this space unintentionally left un-updated
How is time flying by like this? I’ve written so many posts in my head, again.
Currently, I’m grabbing this one minute to type a note, say hello.
Hello!
Am waiting for a guy. The guy who is going to show up and help me (hopefully) unravel the mess that is the unexpectedly and stunningly over-priced chicken coop I don’t like, installed and un-occupied in our backyard. It’s been dramatic around here on that front.
There was also an oh-no-you-didn’t fight with Jonah’s previous preschool over whether or not we owed them the deposit for September.
Seems one crisis or the other is going to land me in small claims court. Or not.
Tra la la.
What are the good things? Hmmm. The chickens are still with us. They’re growing nicely and producing small but rich and delicious eggs on a semi-irregular basis.
Jonah is amazing in both his continually growing verbal capacity, and his continually growing tantrum capacity. I’ll try to think of an example for you of each and actually write about it and stuff. Sometime. I hope.
Posted by calm mama on Wednesday, July 28th, 2010 at 5:10 pm in baby baby baby | 2 Comments » | 
baking with jonah
I’ve made a new friend on Facebook (Hi Michelle!) who is writing a cookbook for families, and pretty much every time she asks for volunteers to test her recipes, I say yes.
But not true to the intention of the book, I had yet to employ Jonah as sous chef, until today.
It took some convincing this morning to get him on board with the idea of cooking with me. Did I mention that he’s 2 years old?
The recipe was for a peaches and cream cobbler. Due to our outrageous overabundance of greengage plums, I decided to go with them as a substitute.
I washed and cut the plums into pieces, and then set Jonah up with a chair to stand on, the bowl of pieces, and the pan. He thoughtfully, carefully, moved the pieces from bowl to destination. I took pictures.
Next we mixed up the filling stuff together: brown sugar, corn starch, etc. Which he scooped into the pan, and then proceeded to massage into the plums for quiet, focused, contemplative, ages. When I called to Scott to come see (and take pictures) Jonah said, “Daddy, I’m working.”
Next came the sweet creamy layer, and then the batter layer on top. Kind of like an upside-down cake. Jonah performed excellent measuring, pouring, and stirring duties.
And then he demanded, “Want to taste it on my tongue.”
Now, I know we’re not supposed to eat raw dough made with eggs. But is it better at least if the eggs are from our own chickens? I grew up licking bowls of all kinds of batter. I couldn’t deny my son this simple pleasure.
After the cobbler went into the oven, he continued to stand there and lick the bowl clean, one fingerful at a time…
…the entire time the cobbler was in the oven (and I was doing the rest of the dishes).
And here’s the result:
Posted by calm mama on Monday, July 12th, 2010 at 10:31 pm in family activities, toddlerhood | 11 Comments » |
in which potty training and learning to spell coincide
We have alphabet magnets on our fridge. Upper and lower case as it happens. The former a gift from my sister, the latter a gift from the nanny – part of a toy from Leap Frog that involves a big magnetic airplane that says things when the letters are plugged into it. For example, “s” yields “I ssssssing with sssssnakes!”
We have often spelled “JONAH” in the past. Tonight, he asked me to spell “TRAIN.”
So, I ask him for each letter, which he finds in the clusters on the fridge and we place them in the proper order. We talk about what each letter’s sound is, et cetera.
As it happens, another group of letters clustered in a corner accidentally spells “FART.” So I point that out. And Jonah thinks that is HILARIOUS. In a fit of excitement, he runs at the fridge, pushes all the letters around until they fall on the floor, runs around in a circle, and comes back.
And then we spell it again.
Funny.
I have found the 2-1/2-year-old-boy funny bone.
So then we spell “POOp.” I mean, how could we not?
And “pee.”
Hi – lair – eeeee – yusssssss.
Oh, yes. We also spelled “Thomas,” and “Murdoch.”
Posted by calm mama on Friday, June 25th, 2010 at 9:04 pm in baby baby baby | 1 Comment » |
sticker-palooza
So, the benefit of having a child who is “adaptable” and “distractible” (according to at least one expert, and to a book I’d read with a questionnaire) is that one can pretty much just stop talking about charts and prizes and poof. All gone.
He’s still into stickers. There aren’t any more “tries” without “dos” so the whole sticker-for-trying thing is over. He just gets one at each potty. Every time. (Unless he forgets to ask for it.) And sticks it on his shirt, till it falls off. And gets lost — and later, many stickers later — found with great delight, and lost again. It’s like Easter all over our house, or a treasure hunt.
There’s a piece of paper taped to the door where the old chart used to be. Part of Chart 2.0 that Scott had started while discussing with Jonah that we hadn’t decided what prize the chart was for. So there’s no lines. Just a blank piece of paper. Every once in a while, Jonah puts a sticker on it. Once the piece of paper is full, he may make some kind of demand. I’ll cross that trestle when I get to it.
Meantime, we’re happy with his progress. He is quite alarmed and unhappy when he has accidents, so for now we’re not penalizing (no pun intended) him for them. Sooner or later, if need be, we’ll introduce the idea of pulling off a day or succession of days with no accidents, and then introduce a new chart and prize then.
He’s pleased with his progress, too. We still often get a little dance after a good potty. And he often likes to point out his successes: “Mommy, I knew I needed to go potty and I did it BY MYSELF!”
Posted by calm mama on Thursday, June 24th, 2010 at 2:16 pm in ec, milestones, toddlerhood, trains | comments » |
progress reports: preschool and potty
So, there are Thomas and Friends stickers all over our house. Mercifully, they seem to have been manufactured with some kind of temporary-ish glue (theoretically rendering them “reusable”) so that they aren’t leaving permanent marks anywhere (unlike the stickers from the pediatrician which left thick white sludgy squares of adhesive on our living room hardwood floor that won’t come up for love or money).
An aspect of Jonah’s personality to be grateful for: as much as he adores getting the stickers, and sticking them all over himself and the house, he seems to care not a whit when they crumple up, disappear, accumulate dirt and sand, fly away. Okay, he does, a whit. But it’s a short whit. If we had to keep track of and care for all of these little graven images of the holy Thomas clan, I’d be in serious trouble.
Did I mention we’d bought a book of 700 stickers to help us on this journey?
We’ve been pottying like mad for about a week and a half and so far it’s been mostly pretty great. Some days he’s maybe 50/50 on scores and accidents, some days he scores more often.
But we are already in trouble for our rookie “chart” efforts. I should have read a book or something first.
In the spirit of making potty training more fun and enduring, we put up a chart with 30 squares which he gets to fill in for each try – whether a success or not. (He rarely sits without payoff, so that’s not really the issue.)
Rather, the problem is that it took him only a few days to fill the chart and win his beloved “wind-up Lady” and while we were hoping to somehow up the ante on the next chart, like filling in squares on days when he doesn’t have an accident, we’re not sure we can change the rules on him that quickly. Basically, the kid takes himself to the pot several times a day, obliges our requests to do the same several other times, fights us hard on occasion, and forgets to go while absorbed in play a few times a day.
My goal for the chart was to get him excited about going, to experience a record of his progress, and to experience achieving a goal.
The bites-me-in-the-*ss part is that one hour after getting Lady, he announced that for his next chart he would like a “wind-up Thomas.”
You totally saw that one coming, right?
That would mean we’ll be buying a $25 toy about every four days.
So we have some work to do to get control of this one. Suggestions welcome.
+ + +
Leaving the old preschool has been mostly good. Jonah appears to be flourishing with the new temporary nanny. She calls herself the “granny nanny” and she comes with her bucket of bubbles and paints and stickers and seemingly endless energy for playing trains, building Lego towers, and digging in the sandbox, all while engaging him constantly in a light but intellectually-stimulating banter.
Next week will be interesting because he’ll have one day with GN, and one day with our former nanny-share; the awesomely energetic, adorable, not-long-out-of-college nanny whom Jonah adores and the 1-1/2 year old toddler whom he used to hug all the time when they were together.
I hope he likes being with each of them, and that it isn’t confusing or anything. We’d already committed to the nanny share for the summer as I was desperately trying to get one full day of care so I could get work done. And there weren’t openings for adding a day, though that may change. We’ll see.
I went to his school yesterday (without him) to pick up his stuff – extra diapers, changes of clothes. I chatted with his main teacher who suggested we check out parent co-op schools and agreed that waiting another year might be a good idea. And then I ran into one of the part-time teachers – the person whom I will probably miss the most, and who LOVED Jonah. She was aghast about our leaving – the woman who would sing to Jonah when he wouldn’t nap, and teach him Spanish. She said if we ever wanted to come back and try again, to please do.
I barely made it out the gate before I started crying. Our experience there was such a mixed bag. Maybe I can just be grateful for the fact that there were people there who did love him, and that he did have some good experiences, and while it’s hard to leave those parts behind, finding another situation where he’ll consistently get the attention he needs, where his non-napping won’t be an issue, and where I’ll get the communication that I need, will ultimately be better for both of us.
There’s also the chance we might not start school this fall. Did I already blog about the fact that my kid is YOUNG? Apparently I was blinded by his rather blinding verbal abilities and didn’t think through the fact that the rest of him might not be ready for preschool. Even though it was a toddler program we’d put him in (at 2 years, 2 months!) and even though he could pretty much do everything listed on the report card they gave me yesterday before he even started there, he’s still emotionally young.
Now that the State of California might be making the choice for me, it’s likely we have three years before he’ll start kindergarten. I’d been against the idea of “redshirting” because to me it just sounded like privileged people trying to get an edge on everyone else. But now I think, what’s the rush? I also hear that school is much harder on kindergarteners than it used to be due to the no-child-left-behind bill. More sitting, less play. He might be more able to deal with that at almost-6 rather than almost-5.
All that to say, if I don’t feel 100% totally excited and comfortable about the next situation, we’re not jumping into anything.