Oh, there was great emotional trauma this past month. The boy was playing out back with HRH and wailed when he discovered that he’s too big to make the little ride-on tractor he got just before he turned two move through the grass by pushing with his feet. He just can’t get the leverage any more, because his legs are so long that his knees are up around his ears. He was very distraught. The thing comes up to below his knee when he stands next to it; he can pick it up and tuck it under one arm. HRH said, “See, that’s new. You could never do that before.” And he tried to tell the boy that it was super awesome cool that he could carry a tractor, but the boy as unconvinced. He’s too big for the sandbox now, too; we haven’t told him that it’s being dismantled this fall. More resisting the growing up…

One of the three new fish died, of no discernible cause. This is the first time that he’s really been aware enough or present when we discovered it, and he had a minor breakdown, despite the fact that he ignores them most of the time. The only way he could work through it was to imagine that a shark was going to eat the flushed fish corpse. How this made it okay, I will never know. I’d have thought it would be more traumatic.

He made up his own Transformer and described it so HRH could draw it, then he sat down with his pencil crayons and coloured it. Unfortunately this has led to arguments and tears when he gets dressed because he has a shirt and a pair of pants in those colours, so he wants to wear them every day so he can pretend to be that Transformer. One day I told him he’d just have to use his imagination, and he stomped his feet and said, “But I can’t use my imagination!” Which amused me, of course, as that’s exactly what he’s doing when he wears those clothes.

He’s developed a very sweetgoodnight kiss routine. First he kisses me and hugs me, then I kiss and hug him, and then we both kiss and hug one another. There are specific words that go along with it: he says, “First me [kiss and hug]; now you [kiss and hug],” and then we both say, “And now, both of us, together.”

Fave songs these days include “Hickory Dickory Dock,” “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” and “E Eats Everything.” We are anxiously awaiting the Canadian street release of Here Comes Science by TMBG. We have a couple of the new videos from it thanks to podcasts and YouTube, so everyone has “Electric Car,” “Paleontologist,” and “Davy Crockett (In Space)” stuck in their brains.

He’s so tall that all his pyjamas are too short in legs and arms. I’ve gone through a lot of his clothes, and we’re going to need new boots again (probably a size ten) and likely new socks as well. Good grief.

There are tougher things going on that he’s struggling to wrap his mind around, too. There are new kids at school, one who is a classic high maintenance child and who tells him on a regular basis that (a) he can’t play with her or be her friend, (b) she is his friend and therefore he can’t play with another already established older friend, or (c) if he plays with someone else he doesn’t like her. He is utterly confused, and often hurt by these statements. “But why would she say something like that, Mama?” he asks, usually at night after our story when we’re snuggling in bed. Trying to explain insecurity and fear of being rejected so one attempts to manipulate and arrange everyone’s relationships to a four year old is challenging, to say the least.

“What’s that?” he said when we were in the yarn store. “A ball winder,” I told him. He gazed at it hungrily, standing as close to it as he could, and I explained how it worked. “Can we get one?” he said. Recently he asked if he could help me knit and was upset when I asked him not to, so I got out the size 11 needles and a ball of rainbow yarn, and cast ten stitches on for him to knit. At the moment we’re at the ‘Mama holds her hands over his hands’ stage, but he is very enthusiastic about wrapping the yarn over the RH needle to make the new stitch. He has decided that he is knitting a scarf for his teacher (first it was a hat “because hers is getting very old”, but I suggested the easier scarf instead and he took the suggestion readily).

We ‘goed’ and ‘wented’ places, and it feels like I’m constantly correcting him on that one point of grammar alone. He used to say ‘went’ correctly, so I suspect either the new kids at school are misusing them, or he’s consciously trying to conjugate and getting it wrong because English follows so many different rules.

There is great excitement at breakfast now. On weekends we set up a bowl of cereal, a small finger bowl of raisins, and a spoon at the table, and turn a big plastic mixing bowl over it all so the cats don’t have a festival with it at night. We put a glass of juice in the fridge, and a half-glass of milk. When he gets up in the morning he comes and crawls into bed for a cuddle, then whispers that he’s going to go make his breakfast, patters into the kitchen to take the milk and juice out of the fridge, uncover the cereal, pour the milk and raisins into the cereal bowl, and have his breakfast. He adores it; he feels so grown up and important. And the bonus is, HRH and I get to sleep in a bit longer.

Fearsclave and his wife got a new kitten this past month, and she’s so tiny she needed to be fed from a bottle for a few weeks. They called her Maggy, and the boy was absolutely enchanted with the short video Fearsclave posted of the kitten being fed. I dug out a squeeze bottle and he ‘fed’ his own stuffed Maggie:

Things you can do with knitting needles other than knit: conduct!