Chatterbug

“Mama?” Matthew looks up at me quite seriously after rolling a yellow play doh snake on the table, “Dis string cheese. Here you go.” He hands it to me with watchful eyes.

“Thank you,” I say, “Can you make me a cookie too?”

“Mmm, good cheese,” he hedges, leaving me no choice but to mock eat the playdoh in my hand.

“Delicious,” I compliment and he claps his hands together with delight before handing me a blob of brown play doh. “Is this a cookie?”

“It’s poo poo!”

“Yuck,” I state this without a trace of humor in my voice.

“Yuuuuuck,” Matthew agrees but his eyes are lit up with amusement, “Yucky poo poo!”

“A mess!” Matthew tattles pointing to the play doh blobs and cutting tools scattered all over our dinning room table that a minute ago it was his string cheese and cookie factory. “Oh no! A mess!”

All He Wrote

I work from two pm until ten pm five nights a week while Bob works more “normal hours” from seven until four. I often am asked if it feels like Bob and I are two passing ships in the night. My answer is that it doesn’t because we still talk to each other all day via email or instant messenger, and on Fridays Bob usually works from home.

On nights that I am working and after Matt is trucked into bed, Bob comes online and provides me with a witty, yet sometimes weary, recap of his and Matt’s night together. I have saved each one. In celebration of Father’s Day, below are some of my favorite moments he wrote about.

1 .We kicked the ball around the house and read his book about chameleons.

2. I dozed off (very briefly) and was awaken by Pirate Booty being shoved in my mouth.

3. Matt does the "HI-YA" karate chop to the monsters now too!

4. Matt was a bit of a handful tonight. "Mischievous" is how I would describe it.

5. It was cute though, when I read Mr. Brown Can Moo he was trying to make the buzzing sound but kept getting tongue tied and just sticking out his tongue.

6. He sat on my stomach and just chatted for about 10 minutes. I have no idea what he was talking about but I think he might have been telling me about his day. Once and while he would just giggle so maybe he was telling me a joke.

7. Matt just did a big fart. I am proud of him.

8. Matt has a new word: snow.

9. We went to the park and he wanted to ride on the swing the whole time. When I would try to take him out to do something different, he would tell me that he was "stuck" until I pushed him again.

10. He seems to be ok with dirt on his hands now too, I told him to just wipe it on his pants.

11. We got a phone call that said town of Holden on the caller ID. It was the Holden police, and they asked if we had a baby that was playing with the phone because someone called 911. I told them yes and apologized, and they asked if they could send an officer out to the house just to make sure everything was ok.

12. I tried a turkey burger and sweet potatoes with no success, so we eventually settled on 2 yogurt tubes. And he gnawed on some leftover watermelon that he found laying around somewhere.

13. Also from the Landmark: 7:25 p.m. 911 no response, noise of young child in background.

14. Then we played Bob The Builder and he sings the song now. It goes something like this "bo billo fix fix fix it”.

15. Matt did not enjoy cutting his fingernails but he needed it:it was like the scene in the 40-year-old virgin where they wax Steve Carrel's chest, and he screams and then calms down and tells them to do it again, then screams again. He would yell like I shot him, and run away, then come back onto the bed and stick his hand out over the trash barrel again.

16. We went back outside to set up the sprinkler and I told him to sit on the stairs while I turned it on, so he wouldn't get wet while I tested to see if it would shoot the right place. Well, I had the sprinkler backwards so when I turned it on it shot right at Matt!

17. After dinner, I told Matt he could help me install the DVD drive in the computer. "Let's go get the tools" I told him. He jumped up and down about 20 times shouting "We're going to get tools! We're going to get tools!"

18. I can't stop looking at him and thinking what a handsome little devil we made

19. He was all about letters and ABC's tonight, singing with Leapfrog.

20. Matt climbed out of the tub and ran to his bedroom before I even knew where he went.

Providence Museum

We’re off to Providence to visit the children’s museum. In the backseat of the car Matthew and his friend Celia nibble munchkin donuts, hold hands, and play a game where Matthew does karate chops into the air and Celia shrieks with laughter each time. In the front seat Celia’s mom Melanie and I talk about what all women talk about, the real estate market and Edward Cullen.

The museum has a great big dragon on top of its roof. The tail hangs down the building near the parking lot. We can’t get our children to notice the dragon because they are busy looking at the trucks and cars on the street. Only once that we are walking into the museum do they notice the tail but at that point it only startles them.

Inside the museum is clean and creative. It’s smaller than the one in Boston that we are used to going too but also less crowded and more catered to the toddler age set. We spend a couple hours walking and playing around the different rooms, Matt’s favorite area would have had to of been a wooden boat with a ladder that he climbed up and down a trillion times sending me into panic mode that he would fall each of those times.

When we leave the museum to head out for lunch. Celia sighs wistfully, "I love church," giving us something to laugh about as we drive by one we otherwise might not have noticed. 

Owtside

Often you are the picture of sweetness like when you are curled up in your comforter singing the alphabet song in your still-sleepy morning voice, asking for more “kicken” at dinnertime, wanting to try on every sock that comes back from the laundry, and your hearty toddler laughter bouncing off the walls of our home. Then of course there are your classic two year old moments which are certainly not so sweet.

The weather is warm and sunny, a perfect morning to play outside. “Matty love, do you want to go play outside?” I ask.

“Yeah owtside!” you answer excitedly. Then you dump out a bucket of play food all over the kitchen floor. Again.

I read somewhere that toddlers making a mess is supposed to be educational, that it your way of discovering the world around you. I wonder what you are learning at this moment as you walk out of the kitchen, stepping on plastic potato chips and felt tomatoes.

“Matthew, please pick up your play food and then we can go outside to play."

“No!” you shout, making a mockery of your own two year oldness, and then climb on top of your art table and start taking down the drawing hung above it and throwing them on the floor.

“Clean up, clean Up, everybody everywhere, clean up, clean up, everybody do your share,” I warble. You start playing with a couple of matchbox trucks.

“Owtside,” you remind me after I have finished serenading the prince of mess making.

“Not until you clean up your toys,” I stand my ground and then snatch your trucks away, “You can have these back once you have cleaned up your mess.”

You pull out all the stops and exaggerate a frowny face before dissolving into tears. So I start tossing the play food into the bucket, mad at you. After watching me for a couple seconds you start pitching in and even smile when I catch your eye. There is never a dull mood around here with you.
“Thank you,” I give you the trucks back, “Now do you want to go outside and play?"

“No!” you answer, plopping down on the floor to play with your trucks.

Peek A Boo Guess Who's Two?

 








“Sit down,” Matthew is always telling me these days, “Sit down pease.” He will say this when he simply wants me play with him, or wants me to watch him play, or if I’m off taking pictures  when we are supposed to be having a picnic together. There is always something else I could be doing, writing a thank you note, checking my email, or reading a magazine, but most of the time I obligingly comply if only for a couple minutes to let him know that I’m always listening.

Matthew turned two years old! If you ask him his age he might tell you that he is two or five or nine. For his birthday this year we did a Curious George theme. We celebrated with red, blue, and yellow decorations, homemade Play-Doh, and served lunch, monkey munch and two types of cake to house full of family and friends. It was a lot of fun.

Two seems like a wonderful age.  I find the messiness and curiosity inspiring. One evening this week I took Matt outside with me to throw out a trash bag and he began collecting fallen tree buds that look like caterpillars. When he was finished he dumped them on our outside table to examine them. When it was time to go inside he followed me but his mind seemed to be lost in his own thoughts of his new discovery.

“Truck! Bus!” Driving in the car with a two year old is a joy. Matt likes to point out every single truck or bus that we pass. His voice is high pitched with excitement at the more trucks or buses he sees. I now find my eyes being drawn to trucks and buses even when he is not in the car.

“It’s dirty! Yuuuckk,” Matthew over exaggerates in reference to his mud splattered t-ball stand after a rain storm, “Ohhhh noooo,” he wails when the ball falls off the tee before he can hit it then a moment later after hitting the ball, “I did it!” with a modest shrug of the shoulders and big grin on his face.

Happy Birthday Matthew!

Grandma Writes

I'm Laurie's mom and Matthew's grandmother, "Grammy".  I had the absolute pleasure of watching him one day this past weekend while Laurie and Bob went out birthday shopping for him.

When I first arrived at the house  Matt gave me a big smile and then proceeded to put on his shy act by turning his head into his mom and clinging to her.

After holding him and standing in the window so he could wave and yell “BYE”, we proceeded into the living room where he promptly walked over to the TV and started jabbering in his baby talk and pointing to the various remote controls on the coffee table. He wanted to watch something, so after fiddling around with all three remotes the TV fired up and a DVD started to play. It was a cartoon about a little boy being watched by his Grandmother and in one scene the Grandmother puts on a record and they dance around the room together.

"DASS - DASS – DASS," Matthew grabbed my hands and pulled me into a type of dance that involved us spinning around and him falling to the floor when the boy in the cartoon would fall down. Afterwards I straightened my back out and sat down on the couch where I thought we could take up reading a book.

"WEE-RIND?” Matthew frantically gestured to the remote controls, “DASS - DASS – DASS!” So we did this over and over.........and over.

Next we went on a wagon ride and while we were walking by a house a gigantic dog came bounding out of nowhere and ran right up to Matt! The dog was friendly - Matt seemed to know him too because when the dog turned around to leave he yelled out, "DOGGY!....BYE!" ".

After that we went home to play in the backyard. He loved it when I crammed myself into his toy house, we had a rock throwing contest, I did the digging and Matt supplied the sound effects - grunt, grunt, grunt - while my foot did the work, and I pushed him around in his plastic car.

When I tucked him into his crib for a nap he proceeded to sing himself to sleep. Later learned that when Matthew had woken up for his nap the first thing he did was look for me.

Journeying

 










When I was growing up my mother and my aunt Gretchen used to take me hiking though the woods behind my grandmother’s house. We would be gone for hours ‘journeying’ as they referred to it. I was entertained by stories of their childhood, like the overgrown path they remembered being a meadow or the fence my mom cut her head open on sledding one winter. We would practice bird calls, watch bull frogs in the ponds, and one early spring day we even came across an ice skating pond.

They terrified me, “I know someone who caught their leg in a bear trap out here and he walks with a limp to this day.” One of my all time favorite childhood memories was when we had stopped for lunch and my mother surprised me with a bag of Cadbury mini chocolate Easter eggs. I remember sitting on top of a hill of hay looking out into the trees while savoring the chocolate taste. We saw broken down cars, abandoned furniture that my aunt said would make a nice sketching, baby birds, and once two black and white baby snakes under a piece of construction wood.

Sometime between when I was eleven and now I have become so afraid of snakes that I feel numb tingles on my legs when I walk anywhere near high grass or piles of old leaves. This year I am trying to be less of an insane person about it and have spent every warm day outside all day with Matthew.

“Will you take him walking in the woods one day when he is older?” I asked Bob one day, looking past him into the patch of woods behind out house at a rusted green car you can make out in the distance. I think of my aunt Gretchen, now living in North Carolina, who would have already hiked out it to and repurposed the metal into wind chimes.


“I don’t know, maybe,” he was distracted at the time that I asked.

When we rake the yard he gives Matthew rides in the wheelbarrow and I can hear the giggling before I see them, come around the back of the house. When the wind blows I can smell a neighbor burning their brush which reminds me of cookouts. In the distance I can hear the playful barking of a dog. I really do love the outdoors, I think I just need to be reminded sometimes.