Hannah Enjoys People

Andrew and I were reading a book before bed, like normal, and I knew Libby and Hannah were trying to settle in for the night in the other room. Then I looked up and, surprise, there was Hannah! Her face was lit up in a huge grin as she crawled slowly into the room. Her crawling was a bit labored because she was wearing her "squirrel suit", but she was persistent!

This was just the most fun. It made me so happy.

Hannah is a people person for sure. I came home from work yesterday and found her in fine form: super happy and bubbly. I suspect it's because she spent all day with Emma and Grandma Moothart. While new people and strange places can make her clingy at first, her disposition appears to be people-focused as a default.

The Many Hats of Parenthood

Today was a typical Sunday. Driving home from church, my mind wandered over my day today and, though it was unremarkable, it struck me just how different my life has become as the parent of two. It is full of infinite variety!

Just since when the toddler came out of his room at 6:55 this morning (which is later than typical), I have been a dinosaur, a quarterback, the axis of a spinning toddler, an engineer, a conductor, a baseball player, a cook, a reader, a dishwasher, a story-teller, a nurse, a chew toy, a comforter, a heavy equipment operator, a naturalist, a custodian, a child psychologist, a religious instructor, a spiritual counselor, a law-giver, an enforcer of those laws, a nap companion, a singer, a snuggler, a diaper changer, a potty enabler, a confection-monger, a chaufer, a manservant, a lady's maid, a confidant, had my arm hair pulled out and my head hair tugged (by different children) and more.

Parenting (particularly of toddlers) is so demanding of your time and resources that one feels there isn't much of a chance left to be... just... you. It is a unique time of self-sacrifice and a particular opportunity for its own kind of sanctification. However, it's also shallow. I'm not qualified or particularly good at any of the things that I did today. I am not performing any of these roles in a way that will improve me in them.

I'm not complaining, though. It's a magical time of my life.

Reflecting on it is one way to make it mine.

Mystery Adjective

For months, Andrew's had an adjective we couldn't figure out: "ponen." He doesn't use it all the time, and in fact I hadn't heard it recently before yesterday, and I think he knew we didn't know what it meant because he didn't repeat it very often when pressed. Anyway, yesterday, I think I figured it out it is a corruption of "important." He said something about a "ponen train." But I'm not sure!

Language development is one of the most fascinating parts of toddlerhood. Vocabularly, parts of speech, tenses, it's hard for a little mind to figure it all out. Andrew's grammar is still developing, too. His subject verb agreement is regularly wrong, but he's quick to correct it if he hears you say it correctly.

Also, reading is so incredibly hard. The other day, Andrew tried to read an exclamation point for the first time. He thought it was an "i." And so, you have to explain punctuation as well as vocabularly and grammar. Plus, lower case and upper case letters often look so different. He sometimes has a hard time with p, d, q, and b. They are very similar!

Funny Conversations

A couple of humorous conversations yesterday with Andrew.

In the afternoon, I was outside for a little while, and when I came in, Andrew was standing next to Grandma sans pants. She was holding up his pants and had his shoes sitting next to her.

I was very surprised. "What happened to your pants?"

Grandma said, "He came over here without pants."

I continued, "Did you take your pants off?"

He noded. I picked him up and found he needed a diaper change, so I carried him upstairs. As I did, he exclaims happily, "I took off my pants!" Great to acquire new skills, but I have no idea why he took off his pants at that moment. It was pretty bizarre. It's hard to get him to try taking off of his own clothes, normally.

When we were upstairs and I was changing his diaper, he says, "I take off my penis!"

"No, that doesn't come off."

A reinforcing conversation on the unique and private nature of penises, including how girls don't have them, was interrupted by an exclamation, "Girls have small penises!"

"No, they don't have any penises. Only boys have penises."

"Girls have HAIR penises!"

Libby and I looked at each other in shock. What the?

"No, girls don't have any penises."

We've tried to make this a normal and unremarkable part of his anatomy, but for some reason it has a fascination to him.