Written June 7th --
We've reached a strange stage in Leo's potty learning. If he is bare-bottomed, he will hunt down a toilet or potty every single time he has to go. A few days ago he started climbing onto full-size toilets by himself. If we're home in the late mornings, I can avoid changing poopy diapers for days. But if he's wearing a diaper, underwear, pants, or any combination of the above, he doesn't initiate toileting at all. Particularly if he's just wearing pants, I think he holds it longer than he might otherwise, but I need to bring him to a bathroom. He is fairly cooperative about going when I bring him, at least. I'm not opposed to letting him run around the house in only a t-shirt for the time-being, but since he clearly knows when he has to pee, why can't he do it with pants on? Argh. I figure we have the summer to iron this out--please, please let him be done with diapers by fall. He doesn't ever pee while in the car or during naps -- I think EC'ing with him has helped with those. Nighttime is less predicable than it used to be. I think that if I brought him to a potty around 2am, he'd probably stay dry all night. But my desire for him to sleep through the night is greater than my hope of him not peeing in diapers at night. We just moved him to a bed of cushions on the floor next to us (he either nurses to sleep in another room or Dan stays with him until he falls asleep there) as a mid-way point before moving him to his own bed in Peter's room. He generally wakes up around 5am and comes to me to nurse. If I'm tired enough, I'll let him nurse until we wake up. He's only nursing in that early morning time, to get to nap, and to fall asleep at night now. I'm not going to wean entirely until he stops napping --I'd rather get the easy nap than fight him. I'm trying to minimize any nursing between falling asleep around 9pm and close to sunrise, but my sleepiness can win out.
Meanwhile, Peter has finally started dressing himself, which is having goofy side effects. He's been known to wear shorts and polo shirts backwards and various things inside out. He refuses to wear clothes that are slightly wet. Today he went through 3 shirts after dripping water on the first two. He spilled milk on the third but that didn't bother him because "the shirt is fuzzy". It was a turtleneck -- I don't get it. We found him stashing his underwear behind the toilet because he didn't want the bother of putting it on after sitting on the toilet. Once we saw three pair there and decided enough was enough with that. Today, he put his underwear on top of his pj shorts, but they're so thin that they fit entirely under his briefs, so I let him stay like that all day. Made it easy to change into pj's at bedtime.
Yesterday, Peter put the couch cushions on the floor and declared that he was going to plant a garden. He found dozens of small toys from his room and carefully planted them all, then took his SIGG bottle and watered them and added fertilizer. Leo began pulling them up and eating them (sound effects and all) and Peter gave him a hard time, saying they weren't ripe yet. Then he found paper and pencil and said there were 95 bean plants growing in his garden and wrote the number down (backwards but legible numerals). I was keeled over laughing by the time he got to his journaling. It's not hard to see how we've been spending our time lately and what's sticking with them. The boys are quite good in the garden -- Leo has blatantly killed one lettuce and landed on what should have been some carrots, but no other disasters can be blamed on the under-5 duo. I kept a 4'x8' section of dirt clear for them to dig in and they spend much more time there than in the sand box. Peter can reliably put seeds and fertilizer in holes for 10 minute chunks of time and both like to help water (Leo gets big things like the raspberry patch, Peter can do individual lettuces). Peter was the one who discovered that the sunflowers were coming up ahead of schedule yesterday. They don't think it's too fun to shake dirt off of sod and throw it in the compost bin, to my dismay. Leo drags the hoe around and calls himself the Hoeing Man after we said it to him once.
They are both really into coloring and activity books. Peter loves color by numbers/letters. Even Leo's half-decent at staying within lines. Peter, who in February would only color pictures a single color, will spend an hour coloring each lined-off segment of a picture its own color. On the computer, he will use the "Paint Muck/Lofty/etc" section of computer games and exactly match the way the figure looks in the example. If anything, I think I should be making sure he doesn't get too caught up in getting things perfect. Leo loves stickers and seeing his own name. He can write O and he asks for the rest of his name to be written over and over. I'll let him write in Wordpad and he finds L,E,and O over and over. They both like to make "words" using magnetic letters and ask what they've spelled.
June 22nd --
Leo is very, very into trucks this week. He's always loved trucks, but now he carries a bucket of little construction trucks with him everywhere. Upstairs, downstairs, in the bike trailer, to the park, in the car. He freaks out if anyone else tries to play with any of the twenty, which doesn't work well at playgrounds. I've been limiting him to two in public places in hopes of keeping the peace. He gets upset when we don't drive/bike past the nearest construction zone. The big excitement the other day was watching a helicopter land on a hospital roof while we were on a bike ride. It was just across the street -- pretty cool, even to me.
Leo has been Mama's Boy for a couple weeks now. Heaven forbid I try to cook without letting him hug me the whole time. He enjoys giving open mouth kisses -- watch out! "I want to be WIFF you, Mama!", "I wuv you, Mama!", "I'm Mama's wittle baby!" Other Leo sayings lately -- contemplating a missing toy -- "Maybe da gabbage tuck took it, maybe?"; adding "of course!" to sentences in just the right tone; ans asking "What we doing afta?" a dozen times a day.
I checked the boys' shoes sizes at REI the other day (Leo has definitely outgrown last year's bike helmet) and was surprised to see that Leo has only gone up 1/4 size and Peter's feet are technically shorter than the size 10's he's been wearing since fall. I no longer feel like a lazy, guilt-ridden mother for letting them wear the same shoes for 10 months. Peter needs to have either white or black sneakers when he starts school in September and I'm glad I'll be able to just get new ones then.
Both boys want to eat all. the. time. We started our fruit CSA share on Thursday and they went through nearly half of the 2 week supply in 48 hours. I prefer their begging for apricots and peaches over M&M's, but I'd like to have fruit left at the end of the first week, at least. They will eat garden lettuce, either 3 seconds after picking it or at the table 20 minutes later, although neither will use my homemade vinegrette and they're using the last of the store-bought.
Peter now recognizes most picture-Bible-friendly Bible stories and has a lot of prayers memorized from saying prayers at bedtime with Dan. Leo will chime in now and then saying Grace before dinner. Peter's favorite is the Divine Praises. Leo likes one where there are a lot of Alleluias. If Peter and Dan are praying that one and Leo's nursing in the next room, he'll unlatch, half-awake to join in on the Alleluias. Both boys are excited to start Sunday School in the fall -- they're starting a two-year-old program this year and Leo will be so happy to stay in that area like Peter. Peter will attend Vacation Bible School for a week of mornings in August -- I'm curious to see how that goes as a first taste of school.
We were able to meet some of Peter's future classmates and their parents at a park this week. Most kids seemed equally unwilling to introduce themselves, so Peter's refusal to speak to anyone was pretty standard. It felt weird to look around and wonder which of these kids will become his friends and whether they'd be the ones we'd hope he bonds with. There are three other teachers' sons in his morning class of 20 kids, which is nice. I should try to get those boys together in the next couple months so there are familiar faces after Labor Day.
Playing Mailman has been Big Fun in the mornings. Our mailbox, circa 1958, goes through the front wall of our house. After the mail comes, I let the boys loose with the junk mail and they'll spend half an hour putting the mail through the slot repeatedly. We can open our storm door's window a few inches (any more and the cat tries to escape), so one boy puts mail through the real mailslot and the other chucks it back outside through the window. They get overzealous and put leaves and pine needles through sometimes and that's about when I have to end it.
With the long daylight here at the 45th parallel (we're about 3 miles north of the official line), bedtime has moved back to 9:30 most of the time. Leo has started getting up at 7am recently, but has been taking two hour naps in the mid to late afternoon. Peter doesn't get up until 8:30ish, so we're slow to get out of the house on days when we leave, so we often don't come home until 2-2:30 and Leo hasn't often been falling asleep in the car. Before Dan finished school, I was holding naps to 90 minutes max and that helped get bedtime back to a reasonable hour (he wasn't falling asleep until after 10 if he napped longer), but we're still getting into a new summer routine these days and haven't gotten things ironed out. Peter will have to wake up by 7am at the latest once school starts, so we'll have to get him used to that eventually.
We're considering putting both boys in swim lessons for two weeks, but leaning against it because I'm not sure Peter would want to go and I don't want to pay and then fight him over it. But other than that and VBS, we aren't doing any regular, scheduled activities. I figure this is our last chance to be schedule-free for, well, forever. Unless we homeschool someday.
The boys are constantly wrestling. Growing up with a sister, all this wrestling is foreign to me. It's hard to know when to intervene.
So far, age two with Leo has been much less aggravating than it was with Peter. He definitely acts up when he wants our attention (if he's not physically climbing over our heads--we're jungle gyms, I guess) -- throwing toys in the air and climbing places he knows he should stay away from are the current favorite approaches. But without a newborn to torment, his acting up often just seems funny a lot of the time. We need to get eye hooks on our storm doors because we'll open the heavy doors to get air flow, but Leo will just take off out the door if he can. I don't think he's figured out how to unlock the front storm door, but it's only a matter of time if he hasn't.
Summer has been agreeing with all of us. The backyard provides a lot more entertainment than anything inside. The boys like to play with the neighbor girls if they're out. We put a plastic swimming pool up yesterday and neither of them really liked the wet swimsuit feeling, but they'll get used to it eventually. I haven't braved swimming at a local pool yet but everything around here only opened after schools let out the second week in June. I'm finding every park within about a 4 mile biking radius. Leo knows all the parks by their quantity and color of diggers and whether they have sand or wood chips. Peter climbs 15+ feet up the trees at one park.
We'll be at the family cabin at the lake in a few weeks and we'll see if it's any easier this year. As long as we have trucks, Leo should be fine. There will be lots of aunts and uncles around for half the time -- more eyes for boy-watching. Hopefully we'll be able to skip the urgent care visit this year.
Peter and I finished "Little House in the Big Woods" and have almost gotten through "Little House on the Prairie". Dan started "Farmer Boy" with him. Leo only wants to read alphabet construction books. Laura suggested Elsa Beskow picture books and the boys and I both like them so far -- can't get much better than a story about a Swedish boy who barters his lamb's wool for people to card, dye, spin, weave, and sew it with beautiful illustrations (well, Leo probably thinks it needs excavators). Peter probably knows a lot more about how sheep are used than most little kids.
