Stinky Diapers

Wordless Wednesday: Pomp & Circumstance

But You Should See the Other Guy

My kiddo currently looks like a bare-knuckle boxer on the receiving end of a KO punch. This picture truly doesn't do the extreme purple-and-green-ness of it justice:

And unfortunately, the other guy looks a lot better than he does. In fact, the other guy came through the disagreement with nary a scratch. Of course, the other guy was a hardwood sofa table with very pointy corners.  I'm just glad the other guy wasn't about three inches taller.

On the bright side, my guy seems to mostly have retained his good humor:

I hope he's learned his lesson - never argue with pieces of furniture pointier than you.

I Wonder If He Does Windows, Too

Normally on school mornings, the Bomber putters around upstairs playing with stuff in his room, begging me to blow down the back of his shirt with my hairdryer and harassing the cat, before finally giving in and getting himself dressed for school. This morning, though, he got himself together pretty quickly, and had about 20 minutes to go before we had to leave.  He announced he was going to downstairs to play, and for a few minutes I heard the sounds of a traffic jam involving all of the various trucks, buses, cars and possibly a space shuttle or two (and boy does THAT snarl traffic up but good) developing in the living room.

As I finished getting dressed and headed downstairs myself, I realized that I hadn't heard either the traffic jam or the traffic master for at least 10 minutes, and I started to wonder exactly what mischief the Bomber might have gotten up to during that time. It was with some trepidation that I entered the darkened kitchen to discover....

the H-bomb, standing on a step-stool in front of the kitchen sink, wearing rubber gloves, and doing the dishes.

He'd done a pretty good job, too. He'd plugged the sink, filled it with hot water, squirted some soap in, and had washed a few things with the sponge. Unfortunately, his efforts were stymied by the fact that the drying rack was already chock full of yesterday's dishes, since we got home late-ish last night and didn't bother putting them away. He was pretty bummed he didn't get to finish up and surprise me with clean dishes, but I promised him he could finish up when we got home this afternoon.

Because I'm generous like that...

And now, a completely gratuitous picture of the kiddo at his preschool's Black History Month program last night, which was both awesome and hilarious. More on that to come.

Another Milestone Reached Already

Our first parent-teacher conference. Frankly, it seems a little silly to be having a conference about my four year old's educational progress to date, but the preschool is big on this stuff, so we go along.

The Bomber has two teachers, both of whom are awesome, and one of whom he had last year as well, which is nice from a continuity standpoint, and also good because I like her, specifically.  It was a little serendipitous, actually, because he started the year with two other teachers, one of whom was a serious hottie - sort of a cross between Matthew McConaughey in Sahara and Josh Lucas in Sweet Home Alabama. He left to take a job in a public school helping special needs children, which I think is really selfish of him. What about my needs, huh?  But I digress....

Anyway,  the point is (yes, there's a point people, stay with me), the teacher he had last year, Ms. C, just happened to be coming back from maternity leave when all this resigning and leaving was going on in the Bomber's classroom, so it worked out nicely that she came back to a position she really wanted anyway, right at the time they needed her. 

So, as I was saying somewhere up there, we had our parent-teacher conference with Ms. C and she brought her baby, who started life as 32 week preemie and is now a snuggly, adorable, happy four month old.  She let me hold him during the conference. And he smelled good, and was all warm and lovey and cooing. And I gave him his bottle, and he did that cute thing with his tongue and made sweet little faces and waved his tiny arms and legs. mmm.... baby......

Wait, was I talking about something?  Oh yeah, the Bomber's conference... um... I think it was good, I don't know, you'll have to ask Larry - did I mention the snuggly-wuggly baby I got to hold?

Seriously, it was pretty much what I expected, though it's still nice to hear it from someone else.  The Bomber is a generally good, obedient, easy-going child, though he does have his "moments" and he is easily wound up by the bigger kids.  This, in my opinion, is the best you can hope for with a barely four year old boy in a class where the other boys are all five or about to turn five, and it's always going to be that way, so we might as well get used to dealing with that now. 

From an educational standpoint, his work is way ahead of where he should be, and ahead of most of the other kids. His writing is apparently excellent (I say apparently, because it's hard for me to judge what a four year old's handwriting is *supposed* to look like - his looks pretty rough to me), his word recognition and reading skills are out of control, and he's really really good with numbers, patterns and mathematics.  That last doesn't surprise me at all - my father and my nephew are both mathematically gifted, his paternal grandfather was an accountant, and he's been showing a definite mathematical bent since he was really little.

In short, he's no longer a teeny, snuggly little baby, but I still think he's pretty great.

Next Stop, NASCAR

Every year since the Bomber was a little over two years old, he's accompanied his preschool class to the South Carolina state fair.  The first year, they were so little, there wasn't a whole lot for them to do. We looked at some animals, and then they rode a few rides  that were small enough for two year olds.  There are, however, very few rides that are actually small enough for kids as little as he and some of his classmates were at two, so we put them on a few rides that were possibly a bit questionable.

One ride, the race cars, looked like it would be okay at first glance, but it turned out to have a short slow part followed by a quick turn around the end of the track.  The Bomber was not entirely impressed by the turn, although his classmate had a blast:

In fact, when he got off he told me he never wanted to go on that ride again.  A year, a few inches and a LOT of confidence later, though, he decided he wanted to try it again:

That's his "wheeeee" face. The car wasn't moving yet - he was just practising. He liked it much better the second time around.  His classmate (the same one as last year) was practising her "ho hum, this is old hat" face, I think.

This year, in the week or so leading up to the field trip, all he talked about were those race cars.  His classmate ditched him for another girl in their class, so he ended up with a random fair kid, but he didn't seem to mind. In fact, he was having such a good time, he actually took his hand off the bar to high-five Random Fair Kid:

It's fun to look at how he's changed over the last few years, but it's also a little sad to realize that in a few years he'll have outgrown the kiddie rides altogether, and be on to bigger and better things. But at least for now, he's still my little race car driver:

 

 

Halloween, Part 5

Last year, right after Halloween (like four minutes after he got home from trick-or-treating) the Bomber declared his intention to be a ghost next Halloween.  This is a problem, because the kid goes to preschool at a Baptist church and Baptists do not, apparently, celebrate Halloween. They do, however, celebrate fall by putting on a festival on a day close to Halloween, at which the children dress up and are given candy. (Yeah, I know.) Anyway, costumes at this not-a-Halloween-celebration cannot be anything supernatural - among the list of the verboten: witches, ghouls, vampires and.... ghosts. But he was three, and I figured that by October 31, 2010, he'd have been through at least a few costume choices. 

Naturally, the child stuck to his guns for 11 months, until finally in September I had to break it to him that he couldn't be a ghost at school, and I wasn't assembling two different costumes for him. (I'm mean like that.) After much negotiation, we decided instead on pirate, since thanks to his Aunt Peg he already had a complete set of pirate accoutrements, including a sword, a hook, an eye patch, a hat, an earring, and some pirate booty.  (But not Pirate's Booty, which in my opinion would have been better.)  As it turned out, this was a fortuitious choice, since two of his buddies that we invited over for trick-or-treating in our neighborhood also decided to be pirates.

So here's my little pirate in a pensive moment:

Here's the merry band of pirates (they look like they're plotting something, don't they?)

The one with the big hat was apparently elected captain, but the sweet looking one with the cork-screw curls was really in charge.  

Pirates, meet princess:

Now they're ready for trick-or-treating, er... I mean, plundering:

The fourth member of their group was dressed as Scooby-Doo, which gave the whole evening the air of a bad 70s cartoon. I kept expecting one of them to say "And I would have gotten away with it, too,  if it wasn't for those meddling kids."

And as it turns out, they weren't the only ones dressed up as pirates. Little pirates? Meet BIG pirate:

 

Wordless Wednesday: When You're Smiling

Wordless Wednesday: St. Patrick's Day Retrospective

  
 

 

Early Spring Saturday

I really need to do a better job keeping this blog updated, because the kid is growing so fast, and right now he's absolutely hilariously adorable. I'm probably going to want to remember that some day. So I'm going to try to write more here, even if most of it is of no interest to anyone else, and some of it is downright banal. 

Anyway, we had a lovely weekend - the weather is starting to warm up, the sun is shining, and we're all in good moods.  Saturday morning we ran errands (a Total Wine next door to an A.C. Moore is like a little slice of nirvana) and then the Bomber took a nap while I finished gathering up the tax stuff. After naptime, H asked to go to "the Big Guy" (a/k/a EdVenture, our local children's museum), but we talked him into the zoo instead.  He was a good sport, though he wasn't all that enthusiastic. 

He and Larry looked at the bears:

and then he took a quick ride on the bronze elephant. He wouldn't let me take pictures of that, though:

 

Then visits to a few more animals and FINALLY (insert dramatic preschooler sigh here), a ride on the train (and what may be THE most unflattering picture of me, ever):

 

Then the playground:

 

The Bomber makes an awfully cute dragon, doesn't he?

Finally, a spin on the carousel:

He likes to ride the carousel, but never wants to sit on the horses. Crazy child.

And then he was done with the zoo. We stopped for ice cream on our way home:

 

 

"Find Happiness Within"

Yep, we do. Every day.

Why to the North Pole, Of Course!

For the Bomber's first Christmas my mom and my sister decided it would be a good idea to get him an electric train set that they could add to each year.  Frankly, I think they were looking for a way to make their Christmas shopping easier... "Oh, and for the Bomber... another train car!"  In any case, in December 2006, an enormous box of trains and tracks and such arrived on our doorstep (clearly marked "For Ages 8 and Over," by the way) and was quickly deposited under our bed, where it resided for several years.

One day this summer, though, H-bomb was looking for a lost ball under there and made an incredible discovery... "Mommy! There's a TRAIN under here." Yes, yes there is... thanks so much for that Grandma and Aunt Courtney. Naturally he wanted to play with it, but I told him it was for when he was a little older. That kept him quiet for approximately four hours. "Mommy, am I old enough now?"  Finally, in desperation, I told him it was a Christmas train and we couldn't use it until December, in hopes that he'd forget about it before then. Those of you with small children should stop all that laughing, right. now. Thank you.

Anyway, after months and months of nagging, last Saturday we we finally broke down and set up the Bomber's Polar Express train. I'd bought the movie for him about a month ago (by then I'd already conceded that he wasn't going to forget about that train) and he was absolutely mesmerized by it. He also has a small Brio Polar Express set that he got from Aunt Terry last year, so now we're All Polar Express, All the Time.

It's a Lionel O gauge set - for those who don't know model train gauges, those are the big suckers. It came with the engine from the movie, a coal tender, two passenger cars and the observation car.  The engine has a whistle and makes smoke. It has four figures from the movie, and a big bell that's supposed to be the one from Santa's sleigh. There's also a non-Polar Express caboose with a moving Santa figure on it. The whole setup is pretty primitive right now:

 

That piece of plywood was so big we had to borrow the neighbor's pickup truck to get it home. It's mounted on two metal sawhorses which are each set on two of those foam squares you can fit together to make a child's play mat. Larry already has big plans for next year, though - at the very least we're hoping to paint the board green and put something around the edge of the board. We've already ordered some more track and a set of caribou figures (also from the movie). Holy cow, that stuff is expensive! You could seriously spend a small fortune on this hobby.

Anyway, the Bomber really liked it.  As you can see, he asked for it first thing Sunday morning, before he'd changed out of his jammies or even brushed his haystack hair:

 

And he figured out how to work it pretty quickly:

 

He's also been surprisingly good about not touching the tracks or train while it's running, and not getting splinters from the board. He can't seem to stop himself from handling the train and cars when it's not running, though, which is driving Larry demented. That said, it's actually worked out pretty well, considering he's really way too young for it. 

So I guess you're off the hook, Grandma and Aunt Courtney... at least this time.