Hug Twice

Or maybe resiliency.  Something like that.

I often think of CJ as being inflexible - he likes things a certain way and he gets very out of sorts when things are changed without warning.  And he’s so smart you can’t fool him at all - we tried to play Rock Band at my parents’ house and gave him an unplugged instrument and he knew it wasn’t hooked up at all and got very cranky.

But my kids are more flexible than I think.  On Sunday, our car broke down on the NY Thruway - twice.  (We thought it was fixed inbetween the first and second time).  Both times we had to wait for a tow truck to come and then get towed to a service station.  Both times, my kids did fine.  They were tired, they were cranky, but they held up better than I did.  And when we rented a car to get back home, they cheerfully were transferred to the new car and rode home without incident.  For 12 more hours.

Thank goodness.  At least two of us were calm. 

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I would be sitting on a stool in a bathroom talking to my four year old about not yanking on his foreskin.

CJ is not circumcised.  It’s a choice Matt and I made, and not one I’m big on debating either way.  it is what it is.

We’ve always treated it like just a fact of existence with CJ, and just like any other part of his body, taught him how to clean/care for it.  And then today CJ screams from the bathroom “MOMMY my penis HURTS!!!!!”

And lo and behold, he’d forced his foreskin back all the way and created a sore spot.  Ouch.

So we had the “please don’t pull on your penis like that when it hurts” discussion.  And I gave him a half-dose of tylenol, more for the psychological benefit.

And I pondered again how Matt always misses moments like these. 

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We travel for the week of Christmas.  We spend the first half of the week with Matt’s family, and the second half with mine.  All of our extended family (both sides) lives very close together, and we are the only outliers.  So we travel.  It isn’t too big a deal for us to do so, and it is our only trip each year to see family.

This year, CJ is four, and taking an interest in all things Christmas.  In the past, he’s been relatively indifferent, so we basically saved all the celebrating for the family visits and not had one of our own.  So this year, we put a few lights up outside the house, hung small stockings on our hearth, took out the little “Charlie Brown” Christmas tree we’ve had from our first-married days, and we had our own Christmas celebration Sunday, where the kids got their presents form us.

There weren’t a lot of presents - just one toy gift to each of the kids (a ball popper for Alexa, a TAG pen for CJ), a few (needed) items of clothing, and a small matchbox car for each of them from each other, and to me it seemed like it was tiny and the kids would be disappointed.  But they loved it.  Christmas with the grandparents (both sides) is always crazy and over the top, and I was afraid comparisons would be made (and maybe in the future they will be) but this year, it was perfect.

And the kids have been fighting over the TAG pen ever since.  ;)  Cj informed me I need to go get Alexa her own so she will leave him alone. 

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Because CJ is only 4 and attends a public preschool with only 24 total students, we have the luxury of the bus pulling right up to our house every day, and we can wait inside until it gets here.  When CJ’s bus arrives, Alexa takes up station at the closest window to watch, and I take CJ outside to get on the bus.  I come right back in after handing him off to the bus driver, and since he has to be buckled into his car seat before the bus leaves, I often get back inside in time to see Alexa waving bye bye to CJ.

Yesterday I did just that, but when I got inside I was treated to a special surprise.  Instead of Alexa simply waving bye bye, or even saying bye bye, she was saying, very clearly, “Bye bye the brother!”

Not only is that a sentence, but it is the first time I have heard her refer to CJ as anything other than “you”.  She doesn’t say CJ, and she hadn’t, until then, said brother.  But yesterday, she did.

Bye bye the brother indeed. 

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In the past three to four weeks, I have noticed that CJ is telling me things he hadn’t really ever before.  they are not earthshattering secrets, but they show an awareness for him of things that he might not have completely been consciously aware of before.  In that, until a few weeks ago, I don’t recall him ever saying one of these things to me.  I should have noticed, but I didn’t - I didn’t realize that this fundamental connection between self and the world was missing.  But now it’s not.

He’s telling me “I’m hungry” when he wants to eat.  “I need to pee (or poop)” when he needs to use the bathroom.  “I’m tired” when he is sleepy.  Connections between internal feelings, speech to express those feelings, and fulfillment of said feelings.

Now of course, he’s realized that he was hungry since birth.  that’s one of the fundamental cries of a newborn - I need food.  But until recently he hasn’t, of his own accord, made that fundamental connection with words and expressed it to us.  He’ll answer yes if we ask if he’s hungry, but not initiate it.  Until now.

So maybe that was the fundamental disconnect with the potty training.  If he wasn’t recognizing the feelings he had as a need to pee, then he couldn’t translate that into using the bathroom appropriately until it was too late.

Maybe.  or maybe he’s just stubborn.  Whatever it was though, I’m glad it is a hurdle we are mostly past.

On to Alexa I guess… 

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