Holidays

We had a lovely Christmas with Aunt Connie and Uncle Bill, who drove up from Chicago for the afternoon, and presented Logan with an actual guitar with which he is currently obsessed. So far the guitar has also been a substitute for a dobro, a mandolin and a bassoon - imagination reigns!

Insult

Logan loves playing with words. For about the last year or so, he's been getting a big kick out of replacing the first letter of various words with the letter G (why G has this honor, I have no idea). For example, he'll say, "How are you, Gommy?" and then start laughing hysterically. People's names are frequently converted – Uncle Guss, Aunt Geidi – or nouns that accompany his game of "Where Does the Diaper Go?" (no, he's not potty-trained yet. Not even close. He will be the only teenager in the world who still wears diapers).

"Where Does the Diaper Go?" is a game he invented that we play before he takes his bath. He takes off his diaper (which obviously goes in the trash) and asks me, "Does it go in the gash? Does it go in the gub? Does it go in the sink? Does it go in the laundry? Does it go in the gotty?" etc. etc, until he finally inquires, "Does it go in the trash?" – to which I respond with a resounding, "Yes!" whereupon he dumps the diaper and climbs into the tub.

He also has a knack for remembering things, most especially phrases out of his favorite books (of which there are many). Usually this is delightful, especially when he starts talking to himself saying things like, "Go, dog, go," or "Mr. Plimpton out of bed, cream in coffee, egg on bread." However the other day, he looked at me and rather gleefully said, "Hi, fatso!" – and I responded by dropping my jaw and getting red in the face and wondering just what it is he's learning at this new preschool, before I remembered his book My Sister Gracie, where a plump dog is teased by other dogs.

Clearly we have to start warning him about the nature of an insult.

Santa

Back

So the blogging took a small hiatus while I finished my book and sent it off to my agent—I love saying that—yes, to my agent for a second perusal. She’s promised to get back to me after the holidays (hopefully with only minor rewrites, if any at all) and then she plans to submit it to the Big Editors. I can’t believe this is the first time I don’t actually have to write query letters and submit the work myself. The wait promises to be just as nerve-wracking, however.

Shay is awesome—sparkly and giggly and occasionally crotchety, but then she does take after her old mom. When we first brought her home from the hospital, we thought she was ever so different from Logan because she seemed to actually sleep (and our memories of our early days with Logan are dimmed beneath a haze of exhaustion so profound we felt like we were mired in molasses). Turns out she’s not so different—she’ll sleep if we’re holding her, but she doesn’t like being put down and she nurses a lot and sleeps restlessly at night. A replica of her brother. Who still doesn’t sleep through the night. At almost three years of age.

But we’re handling it much better, if for no other reason than we’ve accrued some tactical coping mechanisms. And we foresee another few years of poor sleeping among our children (clearly the love of sleep is not a genetically inherited trait), so we’ll just have to muddle through.

Sleep issues aside, Logan also continues to surprise, delight, frustrate and occasionally mystify, but then he does take after his old dad. The guitar continues to be his instrument of choice, and for some reason he keeps saying, “My name is Casey and I have a purple guitar pick.” Casey being the name of one of his preschool teachers who plays a mean guitar and is, no doubt, in possession of a purple guitar pick.

Logan’s enjoyment of Legos has disappated a bit—he used to build (or rather demand that we build) little guitars and fiddles and stand-up basses out of Legos, but now he uses his xylophone as a guitar instead. His other favorite pasttime of late is requesting crayons (five is the maximum I will dispense at any one time), then peeling the paper off the cylinders, breaking the crayons into two or three pieces and then proclaiming them “M&Ms”. Does he ever actually COLOR with the crayons? Rarely. Do we know why not? We have no clue.

Logan’s never been much into coloring, although he does like pens and makes little “scrubbing” marks almost like letters. He knows how to spell his name, and can actually make a pretty decent L and O, but the G thus far continues to thwart him. He continues to be fascinated by numbers and especially the thrill of putting up his fingers to indicate one, two, three, etc. He also knows that his birthday is on January 25^th, that he’ll be three years old, and that cake is somehow involved—although he also expects candy canes.

Speaking of which, we had a very successful visit with Santa on Tuesday (picture to come). I’d thought Santa might freak Logan out, but he went with the flow really well. When Santa asked what he wanted for Christmas, Logan replied, “A present.” Nice of the kid to leave the field wide open for us like that.