Seriously, you could just snap his nose off at any moment

from Carolyn

When Pete really really wants something, and wants you to know he's really serious about his request, he'll come over and in a low voice state his request very firmly right into your mouth. It's sort of the equivalent of getting in someone's face and looking right in their eyes, except several inches lower. Sometimes he holds your cheeks in his hands to make sure he has your attention. Although such moments are very serious to Pete, they always make me laugh. In part because they tickle.

Blog updaKA-BEEP!

Recently, Pete has reached the point of altering the routines he
has mastered to create jokes. For instance, if we ask him a language
question to which he knows the answer, he will often replace part or
all of the answer with "ka-BEEP." So if we ask him the color
of a purple car, he'll say "Purpaka-BEEP" and laugh. And
after learning how to steer one of his cars along the sidewalk when we
push him, he now sometimes steers it suddenly into the grass to shake
things up, again with much laughter.

What they ARE!

Within the standard big developments--picking up language and
movement and such--we see the oddest little developments. A few weeks
ago, Pete started asking about things he saw by saying waving his hands
excitedly, drawing his breath in sharply, and saying "Oooh! What
HAPPENED what they ARE?" The same phrasing would apply for
singular or plural referents, and often remarkably unexciting ones--for
one of many examples, we were walking downtown and had this exchange:

Pete: Oooh! What HAPPENED what they ARE?
Erik: Well, that's a door.

This kind of conversation happened all the time for about ten days,
and poof, no more.

Preparation for The Waste Land

from Carolyn

Pete Takes after His Parents:

Pete is obsessed with his first literary allusion. It's the framed picture on the wall in Goodnight Moon that reproduces in black and white a colorful illustration from Runaway Bunny. He holds both books in his lap, both open to the correct pages, and looks back and forth. He wouldn't hand them over, last night, and I left him in his crib, in a room too dark for him to really see the illustrations, still marveling at seeing a picture long-familiar in once context (the oft-read Goodnight Moon, newly discovered in another (the more-recently-added-to-our-collection Runaway Bunny).

Speaking of Goodnight Moon, Pete is obsessed with the "old lady whispering hush." When I used to read this book to him every night, he never noticed her. But now that we're reading it regularly again, she's the main focus for him. When we're looking at the pages where she doesn't appear, he always (ALWAYS) asks where she is. In some cases, where the picture depicts the room in such a way that she is simply out of the range of the illustration, I point to a place off of the page where she would appear if the illustration were larger. He's started to do that, too. But he's still unnerved about where she is when the book begins (and her chair is vacant) and ends (when it is vacant again). We talk about how she's probably doing the dishes at the end (since that's what I do after I put Pete to bed), and he'll sometimes suggest that's where she is, but I don't think he's convinced. Her comings and goings really seems to puzzle him. Goodnight nobody, indeed.

I think I should write an essay about all the disturbing things about the books we read to Pete. Like Harold and the Purple Crayon. Being and Nothingness for the toddler set is what that is.

I'm just axing!

In today's raised eyebrow category:

Pete's been testing the limits of being aggressive. He knows he's not supposed to hit, but when he's upset at us, he'll form a little fist and press it against, say, one of our arms, with a little push. He'll see if he can get away with that, and then try pushing a little harder, or pressing a little more suddenly. What is hitting, what isn't?

So the other day, he was doing this with (to?) me, and I said: "No, Pete. We don't hit."

He responded: "I not hit. [pause] I drum. [pause] With my ax."

More like it

from Carolyn

Making up for all the axing, Pete, for the first time completely unbidden, said, "I love you, Mama."

Also the phrase "rigor mortis"

from Carolyn

Pete [pointing to a cemetery we're driving past]: Was dat, Mama?

Me [flustered]: Um. It's where people go to remember loved ones.

[pause]

Erik [dryly]: Way to avoid the word "mouldering."

How fetching

Pete and Erik this morning--

Erik: Hey, Pete. I'm going upstairs to get my shoes. Do you want to come with me, or do you want to stay here and play with your cars?

Pete: I get them. I be right back.

Erik (confused--this hasn't happened before): You want to come with me?

Pete (starting up the stairs): You stay here.

Erik: OK. I want the brown ones, all right?

(Pause of about three minutes, punctuated by clunking and clomping upstairs. Pete slowly makes his way back down the stairs, carrying two of Carolyn's white sneakers, which do look like my white sneakers, by his fingers in one hand.)

Pete (on the stairs): I be careful. I have fingers in them!

Erik: Good job!

Pete (at the bottom, handing the shoes to me): Here you go! I did it by self!


Sometimes the most interesting milestones are the ones we never knew to seek.

EVERYTHING.

Scene: friendly conference with Pete's daycare teacher, Stephanie. Erik and Carolyn ask how she organizes lunchtime so we can reinforce the class's little rituals. Stephanie describes how she encourages kids to try everything on their plates before she gives seconds of anything.

Erik: And how does Pete do with that? Does he do all right with fruits and vegetables?

(Stephanie's eyes grow wide.)

Stephanie: Oh. (beat) Pete eats EVERYTHING.

Note the difference between a casual "Oh, Pete eats everything!" and this. It was an expression of a kind of mildly frightened wonder, one I immediately recognized from the comments of previous teachers. And from descriptions of a number of Pete's relatives on both sides.

Mirroring

Pete, on Carolyn's recent placement of some blueberries in his cereal: "Great job!"

Sometimes a cigar . . .

Scene: dining table, lunchtime.

(Pete begins making little waves with his hand and arms.)

Erik: Pete, is that the tuna fish? (referring to a song he knows)
Pete: No.

(Pete switches to a more overhand wave motion.)

Erik: Oh, are you swimming?
Pete: No.

(Pause)

Erik: What are you doing?
Pete: I'm moving my hand!

Changing the old ways

From Carolyn

For years, Erik and I have quoted Trading Places to each other to indicate that we're ready (to eat, to hit the road, to move on to the next thing): "Looking good, Billy Ray" "Feeling good, Louis." We had finished packing up the car to head to the zoo on Sunday, and I was helping Pete get into his car seat. Without thinking about it, I started in: "Looking good, Billy Ray," to which Pete responded (a la his recent response to Erik about his nickname "kitten), "I not Billy Ray. I Pete." True, true.

I not kitten. I blog post.

Pete made a big transition a couple of days ago. He and I had been in the car for a while, and when I got out, I said, "Hey, here we are, kitten!" (That was one of our first nicknames for him when he was born.) He responded, "I not kitten. I Pete."

Baseball and then some baseball, please

Pete has become utterly obsessed with baseball. He has been mildly interested in baseball for a long time, but something clicked when I got a new toddler-sized wiffle ball set for him. We started playing with it about a week ago, and to my surprise, he picked up the basics right away. He started out missing most pitches, and he still misses a lot, but he makes a lot of contact now, and he can handle overhand pitching. He lined a ball at my head yesterday, hard enough to make me flinch. The entertaining parts of this are two:

1) The sheer intensity of his love for hitting. Now when we're at home, every little while, the idea of hitting will come to him, and he begins a relentless campaign: "Hit some baseballs? Hit some baseballs? Hit some baseballs?" He'll make his way to the front door, desperately trying to entice us outside: "Hit some baseballs?" This morning, during one of these episodes, Carolyn said, "Oh, Pete, can you give me a little kiss?" Pete walked to her, put his face up to hers, put a little hand on each of her cheeks, inclined his head slightly to the side, and said, "Hit some baseballs?"

2) Out of nowhere, Pete has made the shift from wanting to play sports to wanting to imitate sports mannerisms, which is much funnier. Jackie Brown's kids taught him to run after he hits a ball; after seeing the Cedar Rapids Kernels play on Friday, he added the step of tossing his bat away with a flourish. The Kernels also seem to have taught him the art of tapping his bat on the outside of the plate before each pitch--Pete now gives his favorite anthill a few gentle whacks. And when we watched the French Open final on Sunday, Pete started swinging his indoor (foam) bat like a tennis racquet and doing Rafael Nadal grunts with each pitch. If you see him and ask him "What does Nadal say?" he'll give you a great little "Ah!"

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.

Deadeye

from Carolyn

Pete is occasionally hitting shots (into his kid-sized basketball hoop in our livingroom) from about 13 feet. I'm still probably a better shot than he is, but I'm guessing that will change before he turns 4. Maybe even before he turns 3. It may depend on how much I practice this summer.

The song begins.

Pete started singing a couple of days ago, completely out of the blue. I've written before about how sudden these developments are. This time, he went from having never sung a note of the alphabet song to singing almost all of it on his own in two days. This video--a dark and grainy one, alas--captures the transition from passive to active ABCs.

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!"

Big! Airplane!

Here is my YouTube debut. I'm disappointed to discover how much the compression degrades the video quality--it looks vastly better on my computer--but it certainly captures Pete's enthusiastic little self. Before we had a child, I would wonder why people ever ate at certain restaurants, the loud places with mediocre food at prices that would buy you more interesting fare in a quieter setting elsewhere. The answer: because at the loud places, nobody cares when your child mangles his cheeseburger while shouting at the window. This video will show you what I mean. And let me emphasize that you're seeing one continuous shot, the only one I filmed. It's a representative sample.