On Tuesday, we toured another potential preschool for Henry. This one is a for-profit, secular school, and it costs twice as much as the church-based one we toured last week. Unfortunately (for the school) I was not twice as impressed with it. The facility itself was obviously newer and more expensive, but the assistant director did not impress me - we stood at the front desk for ten minutes before anyone appeared in the window, though I should add that we were more than ten minutes late for our appointment, so maybe we were being punished? - and the teacher to student ratio was higher than I would have liked. In the classroom we visited, there were like eighteen three-year-olds with one teacher (who appeared to be about 25 years old) and one teacher's assistant (who was maybe 19 years old). They were seated at tables of four or five kids each, so at any given time, two or three of the tables were unaccompanied by a teacher. Many of them looked lost (I thought), and I mentally inserted Henry at one of the tables unattended by a teacher, and that was when I decided this was not the school for us. Now, I know he won't be able to have a teacher holding his hand all the time (he actually asked me the other day, "Mommy, will the teacher hold me?"!!!), but I would like to see him in a classroom with fewer students. After we left our tour, we met friends at the little walking trail next to the library and enjoyed the beautiful weather, playing in a dried-up creek bed that Henry pretended was the ocean. It was a good thing we got out that day, too, because the rest of the week was cool and intermittently rainy. On Tuesday night, my parents (Grammy and Grandpa), fresh from their trip to Israel, spent the night with us. They brought the boys toy camels and donkeys, and shirts with a screen-printed Elmo which read, "Shalom!" We were glad to have them back safely, and when they left the next morning, Henry said, "I hope you come back soon!" We are planning a trip to Morristown over Easter, and he asks every day if it is Easter yet.
On Thursday, we had the morning to ourselves, and after trying and failing to get Charlie to take his morning nap, we headed to Target. We looked around at a leisurely pace, spending probably an hour browsing through the store in our standard pick-up-an-item-of-interest-for-each-boy,-deposit-it-wherever-we-happen-to-be-when-interest-is-lost,-and-repeat fashion. I will most definitely go to shopper's hell, if it exists, for these habits (once I was in the grocery store with my mother-in-law and suggested that we just put an item back on the nearest shelf, rather than in its rightful spot, and she gave me an odd look and said, "Oh no, we don't do that," which made me wonder if something might be seriously wrong with me), but it's just too exhausting to heave ourselves around in that big red shopping cart and go back to return all those items to their designated places. We looked at action figures in the toy section, we checked out arts and crafts in the arts and crafts section, buying Henry two glue sticks he desperately needed, we perused shower curtains and bath mats for the upstairs bathroom, we bought a picture frame, we bought the ingredients to make oatmeal chocolate chip cookies later that day (having just that morning sworn off sugar "for good this time"), we picked up a small bean bag chair for the play room, then thought better of it, wondering if we really had the space. Finally, we went to check out, and Henry said, "Mommy! Will you get Elmo for me? I was sitting on him." Henry was in the big part of the cart, the cart part, and he had brought an Elmo figure into the store with him, then dropped it into the cart when something else caught his attention. I looked underneath him, shifted the brown sugar and oats and chocolate chips around - no Elmo. Did I mention the cart is red? The same shade of red as Elmo? And it has Elmo-sized holes all over it? Elmo apparently had abandoned ship at some point on our journey. So what else could we do? We heaved the cart around and retraced our steps, calling out for Elmo. Henry mused that he was probably crying somewhere. I knew which path to follow because of the conspicuous items that littered the aisles where we had been. The search took us probably twenty minutes, but there was no sign of Elmo, and eventually we had to admit to ourselves that he was probably lost forever. Henry took it well, and we returned to the checkout line to load our items onto the belt. As I removed my purse from the platform beneath the cart, I noticed a red object interrupting the symmetry of the cart's lines: it was Elmo! He was with us all along! I mused that he was probably laughing down there the whole time, the smug little bastard, and I glared at him, returned him to Henry, and we all went home. We made cookies later that afternoon, and they were delicious!
Quickly, quickly, as the end of Jill Time is drawing nigh: What the boys are up to this week:
Charlie: Charlie will hold the phone up to his ear now, chubby little elbow pointing forward, and try to say "hello"!!!! I could not be more excited about this if he had actually invented the iPhone. I've also caught him saying or trying to say "ball," "dance," "night night," "mama," and "dada," and he is definitely saying "bye bye"! It's like all of a sudden, in the space of a week, he is getting the talking thing. He is eating solids better now, in no small part because I borrowed a book of blender baby food recipes from a friend. Apparently, he likes solids, he just doesn't like solids that taste bad! Anyway, he is still drinking WAY more breast milk than advised by any source, anywhere...not sure what to do about that. He currently enjoys a bottle at 8:00 p.m., 11:00 p.m., 2:00 a.m., and 4:00 or 5:00 a.m. And by "enjoys," I mean "demands," as in "accepts no substitute." Dr. Johnson, our pediatrician, says this is merely a bad habit which simply needs to be broken, and then he will sleep. Illuminating advice! Charlie has discovered that he likes to "help" me unload the dishwasher. This involves reaching in, grabbing anything knife-like and potentially deadly, and slicing it through the air before I can stop him. He then steps back to get away from me and bumps his head on the drawer that is open at head-level (Charlie's head), after which I pick him up and comfort him, then set him back down, and repeat until the dishwasher is empty. Another pastime he enjoys now is holding his hand immersed in a glass of cold drinking water; I think it may be some sort of endurance test he's doing. Maybe he will be a runner like I used to be!
Henry: the funniest thing I've noticed about Henry this week is the new fake sneeze he does. I know it's fake because instead of sounding like "Ahhhhhhchoo!" or something similar, it sounds like "Ahhhhblessyou!" and it cracks me up every time. He thinks "bless you" is part of the sneeze itself, not something you say after the sneeze. Get it? That's funny. He has been kinder to Charlie this week, and with less bribery. There is a certain bodily function that Henry still refuses to perform in a toilet, and every time he feels the urge, he tells me, I put a diaper on him, and he goes behind a chair - Henry: "I need my privacy!" Russell: "You know a good place to find privacy? In the bathroom!" - and then I change his diaper. So, we've devised an ingenius plan by which the Easter Bunny, when he comes to bring the eggs and candy and grass, will take away Henry's diapers, thereby forcing him to use the potty when nature calls. It's foolproof! Henry has already begun trying to reason his way out of this. Henry: "We'll have to buy some more diapers!" Me: "The Easter Bunny says we aren't allowed to buy any more." Henry: "You said the Easter Bunny couldn't talk...?" Me: (Long silence) then, "The Easter Bunny is taking away your diapers. You'll have to use the potty." We'll see how that goes...
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