The Boy in Action

OK, I know he's only a month old (two weeks in the video), so there's not really much action going on. But check out those turtle eyes! And wait around for 40 seconds--he smiles! He really does!

Random Observations at 2 Weeks

A lot of random things have crossed my mind the last two weeks that I've wanted to blog about, but I haven't gotten it together. Until now.

The difference between boys and girls:

• One night I had gotten the baby undressed and ready for his bath when I picked him up with my hand under his butt. Immediately I felt something suspicious. Panicked, I turned to Mario, asking, "Did he just poop on my hand?"

Nope. It was just his boy parts. Whew!

• I always thought people exaggerated when they talked about their boy babies peeing on the changing table. After all, Clara's done this once or twice. It's just more dramatic with boys, right?

No. Boys really do pee All. The. Time. While Clara has peed on the changing table once
or twice in two and a half years, The Boy pees on the changing table once or twice A DAY.

Now I know--it's no exaggeration.

Sibling Rivalry

My biggest worry about having a second child was Clara's reaction to him. Fortunately--so far--all my worries were for naught.

• They both wake up a little earlier than we had been accustomed to, but early morning with both kids is one of the best times of day. The Boy is alert, wide-eyed and wondering, and Clara just loves to get in his face and stare back at him. On these occasions, The Boy seems to enjoy her as much as she enjoys him.

• However, she does get upset when he spits up. He spat up in the car seat the other day (which was Clara's until 2 weeks ago). For the rest of the week, whenever she saw him it was an endless litany of, "Baby? Spit? Carseat?" with an ever-increasing note of panic in her voice.

• She already protects him, too. Patty and Mario's mom were teasing The Boy at breakfast about whether he wanted to eat bananas with us. Having been warned that the baby can't eat anything besides boobie and bottles (in case she had the bright idea of feeding him a banana), Clara piped up, "No! Baby eat boobie!"

Way to lay down the law, kid.


For my mom:

Echoing a constant refrain from my own mother, Mario's mom needed my opinion the other day. "Doesn't Mario speak really fast when he speaks in English?"

Mario does have a tendency to speak really fast. In any language. But I can't say that it's much faster than average conversation.

So it's not just you, Mom. ;)

Am I Jinxing Her By Saying This?

I think I can stop holding my breath and finally announce out loud that Clara may just be mostly potty-trained!

July 6th, I wrote on the calendar, "Clara went pipi on the potty!" It hadn't happened for a few weeks, so worth documenting. Then she did it again the next day. And the next. And even some times in those days she'd feel the urge, run to the potty, and sit there before realizing it was a false alarm.

But she knew what was going on.

The last couple of days, she's even gone poo in the potty, so I think we're really onto something. And now she'll go two or even three times a day (although wetting the diapers while sleeping seems to be an automatic reflex . . . I get it). But she generally runs around naked all day and hasn't had an accident for . . . I can't remember how long!

Of course, I realize that she's likely to take a BIG backslide in the next week/month, given the imminent upheaval in our lives. However, since she's come this far, I'm sure she'll hop back on that horse, once she's OK with relinquishing her spot as "the baby" (I'm just hoping that won't take the better part of the rest of this year).

I am really nervous to take her any farther than the butcher's across the street without diapers on. But, these days, we don't go much farther than the butcher's, so it's really not an issue.

But, for experienced parents out there, when do you know that she's ready to go out in public without diapers? (Like, long enough for a drive to the grocery store?) I have a feeling that Clara is pretty far from that point, but maybe I'm just being too cautious.

Two-Year-Old Chores

I've heard that it's never too early to involve kids in chores. And, with Clara, it's often more work to try to keep her from "helping" than from just letting her help in her own way.

• She loves sweeping. She's no good at it, but she LOVES it. We'll have to go to the market and get her a child-sized broom.
  

• I schedule laundry time around the times she's awake, as she loves loading the washer, closing the soap drawer, turning on the machine, unloading the washer, and bringing me clean clothes from the hamper to hang on the line. She really is pretty helpful with laundry. Particularly when we do her clothes, and I don't have to worry about her dragging shirts that are way too big for her through the dust in the laundry patio. Plus, her clothes hamper is just her size, so she can completely load and unload the washing machine on her own. It's great! Then again, she thinks she's capable of folding laundry, too. She'd be wrong on that one!
  

• My mother-in-law mentioned that her kids all learned how to make their beds when they were two or three. Since Clara's bed just got converted into a daybed, I'm in the process of showing her how to pull the sheets tight over the mattress. As it's so stinkin' hot outside, she sleeps with no sheets or blankets, so this is an excellent time to teach her this, right? She's got a long way to go before she'll ever pull those sheets even remotely tight, but she refuses to let me make her bed by myself. So I guess I'll let her learn how to make the bed. She is starting to get helpful at helping me make mine, though.

• Watering the plants has always been high on her list of priorities. Whenever she takes a bath, I now give her an empty yogurt container and ask her to water the plants with the water left in the tub (I've been bathing her in the patio--it's wonderful). She likes having something to do, and it gives me time to clean up her other bath things. Also, it's better for both of us if she's bending over to get that water out, rather than me. =P Sure, she often gets more water on the concrete than in the planters, but she's learning.

• If I make pancakes in the morning, she'll nearly throw a fit if I don't let her stir the batter. And again, she's getting pretty good at that, too.

Since she's so zealous to help, I really can't say no. And, let's face it, in a few years I'll be really grateful that I've already taken the time to teach her how to do these things.

In a few years, here's hoping that she's got a fraction of the enthusiasm for helping out around the house as she does now.

Conversations with Clara (Part II)

Being the things that pass (or, better put, evolve) all too quickly, I'm recording yet another Clara conversation here.

This afternoon we were in the pool. Clara likes using the skimmer net to fish out stray leaves and bugs, just like I do. This afternoon, she decided to fish out her ball and rubber puppy.

Every now and then she accurately counts to two or three. But we seem to be missing something, somewhere.

When she got both the puppy and the ball trapped in the net, she triumphantly exclaimed, "two puppy! Two balls!"

I pointed out that she had only one puppy and one ball in the net. "You have two toys. But only one puppy and one ball."

She seemed to seriously consider this information for awhile. But, for the rest of the afternoon, as long as she was playing with her toys and the net, she had two puppies and two balls.

It'll come.

Conversations with Clara (Part I)

Patty left for vacation this weekend. Clara saw Patty's suitcase waiting in the living room, and now has enough recent experience to know what THAT was all about.

"Patty. Airplane?"

In vain, I tried to explain that Patty was going to take a long bus ride to visit her mom and dad. However, Clara's only experience with buses are city buses (clearly no need for a suitcase). She kept insisting and insisting that Patty was going to the airport to go on an airplane that I just had to give in.

Thinking that I wasn't understanding, she even used the GERMAN word for airplane to make sure she was getting the message across!

This is even funnier, as whenever Clara and I read her German word book, she usually points out the pictures in English and I read them in German (sometimes she'll repeat the German after me). However, whenever we get to the airplane picture, she gets all stubborn and insists that it's an airplane instead of a Flugzeug. Never mind that she's content to hear all the other 999 words in the book pronounced in German. To Clara, an airplane is an airplane and that that's all it ever should be.

So imagine my surprise when I hear, as Clara is insisting: "Patty. Airplane. Tacky [taxi]. Airpope [airport]. Airplane. Airplane! Flugzeug! Airplane! Flugzeug! Airplane" It kind of took my breath away.

So how much will it fry her brain (or mine) to insist that it's an avion in Spanish?

Another Hurdle Crossed

Clara's naps have been rather hit or miss lately. Somedays she'll sleep solidly for 2-3 hours. Other days I shut her in her room for an hour and a half, and she spends the entire time pretending that she is both the audience and comedian at a successful comedy club. Either way, at the end of "nap" time, she's happy.

So, after a silent hour of naptime on Sunday, I was a little shocked when I heard her crying. As crying is out of the ordinary for her, I waited a bit to see if she'd fall back asleep. No dice.

Upon entering her room, I found her torso on TOP of the changing table at the foot of her bed, her legs dangling off (on the bed side, thank goodness), and her little hands clinging with all their might to the table top to keep her from falling. How she got into that position, I'm not sure, but it sure scared her!

It scared me too, so after declaring naptime officially over, I busted out the screwdriver and took the drop side of her crib off. I'm assuming that she climbed that high by using the folding side of her crib as a foothold to reach that fascinating top of the changing table. No more. Whether any of us really want it, Clara is now the resident of a daybed.

I was hoping that this transition could wait a few months, until the baby would have a more predictable schedule (and Clara would be used to said schedule). I sure wonder how those nighttime feedings will go with a two-year-old who's free to roam the room.

But so far, she's been really good about staying in her bed. The first night she cried twice because her teddy bear fell out of bed. Better the bear than her, I thought. Last night everybody stayed in bed, just fine.

This afternoon for naptime, she was caught playing with her Weebles treehouse (which, fortunately for me, makes noise, so I can tell the difference between her OUT of bed and playing and IN bed and talking to herself for hours on end).

This was a hurdle that I had been dreading, but so far, so good. Here's hoping it continues that way!
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Note: picture was re-enacted.