Made in Richmond

The 2:53 mark. That. THAAAAAAT.

All the rest is incredibly accurate as well. If you’ve had a week like we have, you should watch it and laugh. Because laughing is more productive than screaming “OH GAWD TODDLERZZZZZZZ.”

JR is a bit hesitant when it comes to new experiences. Add in his aversion to getting messy (we’re indoor people, ok?) and it can make some of the typical summer pastimes a bit challenging.

I talked to his teachers about his cautious nature at our conference a couple weeks ago, and they assured me that it was nothing major to worry about — just a personality thing that we would be grateful for when he’s 16 and his friends are off acting like boneheads as he’s saying to them “Whatever, dudes, I’m not trying to die.”* They also added that he always does whatever it is you’re asking him to do…he’s just going to do it on his own time.

Well, today was apparently his time.

Ladies and gentlemen, we now have a little boy who is in love with the sprinkler**. And for whatever reason, I could not be more proud of him. Way to go, kid.

*We call this “being the dad” which, funny enough, his dad totally is in his group of friends.
**While he’s pretty into running through the sprinkler, he was more stoked when I turned the water down a bit so he could observe how it moved and clean off his flip flops. Nerd.

This is pretty much how our morning was:

So JR’s teacher does this thing where at the start of the day she has the kids “turn on their ears.” They all hold their chubby little toddler fingers up to their ears and say “Beep beep beep!” Should one of the kids act out a bit or ignore an instruction, her first course of action is to ask him if his ears are on. I think this is genius; it’s such a nice alternative to saying “Are you listening to me?” 18,000 times a day.

After seeing her do this, I decided we would try it at home. Two great things have happened as a result:

1) JR listens better. We are all generally less frustrated and I feel less like a nagging wench.

2) In the event that JR *doesn’t* listen, leading to us disciplining him and him inevitably crying over getting a time out, 9 times out of 10, he will shout desperately through his tears “I WANNA LISTEN WITH MY EARS BEEP BEEP BEEP.”

It’s pretty much the most adorable thing ever.

I was going to write a big, reflective* post about this, but, quite frankly, I’m busy hanging out with my awesome kid. So know this:

Monday was my first day as a (mostly**) Stay-At-Home-Mother. I’m stoked and totally terrified. But it’s going to be awesome, I just know it.

Yeah, he’s pretty excited too.***

*You can read about my official exit here.
**I’ll still be working for our church on Wednesdays mornings and Thursday afternoons. JR will be in daycare on those days — at least until we’re too broke to afford it.
***Yes, he’s holding an iPhone. We removed all the apps off of my old one, and he uses it as a camera. You can check out his photos here.

This evening was one of the more challenging ones we’ve spent with JR in a good long while. There was much crying, an unending chorus of “NO!”, lots of time-outs, and even more glances at the clock to see if it was bedtime yet. And when I say “glances” I mean silent but desperate pleas for the numbers to change more quickly so it could just be 7:00 already.

Later as I was trying to get JR changed into his pajamas, he turned up the two-year-old to 11. I had nothing left in my parenting arsenal.

So I tickled him.

And tickled and tickled and tickled until we were both giggling messes and no one was frustrated anymore.

I’m not sure if it will ever work again, but I was stoked that such an odd impulse worked so well.

Last Saturday morning, JR woke up a little earlier than usual. Since he wasn’t crying or hollering for us (most mornings start with “MAMA! MAMA WHERE AHHH YOU? I’M RIGHT HERE COME GET JAY-R!”) we decided to let him talk to himself for a while so we could get a little more rest.

I stumbled into his room about 30 minutes later (yes, he is good to us) to find JR lounging in the corner of his bed. He looked up at me, waved, and said “Mama, there’s dirt on my hand.”

He had taken a bath the night before. He went to bed right after his bath. He hadn’t gotten out of bed yet that morning. There was no reason for there to be dirt on his hand.

Well. It wasn’t dirt.

Needless to say, after frantically bathing him, brushing his teeth (because OH GOD), and changing his sheets and blankets, we spent the day saying, “JR, no matter what, do NOT put your hand in your diaper.”

(Hold me.)

My dad and stepmom took a trip out west last summer. Upon their return, they brought with them a cowboy hat and Yellowstone National Park “sheriff’s” star for JR.

“Perfect!” I thought. “He can be a cowboy for Halloween. Done and done.”

And then I didn’t think about it for four months because, hey! I already had it figured out.

As it got closer to Halloween, we tried to introduce JR to the concept of dressing up as a cowboy. We would casually suggest that he wear the hat. Gently encourage him to belt out a “Yee-haw!” Give him ever-so-delicate guidance to try on a bandanna.

No dice. He wanted NOTHING to do with them.

Our friend Sarah offered up her daughter’s frog costume from a couple years ago. It’s basically a pair of pajamas with a hood that happens to feature eyeballs. I thought surely he would go for it.

Well. When I attempted to get JR to try it on the day before Halloween, he had a total meltdown, complete with flopping himself on the floor, gasping “No!” through tears.

I put on the brakes at that point.

He’s not even two. He won’t remember this at all. He needs to look at Halloween as a fun evening to be spent with his friends and family, not a time that his parents force him to put on weird clothes for their amusement.

So, I found a red T-shirt and painted some black stripes on it, stuck him in a pair of black pants, handed him his blue blanket, and boom! We had a very happy Linus:

Here he is with his friend (and godbrother, if that’s a thing) Jack, who happens to be sporting the lion costume that JR happily wore last year — back before he had opinions on things.

I’ve had a rough time the last couple weeks with JR’s day care situation. It comes in waves, really. Some days I have no problem with it at all, others I get choked up dropping him off and fight off chest pains throughout the day because I miss him so much.

I love my job. I really do. And thankfully it gives me a lot of flexibility — after all, I do get to spend most Fridays with him. But I still have a hard time with the fact that when you look at his waking hours during the week, JR is with his day care teachers slightly more than he is with us.

Day care has been great for him. He’s the youngest in his class, an arrangement that I think has been great for his verbal development. He loves his teachers, rarely gets sad when we drop him off (and if he is, he easily goes to his teachers for comfort), and is always, always, always happy when we pick him up at the end of the day.

But still.

I worry about his friendships. He has little friends in his class, but we don’t really know their parents, so there’s little chance to grow those relationships outside of school — and our already insane schedules don’t really cater to extracurricular hangouts. Meanwhile, I have friends with kids his age, but we also don’t have a lot of opportunities to hang out with them (other than church, etc.), so he doesn’t really have a chance to grow those relationships either. I realize he’s not even 2 years old, but I think about these things.

I worry about paying for it. We’re still at a point where it makes sense financially for me to keep working, but it pains me to write that check each week.

I worry about emergencies. Obviously he’s in good hands at school, but if something were to happen to him and I weren’t there…oh, let’s not talk about that anymore.

Most of all, I worry about missing things. His teachers are great about letting us know about his day, but on those evenings when he’s a raging maniac and we face tantrum after tantrum, I wonder if something happened (however small) that threw him off.

Oh, what to do? I love this kid and I want to make sure I’m doing right by him. What that looks like? I have not a clue.

The three of us walk, hand-in-hand, up to the door of JR’s school. We spot our reflection in the glass doors.

“I forget sometimes how little he is,” Ross says, laughing.

***

It’s close to midnight and Ross and I peek in on JR sleeping. He’s sprawled out in his crib, taking up every bit of space.

“He’s such a giant,” Ross whispers.

***

JR is currently standing with one foot firmly planted in boyhood and the other standing on tiptoe in the baby version of himself. He’s changing right in front of our eyes — sometimes it is so obvious and seems to happen so quickly that I feel my heart twisting in my chest. And then I hear songs like this and cry and nod and cry some more because it says it better than I ever could.