More Pillows
(March 16, 2009)
 Let's
start with the temporal orientation: it's now the middle of March. Theron will
be three in June, so he's 2.75 years old now. Time flies when you're on the run.
A few weeks ago, Theron woke up crying. The Beautiful Woman got out of bed
and went into his room. He was just sitting up in bed, so she asked: "Did you
have a scary dream?" He said, "Yes." Then he snuggled up against his mother and
went right back to sleep. So, Theron has now had his first official nightmare.
I suppose it's a milestone of sorts.
He can now open door knobs. This is a somewhat alarming development. Even
more alarming is his newfound ability to unlock doors - both the
door to the garage, and the door to the back yard. Fortunately, the front door
has a deadbolt that's about eye level on me - too high for him to reach.
Unfortunately, he's quite capable of pulling a chair over if he really has a
mind to get to it. He hasn't done that yet, but I suppose it's only a matter of
time.
New Games
Theron has developed several new games. He will occasionally climb into his crib
(which we haven't moved out of his room because we don't have anywhere else to
put it) and jump up and down. When he does, he sometimes likes to have pillows
thrown on top of him. Recently, though, he's taken to asking me to build him a
Meerkat Tunnel.
The name comes from The Lion King 1 + 1/2, which Theron refers to as "The
Meerkat movie." He's never seen the original, but then I consider the
direct-to-video sequel to be a substantially better movie. (If you haven't seen
it, give it a look - you may need to watch the original again as well, in order
to get a feel for just how subversive the sequel is.)
A Meerkat Tunnel is created by lining up pillows against the walls of the
crib, and then propping other pillows across the top of them. The crib gives the
whole thing some structural support, and the side-pillows hold up the top.
Theron then crawls around inside it (and giggles).
Theron has also started burping - or, more accurately, pretending to burp -
for comic effect. I blame Jimmy Neutron, Boy Genius (a.k.a. "Robot Dog Movie")
for this one: one of Jimmy's inventions is a soda which provides a guaranteed
one burp per sip. At the end of the film, Jimmy's parents down about half a can
of it.
Finally, he's started... how do I describe this? We don't really have a name
for it. I suppose I'd call it the Huffing-And-Puffing game. Basically, he purses
his lips and blows at one of us - basically the same gesture you'd use to blow a
candle out. We react by crying out and falling down, as if we'd been blown right
off our feet. Theron's fair about it; if one of us blows at him, he flails his
arms, spins around, and falls over too. He mostly does this at bedtime; I have
no idea how he came up with it.
Irish Fest
Last weekend, we took the boy (and my wife's parents) down to the North Texas
Irish Festival*. Theron enjoyed it, and afterwards we turned him over to my
parents (who met us down there) to spend the night. This gave us a completely
Snorkleberry-free Sunday, which really should have been much more relaxing than
it actually was.
His two favorite parts of the festival were the petting zoo and the dog
houses. I'm including some pictures and video clips below, so you can see what I
mean:
Potty Training, Part 2
I mentioned in the last entry that we're (kind of, sort of, maybe) starting to
potty train the Podling. This is going more or less like we expected: every once
in a while, he manages to go to the bathroom on an actual toilet. Other than
that, he's still in diapers, and very little has changed.
We are not worried about this; boys generally aren't ready for toilet
training until three, and we still have a couple of months to go, there. (A
couple of months may not seem like a very long time, but it's a pretty decent
fraction of his Life So Far.) It'll come when it comes, and until then we're not
going to waste any stress on it.
Fixing the cough
Theron has, for the last week and half, been waking us up by coughing in the
middle of the night. We'd put him down to bed, and he'd be down for an hour or
two; then the cough would start, and he'd cough for the rest of the night. This
persisted regardless of what medication - or combination of medicines, - we gave
him; of whether we ran the air filter, the humidifier, or both; and of which
blankets and pillows we gave him.
Finally, after this had kept me awake for two nights in a row, the Beautiful
Woman called the pediatrician to ask for bigger, badder medications. (This delay
is because we were already using something that the pediatrician had prescribed
the last time she'd seen Theron.) I suggested that if the pediatrician wanted to
see Theron before prescribing anything, then she should come over to our house
at about eleven o'clock at night, when he actually has symptoms.
The pediatrician gave us two things, one for the cough and one for allergies.
(She did not feel compelled to come visit us.)
A day later the weather changed, and it rained for three days straight.
Theron has been sleeping through the night, but now I have no idea if that's
because of the medication, or because the rain washed all the allergins out of
the air.
* ...A surprising amount of which is actually Scottish, but it's best not to
look too closely at that.
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