One Thousand Words

Life has been kind of kicking my ass lately. Fun! I’ve been job hunting, there’s been car trouble, Nesko’s still working full time plus some over time plus working with his dad plus trying to fix his car. It turns out that you can’t jam extra hours into the day or extra days into the week, and staying up two hours later than you should just so you have a chance to sit next to and talk with your spouse is a bad idea for both of you because talking doesn’t replace sleep even if said spouse IS really cute.

In more fun news, Niko and I made cookies the other day. It worked out pretty well. We don’t have a table in the kitchen, and we don’t really have counter space, and I can’t really move my enormous heavy stand mixer, so we wound up doing that thing where he stands on a step ladder and I hand him a measuring cup of dry ingredient and he dumps it into he mixer bowl and I remind him not to touch the beater because I like him with both hands thank you very much. And then I turn the mixer on and do all the rest of the work myself and don’t give him the beater to lick because oh god raw egg god no. Then he piles all his toys in front of the oven because that’s the most helpful thing to do when I’m baking. Then we eat all the cookies. ALL OF THEM. I want to do it again, but we’re out of eggs, and the car wouldn’t start Sunday so… grocery trip postponed. (lack of eggs forced me– FORCED I SAY– to eat cold pizza for breakfast. Oh no!)

Niko’s been resisting naps lately, which is a foolish move on his part, because he needs a nap or he… uh. Does not cope well. After several days of nap refusal, he spent most of this morning draped over me on the couch, and is now sleeping in his bed cuddled up with a butterfly hand puppet.

I… should probably tell you about the butterfly hand puppet.

There’s this hand puppet. It’s a butterfly, with a big lipsticked mouth. It’s kind of creepy. Niko is enamored of it, possibly because it looks vaguely like a muppet? There are times when he will not listen to me or respond to me unless I’m talking in a silly voice through the butterfly hand puppet.

“Talk like a butterfly mama! Mama! TALK LIKE A BUTTERFLY! No, mama, no! No singing. Only butterfly can sing. Talk like a butterfly!”

Sometimes he calls me butterfly mama.

I sing the Reading Rainbow theme song in a goofy voice and he sings along.

All this butterfly talking makes my throat hurt. I mean, it literally causes me pain.

But I can’t stop because it’s so adorable and hilarious. Niko brings Butterfly things to eat… rocks and trains, but also flowers he makes out of round tinker toy pieces stuck onto straight tinker toy pieces. He says “I love you butterfly!” and gives the hand puppet a hug and a kiss and I try to eat his face and he laughs and says “naughty butterfly! Oh, I’m not mad at you!” Then he sings a song about butterflies while jumping in a circle.

Is this the best age, or what? Toddlers, man. Toddlers.

Anyway, nap time today, Butterfly coaxed Niko into bed (I only had to scoot him across the floor with my foot A LITTLE BIT) and then read 2 stories to him. I asked Niko if he wanted to sleep with Butterfly. His eyes got big and he laughed nervously. “SURE. YES. SURE.” Butterfly wished him good night and lay down on his pillow and I pulled my hand out. I wished Niko good night and told him to sleep tight. “WE WILL” he promised. Daww. And then he fell asleep in like 30 seconds because holy Christ is he running on empty lately.

DID YOU KNOW: if you read books too often they get broken? It’s true. The words just get worn out. At least that’s what Niko claims. We couldn’t read “Time To Pee” or “I Am A Bunny” because “we read those too much, mama, they’re broken. We broke them. The words are broken. We can’t read those too much.”

We’ve started doing some incredibly lazy and half assed potty training. Nesko released Niko into the wild yesterday wearing a shirt and socks and no pants at all. Nothing. Just his business flapping in the breeze. I set a timer and every 20 minutes Niko sat on the toilet and produced a minute amount of urine and then received a chocolate chip. It was a pretty sweet deal. Eventually it was nap time so I diapered him and put him down and then a friend came over… and it turned out he was faking the nap the entire time and he wanted to party, and since it was his favorite person in the whole entire world I said fuck it and let him. He did the foulest poop known to man, resulting in an emergency load of laundry and bath and the living room smelled really bad for like 20 minutes even though no poop got on the floor or anything, it just funked up the air. He was rashy from it (HE IS A DELICATE FLOWER and terrorpoops give him a bright but passing rash) so I put him in underpants. HE WAS THRILLED. Thrilled I say!  Dude, I have been trying to get him into underpants for months now. Literally months! And he would respond each time as though I were offering to mangle a limb! He was good as gold all evening until I put his bed time diaper and jammies on him. And, I mean, he was still good as gold then, he just wasn’t being manhandled into the bathroom every 20 minutes.

Lulled into a false sense of cocky over confidence, we did the underwear thing again today and after two pee pants in 45 minutes (and this was WITH two toilet visits!)  and a shy request for a diaper, I put a diaper and pants on him. Is he too tired to hold it? Was he only trying to impress our friend? I don’t know. We’ll try again this afternoon, maybe. MAYBE.

Another exciting result of potty training? Niko learned the word “penis” which he pronounces “Pee-Nuss.” It may sound odd that he never used that word before, but we usually use the Serbian word for his penis, which I don’t know how to spell. I think “Pee-Nuss” is hilarious, though. We’ve also hit the milestone that butts are funny, which I don’t know, I guess asses are just inherently funny? Because we don’t have verboten body parts or body labels in our house, and we talk about bottoms and butts and rectums and body parts and nakedness is no big deal. But the other day I told Niko to pull his sagging britches up over his bottom and he said “You mean my… GUZA?!?” (guza is the Serbian word for butt) and then he literally fell over laughing the way that toddlers do. WHATEVER, MAN. Just please wipe your Pee-Nuss after you pee, we don’t need dribbles all over the place.

Technorati Tags: parenting, potty training, toddler

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