28.5 Months
This is a fun age. I guess they all are, but the fun does seem to intensify. Of course the challenges do too.
It's interesting to watch Peter's verbal skills improve and his patterns of thinking getting more sophisticated. Yesterday, he came home very insistent that he wants to go to preschool. I don't think Peter actually knows what preschool is, so naturally I was interested to know why he would want to go. The reason? Because if he goes to preschool, he will (apparently) need a backpack. And he wants a "Racecars" backpack, just like a child at his daycare who attends preschool a few mornings his week. I believe his exact words were "I want go preschool. I go preschool, get Racecars backpack, jus' like Sethie." It's amazing to see his little mind makes leaps and bounds like that. I'll admit, there are some rather obvious flaws in his logic, but it's pretty cool nonetheless.
Last month, Peter's daycare was closed for a month. During that time, he was doing a bit of a shuttle back and forth between various people and it was a little disruptive for him. There were many teary mornings, and to calm him down, it was sometimes necessary for his caregivers to resort to TV. So now, Peter has been introduced to Disney, in particular to "Cars", or as he calls it "Racecars!" I have not seen this particular show myself, but having read the Wikipedia synopsis, it sounds fairly harmless. The difficulty is that there is a lot of "Cars" merchandise, and as the recent backpack request shows, he now has the capacity to wish for and demand it. I believe in the past 24 hours, I have been reminded about his desire for a "Racecars" backpack no less than 30 times. So now I have a dilemma - do I give in to a fairly simple and cheap request? ($12.99 at Toy's'r'us; I checked.) Do I get him something else that I'd rather him have, like a funky backpack with a dinosaur on it instead? Or is that like giving a child a hamster when he wants a dog?
In other Peter news, we are potty training. Part of my impetus is my desire to get him out of diapers before #2 arrives. He is doing fairly well. We have #1s down, so long as we remind him to go. Interestingly, he does well at daycare, but sometimes get distracted at home. We're still having mixed success on #2.
One negative thing we've dealt with lately is hitting. When he gets frustrated, he hits me quite a bit. We actually had an incident when we were out where he grabbed another child by the collar and yanked him too, which was, um, not good. He's always been such a snuggly, non-rambunctious guy so we're struggling with this one. Unfortunately, I have not found the perfect discipline tool for this other than threatening him with going to his room when he lifts his hand. And sending him there when he does. That works, but it doesn't feel entirely right to me. However, no end of explaining, acting sad, telling him why we don't do it, etc. works, so I'm at a bit of a loss, since clearly I cannot allow him to hit me. It really hurts. Most of the hitting seems to be me, and not kids at daycare, so that's at least one not so negative thing - I'm a little more able to protect myself. And I also know it's a normal stage, so we'll get through it - hopefully sooner rather than later.
I feel sort of bad that I haven't documented this pregnancy as well as I did with P's. In a lot of ways the pregnancies are similar, but I've found this one more physically and emotionally draining, especially lately. I haven't had that surge of energy I did with Peter - I'm still tired a lot of the time and have various other aches and pains that I didn't experience (or don't remember) from the first time. But without further ado, I introduce you to #2 - she is very cute isn't she?
Yes, I said SHE. We are very excited about having a little girl. Unfortunately, we've had a bit of a scare after there were some abnormalities spotted on our ultrasound. We had a very frightening week, but after some blood testing and a meeting with a genetic counsellor, our fears have been greatly alleviated. We will still need to look into a few things after birth, in particular a kidney issue, but we're feeling pretty confident that all is well and hopeful that everything will resolve itself by the time she is fully baked. In the meantime, please enjoy looking at her! For contrast, check out Peter's ultrasound pics - they look sort of the same, but sort of different so I can't wait to see how this little one turns out!
