30 months: All the small things

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It’s kind of amazing how each weekend brings little doses of new words, phrases, behaviors. I get to see Holden for about an hour each morning during the week and that’s it. I drop him off at school and I go to work and I’m at work until after he goes to bed. It makes weekends more precious (and weekends spent working more dreadful) but it also makes his little changes seem much bigger to me when I get to witness them in action.

Today I noticed a new behavior: Putting his finger to his mouth and shushing. Ha! They must do that at school. We have never done that at home and he hasn’t watched anything like that he could mimic.

Other newish things, now that we are at 30 months (!!!):

• He is so tall and lean for his age that he’s still wearing some 18-24 month pants. They fit at the waist but they are basically capris on him. He looks so silly and adorable. And often has plumber’s crack because the rise is meant for shorter babies.

• He wears boxer briefs and looks so unbelievably cute running around in them.

• He says the alphabet (gets a little hung up at the beginning — “A B A B E F G…” — but always crescendoes into a really excited Z.

• He is recognizing letters. He has beautiful animal flashcards Tabitha gave us way back when but I don’t bust those out too often because I want to preserve them. So Ray made him some flashcards on sticky notes, and he picks them up randomly and says what they are. Except today he insisted that U was an A, and would not take my protests seriously.

• He loves to sing “Twinkle Twinkle” and gets so beside himself when he sees moons and stars. In the morning I will often hear him wake up and start singing “Twinkle Twinkle” or the alphabet song first thing. It’s cripplingly sweet, wafting across the monitor.

• He is so into sticks. Big sticks, little sticks, little pine needles he calls sticks. He finds one and wants to take it with him everywhere. We have had some epic meltdowns over having to leave a stick outside when we come in.

• We’re all done with the highchair and he’s eating all his meals at his little table and chair Grammy got him for his birthday. They do this at school so all it took was a little peer pressure to get the idea. He still likes to get up and run around and smear peanut butter on things when given the chance, but I totally get that.

• He has his basic colors down (yellow, green, orange, blue, red) and we’re trying to teach him weird colors like “grey.” He seems skeptical.

• I used to play “Airplane” with him — lying on my back and lifting him up flat on my shins — and I always thought he thought it was stupid or boring because it never got much of a reaction out of him. Lately he’s been crawling up on me and begging: “Airplane! Airplane!” He likes the part where I sort of let him fall but I catch him.

• This week is the first week we didn’t have weepy dropoffs at preschool. In fact, there were a couple of days when he walked into the classroom and went straight for the toys without clinging to me at all. When he noticed me waving and blowing kisses goodbye, though, he got a little panicked look in his eye. But I didn’t hear any crying on the way out. And his teacher told Ray upon pickup each day that he hadn’t cried at all. That’s so massive to me. Such a relief.

• He gets daily reports from school that tell how he ate, how the potty situation went, how he acted, and such. He always comes home with a note saying he was chatty and cheerful. That makes me so happy.