Life is never boring with a 3 year old boy around. I have dim recollections of pre-Little Boy life: decompressing from the work day on the ride home by blaring too-loud alternative music, maybe going to a hot yoga class, maybe going into Cambridge for an event at a bookstore, maybe planning a weekend adventure in the mountains, and then enjoying a leisurely 8pm dinner with Mr. P followed a movie filled with guns, sex, and/or bad language. Now I realize that existence, that is boring.
At 5pm or so, I pick Little Boy up from day care, which is down the street from my office. When I enter his room, the teacher says “Little Boy, look who’s here!” (If she doesn’t see me, the other kids rush to take up the chorus.) Some days he greets me with an exuberant “Mommy!” and rushes to be swooped up in my arms. This usually happens earlier in the week. By Thursday or Friday, he glances at me and puts on his jacket with reluctance, especially if he was in the middle of doing something cool like playing with trains or “reading” a book. Sometimes he’ll show me an art project that his class worked on. This week it was a giant paper turkey, with paper tail feathers on which the teacher wrote what each kid was thankful for. Most kids said they were thankful for their parents or their pets. Little Boy: “I’m thankful for cars.”
On our way to the car, he’s either asking about the weather (raining? cold?) or talking about what wants to eat for dinner (if he’s feeling optimistic, he’ll rally for pizza; if he’s feeling realistic, he’ll ask for pasta, meat, sauce and cheese, which is replete with hidden veggies, hee hee hee.) Now that the sun sets at 5pm, he’s a bit sad about not going outside. He’s also scared of the dark and insists I put a light on in the backseat of the car. We drive home listening to not-too-loud alternative music. When we drive through woodsy Concord and Lincoln, he’ll point to the trees and ask me about bears or lions. When we drive past where Route 2 intersects with I-95, he’ll sigh and say “Too many cars.” (But… I thought you were thankful for cars, right?)
When we get home, he’s focused again on dinner. Some nights I can just heat things up and serve right away; other nights, I have to cook 30+ more minutes — grating carrots and zucchini, cutting onions and red peppers needle-thin, and sauteing it all with ground meat and spices. He does not like being hungry and months ago I would have plied him with pre-meal snacks so he does not have to be hungry (which must feel horrible to a child who was malnourished for the first years of his life), but we’re slowly trying to normalize his eating and teach him that being a little bit hungry before dinner is okay. It helps if I show him the food is cooking and let him stir the food. (I wouldn’t mind the snacking if he didn’t have such a voracious appetite, many times eating more food than me while bragging about how he ate four sandwiches for lunch at school. And I’m training for a marathon.) After he eats two bowls of pasta-meat-sauce-cheese-hidden veggies, he’ll usually demand more food (bread and chocolate or cream cheese), and lately I’ve been giving him oranges instead. He’s reluctant to eat it and suddenly loses his appetite and asks to “go down” from the table.
After his dinner, he starts demanding “television, television,” often with a pained whimper. Oh, how I miss the days when he ignored the television! He does this even though our rule is no television until after Mommy and Daddy eat. So he ends up playing while Mommy studies for the GREs (how many times have I studied for this test? Around 4x-12¾=2√2 times. It’s funny to see what age is doing to my mind. The verbal sections are easier than ever, while the math is ridiculously hard and often borderline absurd. Still, it’s for a good cause… finally aiming to get my Masters.) Daddy will arrive home to great fanfare and immediately be enlisted to play. For little boys, playing is not what I remember. I remember playing quietly, in a self-contained area with my dolls or my record player. When he plays, everything in the house becomes a potential prop. Lately he’s started getting into building “guns” out of his legos and shooting everything and everyone in his sight: “Bwew, Bwew!” This is a bit disturbing to me, especially the time he said “Mommy, look!” and “shoot” himself in the head while crumbling to the floor. But I ultimately know this is a natural mode of fantasy play for young boys, and to tell him to stop would be squashing his imagination. So I smile and try not to get offended when he repeatedly blasts my head off.
Little Boy gets about 20 minutes of television a night, usually a movie. Lately we’ve been watching Christmas movies, and he now has some understanding of the approaching holiday. Since Daylight Savings ended, we’ve start putting him to bed at 8:30 rather than 9 (which frequently turned into 9:30). Bedtime is never easy, as he seems to have a burst of fresh energy the minute the pajamas go on. Mr. P and I alternate who puts him to bed. We always read at least one book with him. We don’t actually read the words, as he cannot yet follow and is usually too focused on pointing at the pictures and making observations. He has an incredible eye for detail in the pictures. Then the lights go off. He cannot yet fall asleep on his own and craves a lot of affection while he’s falling asleep. It’s so peaceful — at last, peaceful! — that if I’m not careful, I too will drift off, only to wake several hours later with various pains from the cramped bed and stumble to the cold side of our bed. All in all though, I actually sleep better now than in Pre-Little Boy days… probably because I’m being run ragged.
Getting Ready for Bed (and vamping for the camera)
