One of the boy’s favourite things to do this past month was check on Molly the barn owl who had laid her first clutch of eggs in California. Her nesting box has a webcam in it, and it’s been really interesting to watch the process. Every morning before he went to school and every day as soon as he got home, and sometimes before bed, too, he’d ask to watch her. He saw the first couple of owlets once they’d hatched, and watched a recorded video of the third hatching. He really enjoyed flipping through the other recordings available, particularly of the male owl dropping, and of Molly eating various rodents and rabbits with great gusto. “Let’s watch the one where she eats the rat!” he’d say, and enjoy the somewhat grisly performance with great relish. “What’s that crunch sound?” he said the first time he saw it. “That’s the rat tearing apart,” I said. “Oh, good,” he said, and enjoyed it all the more. He learned how to write ‘owlet’, too:
(I am just as tickled that one of the words he knows how to write on his own is ‘owlet’ as I was when the word ‘book’ was among the first five words he learned to say.)
His writing is really firming up, and so is his reading. He can get two or three pages into a picture book before he decides it’s too much effort and tells me to finish it on my own. I find it interesting that when he writes his name, the first and third letters are capitalsed, but the second and fourth are lowercase. I’m amused by his vocabulary, too. In his stories, for example, ships don’t come back to be fixed, they “return for repairs.” The stories he tells and his imaginative play are becoming ever richer; they start in the morning, especially when he’s got his shoes and coat on and is saying goodbye to me, and carry on in the car with HRH all the way to school. Sometimes he gets distracted by the stories and loses sight of what he’s supposed to be concentrating on. He’s getting really scary-good at Lego. I am told that preschool has to invest in more to keep up with him. Heck, at the rate we’re going, we’ll have to invest in more to keep up with him. (And with HRH building all sorts of spaceships at the boy’s command.)
When the winter boots were put away we discovered that last fall’s shoes barely fit him, so he has new ones now. They’re size 11 shoes, which means that he grew two shoes sizes over the winter. He’s in size 4 clothes, edging into size 5 tops. The naps are pretty much a thing of the past, but that doesn’t stop us from gently insisting on a lie-down after lunch on weekends. On the days when he doesn’t have even a brief a nap at preschool, he sometimes falls asleep in the car on the way home.
It’s great to see his abilities improve by comparing last year’s seasonal arts and crafts projects with this year’s. He brings home spring or Easter crafts and I think about last year’s, and it’s so easy to see how much more sophisticated the current ones are. His current favourite movie is The Princess and the Frog, which is growing on me after a somewhat neutral response to it when I saw it in the theatre at Christmas. The current favourite books are his collection of Henry and Mudge stories, possibly because he’s learning to read them and so is rediscovering them in a way. He mouths the words while I read them.
Just before Easter we were in a pharmacy and he saw the racks of stuffed animals alongside the chocolate. “Blackie needs a little friend,” he confided in me. “He has lots,” I pointed out. And it is true, there is a minor collection of rabbits in various sizes that he has amassed from various places. “No, he needs a new friend for Easter,” I was told. I almost picked one up when buying the chocolate eggs for our hunt, but decided against it. A good thing, too, because he ended up coaxing his grandma into buying another black and white one while they were out shopping on Easter weekend instead. So he has a new bunny about whom we had a serious discussion concerning names. He wanted to name it Blackie-Whitey, which would have been confusing since we already have one. I got him to agree to Whitey-Blackie. And then we had a couple of talks over the next couple of days about how we don’t stop playing with our old friends when we have new ones; Blackie isn’t allowed to be left behind just because there’s a fluffy, soft, new bunny with a shiny ribbon in the house. He’s handed it very well, actually: they take turns cuddling with him, or he has me take both out of his room at night ( “Mama,” he said, “please take my bunnies, because they are being disturbing and keeping me awake.”) And he left both at home on his first day back at school after Easter. We were concerned that he was going to glom onto it, and we’ve already done some work on getting him to stop bringing Blackie everywhere, but he’s been very good about it all.
And of course, the biggest news this past month: NEW BIKE! FIRST TWO-WHEELER!
He’s really growing fast. I say that every other month, I know, but that’s because I marvel continually at how steep the learning curve is for children, and how rapidly they assimilate new information.
Two months till he’s five years old. Just under five months till kindergarten. I’m going to stop the monthly posts on his fifth birthday, and just stay with random boy-themed posts when they come up.
Well, after I handed in that freelance assignment yesterday I was so fried that I decided I wasn’t good for much more than watching the new spinning DVD I got last week, Abby Franquemont’s 
This morning, the boy refused to answer to any name but ‘Artoo’, and communicated only in whistles and beeps. It was frustrating, but also adorably geeky. And I do freely admit that I bear significant responsibility for his Star Wars obsession.
Better late than never. I’ve had this sitting in a file on my desktop, and I haven’t posted it because I was sure there was something I was forgetting. (There was: 
The biggest news this month, bar none, is 
They’re going to officially begin eliminating the nap at preschool in the new year. This makes me sad, sadder than the reminders of how much he’s growing in the form of too-short pants and sleeves on shirts, shoes outgrown before they’re worn out, increasing dexterity with pencils and markers and other growing-up indicators. At school he’s down to a half hour at the most, although at home he’ll still sleep a solid hour and a half, and when he wakes up they move him to the library room where he sits for another hour quietly on his own, looking at books. “He just loves books,” his educators say, and we kind of smile and shrug a bit. When you’re surrounded by them, how can you not love them? Books have been an integral part of his life since the moment he was born. He’s never not known books, something for which I am deeply grateful. My parents gave me plaque that says, ‘Richer than I you can never be, I had a mother who read to me’ and it’s a truth. We are currently reading The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe one chapter before bed each night, and he’s staying quiet for it even though there are no pictures other than the chapter heading in the hardcover copy I’m reading from. I am so thrilled that we’ve reached this point.
He used to sleep on his side, but recently he’s begun sleeping like I do, on his back with his arms above his head. (I have no idea how I get that way; I fall asleep curled up on my side.) But sometimes an arm gets trapped underneath him, and twice now he’s woken up crying in the morning because he can’t feel an arm or hand, because they’ve fallen asleep. And then he cried because the pins and needles sting as the blood gets back into the affected area. A couple of weeks ago we were in the basement one evening and we heard a fitful cry over the baby monitor, a cry unlike anything we’d heard from him since he was a very tiny baby. Now, he never wakes up crying; no nightmares, nothing. So we hurried upstairs and he was still half-asleep, unable to move either of his hands and forearms because he’s somehow gotten them both trapped underneath him. I rubbed them till the pins and needles went away, and cuddled him back to sleep.
On Friday I went to see the 
His arms and legs are just so long. The sleeves of most new size 4 shirts, after a wash, are too short. And he has trouble pulling shirts off because the shoulders are a bit tight. He’s slim, though, so we run into a problem with pants that are long enough for his legs but too loose around the waist. And the feet, ye gods. Did I mention that his new winter boots are size eleven? And that he’s grown out of most of his socks?