Yesterday evening I glanced over at Alex during dinner. It was one of those perfectly ordinary moments when you don’t realize that you have transported yourself to an earlier frame of mind—in my case, the pre-child era—and reality smacks you across the face. Now that I’m a full-time mom of two, the kids are with me almost all the time. I take their presence for granted. But as I watched him spear his “mixed ezztables” I had one of those moments of awe. He’s just so big, so grown up.
What to say about Alex? He’s so loud. I mean, so…loud. Lately I’ve gone on a campaign to get him to stop shouting everything. He finds this infuriating. The shouts, the screams, cover all the emotional spectrum. The blood-curdling scream can mean he’s mad, or it can mean Julianna’s doing something to him. It’s worse when he’s tired. I can always tell when he gets punchy. It’s in his eyes. It’s like they don’t stay 100% open.
He’s so loud that you start to tune him out after a while, and it creates this vicious cycle of mutual annoyance: he shouts, I tune him out, he begins repeating himself, I get frustrated…you get the idea. As adults, when someone addresses us, we wait to hear the whole sentence. But Alex is at a far less sophisticated communication level, even though his speech is very advanced for his age. So he says, “Mommy?” And if I don’t immediately reply, “Yes?”, he’ll say it again: “Mommy? Mommy? Mommy? Mommy?” And when I acknowledge him, he will say, “Mommy, I…Mommy, um…Mommy… Mommy, can we….Mommy, can we…Mommy, can we…” Then, having lost his train of thought, he’ll snap, “Mommy, ANSWER ME!”
I confess that often I end up yelling, “WHAT? Just finish your question already!”
It is quite maddening, but at the moment I’m writing with a smile. Always easier to laugh about the annoyances while the kids are asleep. J
He makes sense of his world by talking about it. He doesn’t have his time references figured out, so “last year, two days ago, two weeks ago” are interchangeable. You have to stay sharp to keep up with him, because he remembers everything. This morning he said, “Mommy, can you say ‘who made this spider web’?” Kim, the OT, and I looked at each other in confusion. “Is that from Charlotte’s Web?” I asked, even though I couldn’t figure out when he might have seen the movie, much less had a chapter book read to him.
“No, no, no,” he said. “Mrs. Meeds!”
Mrs. Meeds is our parents as teachers person, and that was enough to remind me that he was quoting from The Very Busy Spider, which is not a book we own.
He went to “summer playschool” for three weeks in July. Late last school year he was getting very clingy and reluctant to go to day care, so I wasn’t sure how he would do for three solid weeks of school. But he loved every minute of it. At the end of the program, the teachers wrote to us that Alex was “a joy to teach” and “incredibly imaginative.” Lately his imagination has been showing itself at home more. Yesterday I caught him having a conversation with his peas and carrots about which one was going to be eaten next.
Generally speaking, he is very sweet and empathetic. He’s a very good big brother. Tolerant of her beating and climbing on him, willing to feed her bites of his morning bagel…things like that. He’s getting too big to snuggle, but he enjoys it, still, and that’s good for Mommy’s soul. He’s very much a mama’s boy. At night, even if Daddy does the whole bedtime routine, from toilet and teeth to prayers and the great Captain Hook expulsion, he still has to have me come in and pray for people. Mostly because he wants to hug and kiss me.
He’s all boy in so many ways, but he also has a real eye for beauty. He loves flowers and picks them everywhere, from wildflowers in the woods to a bloom off an azalea at Lowe’s. (I didn’t know about that till after it was done!) And whenever I’m dressed up, even a little bit, he’ll say, “Mommy, that’s a beautiful dress.”
I could go on forever, but I’m already halfway down the second page (in Word, that is). At three and a third, he remains a cuddly, chewable little man despite having a head big enough to wear Daddy’s hats without adjustment (well, much adjustment). He’s stubborn and lazy in the morning, but I guess that’s par for the course. He is my firstborn, my sweet baby boy, and if he had not come into my world, my life would be poorer, indeed.
