Hug Twice

Alexa likes to chew on things.  Well, not just things.  Everything.  She is seriously orally-fixated and will shove anything and everything in her mouth.  For being so interested in chewing, you’d think that at 16 months she would have more than 4 teeth, but I digress.

One of her very favorite things to chew on is cardboard.  Board books, boxes, any thing she can find that is cardboard, she will gnaw on, and if she gnaws a piece off, she’ll very carefully scoop it out of her mouth and drop it on the floor.  Little wet cardboard piles… yum.   We of course do not let her chew randomly on things, but sometimes she gets away with it.  She’ll even rip parts off of bigger books to find the cardboard part she can chew on.  Niiiiiice.

CJ is not on board with this phenomenon at all.  It is really funny to watch a three year old try to explain to a one year old that she doesn’t want to chew on a board book, but try he does.  He tells her no, says “Yuck” and makes gagging noises, but she blissfully ignores him.  So yesterday he brought out the big guns.

“Alexa, that not cookie good!”

She still ignored him, but I know where his food priorities lie. 

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As Alexa has begun walking more and crawling less, CJ has begun to take notice. At first, he would point and yell “Baby walking!”. And then there was the imitating her walking and acting like Frankenstein. But now, the tables have turned completely.

The more Alexa walks, the more CJ crawls. And as he crawls, he giggles and shouts “I the baby!”

I don’t know if it is just funny to him, or if he is somehow jealous and wants to be the baby. I don’t really know how to figure that out, either. But for now, we have a baby who is becoming a toddler, and a preschooler who is reverting to a baby.

Life is always interesting, that is for sure.

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I didn’t know the making fun of your sister started so early.

Alexa has started walking. She doesn’t walk all the time, and it isn’t her primary mode of transportation yet (that’s still crawling), but she does walk from thing to thing or just randomly. But she’s got the classic baby walk - arms outstretched, stiff legs, swaying side to side, not very steady.

CJ will see her doing this and get all excited. At first it was cute - he’d point at Alexa and yell “Look! Baby walking! Baby walking!” But now… it is not so cute. CJ gets right behind her, stretches him arms out at his sides, sways side to side and walks stiff-legged behind her (in a fairly good imitation) saying “Look mommy, I baby walking! I baby walking!” Honestly, he looks just like a frankenstein.

And then he laughs and laughs and laughs.

Good thing Alexa’s too young to understand he’s making fun of her. I don’t think she’d put up with it.

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CJ had a little cold. Well, it was a pretty bad cold, for a day. And then he got over it.

He’s a nice kid though, so he happily shared it with his sister. And Alexa is taking a lot longer to recover. She’s not terribly sick, just sick enough to be miserable about it.

I’ve been giving Alexa medicine to lessen the amount of snot she produces under the advisement of our pediatrician because it is interfering with her ability to eat. Well, Alexa hates medicine. I don’t know why, she doesn’t seem to mind the taste itself, but she hates being given medicine.

She has a whole arsenal of tricks up her little sleeves to avoid the syringe going into her mouth. There is the head shake, the tongue thrust, and the raspberries. Then if it gets into her mouth there is the gagging cough, the spitting, and today she added a new one, the blowing a fine mist over everything.

I am so sick of winter. CJ, I know I’ve told you time and time again to share with your sister… but this isn’t exactly what I meant.

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I have a friend who lives several hundred miles away, so although we chat online I don’t get to see her and her son (who is the same age as CJ) interact too often. My family had the opportunity to visit her family a few months ago, and her son calls her “Mom”, not “Mommy”. I didn’t notice at first, until CJ started calling her “Mom” too, because he thought that was her name. I found that pretty amusing, CJ calling her mom, and so did my friend. But my friend also seemed a little sad about the fact that her son always called her mom now and never mommy.

Well, now CJ has started to call me mom on occasion. It is bittersweet to me - he doesn’t do it all the time, there is still plenty of “Mommy” thrown in there, but it is often enough for me to notice. My little boy is growing up. And although I like that he is growing up and maturing and becoming his own little person, I can’t help but wonder what happened to the little baby I spent so many hours rocking and holding, the toddler who ran as far as he could run, but always made sure he had me in his sights. As CJ sets off on the bus each morning, he often doesn’t even look out the window to wave goodbye to me anymore.

Mom.

Sniff.

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