Christmas came and went with the customary blend of chaos and calm, impatience and panic and joy and melancholy, family and friends and too many awkward-shaped boxes to wrap, food prep and overindulgence and crankiness born of exhaustion. Alex was wildly disproportionate in his glee on Christmas morning, exclaiming stridently over a 20-cent Spider-Man Frisbee and a hollow plastic candy cane filled with Hershey Kisses, and dismissing the FRIGGIN TRAMPOLINE with a polite but disingenuous “Oh, wow, I like that too!” (In his defense, the unmarked box full of poles and netting didn’t look quite so impressive as one might have hoped and I’m not sure he understood exactly what it was.) He got lots of games with little pieces, and to my dismay I keep finding tiny bones from the Operation man lying around the house, and blocks of ice (from Don’t Break The) keep appearing in random places. Chutes and Ladders is a new favorite, although when he loses (and hard as I try sometimes when I’m not in the mood for the fallout, I can’t seem to throw a game of chance) he is not what one would call a good sport about it. “Oh NO!” he melodramas. “I’m not any good at it! I’ll NEVER WIN!” We’re workin’ on it.
Before:
After:
Our annual post-Christmas trip to Houston to see our Texas family was nice. My baby boy insisted on sitting in a seat on the airplane by himself, with the aisle separating him from us. He was content to “read” his books and look out the window and drink his Sprite and eat his little pretzels. I remember the panicky flights of yore, my carry-on filled with a solution to every conceivable problem: Boredom? Toys, books, movies, games. Sleepiness: Blanket, stuffed animals, pacifier. Meltdown? Emergency chocolate stash! Once, when he was about two and a half, he realized he had the upper hand (when we’re not surrounded by innocent captive passengers we never lose the upper hand, mind you) and began demanding a steady stream of Dum-Dums until we were safely on the ground and able to balance the power scale. I guess we have these things to look forward to from BB at some point, while Alex will no doubt opt to sit farther and farther away from us with each successive year.
He had a blast with his cousins, Elizabeth and Emily, and Steven’s friend Jeremy’s kids, Hunter and Tyler. Five munchkins between the ages of 3 and 5, running wild in the upstairs play room on the hunt for Alex’s “Mystery Maker” and their ever-missing light sticks. (We later realized why the light sticks kept disappearing when I overheard Alex say, “Let’s play Hide the Light Stick again!”) Whether a natural leader or a Jim Jones in the making, Alex gave me cause for concern with his bossy tendencies, which I’ve never had occasion to see on display quite so vividly. At one point he organized a cleanup of the playroom and I heard him announce, “I keep telling you! This is not play time, this is cleanup time.” (I had a talk with him that night about bossiness, and how to suggest things to friends instead of giving orders, and he did put the strategies into action the next day, thank God. Or maybe he was just lulling me into a false sense of security so that I’ll drink the Kool-Aid too!)
I enjoyed every second I got to hold my sweet 2-month-old nephew Charlie. I thought about asking to borrow him to tide me over until June, but, nice as my sister- and brother-in-law are, they might balk at fostering out their third-born. I did, however, do enough cuddling, smelling, kissing of peach-fuzzy head, and patting of puffy diaper-clad rear end to scratch my baby itch for a while.
And shhh, don’t tell him I told you this, but Steven admitted, of his own accord, that seeing Charlie got him really excited about ours. He can join the club.
He'll (or she'll) be playing soccer in your midsection before you know it.
ReplyDelete