I know you thought that I disappeared for another two year hiatus. But before you complain, let me assure you I've kept a running pile of notes on stuff that our adoring public simply must hear about. I have good reasons for my silence, of course. In October, we were gearing up for a 5-night trip to Gatlinburg, TN. This was our first big vacation with two kids, and given our lifestyle and personal limitations, it involved extensive meal planning, as well as the transportation of a carefully selected 1/4 of my entire kitchen.
That trip really opened Liam's horizons. We went to Dollywood and he had his first taste of a theme park. He ate it up like the cotton candy we would never in a million years allow him to eat. ("Toxins! Step right up for carcinogens on a stick!") He stood with his Daddy in a line that was very nearly the undoing of him for five precious minutes behind the wheel of a genuine 1950's car. (He was driven distracted by the fact that there were no keys and no CD player.) He rode little preschooler rides all by himself. He braved the lines three times to spin in a teacup with me. To this day, if you ask him what he did at Dollywood, he will tell you that he "drove a teacup with Momo" and "saw them make glass." "What color was the glass, Liam?" "It was green. But it was glowing red hot. And we couldn't touch it because it would burn us."
If you have had young kids, you know that they reach inflection points that may or may not correspond exactly to their age. Liam turned "two" about two days before his second birthday, but he has been "three" for a couple of months now. We felt almost like we went to Gatlinburg with one child and came home with another, older version of him. He suddenly started talking in complex sentences. He began using 1st person personal pronouns to refer to himself. He was able to narrate and relate events in sequence. Some of that I think was due to Moon Plane, by Peter McCarty. He loved that book so much that we took the library book with us to Gatlinburg. As I mentioned in my Amazon.com review, that was the first time I had seen Liam actually identify himself with a story.He was cute before we went to Gatlinburg, too, of course. He came up to me one day and hugged my leg, tell me that he was "having some Momo." Another day he told me his Pooh bear was crying. "Why is Pooh crying?" I asked. "Because she is so tired," he said. (We're still ironing out some kinks in our conception of pronouns.) "Well you had better put him to bed, then!" He reappeared a moment later from the bedroom. "Actually, he don't wants to sleep in the crib," he announced. "He likes to sleep in the toddler bed. But he needs his lovey." Liam generously donated his own for the occasion.
It is hard for me to believe that just a couple of short months ago Liam was still sleeping in his crib. Early one morning, right after we returned from Gatlinburg, Damian got up and turned on the light in the living room. From Liam's room he heard, "Daddy turned on the light. Yes, he did. So Liam can find lovey. Oh, I see it." A few minutes later, there was some whimpering: "Lovey? Lovey?!" followed immediately by a stolid, "Oh, I have it."
We moved Liam into his toddler bed shortly after Gatlinburg. We were getting ready to potty train and needed to make sure he had free access to the bathroom. He was already napping in the bed, so one day I told him we did not have any fresh sheets for the crib, so he would have to sleep in the toddler bed that night. We never looked back. The only indication he ever gave that there was any kind of transition trauma was several nights later, when he woke up crying. I went in to talk to him, and he sobbed to me that there was a spider. Following some faint ember of parenting advice that had fallen long ago from some unknown quarter and was smoldering in the back of my maternal hearth, I played along. "Where is the spider?" I asked him. "I fink it's in a kinching," he sobbed. I told him I would go to the kitchen and take care of it. "Can you do it now?" he insisted. I had to come back and assure him that I removed the spider. He spent all the next day working through his dream by "weedwacking spiders." He went on and on about the big, black spider that was in the kitchen. (Why is it even children know that black is the scariest color for a spider?) "Did you dream about a big, black spider, Liam?" "Yes, I did. And Momo took it away."
Caveat Reader
For those of you who don't like to hear about anything involving bodily functions (read: my father), you might want to skip this section. But partly because I will want some record of this for myself, I will sketch a brief record of potty training. We led up to the Big Weekend with lots of books and chat about the subject. Liam has never seen Bob the Builder, but he likes the books my parents have at their house, so we began to walk him through what would happen when he needed to pee and finished our mini pep talk with, "Can we do it? YES WE CAN!!" Liam's favorite book was the insipid Your New Potty. It looks like the writers of this book went out of their way to give it a '70s feel, but if you can get over that, chances are your child will really groove on the photos of real kids, Ben and Steffi, sending their potty contents down real toilets "into pipes under the street." Liam certainly did. He was all about using the potty... until it came time to actually do it.
I see why they say that the "terrible twos" are nothing compared to a three-year-old. Liam is the king of contention. One day, back when he was still in diapers (why does that seem so long ago, when it was so very recent?), I was fed up with his whining while I changed him. In exasperation, I told him sternly, "No. Hush." He misconstrued "hush" as an item I was denying him and immediately shot back, "Want to hush?!" Momo or Daddy forbids it, ergo it is desirable.
It used to be that when Liam hung out in his bed, you could sit in the next room and listen to him do what Damian called "practicing his logic." "Look, it's a cat," he might say. "Why is it driving a fire engine? So it has a balloon. So it's driving." Somewhere in there he switched from logic to philosophy. "Well, I don't, but I do," he protests. "Well, he likes it, but he don't does."
All Roads Lead to No
Sooner or later, all philosophy leads him to one mantra: Protest. Parker got a fabulous wooden truck for Christmas. It is big enough to ride on, and handlebars are conveniently placed at beginning-walker height for pushing it from the front. Wooden blocks can be dropped through the shape-sorter seat into its innards. And of course Liam tries to appropriate it. Parker crawls over to check out what his brother is doing, and Liam begins to scream for us to get Parker away. "That's Parker's truck," we told him. "You can play with it, too, but you can't take it away from him." When the screaming reaches inappropriate decibels, I send Liam, running and shrieking, to his room. Parker watches him go in mesmerized confusion. ("Brother, you're wigging out on me.") About the third time Liam dragged himself back, snuffling and subdued, to lean against me, I said to him, "It's hard to share, isn't it?" "Well," he whines, "it's not hard to share!" "You just want to contradict anything I say," I replied. "Let's try this: It's easy to share!" "Well, it's not easy to share!" was the immediate protest. I said, "Now you're making sense."
The things this kid comes up with. I was cleaning out a closet and gave him an old data CD to play with. He ran around for days talking about his "potato CD." One day I was doing laundry, supervised by Liam, and called out to Damian, who was in the kitchen, to ask if he could oversee the toast in the broiler. Liam marched a few feet away from the laundry room to holler around the corner, "Husband! Need to check a toast!" He came back to me with the air of washing his hands of a task well delegated. One day I was standing at the kitchen counter doing something on the computer. Liam comes along with the wooden push toy that is alternately his vaccuum, weedwacker, or leaf blower, depending on his mood. "Scuse me," he says, pushing against my legs with the "weedwacker." "I need to cut the grass right there." When I finally moved, he said, "Thank you, that's very sweet of you."
Terms of Patronization
Liam's latest habit is to incorporate the appellation "honey" into his protestations and micromanagements... as in, "Honey, I just don't need to pee," or, "Honey, I'm going to cook you some millet cakes."
*****
I never actually went back and finished this post... and I now notice that I never really got to the graphic information I was warning about in the "caveat reader" section. Having now gone through potty-training Parker, it is interesting to flip back through the memories this chronicle triggered. 24-Sep-2008
Liam took a philosophically stubborn approach to potty-training. He had a special outlet and cord that he could only use when he sat on the toilet (he chose the toilet trainer over the potty), but it was not fascinating enough to keep him from digging in his heels. It was when he pooped in his pants -- deliberately, making sure I knew about it, while I sat across the room and "ho-hummed" (externally, at least) -- that he made an instant decision to get serious about this. Something about that poop going straight down his pants and grabbing him by the leg (he refused to wear unders, and since our only rule was do-anything-you-like-but-no-you're-not-getting-a-diaper-so-don't-bother-to-whine-about-it, that was fine with us) terrified him into an interest in the toilet. After that, he spent 80% of his time on it, playing with his cord and outlet.
The process was wearyingly consuming for several days, and it felt like there was very little to show for it. There was, of course... It's just that there was so much hoopla about the bathroom business, and very little production. But since he got a new sticker on his "safe outlet" every time he peed (two when he pooped), and it is now covered in stickers, I guess he did pee a lot. I remember encouraging that he drink water. Looking back, I can honestly say that he pretty much trained himself. We just had to learn together just how long he could hold something, and just how quickly we had to get to the bathroom when he decided it was urgent enough to make him stop what he was doing and attend to it.
And the best part? It's so over.
