New today...

-Wessy has entered a new phase of his bromance with Cal.  When I walk into his room in the morning, Wessy looks up angelically from his crib and holds Cal up and says "CAAAAAAL," like look Mom, it's my best buddy! Every time he sees Cal, he embraces him with unbridled enthusiasm, biting his muzzle and ears and holding him close.  If I try to lay Wessy down for a nap or for bed and Cal is not in attendance, Wessy looks at me pointedly and says "CAL," and he won't settle until Cal is present and accounted for.  Wessy has also taken to giving Cal rides on his chomp and stomp push toy, which I have no doubt Cal enjoys immensely.
-To my horror, Wessy also continues to deepen his love of motor vehicles. The less fuel efficient, the better.  When he sees pictures of trucks and real-life trucks, his face lights up and he yells CAHHH!  If he sees them on the screen of my phone, he tries to pet the screen.
-New teeth:  Wessy has thus far sprouted six teeth in his life.  He got the bottom two first followed by four on the top.  This all happened several months ago, and all had been quiet on the dental front until a few days ago.  He looks to have two teeth budding out on either side of his original bottom two teeth.  He has been a little testy and not eating as much as usual, so hopefully this passes relatively soon.  Selfishly, I can't wait for him to have a little grill because I think it will be so cute.  The downside will be that our already embattled nightly tooth-brushing regime will become even more challenging.
-New au pair! --We were joined by our new au pair (Alejandra Monserrat or "Montse") a little less than two weeks ago.  Wessy misses Geraldine (if you ask him where she is, he will say "bye bye" resignedly) but he has taken to Montse very easily and she him.  After a few days, she pronounced him "bonito-travieso," or pretty-naughty.  I would say that's about right.
-Diaper changes gone beyond comical and landed on hellish.  He thrashes about wildly while you try to change him, screaming bloody murder and either trying to hurl himself off the table or stick his hands into his soiled diaper.  Or both.  That is why we are soldiering on with our little potty training scheme, though I must report there has been ZERO progress on that front.

Our new toddler

For the last few months, I have felt like Wessy was skirting the border between infant and toddler.  At around a year, his walking was non-existent and then sporadic, and up until a few weeks ago he had a fairly small vocabulary. All that has exploded in the last couple of weeks and he is definitely leaving his baby ways behind.  He's now a confident if not coordinated walker and a non-stop babbler if not enunciator of actual words.  But now there is no mistake: We have a toddler.

I think it all dawned on me yesterday.  Dada had worked overnight, so I aimed to take Wessy out of the house all day so as not to disturb.  First we went to church.

For the last several weeks Wessy has struggled with the nursery at church.  The minute we walked into the door, he would start clinging to me like a scared little monkey.  If I put him down, he would fire up The Silent Scream.  Then he would whimper and sniff his way through the rest of nursery on one of the nursery lady's laps.  Last week, his protests were fleeting and eventually he was able to get engaged in playing with some CAHHHH! and did well.  This week, apart from a subtle tightening of his grip on my shirt when we walked in, he showed no sign that he minded the nursery at all.  I left him playing happily with CAHHHH and returned to find him playing happily with CAHHH.  He seemed to enjoy being around the "big kids" and was happily part of the fray.

After church, Wessy is usually bushed, so I take a stroll around the Cow Hollow area while he takes a stroller nap.  This week he was especially kind to me, and I was able to sip an entire hot coffee and read a book chapter.

After that, we got sandwiches and headed to Alta Plaza Park.  This is an amazing park that is perched on a hill with a stunning view of San Francisco.  It is quite popular, and yesterday was packed with kiddos and parents playing and having gatherings.

Wessy again jumped right in to playing with other kids, some of them two or three years older than him.  He played in the sandbox and climbed the play structure.  He spotted another kid with a big CAHHHH (one of those push cars that a child can ride in while the adult pushes) and lobbied successfully for me to help get him in it and ride him around.  While I pushed him in the little car, he looked like a radiant little beauty queen, smiling happily at everyone in his vicinity.

When I sensed that he was getting hot and tired, I plopped him in the stroller and we strolled down fillmore st.  I popped into some of my favorite stores there (Crossroads and Goodwill, not your "typical" Fillmore establishments).  Wessy was drowsy and didn't really mind, but at some point he woke up and started grabbing the arms of hanging shirts and laughing at the hilarity which ensued while I deflected annoyed gazes from the salespeople and high-tailed it out of the store.

At that point, DADA texted to say he was awake,  so we went back to Alta Plaza to meet him.  Stevo and I watched amusedly as Wessy played in the giant sandbox with a clutch of other little ones.  He actually scaled the little sand table in the sand area and conducted his affairs from this perch.  It was then, seeing him playing intendedly and communicating with the other kids (mostly through emphatic babbling and body language) that I realized that, whoa, Toto isn't a baby anymore.




He's our dynamite little guy.  He's got a lot of thoughts and opinions and is better and better at expressing them.  He is still very demanding of attention but he is becoming independent enough to amuse himself for several minutes at a time.  It's such a fun moment in his development and I am trying to soak up every minute!

Current words
-BOOKAH BOOKAH BOOKAH: Always said thrice, this is an evolution of the previously mentioned term "buh."  This term is specific to books, and buses remain "buh!!" This term refers to books but is also a strident request to read him a book, STAT.
-Waffff: waffles
-Aawah or wawa: Water, often he can't decide whether to say it in Spanish or English so he does a mish-mash
-meee meee meee meee: I'm not sure of the literal meaning of this word for Wessy--possibly means ME or is a bastardization of please--but he emphatically says this when he wants something, usually food you are currently eating
-PEEEEE: Please or penis, depends on context.  If he is trying to ask nicely for something then he is probably saying please, and if he is grabbing at his diaper it's probably the latter term.

Buddies

This Old House

As of now, we have been in our San Francisco house for about six weeks.  Amidst all the excitement of the city, Sonoma County seems like a very faraway dream, and not like a place we called home until very recently.  Before we moved, I thought I would be purely relieved to leave Santa Rosa, but it's more complicated than that.  Yes, I am glad to say goodbye to the Northern California rednecks with their monster trucks and vaping.  Yes, I am happy to say I no longer live in the host city of the Emerald Cup.  But yet...I will miss it.

It has taken until now to really digest it all.  Up until maybe two weeks ago I was convinced that this new life in San Francisco was temporary and we would go back to Santa Rosa after awhile.  It seems so different here from anything I have ever known, and so I don't know if my subconscious believed we really lived here until we had several weeks to settle in.  Now that I know that San Francisco is our home, I can contemplate the things that we loved and the things that we will miss in Santa Rosa.

Santa Rosa was an alien a place to me where when we moved there from North Carolina.  A few weeks after we first moved there, I remember thinking California was like the surface of the moon.  Unbearably bright during the day with a steep temperature drop at night because there was no atmosphere (read humidity) to hold the heat in the air.  Dry.  Way too dry. Strange people.

Over time, though, it became familiar to me.  I rode my bike almost everywhere and so I knew the streets well.  I settled into residency and felt like I had a place there.  I came to adore the cool nights.

And two years after we moved there,  Santa Rosa became the place that we started our family.  We brought Wessy home to that house.  All the painfully sweet moments of his early infancy were there.

I nursed his soft, milky self to sleep in that house for many nights. We used to prop him up "Weekend at Bernie's" style on our bed while he slept and we watched TV because we wanted to stay close to him for a few extra hours at night.  I remember coming home from work and helping him practice sit up on a blanket on the floor of his room.  I remember putting him in a high chair for the first time at our dining table and thinking that he looked like a little stuffed animal strapped into the chair.  We had his first birthday party in the backyard there, and he sat in that same high chair, except this time looking much more humanoid.

And the fruit--oh the fruit.  The backyard in Santa Rosa was fecund.  The summer that Wessy was born we ate through no fewer than 100 lbs of peaches and still had tons to give away.  We had buckets of figs, so many that they dropped, overripe, onto the mulch below and made a sticky mat.  A crawling Wessy gorged himself on plums and pluots.  We had a volunteer tomato plant that grew so prodigiously that it was going to strangle us all had we stayed.

Though it was his first home, Wessy probably won't remember Santa Rosa.  He will be "from" San Francisco.  He'll grow up thinking that buses come every two minutes and that a Nigeria-esque gap between rich and poor is normal. He will be inured to world class museums and great food.  But he may never have a backyard like that again.

Trip to the Cal Academy of Sciences

Evening stroll to Dolores Park

Hardly strictly Wessy