More on Sleeping, Eating and Talking

After all, those are the main activities of a mom and her preschool sons, right?

Calvin has acquired my bit of insomnia, apparently. Ever since the paper chain has been down to one tier, he is so excited about Dad coming home. And he tells me about it in the middle of the night...

Sometime between 1 and 2 a.m. for the last three or four nights, he's come thumping into my room and in his cute little voice (albeit quite a loud little voice, since the house tends to be very quiet at that time of day), says without preamble, something like, "Mom! When dad gets home, I'm going to give him the biggest hug EVER!" or, "Mom! I bet Dad is going to LOVE what you did to me and Henry's room." (I set up a "big boy bed" for Henry.)

And then after his little dad-related outburst, he says, "Um, can I get in bed with you?" It's really quite sweet. Except that I am usually just dozing off or else struggling to get to sleep, and once I am fully wakened by these midnight exclamations, the sleeping process is nearly a lost cause. Although sometimes I must actually go to sleep because I am awakened sometime later by a foot on my face...But so it goes.

That is perhaps why I fed the boys breakfast in bed the other morning. They weren't in bed. I was. They had played with blocks quietly for a little while after waking up and when they got hungry, they simply made several trips downstairs, brought back cups of yogurt and/or applesauce to me in bed, which I opened, they went back down and got themselves spoons, came back to where the yogurt was waiting on the side table, then sat down and had a little morning picnic by my bed. And I am admitting one more episode of my slovenliness to the internet. But why else do I blog?

(In my defense, I just must reiterate that I am a relatively responsible and vigilant parent. I know that those of you with little ones probably understand, but there are still some parents out there who do not. What it's really all about is tenacious curiosity, unfathomable energy, keen observation, and incredible speed plus a complete inability to wait for anything. Times two. Divided by a mom who is still trying to stay on the toddlerhood treadmill and sometimes just needs a few more minutes in bed.)

Henry has in fact become very self-reliant in the food department, from peeling himself a clementine, to eating with utensils, to flooding the fridge getting drinks of water . He has been a bottomless pit since birth - even in all my engorged glory I couldn't give him enough to eat. The wonderful thing is that up until recently he was not terribly picky - edibility was really his only requirement. Of course now he doesn't much like meat. And he's anemic, so we're having fun with iron supplements. But anyway...

Combined with his ability to find his own food is his new speaking ability, which seems to have sprung from nowhere in the last few weeks. Much of the time I am the sole interpreter of his language, although it becomes clearer and clearer to the untrained ear each day. The other day, however, I was stumped.

He was telling me over and over, "Case! Dida! Case! Dida!" and I could NOT figure out what he was telling me or talking about. I told him so. Well, a few minutes later, he comes into the living room with a bag of tortillas and a block of cheddar from the refrigerator and starts again: "Case! Dida!" OOOOOOHHHH! He wants a quesadilla! (Which, interestingly enough, is not something that I have recently or very frequently made - it's more of a dad snack around here...)

Later that afternoon, he told me very determinedly, "Lemmehavadonut." And I said, "Can you say, 'Please?'" And this is what he said - I am not even joking: "LEMMEHAVADONUT!" Small pause. "Come. Oonnn!" Um, he got a laugh for that, but not a donut. Where do they pick this stuff up? And I thought that tone of voice wasn't supposed to happen until maybe age ten.