It’s been a while. When I get stressed, I stop blogging, and I’ve felt very stressed lately. Sorry! I’d like to write every day but stress kills my writing abilities dead. It’s just like RAID for bugs.
Anyway, we’re older, we’re colder and Ronan is a toddler. We’re deep into potty training, and for the sake of future teenage Ronan I won’t go into details, but it’s a lot harder as a parent than I remember as a toddler. I do remember falling into the toilet and screaming and my Dad laughing but I remember potty training taking a short period of time. We’re only technically in our second week but I feel like we’re been doing this forever and it’s not fun. On the plus side, I’ve gotten over my phobia about touching other people’s poop. Yes, I’m aware that’s not much of a plus side.
The three short stories I’d like to tell you about are cute and not about potty training.
First, Terry has a new job, and while she likes it very much, we’re all exhausted from the commute to and from work and day care. We don’t live anywhere near our day care, so Terry takes Ronan on the bus across town and I pick him up and bring him back. It take about 45 minutes to an hour each way. Ronan seems to love day care, which is good. He also seems to miss Terry terribly, which is bad. He was playing with his toys. Almost all of his toys are transportation toys. The other day he was playing with a car, a train with Curious George on it, and a plane. Apparently the train was headed off to day care. The train didn’t want to go; Curious George wanted to stay home with his Mom. “You can’t stay home with your mom.” Ronan said, as the plane, “you have to go to day care.” Curious George responded, I don’t want to go to day care!” Ronan, playing all the roles, said, “you have to go to day care, and you can’t see your Mom.” Of course, when I related this story to Terry, she was heartbroken. (Way to go, Dad!) We’ll be talking with Curious George (and Ronan) as a proxy to discuss feelings this weekend. My school’s psychologist said this was quite normal, positive even, and we should let him “externalize” which is a word that means “get your feelings out.”
The second story is about marshmallows. We just had a snow day here, and it was fun to have a paid day home from school. I did manage to get some work done, and because the worst of the snow was in the afternoon, we eschewed the outdoors for hearth (well, radiator heating) and home and cocoa. Unfortunately, while I heated up the cocoa, Ronan learned how to manipulate twist ties and ate a ton of marshmallows, which made him sick, which he then spewed all over the living room. I immediately lost all interest in adding marshmallows to my cocoa, and he lost all interest in eating for the rest of the day.
Finally, we have been trying to teach him “please” and “thank you.” He gets the concept – he will say “PLEEE” when prompted. We’re trying to teach him to say it without being prompted, and to use the full word. Terry was helping him pronounce “Please” by telling Ronan say please with an s-sound on it.” Ronan’s response: “PLEE with an s-sound.” We’ll continue to work on it.