Graeme at 2 years 8 months Old

I haven't posted much of substance about Graeme in quite some time! In September, he'll turn three years old. I can't wrap my mind around that. Three! While I'll have keenly felt the exhaustion of those thousand plus days of parenting, it still is an amazing feat. Three! Certainly no longer a baby and well on his way to becoming a little boy. Pardon the ramble, but I don't want to forget!

He has become a complete nightowl here in Florida. Back in the old days, when I was nursing him to sleep, I'd often miss out on everything because I'd be going to sleep at 6pm and getting up, alone in the world, with him at 3 or 4am. Now, Daniel and I are hoping he'll go to sleep so we can follow suit! He's suddenly shown a complete aversion for his bed. Like, it is extremely fun to jump on but a fate worse than death at night! Instead, he'll stay up until midnight and then curl up to sleep on the living room floor. We wait until he's good and asleep and carry him to bed. Some nights, he'll wake up frantically calling our names (he sleeps three feet away from us) and we haul him up into bed between us for the rest of the night. It's weird. I'm sure there's logic there for him. :)

We are transitioning, about two and a half years too late, to cloth diapers. He loves them, but there is no doubt that they need to be changed more frequently than disposable. I'm not quite with the program yet, so there are still times I turn around to find that he's exceeded max capacity and is standing in a pair of wet shorts. I thought the laundry would be disgusting and never-ending, but really that aspect of it has been easy-peasy. I still put him in a disposable overnight, but I imagine that'll stop once I figure out the timing of everything. Really, though, I'm super happy with the cloth. I can imagine how fuzzy and nice it must feel to wear them! Last month, when I put the first trial FuzziBunz diaper on, he cooed to himself, "Oh! These are very comfy diapers, Mommy!" :D Out of curiosity, I've let him pick whether he wanted to wear a cloth or disposable diaper at every change and he has *always* picked cloth. So that's going swimmingly.

At last check, Graeme is about 33 lbs and stands 3'2". He's getting away with clothes in the 3T/4T range and has giant size 10 feet. :) Our get-him-in-the-NBA retirement plans are really proceeding nicely. ;)

He is still watching more television than he should, though it buys me some delightful showering, reading, and internet time each week. His favorite shows, if he could craft his dream line-up, would be Blue's Clues, Super Why!, Team Umizoomi, Special Agent Oso, Sesame Street, and Dora the Explorer.

Graeme is learning to read. He loves playing games with some "flashing" cards we have that have letters and phonics. Some words, like "cat", he can read on sight. Others, with some prompting like "That word is a color. What color starts with the letter "R"? or "Do you know what animal's name this is?" he can get. He knows all the letters, upper and lower case, and knows what sounds they make. One of his favorite games currently goes like this:

1. He drives his open-bed toy truck around the toy room, looking for any animals that are waiting for a ride. They call out to him in some hilarious toddler impersonations of animals speaking, and hop in. He drives the truck with one big push across the room to the white board where I'm waiting.
( More of the game... )

Graeme is such a good-hearted little boy. He says when he grows up, he wants to be a superhero to help and/or save people. The other day, at an indoor playspace, he saw one of the adults cleaning up drop a toy, unbeknownst to her, and walk away. He picked up what she'd dropped and raced after her, unbidden, to return it. "Here, you dropped your toy!" All of his games involve, in some way or another, helping. At the park, he likes to help clean up litter to help the squirrels have a nice place to live. His toy animals are always asking for and receiving help to do things. When one lion cub is scared to go down a slide, a mommy zebra is there to help encourage him. He astounds me with how purehearted, kind, empathetic, and willing-to-serve he can be. The other day, he had this kinda sad experience at a park behind the library. I think it sorta illustrates his personality and the sort of things I want to insulate him from.

The park was empty as it was the hottest part of the day. He played by himself, climbing up and sliding down slides and collecting and counting pinecones with me. Then, a mom arrived with her three children. One, a little girl, was Graeme's age. She came up to him and just stared. He smiled and said, "Hi! What's your name?" She ran away. He turned to her retreating back and called out, "Wait! Wait for me!" but she was soon across the park. He asked me what her name was. "I don't know", I said, "but you could go ask her Mommy." The mom was standing only ten or so feet away from us while her daughter was maybe 50 feet away. So Graeme trots up to the mother, stands at her knee, looks up and says, "Hi! My name is Baby Graeme. What is your baby's name?" She looks down at him and walks away without replying.

So then he comes back to me, deflated, and says, "I am very sad." "Why are you sad?" "I'm sad because nobody wants to play with me."

Knife through heart.

A few minutes later, Graeme gave it a game try again. He followed the three kids up onto a bit playground structure and was going to follow them down a big slide. He sat down and said, "I'm scared", which was really just an invitation to play with (and encourage) him. The six year-old boy in the group called him a scaredy-weiner. The mother says, "Tyler! You can say that to your little sister but you canNOT say things like that to children you don't know." (OMGWTFBBQ)

So Graeme kinda glumly scooted back from the top of the slide and climbed down the stairs back to me. The mom was rummaging in her purse and looking irritated. Graeme walked back up to her and said, "Do you need help? I can help you!"

Again, she just looked down at him and then went back to whatever she was doing.

I smiled, sweet as pie, and repeated what he'd said to her. "Oh, yes I thought that's what he said. What does he think he's going to help me with?"

"Oh, I don't know. Maybe he'll get us a sunshade and some grapes, maybe fan us with a palm frond. *chuckles* It can be sad for my son to go to the park because he's so much more socially mature than other children. He strikes up conversations, introduces himself, invites others to play with him and people don't bother to respond. He doesn't know what to make of it."

I said it all with a friendly smile, but really I think my point was pointy enough. I was pissed. She got flustered and started pretending an interest in him. Luckily, though, the third child, maybe a seven year old girl, noticed his sadness and came over to adopt him. She held his hand and slid down the slide with him a few times and waited for him to catch up as they roamed over the park together. The little boy turned his terrorizing back to his two year-old sister, who he pushed down, sat on, and made fun of some more. :/ :/

I'd thought, for a long time, that he was the socially awkward one because he isn't in daycare with all his peers. What we've recently discovered, watching him interact with kids his age, is that he's actually the one way ahead of the pack. He's so polite and interested and eager to please and the random kids he's running into just--aren't. A quiet, well-behaved 5-7 year old is about his speed. They so rarely realize it, though, and so there are so many missed opportunities.

Graeme is in love with board games. He's very good, learns the rules and patiently waits for his turn. I've challenged him with games for much older children and he still holds his own. The favorites though are Candy Land and the Cranium game Caraboo Island which he mastered pretty much immediately and is playing on the "Advanced" mode. He's brilliant. He's also damned lucky. I've honestly *never* beat him in a game. Ever. That's all luck of the draw/dice and I'm not letting him win. He does it all by himself. :)

Graeme's favorite toys and activities haven't changed a lot. He loves his Viewmaster, since I have a couple reels with animal pictures on it. (Wish I could find more.) He also adores flashcards, of any sort, and the opportunity to show off how much he knows. The dry erase board, with colored markers, is a big hit as is his box of Schleich animal figures. He's starting to really appreciate playing ball and isn't coloring/drawing/painting quite as much as he used to, though he still enjoys it. The library is one of his favorite places on the entire planet, where we read books together at a little wooden table and chairs. I'm trying to think what else. One of his best friends, of the inanimate variety, is a stuffed Magenta beanie plush from Blue's Clues. He loves to talk to her and for her or have me talk for her. ;) He's also carting around one of those Cabbage Patch werewolf-hybrid-crazy animal dolls that he spied across the room at a thrift store and cried frantically, "THAT'S FRANKIE!! THAT'S FRANKIE! FRANKIE!!". (Frankie had to come home with us. Being a twenty or thirty year old toy, I wonder if it was a past life thing? Either way, it was a bizarre, sweet encounter.)

Graeme has a new pair of shoes, since his feet have grown right out of the last pair. They're white with purple and silver highlights, he picked them himself, and he's so proud and in love with them. He calls them his "purple shoes" and spent at least two weeks approaching every person he could find to ask, "Do you like my new purple shoes?". ;)

Graeme-speech:
"Snake" still sounds like "Cake".
"That's a goob idea, isn't it, Mommy?"
*looking down at his diaper* "Who is pouring water in there?"
"I don't want to lay down! I want to lay up!"