There aren’t many photos this month. That’s part of what took so long; I couldn’t find pictures to accompany the post. I cheated and used some from just after the eleventh of the month.

There are some delicious phrases popping up in the boy’s conversations. The most recent one that slayed both HRH and I was, “Are you crazying me?” Another favourite exchange of mine happened at dinner, and went thusly:

MAMA: So, what did you do at school today?

SPARKY: I can’t tell you.

HRH: …or I’d have to kill you.

MAMA: He evidently goes to a ninja super-spy preschool.

The naps are down to every two days, and the days without naps are becoming more secure and less fraught with overwroughtness around dinner. It’s really quite a relief to know that if we miss a nap on the weekend it finally isn’t the end of the world; we can actually schedule or participate in activities that happen between noon and four now, like the rest of the world.

Bread and Jam for Frances is his new favourite book, slipping in under the wire this month. He was very interested in The Magic School Bus Inside the Human Body book, which we took out of the library when he was home sick for a week. And he’s being very sneaky and not letting us know he’s reading; it only slips once in a while when he says things like, “Can we play the hide and seek game?” while pointing to an online icon with those words that he’s never seen before.

It’s been very Star Wars-y here. Apart from the action figures and spaceships he’s been focusing on, he and HRH have been co-playing through Lego Star Wars: The Original Trilogy on the Xbox, and I’m very impressed with how quickly he’s picked up buttons and combos to move around and do certain actions. (I still have to look at the buttons in order to know which ones to press; he doesn’t.) Then again, sometimes he just likes to play Artoo and fly around in circles while HRH struggles to hold off a horde of Lego stormtroopers on his own. His building with toys like Lego and Knex is getting more elaborate and imaginative, too. I love watching how intricate his playtime gets. He narrates complex stories about Jedis, Transformers, spaceships, cars, and trains, and a lot of it is internally consistent. And finally, on the toy front, Blackie is beginning to stay at home more often. He stills joins the boy for the occasional car trip to school or out on the weekend, but he gets left in the car.

The biggest problem these days is getting dressed in the morning. Like me he seems to need a lot of time to settle into the day, and getting him to have breakfast then get dressed before using whatever time is left to play is frustrating for everyone. It’s specifically the getting dressed part that stalls out, because he wants to play right after eating. I’m considering getting a timer from the dollar store and setting it to give him an independent marker to show when a certain time period set aside for an activity is up, because he seems to tune out HRH and I telling him he’s only got X minutes to do something. It’s worse when he’s sick or headachey, of course, but there’s still a bit of dawdling on a regular basis. Sometimes we can turn it into game or a race to see who gets dressed first, but we don’t always have the energy for that.

When he and HRH get into the car to go to school I wave, and when they pull out of the driveway they pause and wave again before the car pulls away. Lately, the boy has had his nose stuck in a book, and has waved without looking out the window at me to watch me wave back. He’s such an individual, and it’s so much fun to watch him grow.