Bizarre love triangle

Jamie's return to his preschool here has meant a reunion with his great friends Siler and Leah Mei. The three of them have been in class together for a couple of years now and make quite the triumvirate. They are usually there before Jamie in the morning and his arrival often instigates a battle for his heart and mind between the other two. This morning they were playing with balls in the gym. Poor Jamie, who generally needs a little time to warm up at school, was immediately confronted with the two of them saying "Play with my ball Jamie," "No, play with my ball Jamie." The complexity of the interactions between them has quite surprised us. The other day Jamie reported that Leah Mei, who certainly fancies herself the ringleader, "always orders us around, so we try to stay away from her." For his part, Siler has a birthday coming up and has been trying to use this for leverage. Jamie informed us yesterday that Siler had told him that if Jamie shared his book with Leah Mei rather than Siler, he would "wipe Jamie's name off my birthday party list." I think Jamie called Siler's bluff on that one.

Woo-woo-woo!

In response to the previous post, I have been asked about the new underwear in question. Firetrucks, police cars and rescue vehicles. So you see the excitement level was high. This morning he began running around the house wearing only the firetrucks saying "Woo-woo-woo!!!!"

Showing off the vocab...and other things

Jamie has really advanced not only his vocabulary of late, but also his phrasing, which can often sound surprisingly grown-up. He has adopted a number of interesting phrases recently. The first, actually some time ago, was, emerging from his room at night, "Dad, I didn't realize I don't have my woobie." Then lately we've heard "I just happen not to be hungry right now," and in the car, "Oooh, I clearly saw two working trucks." But perhaps best, he announced, quite of nowhere, today after school: "I was determined to show my friends and my teacher my new underwear."

"It's a bird! It's an...another bird!"

Connor's developing vocabulary tends to go from one favored word to another, one at a time. Now the in word is "bird," which comes out more like "brrrr". The kid loves birds and uses it all the time. He is really into going for walks because he can do lots of "brrrr". He sees planes, and these are "brrrr", too. He's also learned to take a kind of quantum approach to the thing, pointing to general areas in which there might be birds and saying "brrrr". If one is holding him by a window, for instance, there may be birds, and one walks away from the window only at risk to one's eardrums for he will not be happy. He even likes to point at the tree that Nonni and I painted on the wall and say, speculatively, "brrrr."

One final cute bird detail is that we have a little lullabye toy is his crib that plays a song and has little birds that fly around a nest. We put him down to sleep and come in later to see him fallen asleep with the birds going, positioned so he can look right at them. Very cute.

J'accuse!!!

As previously discussed, Connor expresses himself forcefully when he sees others having food that he is not. This morning at breakfast this was a most serious matter as BOTH Jamie and Mommy were having strawberries with their pancakes. Connor screamed and cried pitiably until he got some, which was not very long. But soon he finished them and Sarah and Connor still had some. Connor also likes to point and this time he stuck out his two pointer fingers at each of them, as if to say "Both of you, both of you are guilty of depriving nice babies of strawberries." Later, Daddy was implicated, too.

We ask the impossible every day

Jamie is discovering the world of conflicting desires that is life as a three-year old. I have already mentioned here his requests for baths that are both hot and cold. Lately we have augmented that that with this statement about his dinner: "I'm done and I'm not done." Also, when being tickled he will proclaim: "I want you to stop and not stop." Hard to know what to do exactly.

Bombs away!

Over the first couple of days after our return from Yavont Jamie would remember various games and toys that we used to play in Houston. He was very excited to remember what he calls "Throwing balls down to Daddy." I was less enthusiastic. This games involves Jamie standing on the second floor behind the railing while I go to the first floor and look up. He then hurls balls down at me while laughing maniacally. He takes particular joy in my expressions of fear or pain, both of which can be quite genuine. He has figured out to throw multiple balls at once and to vary them by size, weight and hardness, making it impossible for me to defend myself against all of them. At one point he was holding a plastic ball of Connor's, a little larger than a golf ball and about as heavy and hard, with his arm cocked to hurl it at me. I protested, saying "That will hurt Daddy!" "Yeah," he said, "Let's do it!!!"

No fireworks!

As happy as Jamie is to be back in Houston, there are some things he'll need to get used to again, like the street noise. The second night we were back Jamie woke up crying at about 11:30. We had been deeply asleep for about an hour which is sort of the worst possible time to be awakened, so I was a little too fuzzy to really understand what he was telling me when I went down. He dutifully went back to sleep, but the next morning he kept talking about the fireworks. It finally emerged that he was crying because he had been woken up by, he thought, fireworks.

I figured this was just a one-off thing, but he has remained really concerned about fireworks, questioning us about them before every nap or bedtime. He himself ruled them out during naps, observing that fireworks (which he's never seen by the way) are only done at night. The next night when he asked me if there would be fireworks, and I confidently said no, they only do them for special occasions. Now at bedtime he always asks, "Dad, is it a special occasion tonight?" with an anxious look on his face. And the last couple of mornings I have been greeted with "I slept well last night. No fireworks." Seems he got used to those nice quiet Yavont nights.

One, well-aimed, why question

Out of the flood of why questions that spills from Jamie's mouth occasionally one really stands out. Such was the case with the recent query: "Dad, why you don't have so much hair?" My answer, left unsaid, is that I think it's because he and Connor are taking it all.

The return

When we told Jamie we were leaving Vermont to come back to Houston he began jumping around saying "Yay"!!!! Connor, predictably clapped at this. Mostly we really attribute this emotion to Jamie's contrarian nature as a 3 year old, but there is no question he was genuinely comforted to get home.

I had driven ahead of Sarah and the boys and picked them up at the airport. Sarah said that as soon as the plane started to descend, Jamie looked out the window and began yelling "I see Houston, I see Houston!" And then more loudly, "DADDY!! DADDY!!" When they emerged from the security, I could see from thirty yards away that Jamie had had a lollipop on the plane and the bottom third of his face was covered in blue. It looked a little Goth, actually.

When we got back to the house, Jamie came in the front door and uttered only one word, said quietly but with real intensity: "Upstairs." This refers to the main floor of our house, where his toys, and especially his riding truck, were waiting. We didn't hear much from him for the next half-hour as he systematically, almost meditatively, tested the rolling capacities of all his cars.

We're raising a Texan

Well, Jamie had a wonderful time in Yavont, there can be no question. We played in the dirt, went to the pool, went to the beach by the lake, went for walks, threw rocks in various bodies of water at great length and saw many family members and friends all of whom responded loyally to Jamie's oft-repeated demands to play with working trucks. Good times. Jamie, however, claimed throughout not to like Yavont. "I just like Houston, Texas," he would say. When asked why he produced two reasons. One, "I'm scared of the bears in Yavont" (We didn't see a single bear all summer). Two, astonishingly, "Yavont is kind of boring." The real reason, in fact, is nothing more than the fact that his beloved riding truck, upon which he zooms around our house, had stayed behind. This was a strike against Yavont from the beginning. I'm glad he blamed the state and not us.

He is getting a little come-uppance now, however. He had gotten in the habit of saying "Let's take a walk," or "Let's play outside," only to be told that it is far too hot. We're not in Yavont anymore.