Resolutions

Happy New Year!

This year I'm bucking the life coach advice to make goals specific and measurable.  Being a bit of an all-or-nothing perfectionist, I tend to give up in frustration if I don't exactly make the smaller steps of my stated goals or take longer to reach them than I had planned.  So this year I'm resolving to:

1) Make more healthy meals with fresher ingredients.  Recipes that call for fresh ginger and herbs, or exotic-sounding whole grains like quinoa, or ultra-specific perishables like buttermilk (low fat, of course) that I used to think were pointless to buy because they go bad so quickly.  If I get a particularly good start on this and am still feeling ambitious in the spring, I want to start a container-based herb garden.

2) Use less plastic.  Not as in putting a rein on my credit card use, but as in finding alternatives to plastic food storage containers and Ziplock baggies and moving Jack from plastic toys, plates, cups and diapers to more eco-friendly alternatives.

And 3) Replace time I would normally waste websurfing with writing time.  I want to stop saying, "I really need to write this down, don't I?" to Ben about everything from mommy group analyses to Jack's fad of the week.

In furtherance of goal 1, I've picked up a great cookbook from the library that has kid-friendly veggie recipes with both parent instructions and preschooler instructions.  For instance, on one page of a recipe adults are instructed to peel, dice and steam two sweet potatoes with specified amounts of spices, and on the next page simple text and adorable pictures direct children to mash the potatoes and add the spices.  It's a brilliant idea, and I'm really looking forward to when Jack's a little more able to participate in activities like this.

And here's a little addition to goal 3--a wrap up of Jack's post-Christmas wind down over the past week.

We've spent a lot of time watching "ball" this week.  With all the bowl games, Jack's been in heaven.  I'm seriously worried about withdrawal starting next week.  Pro football just doesn't seem to satisfy him as much, and neither of our Missouri pro team even had a shot at the playoffs anyway.  

Jack has become very nurturing this week.  A few months ago I finally found the perfect baby doll for a little boy and was so excited to share baby-care secrets with Jack.  Uncle Tyler had a Cabbage Patch doll named Baby Loagie (short for Logan) that went everywhere with him for a while, and despite naysayers blinded by outdated gender roles, I think it's always a good thing to teach all children to take care of others.  I promptly dubbed the doll Baby Andy, since Andy is my absolute favorite boy's name but I can't scar a child of ours by naming him Andy Angelette.  But other than continually hugging Baby Andy and taking off the baby's shirt and diaper, Jack didn't really know what to do with it.  Until he got his new wooden food cutting set.  It's a box of simplistic-looking wooden food that comes with a toy cutting board and a wooden knife.  Each piece of food can be separated into pieces that are held together by Velcro tabs so that children can "cut" the food and then put it back together.  It serves the purpose of regular play food sets while also teaching the skill of cutting and (indirectly) giving a math lesson on fractions and sets vs. wholes--great idea, if I do say so about a present we got him for Christmas.

This new food set has opened up a whole new world of pretend play for Jack.  Now he regularly feeds both Baby Andy and his the two new penguins he got for Christmas from Uncle Tyler and Nonna and Pops.  He especially enjoys feeding WaddleWaddle pieces of "wawa momma," or "watermelon" for those of you who don't speak Jack.  WaddleWaddle refuses to eat watermelon rinds.  Baby Andy appears to be averse to tomatoes.  Seriously.  Sometimes Jack will hold those foods up to them and will make a disgusted face.  Twenty months old and he's already a food snob.  And now Jack carries either Baby Andy or one of his penguins with him most of the day.

Godmother Melanie will be pleased to hear that Jack has been developing quite the sense of spirituality, or at least learning more religious customs.  We've been working on the sign of the cross with Jack for a while, and now when we walk into church, he dips his fingers in the holy water in a very restrained manner (especially for a boy who LOVES splashing!), and pats his forehead then chest several times.  As with so many things Jack does, I have gotten so used to seeing him do that that I'm no longer impressed by it.  But last week an older lady was standing right by Jack as we walked in, and she went nuts talking about how sweet he was.  It was a great reminder to me to continue praising him for his actions even when I start to think of them as de rigueur.  

But the funniest event of the week happened last night at mass.  Since it was a weekday holy day (January 1 is the Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God, a holy day of obligation in the US, which means all American Catholics are supposed to go to church either the night before or day of) vigil on a night of lots of partying, there wasn't a huge crowd.  The cry room (the soundproof room in most Catholic churches where parents are supposed to take their very young/noisy/misbehaving children--you can hear the priest through a speaker and see the congregation, but they can't hear you) was empty except for the three of us and one very harried mother with an over-tired two-year-old girl.  Jack being very tired himself, we had headed straight to the cry room, expecting mass to be a challenge for him.  The girl and her mother had begun in the congregation, and being forced into the cry room by the girl's behavior seemed to have exasperated the mother even more.  At one point the girl started walking across the row of folding chairs in the back of the room.  Jack watched the girl, fascinated.  

By "watched" I really mean STARED.  From about two months of age, Jack has won every staring contest he has started, often by an embarrassingly large margin.  On our frequent London Tube trips, Jack would regularly have 10 minute stare-downs with complete strangers.  And for those of you unfamiliar with big-city mass-transit rules of etiquette, making any eye contact at all is the biggest no-no of all.  Several people would at first look at him and smile and maybe even make a funny face for a minute or two.  But then they would go back to their ordinary, I-am-a-rock, purposeful ignorance of everyone around them, and Jack would continue staring.  For a long time.  Long, long after they had lost interest.  Really uncomfortable.

At any rate, the girl's mother was less than thrilled about her daughter's behavior, and Jack's staring wasn't helping matters.  He stared for a good four or five minutes.  So what does our adorable little boy do then?  He very pointedly turns away from the rambunctious little girl, kneels, and puts his hands together in prayer!

I don't think I've ever before been embarrassed about Jack's good behavior, and I've definitely never wished he would misbehave, but last night I came pretty close to it.  Geez!  The one mass in recent memory that Jack decides to quietly sit still and he does it when another kid is losing it.  I've so been in that poor other mom's shoes, thinking, "Why does my child have to be the most active, most vocal one in the quiet room?  Why can't his silent, contemplative moments coincide with church instead of happening a few hours before?  Why is every other parent able to manage their child better than I am?"  It's not a fun place to be.  I'm just sorry that Jack inadvertently contributed to that mom's stress.  Tonight when our friends Bobby and Neesha came over with their daughter, Jack's friend Maddie, they dubbed him "Saint Jack."  Our little show-off...

Sentences

Some of Jack's milestones happen in discrete momentous occurrences.  The first time he sat up by himself was around 5 1/2 months, after I had read one afternoon that he should be trying to sit at that age, I realized I had never tried to get him to do that.  Fear of him falling on our hardwood floors was a significant factor.  So I sat him in his crib and we tried it out for a few minutes and he did it. The first time Jack stood alone for an extended period of time, Stacy and I were sitting on our living room floor while Kaia and Jack played around the high chair.  Suddenly Jack let go and stood there as we stared at him in amazement, he stared at us happily, then we stared at each other, then back to him.  It felt like he was up forever, and it really was an amazingly long 20 seconds or so.

Other milestones aren't really identifiably tied to any one happening but sort of happened over a few weeks.  First word?  Possibly the time he said "bubble" in the bathtub.  Or maybe it was when he started referring to his binky as "ba."  First smile?  There were the supposed gas bubbles when he was a few days old, and then there were the wide grins around the time of his baptism.  There wasn't a specific date that I can really tie to it; no age to enter into the blank in the baby book.

So what happened this morning may not have been his first sentence, and it certainly wasn't his first joining of words, but it's definitely the beginning of a new phase.  And I'm not sure I'm going to like this one.  As Ben and I were getting dressed this morning, Jack walked up to us and proudly announced, "Quack quack down!"  The past few days he's been interested in looking down the stairs and had started throwing balls down there, so I had a pretty good idea what had happened.  And, just as I had suspected, Jack's toy duck had indeed gone down and was lying at the bottom of the stairs.  Several balls followed as I was examining the duck and deciding what to do about Jack's new hobby.  At first all I could think of was that Tiny Toons episode where baby Plucky decides that everything should "Go dowwwn the hooooole!" (the skit starts around the 50 second mark)  Mindfulness of that is a major reason we always have the toilet lid closed when Jack flushes.  I'm relieved that Jack didn't choose that obsession.

Trying to find a middle ground between allowing Jack to explore and keeping other, less resilient household goods from suffering bumps and bruises of such falls, I determined that the best course of action would be to remove temptation and substitute some time later in the morning to drop only balls halfway down the stairs together.  That method has worked well in (generally) preventing Jack from throwing things other than balls.  I promptly moved the baby gate away from the stairs, assuming that removing the dropping results would prevent.  One of my boots, a half dozen hair clips and two bottles of contact lens solution soon formed a pile in the hall on the other side of the gate. 

I knew that when Jack was taking two two-hour naps a day last week that he was probably getting ready for some sort of cognitive development leap, but I was sort of hoping it would involve more words, less science experiments.

Where's Jack?

Jack is obsessed with Peek-a-Boo.  He doesn't so much enjoy being surprised, but when he gets to hide and shock us, he's thrilled.  We spend about 30 minutes a day playing that game.  We spend another 30-45 a day playing the game shown in the video below. 

Things I Want to Talk About

Things I do NOT want to talk about: 

1. Pops lost his race by 130 votes, less than 1% of the total.  Absolutely everyone thought he had it won no problem; the new Missouri Attorney General called Pops a few days after the election and congratulated him.  Republicans dumped $100, 000 into the race in the last three weeks, all of it negative advertising about Pops, and much of it in the form of very personal attacks.  I.e., Pops wants to take your guns away (despite having an A rating from the NRA), Pops kills babies (despite being personally opposed to abortion), Pops will raise taxes by $1 billion (I'm not exaggerating here, they literally claimed "$1 billion") and already raised your taxes as Mayor (except that he didn't, just voted with a unanimous city council to let the voters decide whether or not to raise their own taxes).  It was disgusting, and I am not pleased with the residents of Johnson County, Missouri.

2.  Today is my last birthday in my 20's.  

Things I do want to talk about: 

1.  Jack has learned to jump.  Really well.  He demonstrates this often.  We're still working on NOT jumping off stairs...

2.  Jack is attempting (with much prompting) to say "thank you."  He does the sign language pretty well.  Verbally it comes out more like "Day doooo!" but he says it with such excited conviction that I can't help but laugh happily.

3.  Jack has learned to do all the motions to the following rhyme:

Teddy bear, Teddy bear, touch your nose,
Teddy bear, Teddy bear, touch your toes;
Teddy bear, Teddy bear, touch the ground,
Teddy bear, Teddy bear, turn around.

Teddy bear, Teddy bear, climb the stairs, (we say "touch your hair" instead)
Teddy bear, Teddy bear, say your prayers;
Teddy bear, Teddy bear, turn off the light,
Teddy bear, Teddy bear, say goodnight!

At "say goodnight," he lays his head down and starts making snoring noises.  Really, really adorable.

4.  Jack learned to say "gobble, gobble," and "Ho, ho, ho," which he says when he hears the words turkey and Santa respectively.

5.  Jack now picks up the phone and says, " 'Low?"

6.  Our neighbors gave us a toy horse that their children had outgrown, so now Jack rides on this new horse and frequently asks me to ride with him on his old, larger horse.

7.  We had a fantastic Thanksgiving in Lousiana with Ben's extended family.  It was Jack's first time down the bayou, and despite not being used to the hubbub that comes with a massive, massive family (Granddad is the oldest of 8 children, and all but one of them were there, most with their own children!) Jack had a great time.  He truly is the most adaptable little boy!

8. We've finally become normal again.  You see, Ben is the type of person who sings Christmas songs in August.  We've been listening to the Christmas radio station since it came on the air in October.  Early October.  We've had a Christmas song playlist for over a month.  But now we're in the norm again, as everyone is listening to Christmas music!

9.  Jack is obsessed with football.  Since we don't watch TV during the week, he thinks the TV is a football playing machine.  As soon as he wakes up on Saturdays and Sundays, he notices that Ben is staying home and immediately starts pointing to the TV and saying "'ball, 'ball."  Even being on ESPN alone isn't sufficient; there has to be a play in progress for Jack to consider it "'ball."  As soon as the players start running, he yells, "Boom!  Down!" by which time they generally are on the ground.  The Christmas bowl season will be heaven for him.  I'm a little worried about Jack going into withdrawal once the football season ends.  More worrying, however, is the prospect that he'll soon become attached to the NBA.  I love football, but basketball?  Not Momma's favorite.