Calling the Roll

Jed likes to gather attendance. At anything. At the dinner table, for instance. "Mommy milk. Gus milk. Daddy milk. Jed milk." Followed by a nod of the head and a sigh of contentment that the dinner table is what it ought to be. In the car this morning as we are all driving out to breakfast: "Mommy coming? Gus coming? Daddy coming?" (Daddy is DRIVING the car to breakfast.) Brief pause. Daddy finishes it up: "Jed coming." Sigh of contentment.

And the cutest thing I think I ever saw happened tonight. The guys all got shaggy, so we scheduled tonight as haircut night. Jed was really excited, which surprised us because last month he cried through the whole thing. So Jim buzzed him after dinner, and although he howled through the whole thing at least he wasn't shedding salt water onto the towel. It took him most of Gus's subsequent haircut to calm down. Gus has a lot of hair, and is getting impatient by the end. "Daddy, am I done YET?" And Jed puts his arms around as much of Gus as he can reach up there in the chair, and comforts him. "It's okay, Gus. I gotcha."

They had a blast in the park this afternoon while Daddy was getting his haircut. Chasing each other around, taking turns on the big slide, and once climbing the rock wall side by side while laughing hysterically. Watching them makes my heart happy.

A Boy and His Sweatshirt -- A Love Story

When Gus was three, I bought a spring green sweatshirt from the secondhand store. It was soft and cozy, and we have lots of pictures of him wearing it (because we're always outside). Then he got too big for it, and I put it away for Jed.

When Jed arrived it was summer. In fall he was introduced to Sweatshirt in an offhand "Are you cold, honey?" sort of way. They hung out together for a few weeks. And the acquaintanceship ripened into more.

I was dressing the kiddos one morning and said to Jim, "Jed needs a sweatshirt." Jim went into their room and Jed dropped everything and ran after him, yelling, "I pick! I pick!" Stopped in his tracks once he arrived and saw Daddy was holding Sweatshirt. He didn't want to pick, just wanted his Sweatshirt.

He misses it when it's in the laundry. One day he spied it folded in the basket during breakfast and ran to welcome it back.

I finished scrapbooking last year and showed the boys their new pages. Jed loved everything about it. Looking through it another day, he pointed at a picture of him with the jack-o-lantern on the Halloween page. I was sure he was going to say, "Pumpkin!" because he was obsessed with that pumpkin. Instead he said, "Sweatshirt!"

Last Saturday we went out to see a show and left the kids with a great babysitter. Got home to find Jed in his pajamas but wearing Sweatshirt on top. If you can't have Mommy, at least you can have Sweatshirt.

New Year's

Sorry I'm so behind. My eyes are much better, thanks for all the concern. At my last visit the doctor pronounced them "good" (which is an adjective that hasn't been used for them in a long time), took out the Band-aid, and cut my meds in half. Woot! Back there in a month.

We went to Austin over New Year's and had a second orgy of presents with Jim's family. The kids met the new puppy, who is 50 pounds. It took Jed most of the week to touch her at all. Gus was willing to play with her in the backyard until she started nipping at his heels (she is a puppy, after all). But he did enjoy telling her to sit from the safety of the other side of the gate, and would pet her as long as she was being held tightly by someone else. Jed invented a game called "throw the stick to the doggie from the safety of the top of the picnic table", and that was not bad progress, I think. Next time will be better when they're all older, but happily they could all coexist without terrible anxiety by the end of the week, and I'm sure the puppy was happy to have her house back!

We spent some quality time at Zilker Park and took the obligatory trip to Chuy's. Jed dug into the salsa. That kid will try anything. Jim warned him it was spicy, and he nodded, and then continued to tuck it in. I guess if you can put it on a tortilla chip it has to be good. We also took the boys on their first mini-golf outing to the charmingly sketchy local spot. No one was brained, and the boys spent about ten minutes dropping their balls into one of the more interesting holes.

As a reward for breaking a bad habit, Gus got to watch Jungle Book for the first time. I watched it with him in case he was scared of the big mean frightening tiger. But he was fine. The new scary movie was actually Curious George. I know, right? But there's a part where the man in the yellow hat sends George back to Africa and he's all by himself on a big boat in a cage in the dark, and Gus was petrified. We talked about it a bunch and he worked through it.

The boys had a blast being loved on all week, and by the end were lifting anyone's iPhone in the hope it was Granddad's (his has games; Mommy's does not. Put It Down). They were pretty spectacular on the flights home (two layovers so quick we couldn't even get off the plane). Jed and I toured the aisles a lot, and Gus plugged into his videos. The boys were wearing matching sweatshirts from their aunt and uncle and were much adored by the ladies in the flying public.

And then it was good to be home.

Wars of Rosacea

I haven't blogged since Christmas, and that's because I've had a recurring problem with using screens. The glare is awful. Apparently my ocular rosacea flares up when it's very cold, and so as soon as we got back from Texas and the temperature plunged, my rosacea went nuts. What happens to me is that the oils in my tear glands are blocked in from the inflammation, and so the oil parts never get into the tears (I can now testify that they are very important). As a result, I wake up crying projectively and have to force drops into my eyes to hydrate them properly. Repeat every hour or so, all night. It takes about 2 days for my eyesight to recover in that eye, and a few more for screens to be comfortable.

The first week this happened, I had three flare-ups in a week and then one of my corneas got over-wet and exploded (it's like a waterbed; too much water in between the cornea and the basement membrane and boom!). Since that has happened once before, I had a pretty good idea what had happened and hauled into the opthamologist's office and he cleaned it up for me. (First time he took dead tissue of of my eye with tweezers, horror movie. Second time, eh. I guess it all depends what you're used to. Personally, I am tired of the receptionists knowing my name.) So now I'm on drugs but still had a couple flare-ups this week. Jim got me a pirate patch just in case. Saw the uber-specialist again today and he put a contact lens bandaid in my eye (preemptively? he doesn't say much, but the last flareup might have caused a bit of a fissure, too). In three weeks we'll see how much better I am.

Humph. Now you know why there's precious little news coming out of this house. But the drugs are helping and the weather is warming, so soon I'll update on New Year's and etc.

Christmas!

It was Jed's first Christmas at home, and he was a bit overwhelmed. We start with stockings in bed, but he had trouble understanding that he could open everything in his stocking, and actually stopped about halfway through, content to scarf down a breakfast bar and watch everyone else. Gus exclaimed with almost every small present that this was "the best one EVER!" My favorite things are the wind-up caterpillars, which the boys mostly ignored until today. If they don't play with them, I will. The hits were the airplanes which make lots of noise when you zoom them.

After breakfast we opened the presents under the tree. That wasn't too overwhelming, since our family presents don't come until 3 Kings' Day, so all that was under the tree was from out-of-town family. Gus feels that the presents should never stop coming, even though today he can't remember half of what he received yesterday. The boys most enjoyed their Philadelphia sports slippers, the Viking-esque ship from their cousins, and the big box from Mike and Sarah. We had some friends over for dinner who are too far from family (Scotland!) to head home, and the 3 boys spent about an hour in and out of the box, yelling "Surprise!!!"

Today we are awaiting around a foot of snow, and will probably have part of tomorrow off to go sledding. Later this week we will go visit Jim's family in Texas, where there will not be enough snow to go sledding.

No More Shots!

Oops, I forgot until now to celebrate online, but the fix to the Hague has finally been passed and signed by the President. Now kids coming home under the new rules can be exempted from shots in China as long as their parents promise to bring them up to date at home on a reasonable schedule. Woohoo!

Monster Ball

It's been a weird eye month, with a scratch in my eye for which I have now seen three opthamologists. The third one actually snorted at the advice the first one gave me. I don't suppose he'll be at that practice for long. The scratch should be healed by now, and next week I have another appointment which will hopefully take the bandaid out of my eye and be fine. I also have rosacea which affects my tear ducts, so that explains the dry eye and eyelid pain I was having. Anyhow...

After one of the first opthamologist appointments, my eyes were still hurting. Jim came home from worship practice to find me with a baseball cap pulled way down over my eyes. "Honey, you look like Gwyneth Paltrow on the way to the grocery store." Glare from screens was especially painful, but since it was movie night I put on the hat and sucked it up. It was Jed's first turn to pick a video, and Gus was not pleased. But then Jed picked Gus's favorite video ever, Robin Hood (with the fox) and all was well. That night they both wanted to wear their new monster pajamas, and I'm pretty sure that Jed picked Robin Hood because of the music in the video, because he's Jed and he loves to dance. Even a sore eye can't dampen how much fun it was to watch both boys in their monster jamas gettin' down together with Alan a Dale.

I think we talk enough about why we discipline, because Gus can say it all when Jed is in trouble. "You don't talk with boys in timeout." "He can make a better decision next time." Of course he doesn't seem to remember it when he is having trouble behaving. And I can't say I like the preemptive whining: "Jed isn't sharing!" "Have you asked him to share?" Well, no. It's so much faster to jump to conclusions.

Just got back from a week in Pittsburgh with my family. Gus was a bit miffed that Great PopPop belonged to Jed too. The cousins were the big hit, of course--it took the boys a little while to figure out how to play together, and then they were great, and we played with the girls. A day without the cousins was a day with lots of whining, so we got them together as much as we could. At one point Jed went up to his oldest cousin (6) and said something not particularly memorable. She said to me, "You sure can tell he's a Chinese boy!" Wondering how she had learned that from him saying "Hi!" I asked her how that was. And she looked at me like I was a complete moron and said, "Because he looks like one!" Moral of the story: sometimes the thought is not all that deep.

Jed spent the week impressing everyone with his prodigious appetite for poultry and pasta (one night he ate chicken faster than my sister could cut it), his determination, and his progress with English. He started three-word sentences early in the week "That's my daddy!" "I want this!" and progressed to a 5-word sentence before we left, "I want do that again!" Pretty much everything he says has exclamation points. "Mama!" "Sweatshirt!"

When we got home I rushed to get out the advent calendar that I made last year. Yes, I'm crazy, but I couldn't find what I wanted anywhere so I ended up making it. It's a felt calendar which tells the Christmas story (I felt a little less silly when one of my coworkers told me that she has a felt menorah for Hanukkah). We have another "calendar" made out of socks on a string, and in each sock is a piece for the Christmas calendar (and sometimes a treat). It's only day 3, and Gus is already overjoyed when it is his turn for a sock and despondent when it is Jed's. Jed loves all things foot-related, so he will stand there and say "Sock! Mama, sock!"

"SOCK!"