Tommy update

Sometimes I get busy documenting the day to day stuff and don't do enough 'Tommy Updates' to give a snapshot of some of the things he is doing these days. Here's a few cute ones from the last couple of weeks.

He started saying, "I'm sorry". Well, more accurately, he is now at a point where he repeats whatever you say to him and I told him while we were visiting Calvin and Ann, Emmett's Dad and step-mom, that he should go and tell Emmett he was sorry after he misbehaved. He walked over and said, "I'm sorry". Oh wow it was so cute and heartbreaking....ughh. I've always been something of a cheeseball, but having a child really takes that over the edge. :-)

Thomas is also saying more sentences. His favorite is still "Where did [insert whatever item or person here] go?" or when you ask him where something is he'll say, "I don't know". The thing that is so cute is the inflection in his voice when he says these things. It's so cute, difficult to describe, accurate, but slightly exxagerated the way that kids do. Darling. Lately he has been putting together more sentences, a lot of which I have a hard time understanding. Still, he primarily is still communicating with one or two words to get his point across, but doing a darn good job of that, I must say. His vocabulary expands every day, it's so amazing to watch. He is now at the point where he repeats everything and wants to learn the word for everything and it seems that once you tell him, he remembers and it becomes part of his lexicon. So it just increases and increases every day. Almost mind-boggling.

We are also starting work on potty training. Emmett's Mom bought us all this stuff - she didn't like the potty I had bought, so she bought a different potty and some underwear, training pants a cover so that when he has an accident it doesn't make a huge mess and these maxi-pad like things to soak up some of the accidents. Still, it is very difficult and I think Thomas is close to being ready but not quite there yet. He is starting to have an awareness that there is something in his diaper that should not be, particularly in the morning. He will wake up in the morning and when I get to his room he will be standing in his crib and will say, "Poopy!" and then reach behind himself and say "diaper". It's a step in the right direction. But last Sunday night Emmett had him running around with no diaper on and then brought him upstairs where I was napping and we were playing on the bed and all of a sudden, without warning, I smelled it. Sure enough, there was poop all over the baby, all over his shirt and all over our bed. Gross!!! We got it cleaned up very quickly, but I felt discouraged that he just let it rip without even so much as changing his facial expression. So who knows? I guess we just keep trying to get the point across, but that made me feel like we're a long way from actually having him trained.

One of the other funny things that he's been doing is that he learned from his Dad and I that when he wants to go somewhere and we're not going there he will say, "c'mon". When we still don't go he will continue this louder and louder. Neither one of us go it at first, what he was saying, and when we realized that he was saying, "c'mon, c'mon", we laughed so hard.

He really likes to go for walks and has now gotten to a point where he is not so interested in going in his stroller for the whole time. He will say at some point, "I walk". And so I'll let him get down and walk but it is definitely an exercise in patience because he is distracted by looking at everything and it takes about 10 minutes to walk 1 block. Please don't misunderstand. I LOVE that he wants to explore everything. But there are times when we have 10-12 blocks to walk home and I really need to keep us on track and it makes me feel frustrated. I don't want to rush him all the time, I want him to learn to enjoy life and stop and smell the roses and all that, but I also don't want to get home at midnight. So it's something of a battle between the practical and the whimsical sides of me. The important thing at the end of the day is to balance the days when I have to rush him with days where we can just wander around the neighborhood and not be in a hurry to go anywhere. I think that these are both of our favorite days. Anyway, one of the techniques that I have devised to keep him moving on the days when we need to be on a schedule is to have him "run like Daddy". Oh, this is the most darling thing of all I think. Early on in Emmett's marathon training before he hurt his knee, Emmett was running with Tommy in the stroller. He ran that half marathon a couple of months ago with Tommy in the stroller the WHOLE time. After Emmett hurt his knee, they couldn't run anymore, but when Emmett would leave to go running in the evenings when he got home from work, Thomas would ask for Daddy, and I would tell him Daddy went running and he would say, "Daddy running". He also would say "Daddy running" anytime he saw Emmett in his running clothes. So Thomas is pretty clear on the whole running thing. So I started telling him when I'm trying to get home quickly and he wants out of his stroller to "Run like Daddy". Oh. My. God. It is the absolute cutest thing to see that little tiny 2 year old boy running as fast as his legs can carry him down the sidewalk, those little legs just pumping and pumping and yelling, "I run like Daddy". He's also my motivator because he then wants me to "run like Daddy" and isn't satisfied until we are both running. Perhaps while he is still young we can be training buddies since we both run at about the same pace haha.

Okay, a few more things and then it's off to rejoin the family. We had a cute experience the other morning. As I think I've mentioned before, Thomas has this collection of little tiny plastic animals that he LOVES. He plays with them so much that inevitably he loses them and at any given time we usually have 5-6 out of 12 of them around. The other morning I found the zebra under his bed and so he was really happy because he loves zebras. He brought it downstairs and while I was getting his breakfast ready, he walked outside onto the back porch. He must have thrown the zebra because by the time I got out there the zebra was gone. We both looked all over for it, but couldn't find it. Tommy asked me, "where did the zebra go?" and I said, "I don't know, Thomas, what did you do with the zebra?", to which he replied, "I don't know". We then proceeded to yell "zebra! zebra! zebra!" over and over and over again and I think we had the above conversation or some variation of it about a dozen times before I had to give up and distract him by giving him his breakfast. I felt really lucky that he allowed me to distract him because he seemed pretty focused on the zebra for a long time. Of course a couple of days later I found the zebra in plain sight lying in some of the groundcover near the patio.

Another fun thing we've been doing is lots of coloring. He is *starting* to get the idea that coloring is only done on the paper, but, just to make sure he gets the point, I have been either putting him in his highchair for coloring or else sitting with him at the table and coloring. Those are the best times of all. He loves to sit in the big people's seat and sit at the table and especially if I sit with him and give him my undivided attention. The other day (errrr, can't remember if I've already covered this or not) I sat with him and we colored and I drew little pictures of things and had him guess what they were. It was so much fun for both of us. I drew Daddy's car, Mommy's car, a duck, a cat, and a few other things and we had so much fun together doing this simple thing. It's going to be so great when he's just a little bit older and we can play with playdough and all kinds of stuff like that.

I also have instituted a new discipline measure. In the beginning we had been using his highchair as his "time out" chair, primarily because we could strap him into it when he needed to have time out. Now that he understands 'time out' I decided that I didn't want him to feel that he was being punished every time he got into his high chair, since that's where he also eats and colors, etc. I don't think that's the right message to send if you can avoid it. In our case we can because that child is eerily placid about accepting time out. I set up a chair in the dining room in the corner that he has to go and sit in when he is being punished. That otherwise rambuctious, crazy kid, will sit in that chair for as long as he's on time out, and NOT MOVE. It's CRAZY. He will just sit there, not squirming, fidgeting or trying to get into trouble, not trying to get down, nothing. Just SIT THERE, until you tell him he can get down. It is bizarre, but makes the whole discipline process SO much easier. I know that it probably won't continue to be this easy, so I'm going to enjoy it while I can and definitely use it to try to impress on him the difference between good and bad behaviors.

Well, better run, almost time for Thomas to get up and for me to get ready for work. Emmett is home sick today so I have his help, sorry that he is sick, but is nice to have him home and have his company on a day when I'm used to being alone with Thomas. It was also nice to get to sleep a full 8 hours after having gotten to bed at 3am (worked till 2am), to have some help this afternoon with Thomas, and also to know that I won't be late to work. That 5:30pm hand off for my 6pm shift is really dicey. The traffic between here and UCSF is just horrendous at that time of day and BARELY make it to work on time. We are going to have to work on that, but I'm sure it will work out.

Love,
Melissa