week ending feb 4, 2007

Week ending February 4, 2007: This week Alex said something funny. We were getting ready to paint and I was heading toward the dining room table where we usually paint and he said “No! I want to paint on the urinal!” He meant the “easel”, sounds kind of alike. I’ve been noticing how the kids go about trying to find new friends to play with when we are out at venues like the playground. I taught Chloe to say “Hi, I’m Chloe, what’s your name?”, and she has started saying it to every little girl remotely close to her age. For most kids her age, this seems to be enough of an icebreaker and they’ll start following each other around, but if it doesn’t work, Chloe will say “do you want to play with me?”. Some of the older girls (5 or 6 years old) act like Chloe is nuts for being so forward, but Chloe doesn’t seem to worry about it and just moves on to the next candidate. Alex won’t talk to kids he doesn’t know, but sometimes through mimicking he can get another kid to play with him. Alex is still quite shy and prefers to watch when situations are in anyway new. We’d been going to story hour at the Annapolis Library, but they are taking a break before the next session, so we went to story hour at the North County Library near Cousin Natalie. Although the format was the same as “our” story hour, Alex reverted back to sitting on my lap and refusing to participate in the singing and dancing because this story hour is at an unfamiliar place. One day this week he started crying in the bathroom and saying that he didn’t want to flush his toy car down the toilet. We assured him that we weren’t going to flush his toy, but he kept crying. As we asked more questions we figured out that he was upset because on the episode of “Rugrats” that we’d gotten from the library, the little girl’s toy goes down the drain. Alex said, “that was a scary movie”. I guess from his perspective, it really was scary. Earlier this week I sang “my bologna has a first name…” and the kids asked “what’s bologna?”. I said it is like salami or ham, but I thought it was so odd that the kids have made it to 3 years old and don’t know what bologna is. I guess the invention of microwaves and chicken nuggets have changed the way preschoolers eat. Oh, speaking of preschool, the kids were “accepted” to preschool (that means I got the applications in on time). Along with our acceptance letter was a bevy of medical and emergency release forms one of which said that if I couldn’t be contacted during an emergency I would give them permission to send my child in an ambulance. I thought it was a sad commentary on our culture that my kids have been “accepted” to preschool for all of about 4 seconds and already I have to have an image in my head of my kids riding in an ambulance.