Today is Wessy's 2.5 yr birthday. Today marks the day that he's closer to three than to two, and thus that much closer to being a real human being and not a lumpy baby. Every day his facial features are more defined, his personality more evident. He remembers his past experiences and seeks out things he wants/likes. The nexus of control of his world is shifting slowly and inexorably away from me as his mother to him as a his own person. Wonderful for him, waaaaaaaaah for me. He celebrated by going to preschool and then coming home and going down hard for a nap. The usual.
We are still waiting for the terrible two's to hit (I'm sure I will regret writing that sentence in no time). Wessy is a touch stubborn and definitely no stranger to screaming and yelling, but the full-on dramatic tantrums have not made their appearance. He remains an excellent sleeper, a passable eater and an incorrigibly stubborn potty training candidate.
Some of the cuter things he does recently:
-LOTS of hugging and kissing. Anytime one leaves the room, he will want a hug and a kiss. Before, he just kind of threw his arms loosely around you when he wanted to hug you, but now he will actually encircle your neck and give a proper hug. He accompanies his kisses with a dramatic MMMMWAH!, sometimes punctuated with a puckering/smacking sound.
-He asks where everything is. He has picked up the habit of inverting his sentences like a little toddler Yoda and so asks "suchandsuch, donde esta? If you answer him, he will act as if he didn't hear you and ask the same question again. He may repeat this cycle two or three times, until he feels satisfied with the answer, or until he gets tired of asking.
-He kind of tries to put his shoes on. Kind of. Okay, not really.
-He is becoming a more and more fluent and articulate speaker. Complete, grammatically correct sentence are the norm for him now. I was kind of looking forward to the phase where he cutely mispronounces everything, but actually his diction is excellent. He officially has a better accent and possibly a better vocabulary than I do in Spanish now. He shocked us last night when he started saying "NI HAO NI HAO NI HAO." I asked him where he learned that. "La mujer." Where was the mujer, I asked him. "La mujer que corta el pelo," he told me sagely. Stevo and I looked at each other, astounded. The lady who cuts his hair is Chinese and did say ni hao to him last time he was there...almost three months ago. We were both impressed with Wessy's memory and also consumed by a new wave of anxiety about all the cursing we do around him.
-He got a big boy bed. He had been capable of climbing out of his crib for awhile now so we figured we would just call it and get him a toddler bed. At first, he believed there was some sort of force field around it and would not climb out of it. Soon, that farce was revealed and he started getting out of bed and walking down the hall to knock on our door. That was apparently too much effort, so now he just stays in bed and shouts when he wants to get out. He will shout "YA ES DE DIA YA SALIO EL SOL!" or sometimes, "HAY QUE CAMBIARME EL PANAL!" He will shout about it being daytime and light outside even when it demonstrably is not. Little gaslighter; he needs to go look for a job in Washington.
-He is still a fiend for little vehicles. He frequently sleeps with a large and (to my eye) not very snuggly plastic dump truck. The truck was a gift from Jeje, apparently it was a surprise because he still calls it "LA SOPRESA."
Our recent doings Wessy-wise revolve around finding him a new preschool. His current program only goes through the end of June, and even if it continued, I don't know if we would stay with it. The owner/teacher is not really on the ball (changes the schedule/location often, doesn't send us many updates, has some folkloric/non-scientific beliefs regarding child development). The co-op/parent involvement model means that we spend at least $1000 worth of our time doing preschool-related things each month, which has been frustrating.
As it turns out, preschool in San Francisco is like everything else in San Francisco--expensive and difficult to get into. We have sent in several applications--no spot yet, but hopefully something will come through soon and we can have the privilege of paying 20-30K a year for someone else to potty train our child (please). We are planning to continue with language immersion--either staying with Spanish or starting a new language, likely Mandarin.
I'm aware that this makes me an insufferable tiger mom, but I maintain that fluency in another language is a priceless gift to a child. Because of the ways our brains work, introducing a language in early childhood means he will learn it better and more easily than he would later in life. So, the time is now. Also, should he ever choose to become a doctor in San Francisco, fluency in English, Spanish and Chinese would make him some kind of super-being, capable of communication with almost everyone.
So, my squishy little squish-baby is getting bigger. He's a lover, a thinker, a tinkerer and he's ours. We can't wait to see what the next days, weeks, months and years hold for him and who he turns out to be.
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