07.09.09
Dear Ashden: Month Twenty-Two
Dear Ash,
This month has started and ended with questions. Questions, questions, questions. What is that? Who is that? What’s that doing? Man doing? Baby doing? Worm doing? Ant doing? Trains doing? What is that? What is that? What is that? What daAat?
I answer every question as best I can, and just wait for the month when the question “Why?” comes into play. Oh dear. I wonder how long you’ve wanted to ask these things but didn’t have the verbal skills. I’m happy your dad and I have focused on speaking to you like a real person since you were a young baby, your verbal skills are impressive at this age. I expected this kind of behavior to come after two, not before. Not that I’m complaining- I think it’s pretty cute.
This month has really been nothing but rain- I’m serious when I say there was three straight weeks of rain, so we didn’t get to do very much on our days together. One day we went to the Halifax Harbour to see Theodore Tugboat “dedore tugboa!” as a family and that was nice.
I’m not sure if it’s you missing us or what it was, but you seriously kicked our butts this month with a little over a week of a major sleep regression, wherein you didn’t want to sleep before 10pm. Even with an hour or more of nursing or cuddling… I would lay in bed with you, doing both, for sometimes close to TWO hours, and when I thought you were asleep, you’d look over at me with a *blink, blink* and say, “hi!” and I’d realize that GODDAMNIT, all of that time for nothing. The only good thing about your sleep regression is that you didn’t necessarily need attention from us, so you’d be happy playing on the floor with your trains so that we could get work done.
One proud physical accomplishment you achieved this month (there haven’t been that many big ones since you started walking at a year) is that you learned how to jump- both feet off the air and everything. You hop around quite a lot now, it’s pretty cute if I do say so myself.
More than just the questions you’ve been asking, your sentences are filling in with words like “and” and “a” and “the” and becoming more complete. You’re learning how to count to twenty (you’re solid at ten, we’ve just started adding more numbers in recently), you know a lot of your ABCs and can recognize most of the letters of the alphabet. I kind of wish day care would take more initiative to have you learn these things, since you’re home with us not as often as I’d like you to be, but they’re happy with having you play outside and in the sandbox or with playdoh.
We’ve been focusing more on potty training, both at home and at school. You go primarily diaper free at home now, and have very few accidents. You will often ask to go on the “green potty!” if you need to pee, or I’ll hear you say, “no pee on the floor” and I know that you need to go, but your voice of reason has kicked in loud and clear and you’re verbalizing it. You’re still pooping in your diaper more often than not (a behavior that still surprises me, since it seems like it should be so counter-intuitive since you’ve been pooping on a potty since you were five months old). It’s really hard for me accept that you’re doing it, even though it’s been three months since you started school and therefore started pooping in your diaper. I’m not disappointed in you at all- more disappointed in myself that I forced you to be in this situation away from me where you don’t have the attention you need and deserve and therefore have no other alternative. I need to get over this!
This month you’ve started pretending. I’m not sure if it’s a learned behaviour – from school – or if it’s a developmental thing, but now when you see food in a book (like in The Very Hungry Caterpillar), you’ll pretend to be picking up the food and take nibbles. All I know is that it’s adorable.
You love cars. You know more car names than I can count. You spend hours and hours and hours driving your dinky cars on the couch, completely satisfied. I, myself, don’t get it though your father says he does- that when he was a kid he used to make up stories and statistics about each car, so I can only assume you’re doing a variation of that, and as your verbal skills improve, we’ll hear more and more of what is actually going on inside your head. You’re always fascinating to watch, I just can’t wait to hear more about what you think about.
I love this stage of non-stop talking. I love answering your questions and hearing you say, “ooOOoohh” afterwards, satisfied with my answer, whether or not you understand it fully or not. I love to see your personality developing and you becoming more and more like a little boy. There’s not much baby left in you, that’s for sure.
I love you more and more every single day. I miss you like crazy when I’m at work. It may sound strange when I admit this, but I often feel like I can’t ask questions about how your day was at school because I’m afraid that I’ll be too sad that I missed it, or I’ll hear that you fell and got hurt and that I wasn’t there to cuddle you (I know it happens- you have lots of bruises on your legs), or worse- that you cried for a long time- for whatever reason- and that you wanted me and I couldn’t be there. Most of your days are a mystery to me, and I know I’ll never get this time back, but it also means that I appreciate our moments together more, especially our nights, when you plead me to “cuddle, cuddle.”
I love you, Ash.
Love,
Mama.
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