Oops.

Falling behind again.

Developments!

I think Jamie may be talking more. "More" as in "more English", I mean. He has been talking all along, but not saying anything a normal human could understand. If he DID speak English, it would really only be to repeat a single word that someone else had just said (luckily, a curse word was never the single word that he would hear/repeat, although how he managed to escape those still perplexes me, given the amount of exposure he has to them). Now, however, he will string two (or more!) words together without hearing someone else say them first. It's a breakthrough!

Here are some example conversations:

Me: Where is your sock?
Jamie: Sock downstairs.

Greg (trying to corral kids into the bathtub): Come on, let's go!
Jamie: Caity! Caity! Bath!

And this is the best one (so far), from tonight:

Me (hearing a voice outside) : Shhh. I think I hear something.
Jamie: A noise? The noise is Daddy.

Seriously. Sometimes he can get crazy like that and put 4 words together! Chances are high that anyone else would not understand what he's saying, but I understand him and he's saying actual words!

My triumph is somewhat nauseating, I know. But I've been waiting so long for this moment...

Random, Disturbing Thoughts

Can you believe that Ferris Bueller's Day Off was released 23 years ago? I remember begging my dad to let us see that in the theater (it was rated PG-13; Dad had to carefully consider whether or not he wanted to expose his under-13 children to the adult themes sure to present themselves in the film).

Wandering around life, doing day-to-day things, I don't really feel that old. But when I ponder random trivia like this, and think about where it falls in the timeline of my life, I feel ancient.

I graduated from high school in 1993. That seems like it was only a few years ago. But ah-ha! do the math and 1993 was somehow seventeen years ago. How is that possible???? Let's see: if I'm 34 now, and graduated when I was 17, that means HALF OF MY LIFE has gone by since graduation. Where did it all go? What did I do with the past 17 years?


Argh.

Welcome, 2010!

I am going to post to this blog every day this year.

Really, I am!

Probably.

Most likely.

We'll see.

Timber!

Today, during lunch, Jamie almost toppled off of his chair and onto the floor.

Caity and I both told him to be careful or else he might fall.

Then Caity asked me: "Will he fall to his death?"

Our chairs are NOT that high.

The First (and Only) Time...

Caity slept over at her Uncle Doug and Aunt Karen's house last night. Aunt Yvonne was in town with her family - Jeremy, her son, is on a travel hockey league and had a couple games in the area this weekend, so they all came down from Grand Rapids and stayed with Doug in Livonia. We went to Jeremy's game in Canton last night, hung out at Doug's for a while afterward, and left Caity to stay overnight with "the cousins" (there were six of them there to play with). ANYWAY - to get to the point of this post, which I know you've been waiting for me to do - this afternoon Yvonne had her kids get out homework to work on during some downtime before they left. Caity became very concerned, and said sadly to Yvonne, "My mommy forgot to pack my homework." So Yvonne found a random book and told her, "I think you're supposed to read this." That worked, and Caity was satisfied. This will probably be the only time in her academic life that she is dismayed by a lack of homework, so I had to make note of it.

Stinky and Sweet

Jamie has been up to his usual tricks. One of my recent favorites was Bailing Out the Toilet. He procured a plastic cup from the bathtub and dipped it into the toilet bowl to extract the water. But he didn't stop there - heavens, no! He then carefully (I can only imagine his slow, toddling steps as he moved down the hallway, cradling the cup in both hands - I didn't actually see this part of it) took the cup into his bedroom and poured its contents onto his bed. This action was repeated a few times (again, I was not privy to this, or else I would have been able to count the number of trips he made. Because you know I would have let this happen in the first place).

It was probably about this point when I, contentedly playing Bejeweled Blitz downstairs, started to wonder what he was up to. So I heaved myself to my feet and went upstairs. My first clue that anything was amiss was the sight of his soaked hair, shirt and pants. And then I saw the bed. In my state of confoundedness I could only surmise that he'd watered the bed, then lay down in it.

Ugh.

He's had other adventures (such as emptying pretty much every drawer he can open), and I was resigned to a life of chasing him around and cleaning up his messes, when he surprised me with a gesture of a completely different nature tonight.

He had just started eating dinner when he hopped down from his chair. "Hey, where are you going?" I demanded from the kitchen, where I was assembling my own dinner. He ignored me and went over to the dish drainer in the sink, where we air-dry plasticware that has gone through the dishwasher. Reaching up on his tiptoes, he fumbled for something. "Cup, cup," he said. Looking over at his seat at the table, I saw that he had a sippy cup of milk already, but I handed him a plastic cup and off he went to the bathroom. He returned shortly thereafter with a small amount of water in the cup and headed back to the table. Ah, he wants water to drink, I thought to myself, and mentally shrugged. But he didn't take the cup to his seat. Instead, he took it... to his sister. We'd forgotten to get her anything to drink; she hadn't said anything to us, but clearly Jamie had noticed the lack. So he got something for her.

I have to say, I was overcome with emotion. He can be such a stinker at times, but when it counts, his heart is definitely in the right place.