Midnight Musings

I was on single parent duty yesterday while Kim did the open house thing. It wasn't a big deal. After Evan got over a 30-minute screaming jag because I had to use the the restroom, he was actually in a grand old mood, except that he kept wanting to bite me. We're trying to break him of that particular game, so I held him back and said, "Do you want to go to time out?"

He instantly shook his head "no," which is interesting because he's been doing that motion, but never before in response to a yes or no question.

Of course, then he paused, looked down to where he had bitten me earlier, looked back up at my face, grinned, and lunged in for another snap. Of course that meant he had to go to time out.

I'm not really sure how effective time out is. He actually will stop crying when you put him in the playpen we use for time out if he's upset. I picked him up, stuck him in timeout and he grinned at me as I walked back to the couch. I looked over about a minute later to see him looking at me over the top of the playpen grinning. He quickly ducks back out of my line of sight before slowly peeking back up at me, the grin still on his face. When I went to get him out of time out a short while later, he flopped down to the bottom of the playpen and pretended like he was a sleep and then started giggling when I picked him up.

This kid is weird.

I realized that I hadn't posted here in a while last week but couldn't find the camera to upload any new photos. I finally found it lurking behind a picture frame on the mantel (we have to keep anything fragile out of Evan's reach) so I thought I'd take this time to give a little update and post a couple of photos.

Evan's pretty much given up the pacifier. I'm not really sure how it happened. He'll still go for it when he finds one (and he'd been stashing pacis in all sorts of weird nooks, crannies, and shoes for a while there, probably preparing for just this sort of crisis), but he no longer needs one. We started off about a month ago by just not offering him one until it was time to put him down for bed. After a week or so of that, I couldn't find a paci easily, so I just didn't bother. He went to sleep fine that night. After a couple of nights of that, we just stopped bothering with the things altogether. He doesn't seem to care until he sees one and even then when you take it away he doesn't seem too stressed out about it. I'm taking this as a sign that the kid doesn't have an addictive personality and we'll have to worry less about him developing drug and alcohol problems as a teen and adult.

He's also started taking more interest in other kids than he does us. We actually have to chase him down at daycare to get him to come home and he's always unhappy about leaving unless none of the other kids are there. He's definitely got a bit of an independent streak for a kid his age, but he's definitely a social kid. That's good. I'd be happy if he turns out more outgoing than I was and am, but I'd hate to see him be needy turn into one of those kids who can't manage to leave home when they graduate high school. If he doesn't attend college at least 100 miles from Kim and me, I'll know I'll have failed as a parent. That's mostly tongue-in-cheek. Mostly.

Finally, he's starting to really show signs of understanding what you say. If you ask him to hand you something or to pick something up, he usually does so pretty quickly. In the past couple of days I've discovered that if he has something he shouldn't have (a regular occurence) that if I ask him politely, he gives it to me without hesitation and doesn't get upset about it. Pretty cool. His spoken vocabulary is a little smaller, though. It's basically "dada", "mama", "duck", "dog", and "Bubba" (the name of one of our dogs).

Speaking of Bubba, Evan and I actually went out to play in the yard today. Evan had been looking out of the window when he saw his Aunt Kay driving by the house in her Gator and he got excited. By the time we got on his shoes and went outside, she was gone, but we went and looked at the mockingbirds that were noisily swarming the trees in our front yard, petted Bubba for a while, and walked back to look at the chickens, before coming back in to sit on the couch for a little bit before bedtime.

Here's those photos I promised.

Evan had a ball climbing into the laundry basket and getting us to push and spin him around. If you notce his attire, Evan's a huge Georgia Tech fan. His favorite player this year is Michael Johnson. (He's a big Michael Turner fan too, but he doesn't dress up for the Falcons on Sundays.)

He's also training for a rewarding career as a janitor. If only he'd clean up after himself after eating. He's part of the reason we're infested with ants right now.