Our house is all Star Wars, all the time. The boy is alternately Artoo, the Millennium Falcon, and either the Imperial Star Destroyer or the Rebel Blockade Runner. Lego is now material for creating X-wings and TIE fighters and Star Destroyers. I found an R2-D2 figure the other day (Clone Wars figures, who knew?) and bought it for him. He’s still thanking me. He drew about nine pictures of Star Wars characters and ships last week, which I should find and put up on the fridge.

I love that someone can mention something about the moon, and I can say, “That’s no moon, that’s a space station,” and without missing a beat my son will reply, “It’s too big to be a space station. Maybe you should turn the ship around. Yeah, yeah, I think you’re right.” While he plays with Lego spaceships in his room I can hear him recite passages of dialogue accurately, complete with inflection and accent.

In the book area we’re revisiting picture books as we search for a new series of early chapter books to read aloud. A Bear Called Paddington didn’t work; neither did The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. The ratio of illustrations to text needs to be higher.

January was music month at preschool, and as part of the unit he made a guitar out of an empty Kleenex box and the long roll from gift wrap at school, complete with rubber bands stretched across the box opening. The picture says it all.

The biggest thing this past month is his sudden fascination with babies and how they grow. After seeing a woman in an advanced stage of pregnancy (as in, one could see and/or feel the baby moving) he asked where babies came from. Rather than get into super-specific technical explanations we told him that there’s a little bit of each of the mother and father that is grown inside the mother’s tummy over a long, long time. He then (incorrectly but understandably) inferred that the food one eats is what grows the baby. No no, we explained, the baby actually grows underneath the tummy, not in the stomach where the food goes to be digested, although indirectly yes, the food one eats is what helps the baby grow. And then he decided that he had a baby in his tummy and could feel it moving. So we had to disappoint him by saying that alas, only mothers could do this particular trick, although if he wanted to find a way for fathers to do it too when he grew up then more power to him. He then decided that there was a baby growing in my tummy, specifically a baby sister. And he cheerfully started telling people this. Which made things slightly awkward at times, until he decided we needed a new Maggie-cat, and included the information that there was a baby Maggie and a baby sister growing in my tummy. (Just to be absolutely clear: No, on both the kitten and the baby.)

We’ve begun talking about where we will eventually move to next, although it’s certainly not any time soon. He was quite upset by this for a bit, saying that he didn’t want to move to the new house, that he wanted to stay here, that this house was fine. I asked him where this hypothetical little sister would sleep. “In my bunk bed, with me!” he said. “She’d be too little,” I pointed out, “she’d need a crib.” “We could move my easel and put the crib at the end of my bed,” he said, which was very generous of him. While they were out on a walk or a shopping trip he and HRH saw a puppy, and talk turned to owning a dog someday. When they came home Liam burst into the house and said, “Mama, we have to get a new house and then we can have a dog!” So suddenly the new house isn’t such a bad thing. He’s decided that the bathtub will be bigger, the kitchen will be bigger, the living room will be bigger ( “And we will bring our new TV!”), and he will have an office of his own, like Mama and Dada do, with his own computer. To which I said hey, sure, because HRH has already let the IT guys at work now that the next time the eMacs get replaced he has dibs on a couple, one earmarked for the boy himself.

I mentioned that there was a level-up somewhere around Christmas. Well, there’s been another in the past two weeks. The reasoning and language and behaviour and associated stuff has refined yet again. It’s great. On the other hand, he’s hiding his reading skills from us and still trying to convince us that he can’t dress himself or draw. He pretends all over the place and tells exciting stories, and is getting better at lying down in his room and playing with trains or cars for a good half hour or so, constructing elaborate conversations between them and narrating the action.

He has recently gone crazy for raw snow peas. He’s been horse-like in his appetite lately in general (as in eating horse-sized servings, not preferring grass and oats) but particularly so for raw peas and carrots, bananas, blackberries, cantaloupe, and corn. The nap habit is kind of iffy; at school we’re lucky if he naps for half an hour, because there’s so much going on to distract him, and the older kids don’t nap any more. And as he hangs around with them, well, he sees it as perfectly reasonable that he doesn’t need to nap either. Which is, alas, untrue, because if the nap is missed he’s a whiny cranky horror by six o’clock. He naps around an hour and a half with his caregiver and Grandma, and about two hours at home, though, so heh, the nap is not a thing of the past yet, my son.

Something that amuses us is a sudden aggressive politeness. When you tell him to do something and he angrily says, “No, thanks!“, it’s really hard to hide the smile. He has also recently taken to moaning, “Oh, I never get to do [thing you won’t let me do]!” when we tell him no, and we’re very hard put to not laugh out loud at the dramatic hyperbole. Especially when it involves playing with cars, Lego, trains, colouring, watching a movie, or eating crackers. Because you know in our house those fun things Just Aren’t Done. Ever.

Other Liam posts this past month:

~ Liam is introduced to Star Wars