Yesterday morning I suggested to little J that he wear a red shirt for Valentine's Day. Apparently, I shouldn't of mentioned such a thing because red and pink are FOR GIRLS. He informed me that he was going to wear green and blue. And Batman. He first put on a green t-shirt followed by a long sleeve blue t-shirt. The outfit was completed by a too-tight batman t-shirt worn over the first 2 shirts.
Once we were dressed we finally made it to pre-school, valentines in hand. The first thing he said to me when he got in the car was, "I got a lot of girl things." As he looked through his valentines in the backseat I heard him mumble "I'm tired of this girl stuff." I informed him that I was happy to take any of the "girl stuff" off of his hands. To my surprise he said okay. I wasn't sure if I should give him a talk about how there are probably things that he likes inside the pink Barbie bags or should I just hope for lots of gummy hearts? Instead I settled for "Well do you think the girls liked your Superman valentines and tatoos?". He responded with a look of shock that said "why WOULDN'T you like Superman and that you can never have enough tatoos with a big S on it". So much for that strategy.
When we got to the Dairy Queen parking lot to meet a friend for lunch I helped him do the dirty work of looking inside the pink bags. I discovered a very nice pink pencil with hearts on it that he immediatly looked scared of. I suggested that maybe he give it to our friend Ashley, who was meeting us for lunch, for Valentine's Day. He said that he couldn't because if he touched it, he might turn into a girl.
Valentine's Day is for girls
Denial and Dissaproval
A few weeks ago I was discussing with a counselor friend how Jake and I wanted to talk to little J about something. She cautioned that he might not take it well.
She was right.
You would have thought that we had told him that there was a new law in our town banning super hero pajamas, orange juice, and PBS kids (all of our favs) instead of that he was going to be a big brother.
His response to "there is a baby in mommy's tummy" was first giggles and then "no there's not."
After a little convincing there was loud, vocal dissaproval:
"I don't want a baby"
"This is NOT good news"
and our favorite, though we don't know what it means: "I quit".
He went through those first stages of mourning pretty quickly and soon moved on to acceptance. He often asks how the baby is doing and reminds me to be careful. But he would rather tell people about his Super Heros Team video than the fact he is going to be a big brother. And he did come with me to hear the baby's heartbeat at my 15 week appointment this morning but it got old pretty quickly and asked to go to nurses station to talk about Power Rangers (which is what he did when he had to come with mommy to the doctor when he wasn't in the know).
While I was sleeping
For a while I've been complaining about my pink blog and the other night, after I went to bed, Jake did some redecorating(don't worry Sarah, who just put together a very similar pink blog of her own, it needed to be done anyway!). You might have seen the flowers, if you didn't, don't worry because you didn't miss much. It was, well, flowery. So last night I picked out this template and even though the directions were in spanish, my computer crazed husband still attempted it. As I was going to bed I heard him shout "Why?", "No", and "Don't make me come in there" to the computer screen. I started to feel bad and let him know that he could pick something in English as long as it wasn't the flowers. He said "what kind of challange would that be?" So I woke up to this new blog. What do you think? I'm just hoping it inspires me to post more!
The Name Game
Life was so much easier when Jonah was two and into Elmo since I already knew of Big Bird, Cookie Monster, and the Count. But now that J is almost five its getting more complicated.
Recently I've been quizzed on the alter egos of all super heroes and fail most of the time. I've got Bruce Wayne and Clark Kent down, but I cannot keep the aliases of the Flash, the Green Lantern or Robin straight. I can get away with calling Wonder Women "Princess Diana" (what is her last name???).
And to further throw me off we randomly checked out a Rescue Heroes video from the free kid shelf at the video store. I have no idea how many differnt Rescue Heros there are, but its a lot! J has this game where he gets out his 7 or so small stuffed animals and gives them all a name based on the "thing" that he is into. Elmo, Gorilla, dinosaur, and the rest then act out the story. He was so mad at me because I could ONLY think of the names of 6 heroes. Poor Beary {a stuffed bear dressed in camo) did not have a name and therefore the game just wouldn't work!
Too Many Eggs
No, this is not a trip down memory lane, this is a picture from last week, not last Easter! Somehow I ended up with 1 1/2 cartons of eat-me-now-eggs. For some reason I lose the ability to look at expiration dates when I walk across the aisle from the milk to the eggs.
So I hard boiled 17 eggs and had them cooling in a large pot. Jonah came in the kitchen and asked what I was going to do with "those eggs"? He doesn't like eggs so I wasn't really sure why he cared to know but I told him that I was thinking about making some deviled eggs. He then asked what is probably on all 4 year old's minds when they see a large pot full of WHITE eggs- can we color them? I was to tempted to give a boring mom response such as
"Its not Easter!"
but instead I asked a logical mom question "What are we going to color them with?"
He obviously wanted the creative mom response because he asked if I could find something in the cabinet.
I then remembered my childhood days when you associated coloring eggs with the strong smell of vinegar. Then I recalled my friend Lisa mentioning that her mom always just used vinegar and food coloring. I DID have those things in my cabinet! I probably could have found a more accurate recipe online but we were being creative, right? So this is what we came up with:
Homemade Egg Dye
(measurements are app., we just poured...)
3 cups (one each in yellow, blue and red- if you have it)
1/8 c. water per cup
1/3 c. vinger per cup
6 drops of food coloring per cup (we just used primary colors and then dipped our eggs in 2 cups to make more colors, or sometimes all 3 cups or the same cup twice...).
Our eggs ended up with several finger prints on them when J handled them right away, but they dried nicely. Maybe we shouldn't have added the water. Oh well, it was an experiment and kept us busy on a cold January morning!
What happened to "cheese"?
So I realize that I have been slacking in the blog department lately. Normally a situation occurs and I think "I should blog about that". The blog might stay in my mind for a few days until I remember to "spit it out" while working on the computer. But recently my blogs, or my could-be-blogs have been about words. By words I mean something that little J has said or words he confused or something along those lines. For some reason they are not sticking in my head, they leave before I have had a chance to spit them out. Is that my age talking? But today a friend e-mailed and asked where some recent pics were. I then was able to connect that with this story, the only "word" blog that I can remember. Maybe I just need concrete associations... Anyway, here goes:
I hope this story doesn't offend anyone or gross anyone out, but the above picture was taken during our Christmas picture photo shoot. During that time little J was becoming a little restless and as a result was saying several words instead of "cheese". Most of these words were Christmas words, such as Christmas tree, presents, snow and stockings. What we didn't see coming, as you can see from the above picture, was the next photo buzz word, which was diarrhea (of all things). Now, to give you a little background, he did have an unfortunate bout of the above illness at least a month prior to our "photo shoot". He was staying with Grandma and Grandpa and had an incident that was both messy and embarrassing for him (maybe it was more messy for Grandma). But Grandma explained that what he had was diarrhea and that people get it sometimes. She also said that its not something that we talk about often, especially around girls because they do not like to talk that kind of thing. Since then he has been very matter of fact if he mentions the D word and also showed concern if thought someone else might be experiencing it.
So I'm not sure why he brought it up in such a way that day. I guess Mommy doesn't count as a girl, he knows that Daddy will talk about most ANYTHING of that nature and that our photographer, a young male recent college grad (Jake's office mate) was all about the bathroom humor. But it got us to laugh, so I guess if cheese doesn't work next time...