Tonight Atticus practiced using the mouse to click and play on his favorite Tessy & Tab activity page.
It was amazing how he took to it. After about five minutes, he had it figured out.
Kinda scary!
Just a little off the top February 2, 2008
“He needs a real haircut,” Mike said. My efforts using the $3 handheld drugstore trimmer weren’t cutting it anymore, no pun intended.
So two weeks ago today Atticus had his first professional haircut. We took him down the street to the barbershop where Mike gets his haircut. Atticus watched his dad take his turn first, which probably explained how easily he went along with it. Who says you need to spend $20 at a kids’ salon with toys and videos? Atticus gets his haircut like a man!
A.D., the barber, put a booster in the seat and oriented Atticus to the rumblings of the electric razor. Our little baby now looks all grown up.
Crazy About the Circus November 29, 2007
We’re lucky to live within walking distance of “Title Wave”, a used bookstore with a vast inventory of retired titles from the Multnomah County library system.
Before he turned two, Atticus started making up the storyline of books I would read. Specifically, the first time he did this was when we were reading Walter Wick’s “Dream Machine”. It’s part of the “Can You See What I See?” series in which you study these picture puzzles to find hidden objects that are described in the rhyming text.
Atticus got one of Wick’s books for Christmas last year, and while I initially thought he was way too young for it, he was immediately hooked. There’s this tiny character made of red, yellow and blue beads in these books and he’s cleverly integrated into every page. He might be scuba diving in the underwater mermaid scene or painted gold in the Rapunzel puzzle. I call this guy the “Little Man” and Atticus has adopted that has the name. Last July he interrupted our puzzle solving to tell me, “Little Man…go home. Little Man… go store. Buy bananas.”
Now he not only jazzes up the story, he now asks a ton of questions about the illustrations and likes to pretend to read. This sometimes involves him instructing people or the cat to sit down so he can read to us. He’s also developed quite the memory. One of his favorite books right now is “Song of the Circus” by Lois Duncan. It’s an out-of-print gem I found at Title Wave several months ago. In part I bought it because I knew I would enjoy reading it, plus the illustrations are fantastically detailed and full of whimsy.
He’s been requesting that book up to half a dozen times a day. What I didn’t realize is how much of “Song of the Circus” he has memorized. Last week he crawled into our bed and “read” to me the following pages from the book (he got it about 80% right):
This is the man who wears purple tights, who gets shot from cannons and
goes on flights to the very top of the circus.This is the lady with golden hair who flies from a swing and gets thrown in
the air to the very top of the circus.This is Gisselda who learned to crawl on canvas tarps and to toss a ball to
a fat baboon, and who took her naps on tatooed shoulders and spangled laps, for
she is a child of the circus.
All I can say is, he’ll be reading by age 3, no doubt!
Potty Party September 10, 2007
This morning we walked to the playground and hadn’t been there for more than five minutes when Atticus said, “Poopy.” I checked his diaper — nothing. He then turned around and started to play, but I could tell from his odd posture as he gripped the metal bars that something was being extruded from his behind. Of course, I’d left the house with only a sippy cup, but no diapers.
“You pooped. We need to go home and clean it.”
“Come back?”
“Yes, we’ll come back after Mommy cleans your diaper.”
Here it was, a week since my failed attempt to flush his poop, and I had another lovely firm deposit to toss in the toilet. My now-expert eye gauged it a 9.2 on the scale of flushability, and I was right. It went down without a problem.
We were about to head back to the park when he said, “Poopy again.”
“You have to poop again?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Do you want to sit on the potty?”
“Okaaaaaay.”
I put the potty seat in position on the toilet. As I took off his diaper I noticed a small stain. Poop was imminent. He kicked his legs and whined when I picked him up. “It’s okay, ” I reassured him as I parked myself awkwardly on his step stool. “We can just hang out here in the bathroom and play until your poop comes out.” His face brightened. What a concept! We can just hang out! “Why don’t we say our ABCs until your poop comes out?”
We got as far as “I”, and then he tilted his head down into silence. He had his baseball cap on, so I couldn’t see his expression, but there was determination in his bowed little head. I heard a tiny plop, then another. Then moving his head like a turtle’s, he looked at me, as in, “Now what?”
“All done pooping?”
“All done,” he said, smiling shyly.
Of course we made a Really… Big… Deal out of it… Mike got the honor of flushing since Atticus was too afraid to do it. (Maybe, as Brazelton suggests, kids wonder or worry where it goes.) In short, I’m certain his birthday celebration paled in comparison to the whoops and cartwheels we made throughout the house.
Just what the doctor ordered September 2, 2007
Mike took Atticus in for his two-year check up last week, and the doctor inquired about whether we had initiated any potty training. Basically Atticus will sit on the potty seat and play around, and when I say, “No, point it down,” he’ll laugh at me and say, “Point it up! Point it up!” Like every kid his age, he loves to flush the toilet repeatedly. He does tell us when he’s pooped, and sometimes like a bus driver he’ll give us a heads up that the next stop will be at Poopy Central. But we are far from training him.
Anyway, the doctor suggested that the next time he had a “solid” poop, we should show it to him, throw it in the toilet and flush it down so he could get used to the idea of where the poop should go in the future.
When Atticus woke up from his nap last Sunday and proclaimed, “Biiiiiig poop!” a quick glance indicated it was indeed big and appropriately solid. I was actually kind of pumped up about it, like, “Hey, this will be cool! Atticus will see his poop go down the toilet and he’ll make the connection and want to try using the toilet for real.” As I changed him, I said, “Atticus, do you want to put you poopy in the toilet and flush it down?”
“Poopy… down toilet. OK!”
There we stood in the master bath, in front of the toilet. The big moment had arrived. With almost a flourish, I showed him his diaper’s contents. “Atticus, this is your poopy,” I said, talking louder and slower than necessary. “Mommy is going to put it in the toilet and flush it away. That’s where poopy belongs, in the toilet.” He eyed his excrement warily and had no comment. What was I expecting him to say? “Cool! So that’s what it looks like, huh? All this time, I’ve only been smelling it!”
“Mommy… put in?” he asked, verifying he didn’t have any role in this operation.
“Mommy’s going to put it in now, and then we’ll flush it away and it’ll all be gone!” I chirped. “Poopy go bye-bye!” If I’d weighed that diaper, it would have probably registered at about half a pound or more. I had to shake it a bit before my precious son’s turd landed with an ominously dull splash. I realized too late that it was too big. Because he’d pooped in his sleep, it’d been flattened into a cow patty. and now it obscured the bottom of our efficient, low flush toilet.
Gamely hoping water pressure would do the trick, I said, “Okay! See your poopy in the toilet?” Like he couldn’t see it… even a blind person could have seen it. “Now we can flush it. Why don’t you press the handle?”
Atticus shook his head and backed away. “Mommy flush it.”
Shaking my invisible pom-poms, I said, “Let’s flush!” I held down the handle until the bowl filled to the rim. “Water pressure, water pressure, water pressure,” I repeated silently to myself, like a prayer. The water sloooowly seeped back down, the cow patty hardly disturbed.
“Mommy fix it!”
“Uh, yeah, Mommy will fix it.” The plunger was downstairs, and I didn’t want him to see it, because then he’d want to play with it. “Don’t worry!” I called over my shoulder, as I opened the cabinet under the sink — weren’t there old rubber gloves somewhere? Nope. A coat hanger wouldn’t work. Where was a stick when you needed one?
“Atticus, let’s go to your room. Mommy will fix it.” I got him distracted with toys while I rummaged. Eventually I grabbed a few of his plastic diaper disposal bags and put them over my hand. On my knees, I reached in gingerly and tried to break up the cow patty. It was like a sundried clod of clay I’d dug up out of the yard. Atticus ran back into our bedroom. I quickly stood up and tore the bags off my hand.
“Mommy fix it?”
“Mommy fixed it. Let’s flush it again and it will go down.”
But it didn’t.
I picked him up and put him in his room, got another set of bags and tried again, powered by desperation this time. Pat-pat-pat came the little feet.
“Mommy fix it?”
I pressed the handle. The toilet cleared.
“Yes, Atticus. This time, Mommy fixed it.”
And he’s not even 2 yet! July 31, 2007
I’m not sure what to expect when it comes to toddlers and drawing skills, but this just blew me away. It’s not like we’ve been drawing faces, either. Atticus’ morning routine for many months now is to sit with Mike in the office and watch him draw a house. Over time, Mike has embellished it with trees, birds, clouds, a chimney with smoke, a car, etc. (And Mike’s own drawing skills have improved greatly with daily practice. Seriously, his drawings used to be kind of crude; now they are three-dimensional with clean lines.) So Atticus often asks me to draw him a house, as well as butterflies and lady bugs. About a month ago he started drawing a pretty decent circle.
Tonight we were getting ready for bed, and Atticus asked to play with his markers, which I almost didn’t let him do since (1) he was freshly bathed and (2) he likes to draw all over himself… hands, arms, feet, knees, you name it. But draw we did, and I am so glad.
We were just doing the usual stuff — he tells me what he wants me to draw, or he names the colors and scribbles, or draws a circle and says, “Cirrrr-cul.” But then he drew a small squiggly line and said, “Mouth.”
“Oh, is that the mouth?”
“Uh-huuuuh,” he replied. Then he said, “Eyes,” carefully drawing the first one. “Eyes.”
By this time I was in slack-jawed amazement that he’d drawn the eyes where they belonged, rather symmetrically in relation to the mouth. “How about the nose?”
“Nose!” he pronounced, drawing the line down the middle of the face.
I quickly flipped the page to preserve what is now the most amazing piece of art I own, and he drew another face, but much, much rougher and more, dare I say, kid-like.
Say, Atticus, do you want an easel for your birthday?
"I’ll get it, Mommy." July 18, 2007
I’ve been noticing the past few weeks that Atticus has started stringing words together, but mostly it sounds like, “Crayon. Broken. Fix it.” Or the daily mantra of “Poopy. Clean it.”
This evening we were hanging out on the front porch, desperately waiting for an unusually late delivery from our favorite pizza joint. (I called at 4:45 p.m., Atticus normally eats at 5:30 or so and it arrived at 6:30!) I told Atticus we needed to sit on the porch and watch for delivery car with the pizza sign on it; as cars periodically passed by, he would sadly pronounce, “Nope. Nope. Nope.”
With crackers in hand, he found ways to entertain himself, which included discovering some old fuzzy coccoons (moths?) on the underside of one of the pillars. I got a reedy little stick for him to poke at them, but it soon became too soft to use. I said, “Mommy will get Atticus another stick.” I wandered around the sidewalk and couldn’t find one, so I gave him another piece of yard debris, which didn’t do the job when it came to disembowelment of abandoned coccoons. So as I walked back down to the sidewalk , placating him with promises to find a “good stick”, Atticus stood up and declared, “I’ll get it, Mommy.”
What did he say? I’ve been enjoying our little conversations with his truncated responses, and now it seems like we can start TALKING soon! And he didn’t say it in the wooden, robotic way he sometimes speaks… he said it in the most helpful, telemarketer-of-the-year voice.
Last night he also started saying, “How about…. how about… how about that?” Well, Atticus, you’re really talking now. How about that!
The Escape Artist July 13, 2007
We returned mid-Monday afternoon from a long weekend in Vancouver, B.C.. The occasion for my incredible (and it turns out, unfounded) anxiety about traveling in a car for a million hours with Atticus was my cousin’s wedding celebration.
Of course, Atticus put up with being strapped to a car seat for as long as four hours straight with little fuss. It didn’t hurt that I was locked and loaded with every imaginable diversion I could muster, including thrift store toys and books as well as new sticker books and the amazing Color Wonder markers, which were a huge hit. We also caved in and, with a lot of justification and misgivings, bought a portable DVD player the day before we left. A neighbor kindly loaned us several DVDs for the road. Of course, Atticus was way more interested in the cheap $3 headphones that Mike bought him than the DVD player. But during the 90-minute wait at the U.S./Canada border, when he was straining to get out of the seat, the DVD player did come in handy. He just LOVED “Chicka Chicka Boom Boom”, especially the “Trashy Town” story.
What I didn’t anticipate was how energized he’d be by staying in a new environment. All these buttons to touch and rooms to investigate. I couldn’t get him to go to bed for hours. (If only we’d packed the playpen so I could have confined him.) At the reception he was a superstar, making it through the entire 10=course meal and extremely late bedtime with nary a whimper or whine. He couldn’t leave without breaking a glass lampshade at the condo where we stayed, but other than that, the trip was pretty smooth.
Now that we’ve been home for a few days, and he’s been making up his eight-hour sleep deficit, a new sleep pattern has emerged. He wakes up in the middle of the night, screaming for me and only me, inconsolable and unable to sleep unless I bring him to bed. After two nights of this, Mike and I decided last night he’d have to tough it out in the crib. So when Atticus woke up at 4:15, Mike comforted him but wouldn’t bring him to bed. He screamed, “Mommy! Ma-MEEEEE!” at a rate of once every 2 seconds for what seemed like forever. So I dragged my sleepy self in there, gave him a hug and a kiss, patted his back and put him back in his crib. More screaming. Then screeching. Then… a THUD!
He was so intent on getting into bed with us, he climbed out of his crib… without ANY leverage. I ran in there and found him sitting on the carpet, clutching his blanket with one hand and scratching his head with the other. He looked up at me and said, “Lion?” He wanted his stuffed animal. We had no idea he could climb like that. In a way, I’m flattered that he was so determined to overcome any obstacle to be reunited with me. It’s the toddler version of “The English Patient” when Ralph Fiennes character endures countless challenges (the desert, being arrested, etc.) to get back to whats-her-name British actress, who is in fact dead in a cave. But I digress.
I am not ready for him to move out of the crib yet! We are going to bed tonight unsure of what to expect, since letting him settle back down in bed is no longer a viable strategy.
Happy 23 Months, Atticus!
The Puppet Master January 25, 2007
Feigning inability to speak continues to spur my agenda. I cannot resist toying with them, spicing my repertoire of indecipherable monosyllables with the epiphanous utterance of “donkey” or “bye-bye.”
My brilliance in establishing “uh-oh” as a common phrase gave me license this week to scatter crackers like confetti in the backseat of the car – by merely saying it repetitively as I did the deed, I melted her stern expression in the rearview mirror into wallowing adoration.
They find such ridiculous joy in my most effortless tricks. Yesterday, just for kicks, I said “baby” before we headed into music class; she predictably re-enacted the moment in dramatic fashion for anyone who’d listen. I do tire of how she reads to me with such plodding, theatrical enunciation – she’s even convinced him to do it on occasion — but keeping them both blinded to my verbal skills maintains my advantage, so I will consent to being “schooled” for a bit longer. Some days, it is all I can do not to roll my eyes.
I admit to being a bit concerned that this morning’s incident doesn’t prove to be catastrophic. I mindlessly mimicked her when she said “oven mitt” — not once, but twice. What was I thinking? So many times I’ve told myself to keep it simple. “Ball” or “cat” would have sufficed. She suspects me now. I don’t know how long I can keep this up.
Slip Slidin’ Away January 20, 2007
Sadly, the snow has mostly melted. We stayed inside yesterday to avoid slip-ups on the slush. To get rid of cabin fever, today we ventured back to Peninsula Park, where Atticus finally mastered the slide.
We’ve been to plenty of slides at playgrounds, and even have a small one (about 2 feet high) at home. In the past he’s tried to go down with one leg in front, or head first, etc. I’ve been trying to drill into his head that (1) you put both feet in front, (2) you don’t walk down a slide from the top, and (3) you must pick up your feet a bit or they’ll slow you down when you go.
Today, he pieced it all together. For the first time, he climbed to the top of this toddler slide (my guess it’s about 3-1/2 feet tall), got the hang of putting both feet in front of him (he even dared to stand on top of it at one point), and he gave himself a little push to get things going. It was so much fun that we practically did nothing else. Climb up. “Feet first, feet first! Look out for that kid below!” Slide down. Repeat. I think we did this about 20 times. Then, having accomplished a new physical milestone, we had a snack and went home for a nap.
