Firetrucks and parenting

A recent (abridged) conversation over lots of screaming & tears while trying to leave the house in the morning:

Me: "Larson, would you like to put your shoes on, or would you like me to do it?"

Larson: "I want to do it!"

Me: "Ok, then, please put them on."

(L continues to play with truck)

Me: "Ok, well, if you're not going to do it, then I will."

Larson: "NO!!!!! I WANT TO DO IT MYSELF!"

(a couple more rounds of this...)

Me: "Ok, then please do it yourself or I'm going to pick you up and put you in the car without your shoes on."

(L plays with shoes, but doesn't put them on)

Me: "Alright, Larson, you're not listening. We're going in the car."

(LOTS of screaming as I pick him up, carry him to the car and practically sit on him to get the car seat buckled)

Sound familiar to anyone? I realized many months ago that negotiating with a toddler is pretty much a dead end and not really somewhere I want to go anymore. Fun times are not had by anyone. However, I'm not perfect and sometimes find myself doing it despite my best efforts. But really, who is in charge here? It's definitely not the 2 year old! I have to laugh at how commonly the toddler seems to rule the family. Sometimes I feel that actually having rules makes me the odd parent out, if you will. I was recently at a birthday party for one of Larson's friends and gave him the one minute warning (aka: time to leave soon). Another parent looked at me and said, "Yeah, right!" It took me a second before I realized what he meant was that it was a given that Larson wouldn't listen to me. I must have looked confused before I said, "well, actually, he knows that when the minute is up, I'll just pick him up and put him in the car, so yes, he probably will listen to me!" The look on this guy's face was quite entertaining, as if the idea had never occurred to him...

A woman at work told me this week that she read a study by the phone companies stating kids in college call their parents as many as 6-8 times a day. A day? I didn't even call my parents that many times in a week! My sister told me about a recent article in Business Week about business schools noting the increasing presence of parents in the application process. Whoa. This is a whole new level of the parent-teacher conference. What is going on here? Why are we so focused on pampering and spoiling our kids so that they will never encounter anything unpleasant in life? So they never experience frustration, disappointment, feeling "deprived"? Is that actually a good thing?

Granted, these situations are actually not that common in our house but regardless, do I like hearing all that screaming and crying? No, I hate it. It's definitely not the easy way out in the moment. But would I rather have Larson scream for 15 minutes because I made him get in the car/go to bed/sit at the table to have a snack, than have him grow up thinking that the world revolves around him and what he wants? Definitely.

All the above photos were taken last weekend at our local firehouse's "open house", where kids had free rein to climb all over the trucks. Very cool!

3 months old already

I can hardly believe that 3+ months have already gone by since we brought Cora home. It's actually kind of hard to get a good photo these days because she is constantly in motion. The one above was the best of about 15 that I took! She is a very social girl and loves to laugh and smile (sometimes all it takes is a laugh from someone else and she'll start in), but I haven't managed to get her to laugh and take the shot all at the same time...
Cora is definitely going to be a lap baby. There is a very frustrated, loud cry she has that's just reserved for when you put her down and she still wanted to be held (which is pretty much all the time anyway...) It's like she has her own little language. And the pouty lip comes out when she's mad about that, too -- so cute!
Other recent developments: Going for walks facing out in the baby bjorn/moby
Loves sucking on her fists
Discovering her hands, but still not quite sure of how they work
Likes sitting up or standing on your lap
Can be very chatty when in a good mood

Larson enjoys holding Cora on his lap occasionally, but will last about 2 minutes before he declares, "I'm all done." I suppose that's better then just shoving her aside! He's really been a great big brother so far: he's so interested in what she's doing, love giving her hugs and declaring "I love you, Cora" without any prompting from mom or dad. He also likes to name all the toys she can play with when she's bigger (no, Barbies aren't one of them, it's pretty much diggers and other various trucks) and the food she can one day try (mostly candy, which he's been fixated on since Halloween...).

I just love watching these two little guys with their developing personalities and skills. The time is so precious because I know I will blink and they will be leaving the nest soon enough. Here's Larson hard at work in his new playspace that he and dad worked on a couple weeks ago. We've had to get creative in our tiny house as our family has expanded, but at least it gives us an excuse to control the amount of stuff we have!

Halloween!

Yes, I know it's November, but I know there are some very eager grandparents, aunts, etc out there who didn't want to totally miss out on all the fun. Larson was very excited to be a pirate this year. He obviously had no recollection that he was also a pirate last year, or at least didn't seem to mind wearing his costume again. I didn't mind either, because my mom sewed him this really, really cute costume last year and I was quite happy to get it out again. We added a cool hat this year but I wasn't quite ready to get him a sword or any other kind of weapon. (Isn't it just so great that there are all these little kids out there who are in love with pirates but have absolutely no idea what a pirate actually is???) Here are Larson and two of his pirate friends:
Our Halloween festivities basically consisted of a boisterous party at Larson's school, then pumpkin carving at home with the family. It was really fun to see how changed Larson was this year compared to last at the same party. Last Halloween he really didn't have much of an idea about what was really going on and many of the activities and games they had were over his head. This year he could kind of do his own thing, with supervision from a few feet back as he made the rounds. My baby is growing up!

This is probably one of the favorite activites: the cookie decorating table! Above are Larson and friend Theo enjoying unbridled access to frosting and sprinkles. (too unbridled: Larson took the spoon in the bowl with chocolate chips - meant to get the chips onto your napkin, of course, and basically just shoveled an entire spoonful directly from the bowl into his mouth:)

Larson was a big helper with the pumpkin carving while Cora kept watch from her swing (see above...) I couldn't find the cute cat pattern that I used last year, so both pumpkins just got funny faces.

Happy Halloween to all the little ghosts and goblins out there!

Lagging behind...

In my posts, that is. We've had a busy few weeks in our household. First off, Brett was in Australia on a business trip for 2+ weeks at the end of October, so that presented some interesting challenges. Enter Grandma and Grandpa to help keep our family in one piece until he returned. Then multiple birthdays, a trip to the pumpkin patch and, of course, Halloween. I think I will probably turn all these happenings into a couple posts, rather than try to get it all in at once.

So Australia: Brett was in Brisbane which, for the uninitiated to the Southern Hemisphere, is on the eastern coast of Australia. He really enjoyed the friendliness of the people he met there and, despite having a very busy work schedule, was able to visit the Great Barrier Reef for a day just before the trip home. Maybe I can persuade him to do a post on his own about his experiences.

Enter Grandma to help out while he was gone (thank goodness!). She got to meet Cora for the first time and was a big help with both little ones. We ladies held down the fort just fine, thank you very much...

Our October would not have been complete without a trip to the pumpkin patch. We chose a different farm this year, and really enjoyed our trip. Just like our drive last year to pumpkin-land, we left on a very foggy morning and it was just so beautiful to be out in the fields as the fog burned off. A little cold, though, as you can see from Larson's bundling up. It didn't really occur to me to check the weather where we were actually going, instead of just in our neighborhood :)

The highlight of the entire outing for Larson was undoubtably the GREEN tractors that pulled the hay wagons. Picking a pumpkin was definitely secondary! Note the green pumpkin carefully selected by him at the farm. Our neighbors across the street joked with us that they knew which pumpkin on our balcony was Larson's and were chuckling to themselves as they watched it get more and more orange (and less and less green) every day.

The following weekend (still sans dad) was my first back on call, so more reinforcements (ie, Grandpa) were flown in. Everyone rose to the occasion wonderfully and we got through the weekend quite smoothly. Larson got to go "trick or treating" in our neighborhood downtown (for some reason they do it the weekend before Halloween) and his Grandma was very proud to report to me that he said "Thank You" unprompted to every person who gave him a treat. That's my guy!

Stay tuned for more on Halloween and our little 3 month old!

2 months!

Our little girl is now 2 months old; it seems like both just yesterday and eons ago that we brought her home (the latter usually at night :). She weighed in at 11.5 pounds and charmed the pants off her pediatrician with her big smiles during the whole check up. That's my girl! I checked with Larson's records and she's just a wee bit smaller but about the same percentiles (~75th). Here she is on her two month birthday:

And here's how she felt about getting her 2 month immunizations:

But she soon recovered and gave a few more smiles for the camera so I could capture for posterity how cute she looks in her hand-knitted-by-Aunt-Kate green sweater.

And a closeup of her first hair accessory (this one's for you, Amy!) which conveniently matched the sweater. This picture is actually supposed to be sideways, but I couldn't get blogger to upload it that way...Sadly, the pacifier was a necessity to get through all the picture-taking. Whew, what torture I subject my children to! Other developments this past week include lots of cooing and verbalizations, longer sleeping at night (hallelujah!), and a clever armlifting maneuver used to push the pacifier back in (do you discover your forearms before your hands?) No, I'm not kidding about the last one, it was witnessed and confirmed by Grandma.

Lest I forget updates on the toddler front, here are some shots of a boy and his diggers. Believe it or not, all said diggers below are actually community property at our local park. We showed up one day at the sandbox and there they all were, anonymously donated by some good soul, who was, I presume, looking for a way to recycle all the toys taking up space in their garage. A great solution for all involved!

We also discovered today that our park has a little climbing wall! Here's Larson, showing dad how it's done. The backwards hat means the job was serious business.

Mid-September Update

A couple of weekends ago we had a reunion with our PEPS group. This is a group of families that we were matched with a couple of months after Larson was born for support and friendship. The weekly meetings have long since ended, but we still love to get together every now and then to see how all the little ones have grown. See Nate below, rocking out on his kid-sized guitar! It was a lot of fun and even more chaotic now that 4 siblings have been added to the mix!

Yes, boring title for the post, but we've just been ticking along without any truly major happenings. Sometimes that's a good thing! I started my MPH classes last week, so that presented a fun new set of challenges, but so far everything is going well. It's quite different to be a student in the post-wireless-perpetual-web-access era...all the students in my classes who I presume to be a generation younger than me just whip out their laptops every day. I actually showed up the first day with *gasp!* notebook & pen! Not to worry, I have all the class webpages bookmarked and am so far keeping up with the electronic parts of my education.

Cora is starting to engage more with the world these days and it's a lot of fun to see that there is, in fact, a little personality developing in there. Still can't go for more than an hour or so without getting cranky and in need of a nap, but it's so much fun to see her looking around and smiling when she's up for "playtime."
We're enjoying (probably) the last remnants of warm weather this week, but you can definitely feel the transition to fall, as the sun comes up later and later each morning. Even though fall and winter are my favorite times of year (yes, can you believe a native Minnesotan would tout winter as her favorite season?), I always get a little sad every year when my alarm clock no longer goes off before the sun comes up.
We set up the playmat below for Cora's enjoyment, but I think Larson has spent more time on it than she has :) He was showing her "how it worked" in the picture below. Hard to believe when they're laying side-by-side that Larson was once that small! How time does pass quickly...

Hope everyone has a great week!

Smiles and strikes

Well, it turns out the Boeing machinists aren't the only people on strike. Larson is currently on a nap strike. Over the past couple of months he's occasionally had "no nap" days, but since Labor Day and moving into a new room at school, it's been a more frequent occurrence. But surely missing a little 1.5-2h nap in the afternoon could hardly be a big deal, right? Well, let me just invite you to come to our house from 5pm until about 8pm on no-nap days and you can observe the fallout firsthand! It's like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde...

Well rested, Larson is such a delight. Creative, agreeable, talkative, inquisitive, and most of all compliant. Sleep-deprived and all self-control goes out the window! Lots of crying and screaming over every little thing so that we spend most of our evening trying to get him into bed "early" only to barely get the pajamas on and the lights out by the usual time. What a trial! No fun for anyone involved, I can assure you. To his defense, I think he does try to fall asleep at naptime, but can you blame a curious and energetic 2+ year old boy for not being able to fall asleep in a non-dark, slightly noisy room full of other curious and energetic kids?

If anyone out there has any experience with this or suggestions, we are open to them! Of course, all the guilt has begun anew for me because he will, of course, take a rather long nap in his own bed on the weekends. I can't help but feel that it is my responsibility as a parent to provide the conditions to allow my child to be well-rested. If only I could magically have him here every day with me from 1-4pm...

On a slightly more uplifting note, we've had our first smiles from Cora! It may not appear like much in the photo below, but I can assure you that this was the real deal. I'm just not adept enough yet at our new super-duper camera to capture it perfectly for preservation. Not to worry, though, I'm sure there will be more to come!