Odds and Ends

Tanner came home from Preschool the day after Valentines day and was showing me all the work that they did that day. There was a cute art project, dot-to dots, worksheets, coloring stuff etc… Then he got out a lined paper and he said to me, “A girl gave me this”. I looked at it and it had a heart and a T on it. I am assuming that the T stands for Tanner. So he has a girlfriend! I asked him what the girl’s name is. He did not know. There are only 4 girls in his class and he can not remember which one gave him a love note? I listed the 3 girls names that I could remember and he said that he thought it was Ana, “but it does not matter what her name is.” If this girl is serious, she is going to have a hard time getting Tanner to notice.

Every kid knows that babies say “goo goo ga ga”. In reality no baby has ever said that. It is just perpetuated in TV and from popular thought. I have never had a child who speaks in “baby talk” more than Alex. He can say words. He knows tons of words. He knows his letters and letter sounds. He just chooses not to use them yet. We have long conversations that involve Alex telling whole stories about his day and I have no idea what he says. It is a lot of, “duba doba duba lada dada jebe jaba”. We say that he speaks Chinese because it really does sound like that sometimes. We got a video from the library that Alex had never seen before and he loves it. It is a Dora the Explorer video. On this one there are two “super” babies who do a lot of “super” things with Dora. Like most super heros, they say something every time they do something “super”. They say “googoo gaga”. Alex has chosen this phrase to repeat over and over. He thinks it is so cool to say “googoo gaga”. With all my work teaching him to talk, my child has learned how to say “googoo gaga”.

Because of the constant nursing of the baby and the fact that there is 2 feet of snow outside and freezing, my poor Alex is bored out of his mind. We don’t go anywhere because we don’t want the baby to get sick, or it is nap time for somebody, or I don’t want to take four (or even three) children anywhere. So Alex has become a TV head. Really, his head is starting to resemble a TV. He watches Finding Nemo at least once a day and he has it memorized. He does not repeat words but whenever one of the fish screams (which is often), Alex does a fake scream. He laughs in all the same places. It is funny to watch him watch the show.

I have been really impressed with my family since the baby was born. The three older kids have not woken up at all at night. So I am just up with a baby. So that is a good thing. The older boys rarely get up at night. But occasionally Jaxon’s leg will hurt or Tanner will have a bad dream. I had just finished feeding Chase and was burping him. Alex started crying. I put the baby down on the couch and went in and calmed Alex down. He fell asleep. It was about 3:20. I decided to lie down on the couch because the baby had fallen asleep on the couch and I would be there in case he woke up. All of a sudden the baby was screaming. I opened my eyes and Tanner was standing there. He started to cry. It was 3:50am. I asked him what was wrong. He said that he was so sorry. He didn’t know the baby was there and he sat on him! I started laughing. The baby was fine- but it was humorous to be woken up with that circumstance. And Tanner was so sad. All of a sudden Jaxon and Andre came walking out of my room. It was 3:50 am and our whole family was awake! Jaxon needed ibuprofen because his leg hurt (this happens every once in a while when he is growing- it drives me crazy). So Alex was asleep, Chase ate and went to sleep, Jaxon went to sleep, but Tanner has a bad cough and did not sleep much if any. Andre never sleeps if he is woken up towards the morning and I was trying to get Tanner’s cough to calm down. So I think I dosed off right before my alarm went off. So that was a funny night.