--my camera-to-computer cord is missing. Again. The last person I saw with it was O, while I was on the phone last week and didn’t have much time to monitor whether he minded me when I told him to go put that back.
O has always been one of those kids who is into everything. Even when he was just barely standing unassisted he was finding keys and trying to stick them into locks, putting small toys into the heating grates, reaching waaaaay under the couch for some tiny forgotten choking hazard. I suspect that he has a bit of an engineer in him, wanting to understand how things are put together so that someday he might be able to put them together himself instead of just take them apart. I see much evidence in this with his current Lego fascination, and I think he’ll be very happy when his rather good fine-motor skills start to catch up to his vision. One of his quirks is the habit he has of moving objects to unknown-except-to-him locations, and while occasionally entertaining, it more often drives us a bit nuts. He’s been doing this since he could crawl. I find my toothbrush in a kitchen drawer, my underwear in the bathtub and a bra around his neck (the drawer is in the hallway next to the bathroom), and my keys in my shoes. We lose important items for days at a time until O wanders into the room with whatever was missing, oddly mute when we ask him from where it was retrieved.
N, for his part, is more likely to grab things from high places simply for the feat of figuring out to get to them. He moves along the kitchen counters on his tippy-toes, craning his neck for something interesting. If he knows we’re watching, he’ll refrain from actually grabbing (“I’m not being grabby, Mama, I’m not!”), but instead request something or make some justification for why he needs it. He’s very aware of what he needs permission to do, and while he crosses that line at times, he’s more likely by now to say, “may I” and request things verbally, though sometimes with a hand already reaching towards what he would like to have in his possession. I was seriously trying to get used to the idea that we might be facing a childhood of children that need very close supervision, but these days, I am more likely to know where my toothbrush is, and less likely to find boys on top of the kitchen table or destroying something than was the case of few months ago, and this is a relief.
Still, there are exceptions. Yesterday, I was looking all over for a hairbrush or a comb. O asked what I was doing. I told him, and as N wandered by, he said, “You could take a comb from a chicken, Mama!” They both giggled for a long while at that one, and even harder when I asked which chicken I should hold upside down to comb my hair with. Later, I found the hairbrush in one of my boots.
Both boys are doing very well. They have been a lot more fun to live with lately, after a couple of months where both J and I were regularly having some pretty frustrated days with both of them. They love to draw, craft, and watercolor right now, but their very favorite thing seems to be talking. Rhyming, singing, describing, arguing, yelling, whispering, talking, talking, talking. In two weeks, I will take off for a weekend solitary retreat like I did last year. While I truly love to hear my boys explore language and all its joys and particulars, the silence will be welcome.
O has had a bad cold that started with a high fever, but is slogging fairly happily through it. I did get some extremely unwelcome news yesterday: It turns out that we are on the waiting list at our chosen preschool after all, though we are at the very top 1 and 2 slots. We’d received some verbal reassurance last month that we were “in”, but as it turns out, there were an unprecedented amount of returning families that wanted 5 days for next year. The coordinator was extremely apologetic, and said there is hope, but it means that our fear has come true: we may not know what the situation is until the end of the summer. It is possible that we may not get in at all, or that only one will, which essentially means neither. We have a call in to look at one more not-so-in-demand school, but most of the deadlines for any schools have passed, and I just don’t know what we’ll do if we don’t get in anywhere. For previously stated reasons, I think that two years of preschool would be a good thing for our boys, both as twins and as individuals. I am a little like N in not liking change and uncertainty, so this is all just a little bit torturous.
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