Indeed, the last couple of weeks have been a bit turbulent, what with Antonia's nap-shunning and Charlie's consequent attention-getting antics. When I spend the whole day holding Antonia, Charlie resorts to uncharacteristic unruly behavior just to get me to pay attention to him, even if it's just the physical contact he gets from being carried to time-out. Add my harried attempts to snatch a few minutes here and there to clean and stave off total chaos, and I'm plum worn out from the whole business. I don't think I ever imagined that carrying/bouncing a baby all day can be so tiring. All day long Charlie asks me, "What are doing, Mommy?" and the other day when he asked me I answered "Trying to cope with debilitating exhaustion. What are you doing?" I think Antonia suspects that she's been making life difficult, because she did give us a treat last night and slept from 8:30pm to 7:30 am without waking up at all. You go, girl!
Overall, I think Charlie's actually been a pretty good sport about suddenly losing half of our attention to Antonia, and Will and I agreed we wanted to make his birthday extra special. So... we might have gone a little overboard on his birthday last week. Also, we had to compensate for having family flu shots done on his birthday, although he didn't have to have a shot, they did his vaccine via nasal spray. (He still cried.) Actually, the flu shots were part of a health fair put on by the school district for staff and teachers, and the fair included games, face-painting, balloon-making, clowns, etc. Charlie got a balloon Elmo and a taro card reading, so it was possibly his best birthday ever! (Except he didn't really get a taro card reading...but I REALLY wanted him to.) After the health fair we opened presents, then later he got to have french fries for dinner and a birthday cake featuring the "treats" that he asked for: M&Ms spelling "Charlie." When I had gone in to get him the morning of his birthday I said "Charlie! It's your birthday today!" and he got this big grin on his face and said "Fun!" And I think it turned out pretty fun for him, almost as fun as it was for Will and me.
We've spent all the free time we could scrounge up this week getting ready for Halloween, which has been more exciting this year because Charlie is old enough now to get the whole costume thing. Fortunately, he didn't have an opinion about what costume he wanted to be until I told him what costume he was going to be, Peter Pan, and his opinion about THAT was strongly in the affirmative. Every day since I told him he was going to be Peter Pan, he's said "I going to be Peter Pan? I going to be Peter Pan!" about twenty times. And also "Antonia going to be Tinkerbell? Antonia going to be Tinkerbell!" Which is usually followed by "Watch 'Peter Pan' today? Later?" Obviously he's totally on board with the whole "Trick-or-treat" concept and he wants to talk about that, too. Talking about trick-or-treating and getting candy always gets him excited and the more excited he gets, the higher his voice and his eyebrows go.
There have been a couple of run-ins with the scary side of Halloween, however, like the life-size clown with chattering teeth at the costume store, which even scare ME a little bit. We saw that clown days ago and he still talks about it, and does a spot-on impression of how its head bobbed and its teeth chattered. (I tried to get it on video, but he was too camera-shy.) And something gave him the idea that trick-or-treating might be a little scary, so now every time we talk about trick-or-treating he says "It's kinda not scary." So if you're worried, don't be. It's not kind of scary, it's kind of NOT scary.
I've also been meaning to document some of the cute/funny words Charlie says before I forget. These are words that I suppose are kind of tricky for a little kid, but he actually makes them harder to say, the way he says them.
"splarkly"= sparkly (Is that even a real word?)
"splikey" = spikey (as in, his hair is spikey)
"splinkers"= sprinkles (oddly enough, he actually says "sprinklers" exactly right)
And one more funny story: Will brought home an oboe because he now has a student taking private oboe lessons. Charlie wanted to look at it and asked what it was (an oboe is just about the only instrument that he hadn't seen before) and Will said "oboe." With a puzzled look on his face, Charlie pointed to his elbow and said "What's this?"
These pictures are all backwards! Oh well. I got out the camera to check some pictures I had already taken, and as soon as Antonia saw the light she started smiling at the camera, so I snapped these. I guess she won't have the same camera-shyness Charlie has, yay!
This is the balloon Elmo Charlie got at the school district health fair on his birthday. His limbs look a little deformed in the picture, but it actually was quite a cute balloon, and Charlie loved it.
I want to start a tradition of taking a picture of the birthday kid in bed on the morning of his birthday, so if you see me next year around this time remind me. I have a tendency to forget about the traditions that I'm trying to start... It will be fun to see if Charlie is still this happy in the morning right when he wakes up when he's thirteen.
Moments when Charlie wants to hold Antonia are rare, so I had to make sure and get a picture of this, even if they're both looking away from the camera. Also, I needed to have a picture of the shark jammies for Charlie's posterity, because I don't think he will ever love any article of clothing as much as he loves his shark jammies.
2 comments:
That picture of Antonia is priceless. What a camera diva. Did you and Will dress up this year? I'm looking forward to Halloween pictures.
I feel like I could copy and paste your whole section on Antonia and Charlie in my blog, except change the names of course. Honestly, our lives sound identical right now...even down to the attention as he's carried to time-out!!!!
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