Weasel Of Doom

DemonChild is not very verbal. We are lucky to get “Bye bye french fries, nuggets all gone” out of him. He does, however, say “Ting-ting” a lot, and nobody knows what the hell that means. He would come up and point at Squeeker, “Ting-ting!” Or see something interesting, “Ting-ting?” Or just babble “ting-ting” for no discernible reason. We are baffled.

DemonChild is saying some words in Russian. I heard him say “Серёжа” instead of Squeeker a couple of times. Dad says he said “машина” when he saw a car. Mom reports hearing “яблоко” when he asked for an apple. Other than that, he is resisting all our attempts to make him multilingual.

Friday afternoon, DemonChild picked up a big rock and tried chucking it around. Dad took the rock from him and stuffed it down the back of DemonChild’s pants. Much hilarity on our part ensued, as DemonChild tried to figure out what was going on and the rock kept sliding inexorably down his pant leg.

It rained on Friday night. DemonChild was begging to go outside. The grandparents let him out for a while, while the rain was only a drizzle, “so he will grow.” (In Russia, we say that mushrooms grow in the rain; hoping it would work on DemonChildren, too.) We shall see if a sudden growth spurt will follow :-)

And then there are a lot of not-so-cute moments. DemonChild refusing to stop picking up garbage, DemonChild hitting people when he is frustrated, DemonChild throwing temper tantrums, DemonChild not doing what he is told, DemonChild being destructive, DemonChild being disobedient, DemonChild being a pain in the ass. Frankly, I am not enjoying this age very much. I miss the sweet baby DemonChild used to be, and hope that once this stage is over, we will get our lovable boy back.

St. Petersburg is 9 hrs ahead of Milwaukee. Often, adjusting to the time change is the hardest thing about the trip. S., though, seems unfazed – he fell asleep about 10 pm and was up around 5:30, with a couple nursing sessions thrown in between, which is par for the course for him. D. had somewhat more trouble – the first night he was up until 2 am (because some parents who shall remain nameless let him sleep until 8 pm; I was asleep myself, or I would have said something). Next morning, he slept until 9:30, had an hour long nap, and was asleep by 10 pm. Today he got up around 10 am – where is all that sleeping in when B. and I need it during the weekend? S. slept until 8:30 am, too – it’s like the kids are mocking me. He is taking pretty nice naps, too, and rarely squeekers. Nobody believes me that it is so NOT how things normally are *smiles* Update: It is now Thursday, and the kids got up at 7 am (D.) and 8 am (S.). D. is throwing tantrums like there is no tomorrow. S. is finding opportunities for squeekering. Looks like things are back to normal, LOL.

On Monday D. went for a walk with Dad and found a puddle to play in. Such was his joy at making himself one with the puddle that even random passerby cheered him on. He came home dripping wet and covered in mud. On Tuesday, Mom took him to the pond to see the ducks. D. waded right in. It became very obvious that having only two pairs of shoes was not going to cut it. So we took a family trip to the store, and D. now has 4 new pairs of shoes. Can you tell the ones he has already worn?

On Wednesday, my parents dragged a tub outside and filled it with water. Much water play commenced. S. splashed. D. tried to lap the water like a dog. S. led the way into the tub. D. gamely followed, almost squashing Squeektar in the process. Clothes got soaked. Diapers swelled to disturbing size. Eventually, protesting players were carried off to get a bath.

Little buggers do NOT want to go to sleep. Writing this paragraph is accompanied by a rhythmic “thump thump” from DemonChild’s room as he rocks himself in the chair, and ear-piercing shrieks from Squeeker’s as he attempts to cry himself hoarse. These are the same children who would fall asleep on their own just a few short weeks ago. I have a distinct feeling the universe is screwing with us :-)

On an unrelated note, all our passports are back with appropriate visas and stamps for the trip to Russia. If the kids are not going to learn how to fall asleep gracefully, annoyed SAS passengers are going to toss me out of the plane without a parachute.

D. is starting to occasionally say three- or four-word sentences. This week, the sentence du jeur is “rain rain go away” – when he feels ambitious, D. even tries to add “come back another day” to the sentence, with mixed results. He says “wain wain go way” with such joy on his little face, though, and such enthusiasm, that it is impossible not to smile back. Oh, and it seems to be working, too – we haven’t had any rain this week.

We were running late going to the funeral service on Tuesday, and D. benefited – he got his favorite McDonald’s meal, chicken nuggets and french fries (and over in Russia, my mother’s spidey sense just went off – “Grandson Eating Junk Food Alert! Heart’s Bleeding! Commence Plotting Healthy Meals!”). After D. finished eating the nuggets and the fries, we told him they were all gone. Silence from the back seat. Then “Fwench fwies, all gone…. Chicken nuggets, all gone… Bye bye, nuggets…. Bye bye, fwench fwies….” A pause for the enormity of it to sink in. And again, in a philosophical tone of voice for “all gone”s and a sad one for the “bye bye”s, “Fwench fwies, all gone…. Chicken nuggets, all gone… Bye bye, nuggets…. Bye bye, fwench fwies….” He must have said that at least ten times. B. and I were cracking up.

And talking about bye-byes, when he is in the mood D. would bid farewell to all inanimate objects that cross his path (bye-bye school bus… bye-bye stick… bye-bye juice) but asking him to say bye-bye to people has a 50% chance of getting a loud NOOOooooo and a scream reminiscent of un-oiled door hinges.

Random D. hits:

• He knows you are supposed to say “bless you” when somebody sneezes. So, when he sneezes, he says “bless you” to himself;
• It has become almost impossible to take pictures of him because he would either (a) would not stand still and run away somewhere or (b) would not stand still and run towards me to see what picture appears on the back of the camera;
• He loves to read books, and can spend quite a bit of time turning pages and shouting out what he sees in the pictures;
• His repertoire of words now includes bicycle, motorcycle, lawnmower, truck, school bus, and airplane. He is trying to say a lot more words in English, while ignoring every Russian version of them;
• He is yet to meet a stick he can resist;
• If there is dirt somewhere, no matter how difficult it is to locate, D. will find it and proceed to make it his. As a bonus, he would dump buckets of sand onto his own head
• B. has told him to apologize to S. so many times that now when he is asked to say “I am sorry” D. goes straight ahead to “I am sorry S.,” regardless or not Squeek was actually involved in whatever incident triggered the apology request
• He loves to be tickled, and sometimes would lift up his shirt to expose the belly, and say “Tickle tickle!” He would also pull my head in so I can blow a raspberry on his stomach, while at the same time trying to push me away. Needless to say, he usually ends up sans raspberry.
• He loves to be chased; everything is a game. He runs around, on the floor, the table, the windowsill, laughing his head off as we chase after.
• If he can’t sleep at night, he will drag his blanket to the rocking chair, climb in, rock really hard for a while, then curl up and fall asleep.

Months ago, when DemonChild was just starting to get into repeating occasional things said to him, he hunkered down next to me and poked a finger at my stomach. “It’s mama’s fat,” I told him, amused at the serious way he was prodding the love handles. “Mama’s fat,” DemonChild repeated, and grinned.

Once every couple of weeks since then, he’d come to me, lift up whatever shirt I happened to wear to belly-button height, give the revealed rolls a poke, and pronounce, “mama fat!” Figures, right? ;-)

DemonChild is at an “interesting” age. That is to say, his favorite word is “NO” and his solution to problems is throwing a giant temper tantrum. And when you add in the fact that he is STILL not talking in sentences, there are times DemonChild will try the patience of a saint, and saints we are definitely not.

At the other end of the spectrum are things that are cute once, but become a pain in the butt if overused. For example, DemonChild has figured out that you can see the picture we have just taken on the back of the digital camera. So now it is virtually impossible to take a photo of him, because the moment he sees us with the camera, he starts running towards it, screaming “demonchild! squeeker! alligator!” (harking back to the day he made this awesome discovery, when we took a picture of him running around with the toy alligator while Squeek stood at the toy table).

Or the fact that getting dressed in the morning or taking shoes off when we get home or going upstairs for diaper time now involves lots of chasing, screaming, giggling, and going limp at critical moments. All lots of fun, except when you are already running late and Squeeker is screaming his head off (or sleeping) and there is just no time for a fifteen-minute-long prelude to whatever it is we absolutely need DemonChild to do.

Oh the joys of parenthood. Kids need to come equipped with a leash and an off button :-)

There is a rocking chair in D.’s room. (That was B.’s birthday gift for himself. I am not big on rocking chairs, they tend to make me feel car sick.) Every once in a while, when D. can’t sleep, he would crawl into the chair with his blankie and toy(s) of choice, and rock himself back to sleep. Of course, this is D. we are talking about here, so the rocking in question is not gentle. We can hear the “thump thump thump” building up speed, and often wonder what would happen when the chair actually tips over. As of Saturday morning, we don’t have to wonder anymore.

We heard D. get into the chair and start the rocking. Faster and faster the thumps went, until finally there was a rather final “thwap” followed by silence. We rushed to his room. The chair was laying on its back, and D. was sitting on the bed wearing a “who, me? I had NOTHING to do with this chair on the floor, why would you even suspect such a thing?” look. Well, kiddo, seeing as how you were the only person in the room with the gate locked, this ain’t exactly a great mystery. Not to mention we heard the whole thing.

Oh, and once we came into the room, D. got off the bed and started trying to push the chair back upright, saying “up up up.”

Sunday night, we heard him go back into the chair. D.’s new toy de jour is Mr. Banana (which was his favorite thing ever when he was S.’s age, and apparently now D. has rediscovered it), and it jingles when moved. So around 2 am, we heard “jingle jingle jingle-jingle … thump thump thump … jingle thump…. jungle… thump…” – D. has rocked himself to sleep, without flipping the chair over.

D. is going through a “Daddy is cool, Mommy is chopped liver” stage, again. I am OK with that, and just hope he won’t have a meltdown when he realizes B. is NOT going to Russia with us. So I was rather surprised that D. kept crying “Mommy” when B. carried him to bed tonight. Perhaps the fact that it was 10:30, WAY after D.’s bedtime, had something to do with that. At any rate, D. was crying in his bed when I walked in. As soon as I sat down next to him, he stopped crying, said “Спать!” (“Sleep!” in Russian), followed by “Bye bye Papa.” I stretched out next to him on the toddler bed, murmuring the Russian equivalent of “It’s time to sleep.” D., however, was not quite ready to go down yet. He kept saying “Bumblebee” (a new word that Mel taught him when they were watching “Over the Hedge” today). Then he would say “Mel all gone” a couple of times, followed by another six renditions of “bumblebee” followed by “night night”, a minutes’ pause, and then the whole “bumblebee-mel all gone-night night” sequence again. After 15 minutes or so, D. finally was ready to let me leave and go to sleep on his own. If we are lucky, he might sleep in until 7 am tomorrow, but I am not holding my breath.

I try to speak Russian to DemonChild, in hopes that he will be bilingual. I think DemonChild just hopes I will shut up and stick to the language everybody else is speaking, but he is so totally SOL on that one.

Anyhow, while most of the time DemonChild refuses to say anything in my native language, every once in a while he forgets about faking incomprehension, and says something in Russian. Here’s what he let slip so far:

• лёд — ice (when begging for some ice, and English is producing no results)
• утка — duck (playing with a bouncy ball with a duck on it)
• мячик — ball (for all things round and possibly bouncy)
• глаз — eye (said it only one, when he found a lego with eyes on it, and it took me 5 minutes to figure out what he meant, due to cognitive dissonance)
• нос — nose (usually when stabbing his finger into various parts of my face)
• волосы — hair (ditto, accompanied by gentle and not-so-gentle pulling)
• конец — the end (when a song or a cartoon come to an end)
• всё — all done (when he is all done eating something)
• мультик — cartoon (when begging for the idiot box to be turned on)
• яблоко — apple (did only once, while pointing at a photo of an apple)
• кто там — who is there (the one Russian phrase DemonChild says often and with great enjoyment, while knocking on everything in sight, be it animate or inanimate, with great enthusiasm)
• папа — daddy (when BelovedSpouse comes into his room in the morning or gets home at night)
• раз, два, три — one, two, three (usually followed by jumping off something)
• he can also count to twelve fairly reliably, if the spirit moves him

List of things to remember when things are dark:

• DemonChild going “Mommy, mommy, mommy” in the mornings, and when I come in, saying “Diapertime” and laying down on the changing pad in the “change me” position

• Sequeeker smiling at us when we come into his field of vision

• DemonChild holding my hand to his cheek and snuggling to it during our walks

• Squeeker launching himself at the boob when he is hungry, and being so happy once he eats his fill

• DemonChild saying “Ice Ice Ice Ice Pweeze” when he wants to eat some ice. Then looking at me and saying “Lyod,” which is Russian for “ice.”

• Squeeker happily chewing everything within reach

• DemonChild and Squeeker snuggling, which to untutored eyes would appear more like smothering

DemonChild pulled the Hulk video from the shelf. BelovedSpouse, ever the helpful parent, told him the green guy was Hulk, and that Hulk says “Smash.” So now DemonChild walks around, saying “Hulk MASH” – too precious for words.

DemonChild is getting more and more verbal. Though often we still have no idea what he is trying to say, he is building up his vocabulary and is definitely understanding a lot more, as well. He can count to twelve in English and in Russian, and knows most of the numbers by sight, as well. When we read books, he would point out page numbers, and be correct 80% of the time. He also likes to repeat the alphabet (English and Russian) after us. Sometime he would just sit there and say random letters (“A,” “G,” “F”) with great satisfaction. He is now very clear that I am Mommy and BelovedSpouse is Daddy. At dinner, he pointed at BelovedSpouse and said “Daddy” and then pointed at me and said “Mommy.” Our friend Jason, who once got called Mommy by DemonChild, can now relax :-)

On the way home Tuesday, DemonChild pulled off his shoe and was chewing on it. I told BelovedSpouse that, got very little reaction. Until after they got back home from food shopping, and BelovedSpouse yelled up the stairs, “I now know what you meant when you said DemonChild was chewing his shoe. I though you were talking figuratively before.” Which now makes me wonder how one can figuratively chew a shoe….

We switched to a new cartoon. Now we watch three Russian cartoons about a boy and a dog and a cat, who live in the village of Prostokvashino. There is also a bird who can say “Kto tam?” (“Who is there?”). Now DemonChild can say “Kto tam?” too.

Another cool thing is that now DemonChild likes to read books. He would pick one, come to us, and say “Book!” Then he’ll sit on our lap while we read to him, and point out things he knows. He can identify many of the books by the first words of what’s inside — “I am Sam,” “Tili-bom,” “I love you through and through” (though ‘through and through’ tend to come out rather garbled, he does try).

DemonChild tries to play with Squeeker, but is still somewhat unclear on the concept of not stepping on baby or sitting on his head. I was telling him “No” the other day as he tried to walk over his brother, and he looked at me and said “No” back and shook his head. Too cute to stay mad at.

DemonChild likes to push the garage door open button when they leave for daycare in the morning. Sometimes, we deliberately close the door just so he can open it.

I moved my plants from the great room to the living room, and now DemonChild has fun playing with his trains on the seat of the bay window.

He climbs everything like a little monkey. If there is a hard way to get from point A to point B, DemonChild will pick it – otherwise, where is the fun?

Ugh, it is 5 am and Squeeky is crying, so away I go…..

(I read quite a few blogs written by mothers, and the writing there is exceptional. My blog is more of a personal journal, where I jot down things before I forget them, and therefore it is extremely boring for others to read, I am sure. Not that anybody reads it, but for the sake of those few who do, here’s my attempt at a post that is less sleep-inducing than my usual ones.)

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Scene: I am sitting on the couch, breastfeeding Squeeker. D. looks at me for a while, then points at the boob and says “apple!” Here’s hoping he was referring to its (pleasing) shape and the fact that it provides food — I’d hate to think that my almost-two-year-old thinks my breasts are small, hard, and green. Then again, he calls pumpkins and mandarin oranges “apple,” too, so I guess my breasts are now a fruit.

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Scene: D. and I are walking down the stairs. There are two steps at the top, then a landing, followed by a long stretch down, another landing, and one more step to the tile floor. D. jumps from the top of the stairs to the landing, grins, grabs the rail, walks down, and jumps down four steps to the next landing. Grins again, turns, and climbs higher. He is now five steps up. Turns around, at which point B. and I say “NO” in unison. Another grin, one step down, and a jump. He lands, and proceeds to jump over the last step and slide on the tile floor. New rule: if we are going to be jumping down the stairs, we are going to do so in our bare feet.

I told the story to my mom. Her reaction: “I would have a heart attack!” Coming to our casa in November – “How I gave my grandma a heart attack” by D.. Watch this space for details.

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Scene: B. and D. just got home. B. went upstairs, and I hear D. downstairs, saying “Su, su, su” repeatedly. Curious to know what is going on, I come down, to see little guy sitting on the landing, patiently waiting for somebody to take his shoes off. The moment they are off, he runs away to play. In some ways, we have a very well-trained child.

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Scene: Our kitchen. D. grabs the two puppy towels, puts them on his arms, and runs around the house, towels flapping. That goes on for two days, to much parental amusement. Also while in the kitchen, D. would attempt to close the child-proof lock on the cabinet that hides the garbage – because that door is supposed to be locked. Helpful little guy.

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Scene: this morning. While B. preps D.’s lunch downstairs, and I feed Squeeker in bed, D. comes to visit. He comes bearing gifts, two – in three trips, two pens, a piece of paper, and a DVD-R from the study are all laid on the coverlet for me to enjoy. D. then proceeds to pull pieces of shelving from B.’s closet. When he judges that a sufficient amount of squares have been pulled out, it’s time to jump-test them. More squares are added as needed, and my “D., that’s enough” is ignored – he knows that with Squeeker attached to my boob, I am not a threat :-)

Favorite movie: Russian Winnie-the-Pooh. D. comes up to the entertainment center and says “Pooh!” when he wants to watch it; for a while, the demand for Pooh was constant. Now he slowed down a bit, in part because we put our foot down (it is so easy to just sit him in front of the TV instead of playing with him, so now he only watches before bed). Right before the end of each episode, he says “All done.” He makes the “ssssssshhhh” noise when the air escapes from the shot balloon. He says “Boom” when Pooh falls and hits tree branches and the ground.

Favorite book: Go Dog Go by P.D. Eastman. Or at least it was until yesterday. Today he did not want me to read it, so who knows. He can follow along with the conversation between two dogs (“Hello” and “Good bye” parts, anyway) and says “Go go go” when he wants to get going.

Favorite toy: cars, in particular a little yellow car from a McDonalds kids meal and a little red car from a package of batteries. He walks around looking for them, saying “caw, caw” (sounds like “cow, cow”). Little red car is the current favorite (and a choking hazard, I strongly suspect ;-). B. bought him a megablocks set that includes a ramp, and now the cars ride down it every evening – lots of fun.

Things he can do: will put things away when told “Put it back.” Can point out his eyes, ears, nose, mouth, feet, and hands. Gets a bit confused where the tummy is, but working on it. Loves jumping down the stairs. Most he jumped over is four, I think. Fearless little guy.

New words he can say: apple (applies to just about anything loosely apple-shaped). no-no-no. thank you (but you have to know that’s what he is trying to say). please (ditto). car. puppy. doggy. fishie. He babbles in full sentences, but we often don’t understand what he is trying to say.

Ugh. I love my kids, but sometimes I wonder if the feeling is reciprocated…

Exhibit 1: Squeeker. Who discovered that he does not HAVE to sleep all the time. It took his brother about a month to come to the same conclusion. I was so hoping this one would follow suit, but nooooo. So, after his 8:15 feeding, the kid would not go down. I fed him again at 10 (desperate times call for desperate measures, etc), tried more feeding around 11, snatched an hour or so of sleep downstairs on the couch with him (to allow BelovedSpouse to sleep), fed him at 1:30, and then –

Exhibit 2: DemonChild. Who has not liked sleeping ever since he discovered he could stay awake. The kid fights sleep any chance he gets. And I mean fights it, to the point of pulling on his eyelashes and pinching himself. It takes him half an hour to go down for the night, most of it spent climbing in and out of his toddler bed, squirming around his toddler bed, attempting to sit on my head if I am stupid enough to put it down on his toddler bed, until he finally clonks out in exhaustion. By which point I have gone through a number of rousing renditions of “Tired Toys Are Sleeping” and “Sleep My Joy Sleep” and those famous Russian lullabies, “Chained Together,” “I Tried to Go Away From Love,” “A Star Named Sun,” “Pack of Cigarettes,” and other classics brought to you by Nautilus Pompilius and Kino. Not to mention that I cannot carry a tune to save my life, so it might very well be that he falls asleep to escape my singing… At any rate, he was down by 10 pm, just in time for me to go and give Squeek some quality boob time. Around 2 am, right after another boob time episode, DemonChild started to scream. I think he had a night terror – I could not comfort him, and after 10 minutes of screaming, he finally fell back asleep to the tune of “Baa Baa Black Sheep” with the bag count-down from 10 to 0. At which point –

Exhibit 3: Squeeker again. Crying. Would not be comforted, at least not by me. BelovedSpouse woke up, and was told it was his turn to comfort crying children. So currently Squeek is asleep, tightly swaddled, on BelovedSpouse’s chest. I keep waiting for him to wake up and ask for his friend the boob, but no luck so far (of course). It is after 5 in the morning, I have not slept yet, and last night I got only 2 hrs of sleep as well. I would scream, but that would wake the kids up.

On the plus side, I have been productive this week, despite lingering discomfort from labor (not sure if the stitches or the hemorrhoid are to blame, so they can share the responsibility). On Sunday I did a lot of laundry and vacuumed everything. On Monday the upstairs bathrooms got cleaned, and the linen closet got reogranized. On Tuesday, I have made a lot of progress cleaning the computer room. One can actually see the bed now. I also washed all the linens, and decided on the way to store them (in bins under our bed; very creative of me). BelovedSpouse took a half-day, and we went to the new Wal-Mart super-center, where I promptly spent the rest of my gift certificate from BelovedSpouse’s dad. Of course, I only bought 2 storage bins, and it turns out I can use another 6 for the bedding, proving once again that I cannot estimate worth anything. Oh well, good thing there are more at Wally Mart ;-)

P.S. Kids update, Wednesday, 1:30 pm: DemonChild was up by 7 am, and roamed around for an hour or so when BelovedChild fell asleep downstairs. Squeeker fed around 5:30 am, slept on me until his 8:30 feeding, and has been sleeping in the pack’n'play for the last 4 hours or so. Where is that sleeping behavior when it is night? ;-) At any rate, hopefully he will wake up soon, because he needs to be fed (and I need to feed him *smiles*)

DemonChild will be 20 months old in another week. Seems like just yesterday he was still a little baby; where has time gone?

Physically, he is way ahead of other kids his age. His new way of taking the stairs down is what BelovedSpouse calls “luge” – he tries to slide down. When not sliding, it is jumping from step to step – I usually hold his hand for that, and at least for me he somewhat watches what he is doing – apparently with BelovedSpouse, he just launches himself down the steps. Eeep.

This week he finally figured out how to put Quatro blocks together (before, they existed to be built into elaborate structures by Mom or Dad and then destroyed with unholy glee by DemonChild). There are little clusters of blocks scattered throughout the house now, interspersed with foam letters and numbers which are very likely not intended to be chew toys, but are a lot better than other objects that DemonChild elects for that purpose (such as toy cars and board books. What the child did to “Guess How Much I Love You” is not pretty. It is in at least five well-chewed up pieces. He is now working on getting “Kiwi 1 2 3″ into the same state. Board books, your source for fiber in the diet. When we got back from Russia at the end of June, DemonChild decided to hate taking baths. He would back into the corner of the bathroom and cry unconsolably as his cruel parents filled the baby tub and plonked him there. Duckies and bowls failed to cheer him up for more than a few minutes. Water from the faucet was the enemy. Bath time was torture time. Fortunately, the bath-hating stage lasted only about a month. Now he is back to loving it, and cries when the baths are, in his opinion, cut short. We are all very happy that bath time with Daddy is fun again.

Another thing that started getting out of whack even before we left for Russia was DemonChild’s sleeping patterns. He would go down around 9 or 9:30, then wake up crying around midnight, do it again around 3 am, and be up for good around 6:30 am. June is white nights month in St. Petersburg, and it did not help. DemonChild would fight sleep like it was enemy #1. He would pinch himself. He would pull on his eyelashes. He would pinch others. He would cry. Eventually, he would fall asleep out of exhaustion around 10 or 11 pm. By 2 am, he would be up and crying unconsolably. I would take him in bed with me, he would crawl around for half an hour or so, find a position that would make my sleep most uncomfortable, and then fall asleep. By 6 am, he would be up and raring to get into trouble. Needless to say, not the best three weeks night sleep I got.

When we got back to America, the sleeping thing did not get better. We replaced the crib with the toddler bed. Still no dice, and he would wake up and cry three or four times a night. He did not want to sleep in our bed, he just wanted one of us with him. BelovedSpouse would sleep on the floor with him, or I would. We tried letting him cry it out once, and he cried for hours, so that was a dismal failure. Then DemonChild decided that he preferred Mommy for his nightly awakenings. No idea why, since BelovedSpouse is a lot better parent, but for some reason if I was the one who came to the gate, DemonChild would actually head back to bed, and if it was BelovedSpouse, he would keep crying. So, more sleeping in 2-hour intervals for me. Unfortunately, at 8 months pregnant, sitting on the floor by the toddler bed was getting to be less and less fun. Things do seem to be getting better, though – the last week, there were couple of nights when DemonChild only woke up once, and went right back to sleep after a few minutes. Last night I gave up on trying to get him to sleep after half an hour, and though he cried for a while, eventually he went back to sleep on his own (and the crying was of the “i am whiny” variety, not the “i am desperate” kind we were getting before). And when he woke up in the morning he played in his room until 9 am, for which Mommy and Daddy were very grateful. So here’s hoping for better sleeping!

He is also building up his vocabulary. It now includes Yep, Nope, All done, More, Up, Down, Mommy, Daddy, Uh-oh, Book, Socks, Shoes, Diaper, Car, Baa-baa (request to sing Baa-baa Black Sheep), AB (request for alphabet song), Blueberries, Peas, Milk, and Outside. He is babbling in what appears to be sentences, but they are all in DemonChildese, and mom and dad are not proving to be the cunning linguists they thought they were :-)

He also understands commands, and on occasion chooses to obey them. He knows what “close the door” means, and “let’s put on shoes” and “want to go outside?” and “it’s night night time” and “nyam-nyam.” Once, BelovedSpouse heard his babbling away, and suddenly in the middle of it there was “DemonChild Come Here” followed by more babbling. Guess the kid knows that one, too, though so far he has not chosen to obey it once :-) When he is hungry, he pulls out his high chair. When he wants to go outside, he comes to a door that leads there, and loudly says “Outshide!” He will say “Up” if he wants to be put in a chair or lifted up, and “down” if he wants to go back on the ground or downstairs.

Some cute DemonChild stories:

• A week or so ago, I was working late and did not get home until 10 p.m. DemonChild was still awake, and I heard BelovedSpouse tell him that yes, he can go downstairs. DemonChild came down to the lower landing, and we snuggled a little on the steps. I asked him if he wanted to go outside. He said “Nope.” Since “yep” and “nope” don’t necessarily mean anything with DemonChild, I then asked if he wanted to go night night. He said “Yep,” took me by the hand, and started pulling me up the stairs. We walked to his room, I opened the gate, he walked in and went to his toddler bed and laid down. I asked if he wanted a song, and he requested first AB and then Baa-baa. By the end of the count-down from 10 bags to none, he was asleep.
• This Wednesday Eric and Shannon came over, and DemonChild was playing with Alex, their 8-month-old, who had recently discovered the joy of crawling. DemonChild and Alex joyfully babbled at each other, chewed on the same playstation controller, and in generally gave us hope that perhaps having a new brother or sister won’t end up being too traumatic.
• DemonChild has a plastic bucket he got for Easter from Bernie and Betty. He likes putting it on his head. If I am playing with him, he would also put it on my head, and then laugh. He has a new laugh, the “hah hah hah” one complete with sticking out his chest. I think he learned it from Daddy. Hopefully we caught it on video, because it is too cute.
• His tricycle has a storage container on the back. Occasionally, DemonChild would lift up the lid, sit there for a while, then get up, close the lid, and continue with whatever it was he was doing before.

Ugh, it is 2:30 in the morning. I am off to bed.