The countdown to three years is officially on!

We are firmly entrenched in the time of “No, I can do it myself!” He insists on pushing shopping carts, strollers, wagons, and anything else he can get his hands on. He vacuums and sweeps, refusing help even when he’s struggling. When we shop at Metro we let him take one of the tiny kid-sized grocery carts and he pushes it around very importantly, putting things in the basket, and then unloading them onto the conveyor belt for the cashier. I spend a lot of my time diverting the cart from crashing into shelves because he looks at the displays and not the aisle ahead of him, or catching it as it falls over when he tries to make too sharp a turn. It is terribly sweet to see how proud he is when he handles it all it, though, and it amuses other shoppers too.

He is also very helpful when we drive. “Green!” he exclaims as soon as a traffic light changes. If I’m not careful he will bounce into the front seat when I get out of the car and say, “I’m driving!” When we start out for wherever we’re headed, he will make his request for whatever music he wants to listen to that day, and then very often shout “Make it louder!” with much glee. Sometimes he listens to whatever classical music I have in the CD player instead of asking for his music to be played, and now and again remarks, “I like this, it’s pretty.”

“It’s big, and huge!” he said excitedly the other day as he was telling us a story. He uses words neither of us remember teaching him — feature, silo, treatment, airflow, aileron — and unless he’s speaking too fast he can be understood by just about anyone. His letter recognition has just skyrocketed (thank you, TMBG — this learning leap brought to you by the letter F for fridge, upon which are the letter magnets) which is kind of dizzying, because suddenly we’re fielding letter questions again, only this time they’re tests of our own knowledge.

Something I’ve never mentioned is that he sleeps with BunBun over his face. I know he’s settling down for the night when he stops chattering and telling a disjointed review of his day to his toys and books and curls up on his side, pulling the stuffed rabbit over his face. Lately he’s been wanting me to curl up with him so he can fall asleep holding my hand, which is fine. I’m not seeing it as a problem, as he falls asleep perfectly normally on his own everywhere else. He’s also taken to inviting BunBun along on outings, and sometimes cradles him across his lap in the car. “This is my baby,” he informed me the other day. “He is hungry. Can he have a graham cracker?” And he solemnly held the cracker to BunBun’s mouth, and then asked for his sippy cup of milk and fed that to BunBun too.

Most of the time if the weather’s nice we take the wagon to the bus stop to meet HRH on his way home from work. Liam now pulls the wagon– or pushes it, depending on his stubborn preschool mood, which engenders resistance when I try to hold the handle to steer the thing. “No, don’t help,” he insists, and stomps his feet in frustration when I explain that someone has to steer or he’ll crash. Or, you know, run over my feet. Again.

He spent much of our Mother’s Day visit to HRH’s parents running around the front lawn, turning over the ornamental rocks in the garden to look for bugs underneath them. He found an ant nursery, which suddenly began boiling over with furious ants shoving little eggs around in the sudden blinding sunlight, and was glued to the sight until we literally dragged him away and replaced the rock over the poor things. When he got tired of turning rocks over he ran up and down the front slope, looping around the pine trees, shouting, “I’m running! I’m running! I’m running around a conifer! C is for conifer! T is for tree!” His favourite DVDs right now, you see, are They Might Be Giants’ Here Come the 1 2 3s and Here Come the A B Cs. Favourite songs include BNL’s ‘7 8 9’, and TMBG’s ‘Seven’, ‘Nine Bowls of Soup’, and ‘Triops Has Three Eyes’, all of which he can be heard singing at various times. He is also fond of ‘Five’ as sung by Robin on The Muppet Show.

He has taken to disguising himself in the bath by scooping up a handful of bubbles and plastering them to his chin, then saying in a deep muffled voice, “Where’s Liam?” which is hilarious to play along with. He has also taken to frequently pretending to be a cat, saying “Meow!” in response to whatever I ask him, and curling up in my lap and leaning against my shoulder. It’s fine by me; I take the opportunity to put my arms around him and stroke his back, and murmur to my Liam-Kitten. His sense of humour is developing nicely. On the other hand, so is the little-boy fascination with Destruction as played out by Toy Cars and Trains. And finally, the enthusiasm for dinosaurs has kicked in. I was beginning to wonder if it ever would.

Recently he was playing with the cardboard tube from a paper towel roll while I made dinner. “Oh, hi,” he said, holding it up to his ear while looking at me. “Hi,” I said back. “I have to go to orchestra now,” he said. I figured out that the tube was a phone and said, “Oh, really?” “Yes,” he said, “you can wave at me through the window.” “Have fun!” I said. “Okay, bye,” he said and ran off, then came back into the kitchen without the tube and said somewhat sheepishly, “I need my cello now?”

He has also discovered painting with tempera and nice big thick paintbrushes! When he gets going he paints in a gleeful frenzy and then cries out, “More paper!” I whip the finished painting away, place a blank piece down in its place, and away he goes again. He is having great fun discovering what happens when he mixes colours together, and what shapes he can make with different strokes of the brush or thumping the bristles down on the paper in various ways. He’s into art, letters, and music; no surprise, I’m sure. But he also loves tossing balls around, playing “sockey” (which is what he calls both soccer and hockey), and riding the trike. It makes for a lot of fun these days.

More Liam posts this past month:

The trip to the EcoMuseum, where Liam loses his cap
The resolution of the hat drama
Liam discovers the library
Liam helps feed the baby squirrels