Is that London or New Hampshire?

You pop the boy in a British primary school for a couple of weeks, and you get this!

After attending the Poetry Show, we all went to the National Gallery, which stays open late on Fridays. Out front in Trafalgar Square, it was Malaysia Day! Music and food abounding! Inside, it was a mellow, uncrowded National Gallery, with Pete-entrancing audio tours galore. On the way out, a (non-Malaysian) fire-juggler. Not a bad London evening.

Some things should last forever but won't.

Pete has taken to using "the heck" as a general intensifier, placed willy-nilly in sentences, as in, this morning, "My shoe has a hole in it. It is really the heck hurting my foot."

We're already regretting the storytime ritual

Ono: Pete figured out his first spelled word today (the name of his friend Jack). The Parental Spelling Code Era begins its fade into twilight.

A hoot

from Carolyn

We saw what I think was a small screech owl on campus yesterday, in the loggia between Clark and Dibble. We were walking through with Pete on our way to Mac Field, and it was just sitting about five feet up on a small pedestal in a corner. It was very exciting to see. ("I scared owl," Pete admitted, although he gave several excited hoots and has retold the story of seeing the owl many times since. I'm starting to think that when Pete says he's scared of something, he really means he's struck by it.) When we passed through again on our way home, the owl had moved to a bike wheel not far from where we had first seen it. Other birds in the area were making a big racket in nearby branches. Maybe because they were unnerved by the owl?

Pete defines the sublime

from Carolyn

We've been walking on campus with Pete most evenings, and we regularly stop in the art gallery in the JRC. We're big fans of the work in there right now (which is part of the draw), but I'm also curious about Pete's reaction, which, every day, is "I scared [of] art." He doesn't really act scared and I can't tell what would be scaring him. I keep hoping he'll elaborate.

Little blessing

from Carolyn

Pete has developed an occasional timidity (toward big dogs, high slides, sudden noises). As he puts it, when he's apprehensive, "I scary."

Adjectives of scale are still really important to Pete. He's emphatically invested in how big or small things are. Last night, when he was supposed to be sleeping, he sneezed a couple of times. I was in the room with him and so I said, quietly, "Bless you, Pete." His response was to say, in the little high-pitched voice he reserves for small things, "Tiny bless you!"

Weekend of sick

from Carolyn

We've spent the weekend caring for a Pete who was sicker than I've ever seen him. I haven't left the house since I picked up him early from daycare on Friday, where he had already thrown up once.

Is it awful to admit that Saturday held some real pleasures, even in the midst of Pete being sick? He had a temp all day (104 at the peak) and threw up whenever he tried to eat anything. His only demand, really, was that he get to stay downstairs with us, and so we spent most of the day taking turns cuddling with him on the couch while he dozed and slept. We got to doze and sleep, too, which was heavenly. He's not usually very cuddly, so this was a treat of sorts. We watched a lot of basketball, and I read an entire book, which is unheard of in the era of Pete. When he was an infant and spent a lot of time in my arms, I was suffering from awful pains in my hands and wrists (an unusual syndrome that occasionally plagues nursing mothers), so I couldn't hold a book. But yesterday he was so worn out all day that I could read without him noticing. It was kind of great.

The one very strange thing about this whole episode is that he started adding "eeee" to certain words. "No" became "No-eee" and, similarly, "juice" became "ju-eeese." "Pooh" became "Pooh-eee." "No-eee" in his small little sick voice is pretty heart melting.

Today the fever was gone, but the vomiting continued. And the crankiness began. He still wanted to be held, but couldn't get comfortable, so was unhappy most of the day. Having a throwing-up two-year old is so much better than a throwing-up pre-1-year old, though. 1) the all-milk diet of a little one makes for a unique sort of nastiness. 2) two-year-old Pete is great at throwing up into a container, even when he's not happy about throwing up. "No-eee," he says over and over.

On being overtaken

from Carolyn

For the first time ever, Pete expressed a strong opinion about what clothes he wore this morning. That's why he headed off to school with his Thomas the tank engine pajama top over his blue shirt and crazy striped socks that didn't match anything.

Actually, Pete would point out, as he did to me last night, that his pajama top has pictures of Thomas AND Percy. Where did he learn to distinguish between the two? I hadn't noticed that there were two differently colored trains on the article of clothing, and although I have a general sense that Thomas's friends are different sizes and colors, I wouldn't have been able to identify that Percy was Thomas-sized and red. I've learned a lot from Pete over the (two) years, and he has pointed out a lot to me that I would not have noticed on my own, but this might be the first time that he's concretely known more about a topic than I have.

I still know more letters of the alphabet than he does, though, so he'd better not get too high and mighty.

Pete becomes a toddler

I haven't written much about Pete lately, so as the Super Bowl winds down, I'll try to capture some of what it's been like to watch him pass his second birthday and careen into full-fledged toddlerhood.

We've been struck by how Pete develops in streaks and bursts. For example, he was a little slow to pick up his numbers; he had gotten pretty good at identifying two of something, and he had become fond of five ("Pie!") as a word for more than two. He had said three only sporadically and almost never four. Furthermore, he had never counted, even to two. Last Sunday, we all came downstairs in the morning, and Pete was standing in the kitchen as Carolyn prepared the coffee that would fuel the day. Pete looked around, then, as Carolyn put the scoops of coffee in the filter, said with complete authority, "One! Two! Three! Four! Five!" Or, phonetically, "One! Choo! Fwee! Fo-or! Pie!" And he squealed and clapped and laughed until he fell on his butt.

He's still shaky with three and four, and he still likes shooting balls at his hoop more than counting them--these developments have been complicated and cyclical, but the initial gains can be flashes of lighting. Just as he passed that tipping point from not counting to counting in a night, he later did a somersault out of the blue and began without warning to catch thrown balls; the kid who wouldn't leave our grasp in a swimming pool eight months ago wanted immediately to climb the ladder and jump in by himself this winter. In the last few weeks, Pete has gone from identifying no letters to naming about half the capitals most of the time.

I say these things not to brag about Pete but to wonder at toddlerhood: this is the stuff kids learn at Pete's age, but I find myself endlessly amazed by the way the process plays out, and my favorite part is how--as in the counting breakthrough--Pete takes such joy in the new things he can do.

Oh, a random bit of fun from the last week: Pete continues to love music--playing it as he can (mostly drums and kazoo), listening, watching videos, whatever. Becuase Carolyn's dad plays banjo, that is one of Pete's favorite instruments, so I found him this vidoe of Bela Fleck and the Flecktones. As we watched it together after breakfast a few days ago, Pete started holding his nose and saying, "oooo." Over and over. After watching this for a minute I realized what was happening: Pete was playing harmonica! So we learned that word and looked for other harmonica videos. Excellent.

Pete for THREE!

Pete now hoots "For three!" when he hits one from downtown. He also calls out "Yay, Papa!" or "Almost, Papa" (or "Yay, Pete! and "Almost, Pete!") as appropriate. I think "Almost!" is one of my favorite Pete expressions: he doesn't get down about a ball not going into the basket, he just celebrates its closeness to the basket.

He's also starting to string words together, often when he wants something. He was doing it a lot today: "Mama? Ball? Shoot?" when he wanted me to play, too. "Pete? Out? Snow?"

Tunney, tunney, tunney

From Carolyn

Pete turned two on Saturday. And he will answer you correctly if you ask him how old he is.

He's finally learning colors, or at least learning to tease us by insisting that everything green is blue. He can be quite crafty.

However, I think his repeated proud statements about his "big cup," in which he consistently replaced the final "p" with a "k" sound, were actually innocently spoken.

He traveled very well on our adventures out east, remembering how to sleep in the car and being game for new places to sleep many nights. The saddest moment, though, came the night after we drove through Pennsylvania. Pete loved driving through the tunnels along the Pennsylvania turnpike, and was very sad each time we headed out into the sunlight and left the tunnel behind. He woke up that night crying. Sometimes when he cries at night he's just fussing, but sometimes he's crying for some specific thing. If we can hear him say what he wants--water or his blanket, for instance--we'll go in and give it to him. That night, though, we heard him wimpering "Tunney, tunney, tunney." It took us a few seconds to figure out that he wanted tunnels, something we were unable to provide on the spot.

Companions

from Carolyn

Pete has recently started wanting his blanket with him when we get him out of his crib. And he's also gotten very invested in holding a single wet wipe. ("A one!" he calls it. "A one!" "A one!") So he often heads down in the morning or after his nap with a wipe in one hand and his blanket in the other (often draped around his shoulders so it won't trip him up). That leaves him with no hands free to negotiate the world. Yesterday he just sat looking at his cereal. I had to feed him a couple of bites. Finally he decided to put down the wipe to feed himself, but it took a while. The blanket makes some sense to me, but why does he want to hold the damp clammy wipe?