Little Dude’s Travel Gear Selection:
Current Weather conditions: 65 and sunny!
Quotable Moment:
“Mommy, I want more Poofy Heads!”
Distance traveled: 3.02 miles
Current Total Distance Traveled: 71.14 miles
I owe the babies: $17.79
I’m sure you’ve noticed that in a great many of my photos, Ian is wearing mismatched socks. This may have led you to conclude that we dress him in the dark, that we let him sort his own laundry, or that we have decided to dress him as Dobby daily, because Halloween is not just for October 31st any more. Not quite.
First of all, let me lead into this by saying if you know anyone with an infant, go directly to the Target.com website and order them a dozen pairs of IDENTICAL toddler socks. Not infant socks, I want you to work ahead Choose size 12-18 months. You’re looking for the ones with the roll-down cuff. They should run you about a dollar a pair. I’ll wait.
Now. As for what’s up with the mismatched socks. It turns out that baby and toddler socks get lost a lot. When your child is an infant, this is no big deal, since you can do without them. Just use those cute little outfits with the feet built in. If you have a summer baby, let their adorable little tootsies hang out so everyone can exclaim how cute they are and then tell you that they never got sick as a baby because their mother always put socks on them. Then hold up one teeny, weeny, little sock as evidence of your diligent parenting, and ask if they’ve seen the other one anywhere.
Once your kid starts wearing shoes, however, all bets are off. They’re going to need socks, and lots of them, because you can throw a lot of kid stuff into a hamper before it’s full enough to make it worth running the washing machine. Plus Daddy can’t tell the difference between Mommy’s socks and baby’s, so you’ll never find them again, because you don’t know they are in your own dresser.
Then, the washing machine apparently has an insatiable appetite for baby socks. You can buy new socks every time you make a diaper run, go broke, and still have no socks for this kid. Or rather, have a drawer full of SINGLE socks. Because it is against laundry machine union rules to eat BOTH socks in a pair, so if it accidentally gets two the same, it spits one back and keeps fishing. (Remember when I said to buy a dozen pairs of IDENTICAL socks?)
I eventually broke under the pressure. That’s right, I knuckled under and realized that if my kid was going to wear socks seven days a week, I was either going to have to wash his one remaining matching pair of socks every night, by hand, blow them dry with the hair dryer, and then safety pin them together and hide them in my bra to protect them from my husband and the washing machine, OR, let him wear mis-matched socks. So when I spotted a HUGE bag of mis-matched toddler socks at my favorite children’s consignment sale for a quarter, I snatched them up so fast you’d have thought they were Beanie Babies in 1997. Except no one wanted them but me. I threw them in Ian’s sock drawer in hopes that they’d breed with our existing collection of singleton socks and create at least seven pairs of socks that fit him.
The result is that we have created a child who doesn’t realize you are supposed to have two of the same socks on. If he selects his own socks, he picks whatever two take his fancy. When Mommy does it, she just picks two that fit him and the color scheme of his outfit. So if you see him in matching socks, you know Daddy dressed him today. When we go to Ft. Belvoir, Daddy specifies that Ian must wear matching socks because, and I quote, “people judge you, you know.”
I see many advantages to my approach. One, I can always pick my kid out of the crowd on the playground even when I can only see him from the ankles down. (This comes up more often than you’d think.) Two, he picks out some fun combinations, and I think it’s hilarious. Three, I can solve the world’s single sock problem from here on out. I am currently accepting single socks in sizes 24 months and up. Just email me and I’ll tell you where to send them.
Little Dude’s Travel Gear Selection:
Current Weather conditions:
Quotable Moment:
“Those cars wanna jump in the puddles. That van want jump in the puddles.”
Distance traveled: .79 miles
Current Total Distance Traveled: 68.12 miles
I owe the babies: $17.03
Today’s hot new toy is a basket of sea shells mommy picked up at the thrift store. There are six big shells and it turns out that if you take them in the bath with you, they can be BOATS. And the little shells can RIDE IN THEM.
“This one seashell is up here watchin’ the boats. These boats are all sailing. This one is sailing in the boat. Now these don’t want to be boats any more. They want to be FISH.”
In our evening call to Daddy, Ian tried to show him each seashell over the phone.
This morning they were play #1 after stories in the chair. Some of them are still a little damp, so he is shaking each one dry as he goes. And, of course, making up a little story about what each one is doing.
Bonus quote for the day (Heard while reading Richard Scarry’s A Day at the Fire Station): “
Mommy let me count the fire trucks. There’s one. There’s two fire trucks. Mommy there’s three fire trucks!”
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| seashells |
Lately I’ve been doing some reading on the Waldorf Method of education. While this is definitely a case of, “take what you want and leave the rest,” some of what I’ve read I definitely want. One of the things I liked was the idea that the more archetypical a toy is, the more your child will use his imagination. Now, a child who can turn an Elmer’s glue bottle top into a fish in a pond or a toy plastic corn cob into a duckling is having no trouble in this area, but still, I like the thought.
So I went on Etsy.com and ordered him some little people. No, not the Little People made and popularized by Fisher Price, some little wooden peg people. Six families of five, to be exact. When they arrived and I opened the package, his eyes lit up.
“Those are mines!” he exclaimed, demonstrating a very good grasp of the heart of the matter. He immediately began manipulating them and making up little stories.
“Here’s a baby and another one baby. This one is the Mommy. This one is another one Mommy. She got dressed. She put hers dress on.”
He arranged them in different groups and chatted about their interaction. They climbed the stick and played games together. This went on until bedtime. My only concern is that the smaller people are definitely choking hazards, so they live in a box on a high shelf for supervised play only, but that just means I won’t miss a minute of creative expression.
Ian and I took a walk to the store after nap today. (Okay, I walked, he rode.) Most notable features of today’s walk were the altercation between two motorists (they taught Ian a new word… “F***er!” Then Mommy said, “Ian, you didn’t hear that. She’s right, but you didn’t hear it.”) and the unusual number of serious cyclists we saw today. Lots of them were sporting logos from their sponsors… either they are just enjoying the nice weather like us, or there’s an event on the horizon and they’re training.
Also, Ian just found out that his stroller seat RECLINES, which he thinks is fabulous.
Little Dude’s Travel Gear Selection:
Current Weather conditions:
72 and broken clouds!
Quotable Moments:
“I want my shoes and socks on, please.”
“Mommy, I want THAT apple, please.”
Distance traveled: 3.41 miles
Current Total Distance Traveled: 67.33
I owe the babies: $16.83
Distance traveled: 1.23 miles
Current Total Distance Traveled: 63.92 miles
I owe the babies: $15.98
Little Dude’s Travel Gear Selection:
Current Weather conditions: 66 and sunny!
Quotable Moment:
Ian: “Mommy, what’s that beepin’?”
Mommy: “I don’t know; let’s go see!”
Ian: “OH YES!”
Distance traveled: 2.39
Current Total Distance Traveled: 62.69 miles
I owe the babies: $15.67
In a perfect world, everyone would have friends like mine. We held a “work party” yesterday to begin building the permanent back yard fence. (Goodbye, hillbilly wire!)
Ian is ready for work…
The posts for the new fence are all in place- the concrete is still curing. Once the panels and gates are in place, we will have an attractive fence that will resist the children’s efforts to dismantle it. (I wish I had video for you of the day Ian and Sophie decided to try to defeat the fence. First they tried to push it down. When that didn’t work, they tried to push it down with the yellow jeep. When that didn’t work, Sophie got into the jeep and drove it while Ian pushed. Then they used buckets to try tunneling under it. When they moved on to trying to remove the bungee cords on the temporary gate, we told them, “No more fence!”)
Chuck, in particular, was a very good sport- showing up at Home Depot early on a Saturday morning to pick up supplies for someone else’s home improvement project, running out to the equipment rental place to help pick up the LAST one-man auger they had on hand, digging fence pole holes out by hand when the auger hit a root it couldn’t get past, measuring, rejiggering, and backing my car up to the side yard to unload six 80 lb backs of Sakrete… you get the idea.
While Chuck and Chris were busy working on the fence (and I’m sure my next door neighbor was thrown for something of a loop when they saw the new gap in the hedge for the first time…), Nathalie, Claire, and Danette kept the collected kids from taking over the world, I made supply runs, and Heather and I made a good start on dismantling the trash pile masquerading as a flower bed in the back yard.
I am convinced that the previous owners put in a flower bed at the front of this area solely to escape the responsibility for cleaning it up so grass could be planted there. It is a very narrow area of plantings backed by some terribly inappropriate, scrubby bushes which are just front-men for a thicket of poison ivy, sticker bushes, rusty metal, tin cans that have been through the lawn mower, dead dog balls, old carpet, styrofoam, and broken glass.
What I OUGHT to do is have a truckload of dirt delivered and bury the whole thing. What we ARE doing is clean it out, trim back some bushes and remove others, and turn it into a “play fort” for the kids now that they’ve reached that imagination age.
The high point of the day for me (new fence not withstanding!) was watching Ian and Jade play with a large tree branch. It wasn’t immediately apparent what they were doing- they’d put it to the ground or a tree trunk and lean into it. Once I got close enough to hear the sound effects, I realized they were “running the auger.” Priceless. Absolutely priceless. A few minutes later they noticed the pile of leaves Heather and I had made and the “auger” was suddenly a “leaf blower.”
Close behind it was watching Ian and Gregory use shovels to move dirt from one particular spot to another in support of a plan known only to them…
I am now more motivated than ever to complete both projects in a timely fashion. Because obviously we can’t allow them to take over the world- which they will surely do if all that’s between them and domination is a flimsy hurricane fence- but they also need fodder for their emerging imaginations!
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| work party |
Little Dude’s Travel Gear Selection:
Quotable Moment:
Actually, he just sang the “Bob the Builder” theme song most of the way, so let’s go with this:
Current Weather conditions:
61 and sunny with a nice breeze!
Distance traveled: 3.4 miles
Solo Miles: .25
Current Total Distance Traveled: 60.3
I owe the babies: $15.08
