My son and pizza are awesome

Oof, I'd gotten into the habit of not writing.

Hi again! I've been doing pretty well lately. Gearing up for NaNoWriMo at the moment, which is a lot of why I'm writing this--I want to be able to blog about that. I'm excited! And I'm scared! And I'm excited. Hopefully it will be all fun and glory and creepy fairies, tapping into the majesty of my first three years (especially the very first) rather than the letdown of last year. I have reasons to hope that it will go well.

In other news, I just ordered pizza! It's kind of a waste of money, but whatever! I'm super hungry and we haven't gone to the grocery story in 2358547 years. Anyway, apparently Domino's delivers to Monmouth now, so this is going to be pretty freaking awesome.

Well, I'm boring tonight. Oh well. I'll plagiarize from facebook my most recent Daniel update, which I posted yesterday:

Tonight, we have finally embarked on the goal of having a bedtime routine for Daniel. We've been surprisingly fine without one, but it was time and past time. He wasn't even sleepy tonight because of a late nap, but I was determined anyway, and shut us in his room. It only took an hour of quiet play, reading, and snuggling,* and he fell asleep in my arms in the rocker. Yay! Pretty good start!

* Also, I might mention, nursing. The fact that we're still doing this is a big part of why we haven't really needed a routine, because I can just bust out the sleep-inducing hormones wherever he happens to crawl into my lap. But I'm hoping to wean around his second birthday in six months, so having other sleep-inducing factors well-established in his life by then will help a lot.

 Oh, and while I'm talking about Daniel, this one describes some awesomeness from last Thursday:

The other day I took Daniel for a walk through campus without a stroller, and it was slow and long and exhausting and totally amazing.

He learned how to blow dandelion seeds, listened to a clock tower chime, ran through a tunnel made of bike racks, tried to read the spray-painted roadwork letters on the sidewalk, eagerly pointed at items in a shop window but didn't want to go in, played around on some stairs, sat a table doing nothing for a while, pressed the alarm button in an elevator, stole some brochures, touched rocks in a fountain, laughed at his reflection in a sculpture, crawled under an advertisement sign, pointed at a lot of interesting cars, crunched a lot of leaves, got tired, pitched a fit, and was carried home. After 20 minutes of rest, while I was still dead, he started pointing at the stroller and saying "Go?" again. Luckily Heath arrived home around then to take him back out.

 So good. So good. I was so tired, but it was so good.

Actually, I've been feeling strangely competent as a mother today. Strange because I never feel competent, even though I no longer feel like a total screwup (at least not most of the time). But I've been playing with Daniel more, and enjoying it more. I've been doing other stupid boring distracting things less. Also, I actually cooked lunch (read: made boxed pasta) and we ate it together, and when he was full he pushed his bowl away instead of throwing it at the ground. (He saved that for later, when Daddy was giving him dinner. Haw haw.) He got my wallet out, and instead of storming over to snatch it away before he pulled all the cards out, I nicely asked him not to open it and to put it back, and after a while of procrastinating, he actually put it back! And then applauded himself! Also, we went for a walk, and we saw a kid meow at a cat, and Daniel meowed at the kid, and the kid was obviously delighted.

We've been doing "Parent and Me" swimming lessons, and Daniel is amazing. His only thing is that he doesn't like being confined to the warm little therapy pool, even though it's awesome, and would much prefer to be free to climb out and go jump in the lap pool. But that's just him being him, and the water itself bothers him not at all. I can hand him a pair of floaties and propel him around the pool on his stomach, only holding him up by the feet, and he doesn't even care. He splashes and climbs in and out and plays with toys. Today he didn't want to do much of what the teacher was suggesting, but she's extremely cool about my disinclination to force him. Instead, he floated by himself for a couple seconds, using only the little water weights and without my touching him at all! Then he figured he was done and really wanted to climb up the stairs and go do something else. Instead, after some other wandering around and playing, I set him standing on the bench and gave him a watering can. He spent most of the rest of the lesson scooping up water and pouring it out, often on the concrete by the side of the pool, with a look of deep concentration on his face. I could practically see his brain working, and it was the most magical thing ever. I told the teacher, "I bet you didn't know you were running a Parent and Me Physics Lab."

(Another awesome thing Daniel does is recognize letters. He doesn't know any individual symbols, but he knows writing when he sees it, and he likes to poke the letters and make authoritative little staccato noises. He does this with the depth markings on the pool, the warnings on his carseat, building signs, food packages, sides of cars, books... I'm pretty sure the place he learned it was from sitting in my lap when I was on a big crossword puzzle kick a few months ago. Just the other day he found one of my puzzles sitting out, picked up the pen, and poked at it four times, stating, "Dee, oh, nih, nih.")

So yup. <3 Some pretty nifty stuff going on. Also some other kinds of stuff. But right now, I feel like I'm doing okay at life, and that is nice. It's weird to feel competent on an evening when the kitchen has more dirty dishes than clean and the fridge contains more moldy food than edible, but whatever. I'll take it.

In another post I should talk about all the books I've been reading, and the one I'm about to write! But right now it's time for me to sit here and imagine eating pizza until it's time to sit here actually eating pizza. Mmmmmmmm.