Parenting moments that make me "habby"

• Having Otter come to me and say "lap!" and sit down, snuggling in
• Reading Max Drives Away to Otter as he insists on repeatedly going back to the page where Max gets in the car to drive to Grandma's, "bumpety bump," which Otter loves as we go "bumpety bump" bouncing him on my knees
• Otter saying "ding din" as he shakes the monkey with bells in his feet and hands
• Getting out of bed to check my email and coming back three minutes later to find he's drifted way over to G's side in his sleep looking for his "Dee"
• Otter standing up and walkgin to the gate from the living room after watching a quick Scholastic DVD chapter and saying "teeth!" to signal he's ready to go brush his teeth and go to bed
• Smelling that toddler smell of Otter's neck and hair
• Otter smiling and saying "mama!" when he sees me come in to daycare to get him

You may have noticed that many of Otter's recent remarks have exclamation points. What can I say? He's at a very emphatic age.

Is this a sentence?

We've been tryign to teach Otter that not all men are daddies. He meets men mostly through our friends with kids and through other daycare fathers dropping or picking up their kids, all of hwom he hears called "daddy." So I've been telling him, no, not a daddy, a man, when he does things like post to the absolutely gorgeous guys in the Hanna Andersson or LL Bean catalog and says daddy.

The whole thing seems relatively innocuous, until you meet some friends in the supermarket and he points straight at the man in the couple and says with glee "Daddy!" Funny but also a bit awkward.

It isn't easy for him to grasp that daddy isn't a generic term, especially as one of his grandfathers goes by Dad-dad. With women it's easier, as the women who work at his daycare are NOT called mama or mommy, and thus he gets that not all women are mamas.

But I htink we're getting somewhere. This morning he looked at his father and said "Daddy... MAN!."

I think that's one of his first "sort of" sentences, communicating two concepts and linking them.

More new words and concepts

Otter is adding more verbs now. He has: walk, run, squeeze, rock (as in rocking chair), chew, hug, jump, color, comb, brush, and so on. He's also adding more nouns: stroller, brella (for umbrella), rain, juice, zee (for zebra), za (for pizza), sauuuh (for applesauce) and more numbers: one, two, three, five, six, seven, nine, and ten--four and eight are thusfar missing at home. He has no real idea what the numbers mean conceptually, but he gets that they go in an order and is beginning to have a sense of what that order is.

He gets that snow is cold, and so is our bathroom floor. (Previously, he seemed to think "cold" was equivalent to popscicle/ice cream.)

I am sure I'm forgetting some; he learns so fast it's hard to keep up with him.

Trips aren't for toddlers

Otter loves being in new places. Otter loves going to new places--even in the car--provided you can get there within two hours.

After two hours, he gets cranky in the car.

I know this because we just returned from a one-week jaunt Mama-and-toddler to visit my family. You may have guessed that this trip requires more than two hours of car time. far far more. Many hours more. We played Dan Zanes music over and over, sang the star (twinkle twinkle) song, sang the "if you're happy and you know it" song, hummed, gave him crackers, gave him water, gave him cookies, stopped to allow him to walk around a bit... still, after two , maximum three, hours he's just not a happy child in the car.

Once there, it was wonderful and exhausting--for both me and Otter. Otter had a lovely time running in circles around my parents' downstairs (living room to kitchen to dining room to living room, then repeat), a much bigger and more open space than we have at home.

Otter also had lots of fun playing with his rapidly approaching 4-year old cousin. Formerly-Emperor now-Prime-Minister K (he now has a baby sister whose arrival, I believe, has changed his family from an empire to a parliamentary democracy) would pull the toy elephant around the room while Otter chased him--sort of. Otter would make small digressions in his following of K and the elephant to spin in circles with joy.

He had fun with his grandparents too, and his aunt and uncle, and at Barnes and Noble's train table, where he became atypically shy and quiet watching a somewhat older toddler assert that "no, baby!" those trains were hers, all hers.

He had fun doing almost everything but napping--and watching me hold his new baby girl cousin. More on that later this week.

We're all glad to be home, especially as we stopped to pick up G on the way home from his annual Hearts weekend. Otter was beyond thrilled to see his dad, and we were all happy to get back to our own messy house (we're working on it, and it's getting less cluttered, really), and our own warm well-made (thanks to G) family bed.

Our grey and white cat was also thrilled to see Otter, and this morning when he woke up he got fits of giggles just watching her sit in the room.

It is this type of Otter joy than leads both G and me to concur with Otter when he says (his latest and most amazing word) that he's "habby." He will spin and turn and dance and run, saying "habby habby habby habby" and trying to make the sign for HAPPY.

Sometime having a kid is hard and complicated and exhausting. But sometimes--sometimes at the same time that it's hard, sometimes on its own--it just makes you "habby," right down to your spinning dancing toes.