s best friend, Jackson and his parents. We decided to keep it, hoping that it wouldn’t be overkill after last night. I’m so glad we went. Tate had the best time with Jackson. Those two really are best friends. Jackson’s mom calls them twins separated at birth:

They are super fond of each other. It was great to see how happy they were just to be together.

Jackson hasn’t been moved up to preschool yet and I know they really miss one another. Tate was really quiet at the big dinner party. We’d just gotten both his flu and H1N1 vaccinations and I was worried he was coming down with something. But today with Jackson he was totally back to himself. I think he just liked being with his friend:

Jackson is also very verbal and so he and Tate have full conversations. They also seem to have complementary interests since whenever there’s a vehicle to sit in, Tate is happy to be the driver and Jackson is happy to be the operator of the buttons:

Tate’s already asking when we can go back to the zoo with Jackson. It’s good to have someone around who you truly enjoy being with:

A minute after I took this photo, they took off, ran down the grass and found the only, deepest, muddiest trough of water, grass and mud in the whole field to jump into. Both feet. I guess it truly is best friends in everything.