2/6/08

One day recently when Noah was supposed to be napping, I can hear him squirming around in his room. I go in to give him my typical lecture about how hard it is for him to fall asleep if he’s not laying down with his eyes closed and his body still. But before I can say anything I notice that as he’s wiggling, strange crinkly noises are coming from his pants. “What’s in your pants?” I ask.
“Nothing,” he replies, as one would expect.
“Noah, what’s in your pants? Take it out now.”
He reaches in and pulls out his doll Shushu, and has a sheepish grin on his face. Meanwhile, I’m trying to be serious and maintain my appearance of stern reprimand, but I’m finding it difficult. “Is that all?” I ask.
He reaches in again and this time brings out a plastic bag of markers. I take them. This time I just look at him. It’s nearly impossible at this point to keep a straight face, but I’m doing my best. Out comes a toy tool, and then another toy tool, and then two or three other things. I take them all, put them in the toy cubbies, tell him in my “listen up buddy” voice that he needs to take a nap, suggest rhetorically that putting stuff down his pants isn’t going to help him fall asleep. Then I leave the room as quickly as possible so I can escape to the pantry downstairs – as far as I can get from his room – to crack up laughing over the whole event. He is such a nut. Are all kids this crazy?

Jenn and Pete and Colin were here for a few days. It was such a treat to get to spend the time with them. We decorated rooms all over the house, doing things I’d been wanting to do since we moved in, but haven’t done because of lack of time or vision. It was great to have the boys together again. Colin has passed up Avi in weight, probably because Avi isn’t interested much in food, other than the kind that comes directly from me, whereas Colin has a hearty appetite. Compound that with Colin’s tendency to be a bit more sedentary, content to smile and laugh and squeal, compared with Avi’s constant motion. He is officially crawling now, not a well-developed rhythmic crawl, but it’s a crawl nonetheless, and combined with rolling, it can get him all around a room in no time at all. He uses this skill to his nefarious advantage to routinely travel to Colin, steal the toy that his cousin was enjoying and then often bonk him on the head with it. Mostly though they had fun together. They enjoyed watching each other. And we only had dueling tantrums a few times. We did discover that Avi finds sharing his evening bath with anyone else completely unacceptable. We put them in the boys bathroom together on the first night, and Avi, who is routinely giddy over bath time, started screaming his head off. We plucked him out, held him in a towel, finished bathing Colin, and then put Avi back in to enjoy his time by himself, which he did. The following night, thinking that the issue was not enough personal space in the regular bathtub, we put them in our big tub in the master bathroom. Same scene. Avi howled again until we pulled him out. Apparently he doesn’t like to share a soak.