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JJ (clawing at the back of his neck): Something’s stuck on me!
Me (after inspecting the situation): Oh, it looks like you got a mosquito bite.
Jeff: Sorry, bubba, you got a little bug bite.
JJ: It’s not a bug bite. It’s just a nipple!
JJ was just playing with his dinosaur shaped chicken nuggets. Here’s a snippet of the dinosaurs’ conversation:
“I’m a man! I’m a man!”
“You’re not a man!”
“I’m a man!”
The conversation then shifted abruptly to Nightmare Moon from My Little Ponies (or maybe it didn’t shift, and I just don’t understand the connection), so I never found out if the man-ness in question was about species or masculinity. It’s a shame, because I was very curious.
After being unsuccessful in his attempts to turn his head upside down enough that the “M” on my American Eagle shopping bag became a “W,” JJ gave up and asked me “Where’s ‘W,’ Mama?”
To which I, helpful mama that I am, replied, “Is it in your bum?”
“No. It’s poop,” said JJ.
“Is it in your nose?”
“No. It’s boo-gers.”
“Is it in your mouth?”
“No. It’s tongue.”
“Is it in your ear?”
“No. It’s spiders.”
Spiders?
I am really enjoying Two (years old, that is). The guys demonstrate new skillz pretty much every day. Their language is growing in leaps and bounds, and it is so fun to have them start communicating well enough that I get bigger and bigger glimpses of what is going on in their adorable, disproportionately huge heads (seriously, at their two-year checkup, they were both at or below average for height and weight and around the 90th percentile for head circumference). The game we play of Mama trying to figure out what the heck JJ and Linky are talking about is almost always a blast and quite satisfying. Admittedly, it is occasionally frustrating on both my end and theirs — especially when I ask for clarification and they just affirm heartily (e.g. JJ says, “More, pwease, Mama. Pwease, pwease, pwease,” and I have neither given him anything nor done anything for him in recent moments, so I ask, “More what, JJ?” In answer, JJ nods exuberantly and says, “Yeah!” Gyaaaargh!) — but I think we are pretty good at being patient with each other.
Anyway, occasionally they bust out with things that amaze me (I am willing to admit that, perhaps, I am too readily impressed) because I have no idea where they learned them. For example, when the mail comes in and gets set on the table, if we give them the opportunity (which means not standing over them every single blasted second — so basically every time), the boys will swipe the pile off the table and shuffle through it looking for something interesting (them boys love a catalog — if I try to talk to JJ while he’s perusing one, all I get is a curt, “I busy!” (sadly, I know exactly where he got that one)). Around Thanksgiving JJ came running up to me with one of his finds — a card advertising some store’s Christmas sale — and pointed excitedly at a row of lit pine trees. “Yook, mama! Chwristmass twree!”
I was then just as excited as he was because 1. Yeah! Christmas tree! (although I couldn’t wait to get ours up, I failed to make Jeff see the merits of getting our tree up the day after Thanksgiving and that event was relegated to the next weekend) and 2. Where the heck did he learn that? I mean, Jeff and I didn’t teach him that, and we hadn’t watched any Christmas shows yet or anything (I tried my darnedest to not get too excited and let Thanksgiving have its day without being mowed over by carols and tinsel and Rudolph and such), and there’s no way he remembers those words together like that from last year (when he was 14 months old and not doing much talking at all), right?
One of Link’s latest where-did-that-come-froms is the way he searches for things. He wanders around aimlessly with his hand shielding his brow while alternately calling out for the missing item — for example, “Pooooom, w’aaaaah eeeyooooooou?” (for those of you not fluent in 2-year-old mush-mouth, that’s “Spoon, where are you?”) — and tapping his chin with his index finger while going, “Hmmmmm. Hmmmmm.” As far as I can remember, I had nothing to do with his acquisition of this behavior, and, while it is pretty stinkin’ cute, I wish that whoever it was that taught it to him had also taught him how to do the actual searching more effectively because the objects invariably do not answer his calls, and the chin tapping is equally useless, so I always end up having to find them for him.
I can’t wait to see what other things Two will bring that I didn’t teach them.
WARNING: Potty talk abounds in this entry. Read at your own risk.
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While the boys were napping today, I made a batch of m&m cookies (don’t worry, this is not the potty talk part). We had a half a big bag of m&m’s left from decorating cupcakes at the boys’ birthday party, a few bags the boys got trick-or-treating, and a bunch of fun size bags left from the Halloween candy we’d handed out. I looked at all those m&m’s then down at my post-baby belly then back at the m&m’s and decided it would be a pretty bad idea to just eat them, so I decided to use them to make cookies. Seriously, that was my train of thought. You can’t just eat all of those sugary treats. But what shall I do with them? Why, just bind them together with more sugar and some carbs and lots of butter and THEN eat them! Yes, that will be good. I did catch myself on it just seconds later, but still. Sheesh. And once the cookie train gets rolling in my brain, there is no stopping it, so make cookies I did. They are tasty.
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We have done exactly nothing in the way of potty training (besides hanging the boys over the toilet a few times many months ago when they tried to poop in the tub during bath time (which they hated, so I’m sure that set all things potty back, if anything)). I figured we’d hang out outside next spring/summer while they got the hang of it so’s I wouldn’t have to clean pee out of the furniture and carpets.
Well. It turns out Lincoln may have different plans.
He came up to Jeff and me this evening saying, “Poo poo potty.” Surprised and sure I must’ve misunderstood, I asked, “You want to go poo poo in the potty?” He nodded fervently and grabbed at his butt. Still unconvinced, I shrugged at Jeff to indicate that I supposed it wouldn’t hurt to let him sit on the potty. After checking him to make sure he wasn’t telling us he’d already gone, we plopped him down on the toilet.
Like I said before, we have done nothing in the potty training way, so we have no equipment of any sort. He was just teetering on the front of the big boy seat and looked quite uncertain about it, so I sat down behind him and held him up (sometimes moms just have to do undignified things — it’s the nature of the job). I figured we’d sit for a bit, he’d get bored, and I’d put the diaper back on, and that would be that. But I’ll be danged if that little dude didn’t start grunting like he meant it, and before I knew it, “Plop!” he’d laid a little log.
Then there was much cheering and rejoicing, and Linky proudly bid his dump adieu as he flushed it away. I was so thrilled that, despite our temporal proximity to dinner, I proclaimed that he should have one of the cookies I’d so fortuitously made earlier in the day.
In an attempt to maintain at least a semblance of parental responsibility, I gave him just half a cookie. It made no difference to Lincoln. He savored that half-of-a-cookie quite seriously. He literally sat with it cradled in his hands and just sniffed it for a good ten minutes before taking a bite, and then he blissfully nibbled it out of existence. Well, not exactly out of existence. It is, as I type, traversing his digestive tract becoming the very substance that won it.
I don’t know if this was an isolated incident or if he’ll also start wanting to number one in the potty or what, but for now I am just so pleased, and I wanted to let everyone know:
LINKY POOPED IN THE POTTY!!!
Today, just two days shy of their second birthday, JJ and Link decided they needed no nap. It was quite out-of-the-blue — they haven’t been taking shorter naps lately or anything like that — and who knows what will happen tomorrow, but today they just flopped around in their cribs and talked to each other for two hours occasionally calling for Mama or Dada. Just before I went to get them, I heard this exchange over the monitor:
JJ: Punkin. Punkin. Punkin.
Link: No. No puh-kin.
JJ: Punkin.
Link: NO puh-kin!
JJ: Pump. Kin. Biiiiiiiig pumpkin. (He can say it right if he concentrates.)
Link: NOOOOO! NO PUH-KIN!
JJ: PUMPKIN! BIG PUMPKIIIIIN!
Link: NO NO PUH-KIN!
JJ: No! No way! (I’m sure this was accompanied by some shaking of his cute little finger in Link’s direction.)
Link: No PUH-KIIIIIIIIIIIIN!
JJ (simultaneously): NO WAAAAAAAAAAY!
It kind of died off after that. I couldn’t tell whether they settled on pumpkin or no pumpkin or if they just agreed to disagree.
I love to bake, but since the boys were born I haven’t had as much time to do it as I used to. I have been looking forward to the day when they could bake with me so I didn’t have to wait for them to be asleep to do it.
The day came! I did have to wait for Hazel to be asleep, but that wasn’t too hard because she still sleeps quite a bit.
We made monkey bread from a recipe on The Pioneer Woman’s website. Here’s the result (after we had sampled it):
While we were at it, JJ made a drum out of the teaspoon and measuring cup…
… and Linky made a hat out of the biscuit can.
By the way, I wouldn’t really recommend the recipe. While the preparation was super easy and had plenty of things the kids could enjoy doing, the end result was just too much with all the sugar and butter and biscuitiness. I much prefer my monkey bread to be made with a yeast dough.
I’m still really glad we did it, though, because now I know we can.
This afternoon Lincoln grabbed his butt and announced, “Poop. Poop.”
“Are you poopy?” I asked.
“Poop,” he insisted then went and lie down on the floor where we usually change their diapers.
I went over and checked his diaper. It was clean. “There’s no poop in there,” I said, at which point Lincoln started rolling around on the floor laughing.
“You think you’re sooooo funny, don’t you?” I asked him.
“Yeah.”
I would’ve thought he was too young to be playing jokes on me.
Teaching the boys to sign “more” has worked splendidly. At first they used it to ask for more goodies like Nilla Wafers or Animal Crackers. Very soon, though, signing “more” generalized to other areas of need. The boys quickly learned to use the sign if they wanted something, even if it wasn’t food, and even if it wasn’t necessarily “more” of something. Such as when Link signs “more” so that we’ll read a book to him or the time JJ tried to turn on the TV with the remote and when it didn’t work, he came over to me and signed “more.”
It’s been fun to watch the boys’ communication change over time as well. Over the past month or two, the boys have become beggars whenever there is food around. I no longer eat meals at the dining room table, because doing so means I am swarmed by JJ and Link who desperately want to sample whatever I am eating. Instead, I eat in the gated safety of the kitchen. Let me tell you that standing up while eating is weak.
Anyways, with this begging comes their new way of asking for food. They probably picked this up from feedings where they get the usual “Open up your mouths, say ahhhhh!” Begging for food now comes with the ever-so-cute “Ahhhh!” In JJ’s case, it sounds more like “ahhhhm!”
Watching TV and Begging for Food.
The boys are also picking up new words and last week JJ started using “nana” when he wanted to get some banana. Of course, he couldn’t just say “nana” — he had to do it in a cute sing-songy kind of way.
Link has developed the very unfortunate habit of being a difficult eater. Primarily, his misbehavior during meal times consists of pulling out partially-chewed pieces of food from his mouth. Once it’s out, it usually ends up being smashed on his tray, and, in many instances, smeared on his face or in his hair. Every once in awhile, when Link doesn’t feel like eating for one reason or another, he’ll take whatever food is on his tray and swipe both of his hands back and forth so that all of the food flies onto the floor. One of the reasons he does this is to obviously amuse himself, but another reason is to leave little presents for himself for later when he wants a snack — all he has to do is pick the goodies up off the floor.
So today, the boys were having lunch, which consisted of little cut-up pieces of hot dogs and string cheese. JJ neatly and carefully ate as he watched TV from his high chair. Megan cut up some grapes and JJ really, really loved them. Megan gave him a few, he gobbled them up, and he signed for more. Megan told him that he had to eat more of his hot dog before he could get more grapes. She went over to the couch for a bit and when she came back to check on JJ, he had quietly eaten his hot dog so she gave him the grapes she’d promised.
Link, though, was having none of this thing called “lunch.” The boy refused to eat, laughed at our attempts to coax him into dining, and did his swiping thing so that hot dog and cheese and fruit ended up all over the floor. Megan wondered aloud why Link had to be such a pain in the butt about eating, while his sweet twin brother was such a good eater.
A few minutes later, JJ had finished up his food and it was time to pull the boys out of their chairs so they could go down for a nap. I picked up Link’s mess and got him out of his chair. Megan got JJ out of his chair and when she removed his bib she discovered his dirty little secret. She showed me the contents of the large pocket at the bottom of his bib.
It was full of teeny pieces of hot dog.