Sunday night

We got Vincent his birthday big boy bed this weekend- only six months late. Good thing he can't read a calendar and is easily distracted! ;-) It was a great success. Though when we were taking apart his crib, he wanted us to set it up in the living room. He took a nap in it yesterday for the first sleep, and we went off to spend a couple of hours at the mall getting new cell phones (why, why does it always take at least two hours to do this? It took Robbie THREE HOURS when his phone was stolen!). Anyway, V woke up before we got back and Uncle Robbie took care of him for a few minutes, but V had a terrific nap and was totally happy about his new room.

Before he went to bed last night for the first time, he asked if he could get up by himself in the morning. I'm thinking that this is how it starts and next thing I know he'll be standing next to me at 4 a.m. asking for cereal, but I said, Yup, you can get up by yourself in the morning. And he got really sad and said but I don't WANT to get up ALONE! Of course I told him I would come get him up in the morning, same as always, he didn't HAVE to get up alone. So we dodged the bullet there, for the time being.

So I got him up this morning, and he was so excited about the whole thing, he asked, Can I keep my big boy bed? It was adorable. So good times around here. Can't wait for our camera to arrive so I can show off his new room.

Chopper

Our upstairs neighbors are extremely hip. They have three kids, and the oldest one (who wears Prada clothes to third grade) just got a new bike. Vincent has been coveting all of the kid's bikes in our building (there are two third graders, two kindergartners, and one one year old in the two condos above us), but Duncan's is by far the coolest. So when he got a new one, Duncan and his folks told Vincent that he could start riding Duncan's Old Bike (this is what Vincent calls it). So we put training wheels on it and that's how we've been spending every afternoon after school. We get home around 5, and Dan takes V out on the bike, he rides it over to the track around the corner and goes around the track. Yesterday I took him as Dan had a defense so he couldn't get home before 6:30, and V pretty much rode the whole way around the track by himself!

I don't have pictures because we still haven't gotten a new camera yet (it's been broken since our trip to Florida to visit Mom and Paul in MARCH!!!), but here is a picture of the bike from Amazon. See what I mean about our hip neighbors?

I also only have a few minutes before V wakes up, so you'll have to cut and paste this link, as I don't have time to figure out how to put a link in. Jil? A little help?

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/images/B000F9777U/ref=dp_image_0?ie=UTF8&n=3375251&s=sporting-goods

First sick day, though I'm not sure it wasn't first nightmare day

V usually sleeps like a rock, twelve hours, 7 to 7 every night. Last night, though, he started hollering and crying for me at 10 (which was actually after I had gone to bed). I went in and he was so sad so I put him on my lap and cuddled him, and he was SO hot. I thought he might have a fever, and he was asking for a drink of water, so I called for Dan who brought in water, Motrin, and the thermometer. Too bad the thermometer battery was dead, but we gave him the Motrin anyway, and sent Robbie to the drugstore to buy a new one (he was hanging out playing video games when this all happened, so it wasn't like I woke him up. Though he probably would have gotten up for V). By the time he got back with a new thermometer, V didn't have a fever, and went back to sleep (though he woke up a bit later having to go to the bathroom, good job on not peeing in your sleep, buddy!). We decided that if he had a fever this morning when the Motrin wore off, we'd keep him home.

So this morning, I go in at 7, when we would normally be getting cereal and getting ready for school, and he's still out cold. I took his temp again and it was totally normal, but he was so sleepy, I just let him sleep and Dan agreed to stay home with him today and we'd see how it went. Well, he slept til 8, and today told Dan all about how the reason he was hollering for me was that he had had a terrible nightmare, and I needed to go help him because the big bad wolf was climbing up his crib four times, FOUR TIMES!, and I needed to put the rail down to squash it. (And yes, he is still in a crib, I have gotten new linens for his big boy bed, and we've tentatively picked it out, but we need to go to the store and look at it as a family, which Dan couldn't do last weekend, something about a hundred mile bike race..., but we ARE going this weekend. I promise we are not trying to stunt his development or something. )

So apparently he got a day off from school because of nightmares. It gets better: our preschool instituted a policy that if a kid has a fever and a cough (and V always seems to have a cough lately), then the kid must stay home for TEN DAYS. (They better be counting weekends too). So even though I didn't know for sure, the fact that I said "I think he did, though he's fine this morning" when they asked me if V had a fever, well that could mean I'm working from home at least part of the time for the next week and a half. We'll see. Fortunately I'm not teaching so I won't be dropping the ball for my students. So it's possible he gets a week and a half off from school thanks to the big bad wolf.

In other news: the beluga whales are pregnant at the Shedd Aquarium, where Robbie is doing his internship. They're literally about to go any moment. So we're sitting around tonight and every time his phone buzzes with a text message or email we call out, "Beluga babies?", but no dice. He's very excited and nervous. It's pretty funny.

Saturday morning

Hi there,

Yesterday when I dropped V at school the morning teacher told me that he is the best block builder she'd ever seen. :) Apparently he goes straight to the blocks in the a.m. and just has these ideas in his head of towers and buildings and builds these really beautiful symmetrical things while all the other kids who play with the blocks pile them up haphazardly. She said he's a little engineer.

I thought the grandparents (and uncle) would like that little bit of bragging.

(To balance it out, he also got in big trouble yesterday at school for calling his friends names, laughing when he was told to stop and ignoring the teacher, and generally not listening. Yep, my superstar...)

Holy cow start a new job and three months disappear!

I will try to write more regularly, people. :) I have ten minutes before I have to get ready for bed, so here is a gem from today's car ride home. We left school an hour late because I had a parent's council meeting. Normally if Vincent is good at school (listens well, keeps his hands to himself, takes a good nap, etc. etc.) we stop at the drive-through Baskin-Robbins and get him a little kid's cone on the way home. He usually eats about three bites then either Dan or I get to finish it. But tonight, there was just enough time to get home and eat dinner, so when Vincent asked if we could go for ice cream, I said that we were really late but we would go tomorrow. Well all hell broke loose and he cried and cried and I told him I was SORRY and we'll have ice cream after dinner at home, until finally he wailed "IT JUST DOESN'T MAKE SENSE!!!" Which I had never heard him say before so I asked him, "What? What doesn't make sense?" And he goes, "I didn't dump any wood chips in the water fountain, but I'm NOT GETTING ANY ICE CREAM!!!!!!! It doesn't make sense!" I don't know if you find this as funny as I did. I've never heard him use the word "sense", much less exactly properly, so I was blown away. But before you feel badly for him, we came home, he ate a huge meal of awesome pulled pork tacos his dad had made, and then he got a piece of chocolate AND a bowl of the last of the homemade mango sorbet. :)

Preschool!

We had our preschool orientation this morning. Since we were out of milk and bread when we got up (thanks, Uncle Robbie!), Vincent and I were planning to go to the diner down the street for breakfast when Dan got up and decided to come along too! So it was a rare three-in-the-family morning, and really fun. The diner is next to the metra stop, so we watched the commuters go by and the trains pull in (and the occasional express fly by without stopping). V was such a good big boy, he ate almost the whole waffle, the egg, the bacon, and the sausage, then stole some of my eggs too.

We drove over to school, the whole way V was so excited talking about how he's going to go to school with mommy, mommy goes to school in HER building and Vincent would go to school in HIS building and so on, and kept saying he was so! excited! for! school! Pretty much right up until he got there. Then it was clingon time. We stayed in the room with him for about five minutes and then they were having "rug time" when everyone sits on their spot on the rug (marked by a different colored shape) and they sing and talk about the day ahead of them, etc. So V was sitting there quietly watching while we and another set of parents were in the back, when the director's assistant came and got us to go do paperwork. I didn't know how long we'd be gone, so I just went over to V and whispered in his ear to be sure to go tell the teacher if he had to go potty (he had refused to go earlier, all excited to go on the new! toilet! at! school!), and that we would be back soon.

So we went and it turned out to be about an hour of forms and reviewing policies and signing things. I was getting pretty anxious to see V, mostly because he hadn't gone to the bathroom yet today and I had no idea if he would be confident enough to speak up and ask. So we went back and V seemed fine, ran up and asked if we were leaving now, but as he turned away he was messing with his backside, and I thought hmmm. So I went over to his teacher and asked if he had gone, and she said that he had, he went to her and said he had to go so she sent him off to the little bathroom there in the classroom. Which is how I found out that they do not go in there with them, the kids are entirely on their own. (We pull his pants down for him and put him up on the potty, and when he poops we still wipe him off). So apparently he had gone in there, tried to pull down his shorts himself, but I'm guessing he didn't get them down far enough because he peed all over the back of his underwear and shorts. Then he apparently put them back on. So he was messing with his backside because he was wearing damp underwear!!! It looks like we're going to have a very busy couple of weeks of teaching him the finer details of this potty thing. The policy at the center is that they do not touch the kids at all. I just got off the phone with the teacher from the younger kids room where they do potty training, getting pointers from her on what to do.

Anyway, the teacher said that he had cried some when we were gone but then he was ok. As we went home, he kept telling us that he had "cried and cried because mommy and daddy were gone and we didn't come back". He also said that he was all alone there, without anyone to play with, and we asked him about the other dozen or so other kids and he said, oh yeah. It was kind of funny, actually. I just wish we had prepared him better for the hour or so alone. I really didnt' know that was going to happen.

It's also finally sunk in with Dan what a transition this is going to be for the boy. I plan to have Marissa here in the afternoons in July and August and have V go to half-days to get used to the idea, then transition to full days in September. Dan thought it was dumb, until we were there and it hit him that if I was planning to drop Vincent off at 7:30 in the morning five days a week, that meant V would be having to get up at 6:30, no hanging out time for an hour in the morning, no leisurely breakfasts, no TV or DVD, just up and eat and out. At least being able to come home for nap and unwinding in the afternoon will make this a little less of a shock, he now agrees. I'd like Dan to try to move his schedule a little earlier to help out, since he won't have anywhere to be in the morning and I'll be trying to get ready for work, but I'm not hopeful. I think I'm going to be continuing to do the morning routine by myself every morning, even if it gets exponentially more complicated and difficult. I'm pretty stressed out at the thought, but I'll just do what I have to do and make it work somehow. I'm sure it won't be as bad as it seems right now. Getting any exercise is going to require me to get up at 5 a.m., though.

I do think that Vincent is going to love it at school. After he said for the millionth time in the car that he was sad and cried and cried when we were gone and how he was all alone and he didn't like school, we asked him if he made any friends and he perked right up and said YES! I played with boys and girls!! So I think he'll be fine.

Saturday

This morning it was drizzling and cold (55 degrees), so Vincent and I watched a lot of Thomas the tank engine while Ivan snoozed on the rug. By 10 a.m., though, Ivan needed to go out and I was pretty sick of the couch, so I convinced V to give up Bob the builder and we went out for a long jog in what was now a decent rain. The jogging stroller has a great rain cover you can put on it, though it could use a defrost switch. There was an old (clean) diaper left over in the basket of the stroller so I occasionally stopped to wipe the rain off of the front and the fog off the underneath part. We did our usual route, from our house over to the Rockwell Street el stop, which is at street level so has gates and lights flashing, where we always stop and wait for the trains to come and go (this time under a tree so we weren't getting rained on while just standing there, somehow it's only not uncomfortable when running), then we go over the bridge over the Chicago river, then run around Blogejovich's neighborhood on the west side of the river. It's really nice over there and there are a lot of trees so again the rain doesn't come down as hard.

I haven't been running much since my little race at the end of April, so coming back I was really, really tired and kept walking. V kept yelling "NO MOMMY! YOU HAVE TO RUN! YOU HAVE TO RUN FAST!!!!" I was like, thanks buddy. We've been out for an hour here.

Got home, put the boy to bed for his nap, and took one myself. First time in a long time I've felt like I have time to do that!