I have this list of amazing Daniel things to blog, but I'm not really in a writing mood, so this is likely to be even more disjointed than usual. (If I ever make a new journal, I should just call it "Disjointed," because I seem to use that word in nearly every entry. Come to think, that might have been the name of my LJ layout.)
* Noah is getting stronger. He can't roll over, but when I set him up in my lap a few days ago he was briefly able to hold his torso erect. I excitedly showed this to Daniel, who said, "He's growing up!"
* Where a normal person might say "That's interesting," Daniel says in highly intrigued tones, "That's serious." I think he might have developed that because serious is the opposite of silly? And therefore when things are remarkable but not silly, this must be what you say? Anyway, it's darn cute and another of the injokes Heath and I have adopted into our own vocabularies.
* There was an armadillo on TV, and I talked to Daniel about it. "Isn't that cool, how they can turn into balls?" "Yeah!" he said, "like cars do!" "Cars can turn into balls?" I asked. "Yeah!" he said. "Huh. I've never seen that," I said. "It's kind of busted," he explained. Which is exactly right, now that he's pointed out to me. A sufficiently busted car would totally look like an armadillo.
* Daniel has always had an amazing brain for making unlikely visual/auditory comparisons between things. Like last summer when he bit a sandwich into the shape of a helicopter, or a couple weeks ago when he pointed to the cover of this book at the library and said, "Mario!", or last week when Noah suddenly howled and Daniel remarked that he sounded like an elephant.
* No matter how whimsical a parent you are, you can't be prepared for everything. When he asked me "What sound does a brain make?" I was overcome by amazement at the question itself and unable to come up with a good answer.
* Noah has been sleeping in his crib at night for the last week or two, and it's been so lovely. It's not really a huge change--we still bring him to bed when he wakes up so that he can nurse, and then fall back asleep for the second half of the night with him still there. Same thing we did with Daniel. But he was spending the first part of the night in the swing in our room before, and there's something just so exciting and wonderful about tucking both my sweet little sons into their shared room and tiptoeing out. Daniel really likes having him in there, and the first few nights I just hung out in there for over an hour after they were both still asleep, playing Backgammon on my phone and just soaking in the magic of listening to my plural children breathing peacefully together.
* In less lovely but still interesting sleep news, Daniel has nightmares sometimes, and they are fascinating. We try not to show him scary things on TV or whatnot, and he hasn't had very many frightening experiences in real life (aside from the occasional Mommy Is Extremely Loud incident), so they're not usually about obvious things like monsters or drowning (although the most recent one is about a burning truck, which makes sense). But if your hormones tell you to be scared, you'll come up with something for it, apparently. The big one last week was, as far as I can understand, about a coconut tree that sprouted in the middle of the church. "It's very tall. It's very big. The coconut tree spins around. It spins around very fast. It's kind of smoky. And the man, he's talking." I think it's amazing how these peculiarly benign elements add up to something absolutely that is absolutely legit creepy.
* Interesting parenting moment: Daniel has discovered the word "beautiful," and as he was examining the DVD case for The Little Mermaid on Saturday, he remarked that Ariel was beautiful. Heath told him that was a nice thing to say. Then he pointed at Ursula and said, "What's that?" "That's Ursula, the Sea Witch," said Heath. "She's very beautiful," said Daniel, and there was this brief pause while everything about the fat, aging, garish, super problematic and stereotyped character design flashed through my mind--along with everything I want Daniel to know about the women in the real world, and all the different body types, personal styles, ages, degrees of physical ability--and how I want him to respect them and treat them kindly, in the fact of extreme peer pressure to the contrary--and how little time I have as his sole and utterly trusted source of socialization... It felt like an extremely long and significant pause for thought, but it was only like half a second. "Yes, she is beautiful," I agreed.
* What else? Oh, yes. Yesterday I asked him if he remembers the names of his fingers--I was thinking pointer, pinky, etc.--and he said yes. So I held up my
thumb and said, "What's this one?" and he said with a big smile, "Jenny!
* I am working on returning to being a person who does not swear even when severely provoked, and I'm finally making progress. Last-second cuss word replacements from last week: "What the funny money!!" and "Oh, shirt."
* Today we talked about "full names," and I told him his own, and those of other people he knew. He was fascinated and asked for more. It was awesome. Other than that, it was a really difficult and lonely day. But it was really sweet when he painstaking assembled the sentence, "Is something wrong, Mommy?" (Noah screamed a lot today, is the main thing. He took a big nap in the morning, during which I did a ton of laundry out of sheer boredom, but after that it was Just No Good for anyone. I felt totally abandoned by the rest of the world, and the weather was super nice but I couldn't get everything together sufficiently to get us outside, so I was trapped. Then, after about a century, Heath got home, and with the extra pair of hands I was able to fix everything up. We went for a really excessively long walk in the beautiful sunshine and all came back exhausted, but I felt so much better afterward.)
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