Recent Happenings

Evan, these are some of your favorite things recently:

• Joe, our 89 year old neighbor. You like to shake his hand, give him knucks, and shout “Doh!” when you see him.
• Trucks. Good lord, do you love trucks of all shape and function. You used to call them all “baba” (a derivation of bus, we presume) but now you can differentiate pick-up, dump, and digger varieties. You call firetrucks “woo-woos.”
• To dump stuff. You dump your food off your plate. You dump your clothes out of the hamper. You dump toys out of boxes. All while joyfully shouting, “DUMP!”
• A bottle of mustard you liberated from the refrigerator. You keep it on the shelf in the kitchen kitchen next to all the cookbooks. “Muhtard!”
• You also like to rapidly rip all the alphabet magnets off the refrigerator so they skitter on the floor (and make a sound that causes me to close my eyes and inhale deeply through my nose to keep from screaming.) You do this often, and I’ve tried to let you know that when we throw things on the floor, we need to pick them up. So, I say, “Oh, are you ready to pick them up and put them back on the refrigerator?” And then I sing this ridiculous song I heard someone sing to their kid: Clean up, clean up, everybody, everywhere…. And so now, you’ve taken to ripping all the magnets off the refrigerator and shouting, “Weddy peek up!”
• You love your stuffed bunnies. Somehow you acquired quite a few of these. One from your great-grandma Helen, one from B&C’s friend Lee. You can’t quite say “bunny” but you say “munny” and you love and smooch these bunnies all over the place. Also related: your abiding love of the Richard Scarry book I Am a Bunny. 
• You love to run in circles until you are dizzy and then fall down. When you fall down, you say, “Kaboom!”
• You love to run in circles around any available table, often with people chasing you. You pump your right arm furiously as you do this, and IT IS AWESOME. You run under our legs. You also love to have me hold you tight on my hip with my arms holding you close as I run somewhere. “Wuneen! Wuneen!”

Some stuff we’ve done in the last several months:

• In March, we went to visit grandma and grandpa in Arizona. You were overjoyed to see them, which was a great relief for everybody. Our plan for that week was to swim and hang out, but it was too cold most days for swimming, so we mostly just hung out.
• Around the fourth of July, we went with my sister and her family, and my dad and step-mom to a hotel with an indoor water park. Spent two days having cousin time and playing in the water. You LOVED it. I love to see how much you love the water.

Some awesome Evan pronunciations:

• birdie = booty
• clock = cock
• I know there are more, but I can’t think of them. In the last month, you have started repeated nearly everything we say. It is awesome and terrifying, like a thunderstorm. You say: noodle, butter, peach, plum (“pum!”), banana, ice, water, lots of color words, up, light, wall, window, ceiling, floor, bunny, monkey (and you make an awesome monkey sound), you say kitty (you call ours “Ona” and “Deedle”), puppy (and you make an excellent panting noise for puppy), plane (“pain!”), choo-choo train, pocket, pee-pee. I can’t think of it all. This language explosion has happened in the last month.

Mostly our days are like this. Tuesday-Thursday: You wake up somewhere between 6 and 7, and sometimes I make you breakfast (eggs with cheese and spinach or kale, or some sort of vegetable enhanced banana smoothie – sometimes this is the only green veggies you’ll eat in a day, which causes me a bit of anxiety), and then I take you upstairs to see Grandma and Grandpa, whom you call Namma and Pop-pop. (You are so freaking happy to see them everyday. Despite my quibbles and minor internal dissatisfactions, it is a real gift that you spend your days with them. Adoration abounds in multiple directions when the three of you are together.)

During the day, you guys go to parks, SO MANY PARKS. You climb stuff, you go down slides and swing on the swings. Sometimes you kick a ball, and sometimes you just dig around in the wood chips or dirt. A couple days a week you go to Starbucks and then storytime at a little volunteer library branch on Chicago and Main called the Mighty Twig. Sometimes when it’s warm, you play in the purple kiddie pool in the backyard under the white canopy. Less often, you take the bus to the library downtown and eat at Panera.

You take one nap, usually in the basement on the futon. Grandma uses the stroller to get you to go to sleep – I’m nervous about how we’ll transition to daycare in January, and how you’ll nap then.

Chad usually gets home from work between 3:30 and 4:30 (depending on where the job is), and I usually get home around 5. When I get home, you always nurse right away, at least for a couple minutes (sometimes for 20-30 minutes.) We play a bit, get the rundown on your day, figure out dinner. We typically eat with Grandma and Grandpa a couple days a week. After dinner, Daddy gives you a bath (and I have 10-30 glorious minutes to myself), then around 7 or 7:30, we get you in pjs, brush teeth, read a book, and go to bed.

On my off days, I usually try to get us out playing with other kids your age.  You tend to take longer naps when I’m home. We still nurse to sleep at night (and for naps when I’m there.) We changed your crib into a full-size bed, which is where you sleep now. I sometimes spend the whole night there with you, but I’m trying to sleep more in the big bed. You’re still teething, and I think the nursing really helps you deal with that discomfort.

(You never slept in the crib. Mostly you slept in our bed with us. Then for a while, we put a futon mattress on the floor next to our bed, and I tried to get you to sleep there. Then, we moved the futon mattress into your room on the floor. Then, your room just got too crowded, so we opted for the full-size bed.)

I’m recording some of these details because I don’t want to forget them, and I’m afraid that if don’t write it down, I will forget how much I love waking up to your insane bed-head, and how happy you are to wake up. You are a snuggly, delightful toddler. Yes, sometimes you scream “No” repeatedly – but you are generally very easy to talk with about things.We love you so much.