Good Neighbors

With the wonderful summery weather we've had the past few days, I've realized once again how much I love our little neighborhood.  Brentwood is a cute little town of 7,000 right in the middle of the inner suburbs of St. Louis.  I say "inner suburbs" because urban sprawl here really is horrific--it's not as bad as D.C. or Houston, but there are actually people who commute 40 miles or more to downtown without going through a bit of rural area.  On our trips to visit Nonna and Pops, it takes almost an hour before we officially leave St. Louis's outer suburbs.  And even where we are it takes Ben over half an hour to drive to work, which makes me feel as if we're living way out in the boonies, since Ben's London commute consisted of a 7 minute walk by some of the city's tallest buildings.  The preppiness of it all also occasionally gets to me when I realize that there are 4 identical white luxury SUVs in line at our local Starbucks driveup window or when I see moms at the park dressed in skirts and with lipstick on(!) while their children play around them in Strasburg Children clothes.  And I completely don't get the monogramming fanaticism--seriously, I've seen it on cars, on baby bibs!?  Didn't even J.Crew ditch that fad as too preppy about five years ago?  But, again, good outweighs bad.

But, being relatively out of the hideousness of McMansion exurbia, Brentwood's a pretty nice area.  The public elementary school is literally six houses away, and our favorite park is less than a mile's walk through a tree-lined neighborhood.  There are a few businesses that we can walk to: the library, fire station (this is key for Jack), dry cleaner's, pharmacy, our insurance company, Whole Foods, Panera, Starbucks.  If the streets were set up a little more walker-friendly, we could even make it on foot to Target!  

The best thing about our new home is our neighbors.  We're in a row of 10 newly built houses that share a common back alley private drive that leads to all our garages.  In those 10 houses live 13 children between 7 months and 10 years of age!  So as you can imagine, the alley in back is home to frequent bike races and impromptu soccer matches.  I'd imagine it's like going back in time 50 years to stickball game years.  Except that the parents join in, too, jumping in and out of the games and talking to one another.  Saturday we walked outside and were greeted with drink and barbecue offers from both our neighbors whose kids were playing in the sprinkler and those who were making their first attempts at gardening.

It's also reassuring to know our neighbors so well when I read a story like this one that was briefly on CNN.com earlier today.  As I incredulously read the story to Ben, his jaw dropped and he said, "I could totally see Jack doing that!"  Me too.  And let me give you an example of exactly why we could see that happening.

Some background: although the big boy bed thing is going fairly well (our featherbed has been returned to its intended use and we've yet to have a falling out incident), Jack does like to get up and crack his door open after we've put him to bed.  We've now gotten used to hearing the creak of his door a few minutes after lights out.  He then spends at least 15 minutes jabbering away to himself before falling asleep; generally he recounts highlights of his day (presumably for the benefit of Waddle Waddle and Little Teddy), then ends by giving his animals kisses and singing the last line of his lullaby, "Goodnight Jack, we love you."

Saturday night, however, Jack seemed to go to sleep rather quickly.  It was a little late and he had spent a lot of time playing outside in the sun, so we chalked the lack of noise up to exhaustion.  In the process of opening the door, however, Jack kicks off all his covers, and he's still learning how to cover himself back up, so I've recently made a habit of stopping by his room before I go to sleep and straightening his covers.  I find it really sweet.  But when I went in to do that on Saturday, Jack wasn't in bed.  I patted the blankets and pulled them off the bed in shock and had a brief moment of panic before I realized exactly where he was.  When we weren't outside playing in the sun, we spent a good portion of Saturday in our guest room.  We had a huge buildup of laundry to fold and I (embarrassingly) still hadn't washed the sheets from our Easter Grammy and Granddad visit, so we spent a lot of time playing on the twin-sized guest bed with the trundle underneath it pulled halfway out so that Jack could jump up on the bed, too.  

Jack had apparently tried to recreate our afternoon fun, because there he was, snoozing away sans sheets, with no blanket, no pillowcase, not even a stuffed animal for companionship, just three bah-bahs (pacifiers, one for each hand and one for his mouth, on constant rotation) on the "Nonna Pops bed," as he had dubbed it earlier in the day.  We carried him back to his room, but Sunday morning, instead of wanting to snuggle in our bed for a while after waking up (as usual), Jack urged us to go to the guest room instead.  We politely declined.  At least we have an inkling that,  should he have a baby brother or sister who would need to be in a crib and in the nursery closer to our room, changing rooms and moving to a true big boy bed will not cause much emotional trauma for Jack.

Here's to hoping that by the time Jack has siblings who can toddle along after him he'll have turned his leadership skills toward more productive endeavors so that we won't end up on the CNN ticker on a slow news day.

And Happy Birthday to Daddy!

And the birthday madness continued, only to end today.  Jack's birthday is not only (generally) close to Easter, but it's just a week and a half before Ben's.  So on Monday, after a final birthday party for Jack two days before at Nonna and Pops's house, we were at the grocery store buying ingredients for Ben's birthday cake.  I was, as usual, attempting to keep Jack happily in the cart (as opposed to unhappily throwing himself out of the cart) by using my standby tactic of talking his ear off so he doesn't have time to process anything else (Uncle Tyler, you can keep your Nonna comparison jokes to yourself, thank you very much!).  So I was explaining to him what we were getting and why we were having yet another birthday cake.  Jack turned to me and said, "Hap Birday Jack all done.  Hap Birday Daddy."  

Actually, I should qualify this by explaining that Jack wasn't just saying this to me but to the entire grocery store.  You see, he doesn't actually say, "Hap Birday"; he sings it at the top of his lungs.  Every.  Single.  Time.  I don't think he understands that the sentiment may also be adequately expressed in spoken words.  

I'll attempt to capture the singing on video tomorrow and repost it here, although I have two concerns about doing this: 1) whether Jack could possibly refrain from looking at the camera long enough for him to sing the entire song or even a representative snippet, and 2) whether such a post would require paying royalties.  I'm going for the defense of tenuous connection to the actual tune and lyrics given a 2-year-old's vocal development.  That is unless any of my litigation friends have strong arguments against it.

Regardless, I'm indescribably glad that my wonderful husband and best friend was born 29 years ago today.  

Happy Birthday Dear Jack...

I can't believe it, but Jack is two years old today!  Since I know pictures are always the big draw and we had some great ones taken weekend before last, those come first.

Jack had a busy weekend with Grammy and Granddad (Ben's parents) in town.  Friday night we had a birthday party, complete with a Momma-made three-layered strawberry-lemon cake with strawberry buttercream icing.  

Jack, who has been deprived of almost all sugar almost all of his life, predictably went crazy over it...and eventually got sick.  Poor guy!

Although it's been fun celebrating for four days straight (with more to come this weekend at Nonna and Pops' house!), I'm eager to get back to a little normalcy.  After two days of waking up to presents and surprises, I'm wondering what Jack expects for tomorrow.  Since my birthday is December 3, I've always been sensitive about wanting to celebrate my birthday separately and before Christmas.  But this whole having a major holiday the day before a birthday thing is new to me, and I'm not sure I've got it down yet.  Luckily I have until Jack's 24th and 29th birthdays to figure out just how to manage celebrating both Easter and Jack's birthday on the same day.

And now since I've demonstrated my apparent overabundance of time, I'm off to read Slate--I gave up reading that, my favorite magazine, for Lent, and I've built up a 43-article backlog of interesting things to read.  I may once again have interesting, non-mommy things to say by the end of the week.

Things We've Been Up To

1. Sleeping in a big boy bed.  He feel out once the first night and once the second and since then has been fine.  Two or three times when he had trouble going to sleep we had to turn the bed around so the crib rail side was facing out, but other than that it was an amazingly smooth transition.  Hooray!

2. Making music.  Although it was not useful to keep him in bed, Jack decided that the one of the rods from the non-toddler bed bedrail would make a perfect Riccola-style instrument.  He now sing/plays, "Doot doot doot doot doot, good morning, Momma!" many times a day. 

3. Cooking.  I've been doing pretty well on my resolution to cook more and better.  We've had multiple variations of gourmet muffins and pancakes, some lamb, risotto, and homemade soups, among other yummy treats.  Here Jack is helping assemble crepes.  We didn't end up with any blueberries actually on the crepes, but the pumpkin butter ones were particularly good.  

Our exception to fine cuisine?  National Corndog Day.  Honestly, it's a real event.  We used to celebrate with our law school friends Tim and Juliet.  On the first Saturday of the NCAA tournament, parties are held across the country at which brave souls attempt an edible (by some accounts) triple double.  To do so requires eating 10 corndogs, 10 cans of beer, and 10 units (of 10 each) of tater tots, all within the hours of live basketball play during the afternoon.  Greasy goodness.  

This year we showed our age by substituting organic veggie "corndogs," homemade sweet potato fries, and blackberry juice cut with sparkling water.  We'd definitely be laughed out of the UVa party.  Needless to say, even with the modifications, none of us made it close to triple doubling.   

4. Obsessively reading all the Madeline books.  All six of them bound together in one book that we borrowed from the library and devoured immediately and repeatedly.  Within a day we had read through all 300 pages, some of the stories several times through, and we continued to read at least two before every nap/bedtime every day.  I'm normally a fan of greatest hits collections, but I can say with utter confidence that at least half of the Madeline books never should have been published.  That bad.  I've been surprised at several of the classics that I had just assumed I loved that I can't stand at all.  I found "Where the Wild Things Are" particularly disappointing. 

We returned the Madeline book this morning, and I am thrilled to be free of "Madeline and the Bad Hat."  Free at least until Jack's birthday when he's getting his own copy from us.  I'm hoping two weeks absence won't increase his fondness.

5. Working out.  In a preview of his college days, Jack spent Saturday morning shirtless and playing with a frisbee.  

On Monday afternoon Jack suddenly dropped and gave me three, and he counted the pushups nonetheless!  I cracked up and called Ben to report Jack's imitation.  

Ben responded, "Oh, yeah.  We do pushups together.  And we count them out loud."  Apparently they did several sets while I was at a meeting on Sunday.  Hmmmm.  Wouldn't have thought of that activity.  The first video is just included because I love that "hooray for me!" smile that he gives at the beginning.

6. Building and climbing.  Jack has started stacking everything.  I handed him the blocks in the picture in order, but he put them all together by himself.  

And the climbing has gotten a little out of control.  Our kitchen is now constantly littered with chairs Jack has repositioned and repurposed as stepladders.  He can now even manage to clamber up on our barstools.

7. Talking with wonderful friends.  Neesha and I are taking a parenting class together while Bobby and Ben stay home with the kids, so we had some time to chat as we carpooled to the first meeting tonight.  Juliet, a friend from our Charlottesville days, called this afternoon for a nice surprise chat.  And Stacy and I have booked a Skype visit for tomorrow afternoon.  It's wonderful to have friends who I admire so much as women and as mothers.  Sometimes being a stay at home mom can be very isolating, but those pats on the back that we share with one another make it so much easier.  I just hope I'm as generous with and deserving of the compliments as they are.