I think the biggest milestone over the past month has been Liam’s first official haircut. I’ve been cutting it myself at home when I could, but it was getting to the point where I couldn’t keep it as even as it should be, so in he went. He was pleasantly distracted by the movie they were showing (CARS!), and ran up to his stylist to thank her twice at the end of it all. He chose a red lollipop, naturally; they seem to be his favourites. The other big thing this past month has been the bike trailer. He has dragged everyone who has stopped by down to the garage to show it off.

His current favourite books are the Henry and Mudge series. Like lots of the other books we read together they’re early reader books, but they’re perfect to read aloud. Henry is a very Liamish boy. Mudge is, well, a huge Great Dane. Liam started calling Gryff Mudge for a while. And let me tell you, when they galumph and chase one another up and down the hall, Gryff certainly sounds like a Great Dane. (HRH told me the vet weighed Gryff when he was taken in with the infected bite, and he’s eleven pounds now. Gah.) I love looking in the rear view mirror while driving and seeing him sitting casually in his booster seat, legs loosely crossed, a book held open on his lap.

In the food division, the recent winners are ice cream bars on sticks, corn on the cob, and any kind of meat on a bone of some sort. Seriously. It gives us both great pleasure to watch him hold a bone in his hands and tear the meat off with his sharp little teeth. His snack of choice is fresh mangetout peas from the garden. (Note to self: plant lots and lots more mangetouts next year.) Last week he ate a banana as if it was a cob of corn — peeled it completely then held it horizontally and ate bites out of it that way. He has also discovered what he calls ‘iced cappuccinos’. I crush some ice cubes in the blender, add some milk and chocolate syrup, blend it all together, and serve it to him with a straw. It’s basically a chocolate milk frappé, but to him it’s a very grown-up drink and he loves it.

Current fave music is the Snacktime album by the Barenaked Ladies. He’ll even dance to it, and encourage other people to dance as well. He still won’t let other people sing it, though. “No,” he’ll say, “that’s my song.” Meaning, of course, that no one else is allowed to sing it. He’s still a big fan of ‘The Mesopotamians’ and ‘Dr. Worm,’ too.

He’s been having trouble with his sleep patterns lately. His naps have been comparatively brief (an hour instead of two), and he’s been fighting bedtime in general. He gets up after the door has closed, cries, and pushes our buttons. It’s hard to keep the frustration under wraps. He wakes up between five and six AM, often with a mid-night waking as well. We’re buying a set of bunk beds from HRH’s officemate next month, and I’m hoping the novelty of a big bed will help him stay in it. We’ll get to choose new sheets and a coverlet, too. We plan to set up the bunkbeds but leave the upper mattress and the ladder off the unit. Voila: instant tent once one has hung fabric off the two open sides.

On the other night-time hand, he’s only wearing a pull-up at night in case of emergency, and he’s dry more often than not. So good for him.

We’ve been having problems in general with whining and encountering resistance to any idea that isn’t his own. We try to remind him or tell him ahead of time about things so as to avoid the sudden change of direction or activity, but the immediate response to any prompt is still resistance. In fact, he’s been resisting things in general, running the gamut from deliberately doing the opposite of what we ask to simply ignoring us, to throwing a fit. I know he’s working things out, testing boundaries and confirming structure, but it’s very wearing. He’s also been very screechy and shouty. Liam is a very strong personality, and it’s hard to grit one’s teeth when he looks at you and does something deliberately to provoke you. Forget the terrible twos; these are the infamous threes. Not to imply that he’s a stress all the time; there are long stretches of fun and cheery Liam, and then suddenly there is a horrid moment of vexation derived from naughty behaviour or something positively Not On, for which he gets a turn in the Time Out chair. (Suddenly turning around and biting Mama for no reason until the teeth meet but the skin isn’t broken qualifies as one of those Not On things. Especially when followed by laughter.)

I figured it was about time he got to play with one of the consoles, so I bought Endless Ocean for him to play, and he’s having a ball. He feels extremely important holding the Wii remote, and once we’ve set the game up he won’t let us touch it. We’d opened it and played it before HRH came home that day, and Liam took great delight in showing HRH how things worked (going so far as to say, “Here, Dada, I’ll show you how it works” in a very officious manner). He’s lost his game a couple of times by hitting a sequence of buttons, but he doesn’t care; he likes being able to move the diver around and switch between first-person and third-person views. And he is very chuffed about having figured out where the A button is. He acquired his dolphin friend over the weekend and now has way too much fun making it do tricks.

When he sees that my computer is on he gathers a bunch of his trains up and patters into my office, eagerly saying, “Hi Mama, can I play in your office? Can I watch Thomas and friends?” He has discovered the joys of YouTube, and the seemingly endless supply of child-directed reenactments of Thomas episodes using the actual episode narration and toy trains moved around in front of a video camera. It’s the main reason I want the laptop up and running properly again, so I can work and he can do his internet-related stuff at the same time. ( “I’m working,” he said importantly the other day when I’d gotten the laptop up and running, albeit temporarily, as he sat there and typed away at the keyboard. “I’m sending you a message.”)

He is very sensitive, and he’s working that out in his own way too. He unintentionally made me cry the other day. He trundled his blanket-covered toy shopping cart up to me. “Mama,” he said in a coaxing singsong way, “I have a surprise for you!” “Really? A surprise?” I said. “Wow! What is it?” Liam whisked the blanket away to reveal the little stuffed black and white cat he now calls Maggie. “Ta-da!” he said. “It’s Maggie-cat!” And I burst into tears, surprising both of us. He looked very unsure as I reached out and picked the toy up and crushed it to my chest. “Thank you,” I said. “Mama?” he said uncertainly. “Are you okay?” “Yes, lovey,” I said through the tears. “It’s just that you surprised me. And I miss my Maggie-cat so very much, more than I thought I did, I guess.” He still looked kind of spooked, so I held out my arms and cuddled him along with the toy. I couldn’t stop the damn sobbing, not for a while. He cuddled me and patted my arm, and finally said, “It’s okay Mama. It’s just a stuffed Maggie.” And I laughed through my tears. I his world, it made sense. And sometimes we need to take a three-year-old’s point of view and say to ourselves yes, it’s just a stuffed Maggie. There’s no need to be upset. She’s something to squeeze and love and play with, and if we can’t have the real Maggie (as he seems to finally understand, or at least he’s stopped saying “We’ll find her again later” at any rate) then a stuffy is just fine.

Liam-themed posts over the past month:

– The new bike trailer
– Mama’s birthday, Liam’s first car wash, and Mama’s new bike

If you missed the 37 month post (and didn’t we all) I did one a couple of weeks ago and back-dated it.