Gatito’s bed is arriving on Thursday. I always swore that I would not move him out of his crib unless he was climbing out or I needed it for another child, but I didn’t count on being woken up in the middle of the night by a child who needs to use the toilet. Not that I am counting on his getting up to pee independently and going back to bed without waking us up (although he is capable of it), but it could happen! I guess this is really the end of babyhood.
One thing that amazes me about Gatito is how consistent his personality has been from the age of two months. In infancy, he had an unusually long attention span and ability to entertain himself. These days, he requires long periods of daily independent car playing to be truly happy. Last week, when we arrived an hour too early for his tots music class, he sat entranced through an entire Suzuki violin class first. They let him interact with real instruments during and after the tots class, and he loves it. Tata sent a great picture of him holding a violin under his chin a few weeks ago, and since then I’ve been looking forward excitedly to learning Suzuki violin (or other instrument of his choice) together when he turns four (only if he still wants to, of course).
While his personality has been consistent, that doesn’t mean he hasn’t evolved. He has always been extremely sensitive to loud noises. He still doesn’t like them, but he’s learned to deal with them, in part by talking about them often. When my mom showed him an apple corer/slicer, he asked, “Is it loud?” He pretends to vacuum and makes me hold Cowie and cover his* ears and have Cowie cry because of the noise. (*Although all cows are female, Gatito insists that his is a boy, just to be contrary.)
He remains tall (around 40 inches– the average height of a four-year-old) and skinny, and he’s always hungry. He consumes whole pints of berries in a sitting. Often when we put a plate of food in front of him, he immediately asks, “Are you going to give me more?” as though he’d lived through a famine or something! He’s excellent at co-opting whatever we’re eating, which is a pain on the days I am bothering to count WW points. When he is at other people’s houses, he says, “I have a kitchen.” And then, “Do you have a kitchen?” This generally has the desired outcome of being offered a snack.
He woke up in the middle of the night last week and started crying hysterically, “Daddy! YOU ATE MY PASTA!” (No pasta had recently been served, just for the record.) After a few minutes of that, we went in there and he accused daddy again and added, “And you were fading away. And you need to be blue.” It was so wacky I thought for a second he may have had a brain injury, but I guess he was just still mostly asleep.
He’s totally potty trained and has been for months, but he still delays going and does an elaborate pee dance. It hasn’t resulted in an accident so far, but I worry about bladder infections! Ever since we had to stop on the side of the road in the Bronx to let him pee, he’s loved peeing outside. It sure is easy being a boy, but that doesn’t mean I want him peeing on my lawn all the time! (Or worse, he often wants to go by the side of the pool at our new club. Uh, no!)
While he’s often in non-stop motion in the typical manner of a two-year-old, he’s not aggressively physical. He only recently got comfortable with climbing up ladders and going down slides. The dad next door showed him how to throw a baseball overhand. He did it and we all cheered, and when the dad asked if he would like to do it again, he said, “No, thank you.”
If he one day ends up as a film or theater director, we will tell stories of how he used to sit on the potty and direct A and me in elaborate plays involving Cow and Monkey (or, if I am too lazy to get them, Toothpaste and Hairbrush, or Flat Iron and Hair Dryer). Mostly I have to make them bake cakes and serve them, or else look for and purchase a book for Gatito. The required accompanying dialog is elaborate and specific and woe betide the stuffed animal or hair styling tool that messes up a line.
He’s still nervous around other little kids (interestingly, in particular younger kids and babies), but Tata has been taking him to playgroups with a few kids that will be in his preschool class in the fall and I have been getting him together with the little girl down the street who will also be in his class, so he won’t walk in to a room of 17 total strangers. I think the timing for school is going to be perfect for him. His personality was so much more suited to the one-on-one, calm attention of a nanny, and we’re lucky to have had that option, and lucky to have the option to continue that in the fall, with preschool three mornings/week.
He’s amazing around grown-ups, always at his most charming. He’s incredibly articulate in both English and Spanish and impresses everyone he meets. We took him to a barbecue with people from A’s job and he charmed the pants off all of them, from his greetings and hand shaking to his unprompted pleases, thank you’s and general conversation, to his general obedience. (He has his share of melt-downs and obstinacy but he generally saves these for when no one else is around.) Quickly catching on to the rules of Simon Says, he wanted to be Simon and directed everyone to look at the sky, look at the grass, look over there, in a sort of existential version of the game.
We had to go to a daytime wedding on Saturday to which he was not invited and I was grumpy about losing a whole day with him. Even though I am sure it is healthy for me to spend some time away, I almost never spend more than an hour away from him other than when I am at work, and I felt like a piece of me was missing. I was so excited to see that my office is having a kids event in a couple of weeks because I cannot wait to show him where I go every day and to show him off to my colleagues.
Tata is on vacation this week and we split up the days between A, my mom, and me. My time starts tomorrow, and I couldn’t be more excited to have two full days of him all to myself. We spend a lot of time laughing around here, and asking how he manages to be so cute and so funny, and how we managed to get so lucky.
