catch up

Blog entries are the offspring of inspiration and opportunity, which for me have not been coinciding. It's been a month now. Elias has done so many blogable feats, but of course now I'm having trouble recalling them. Alas, that's a prime reason I do this: to try to capture in some shadowy way those magical moments that would otherwise slip through my poor memory. Here's a few snipets I recall.

A couple wees ago he was counting like he often does, methodically pointing at objects and saying "one..twwoo...three..." when he shocked me by switching to Spanish! In the same measured way he counted all the way to 10 in Spanish, with darned good pronounciation, too. I guess he IS learning something at those Spanish lessons in daycare. Today I heard him count to 17 (he kept pointing to reach 20, but the pronounciation pretty much deteriorated to be unrecognizable.)

The floor in Elias' room is covered with those foam puzzle pieces with letters, numbers and shapes. I love it when he takes out a letter, holds it up and says "uh-oh, S!" or "Uh-oh, I!" Then inevitably he asks for help putting it back, then I say "no, you can do that yourself," then after some fiddling he does, and proudly proclaims "I did that!"

He asks for most book by either title or the opening few key words. For some of them he enjoys reading key phrases along with me. He often comments on the story or pictures.

It's been really hard to take pictures of Elias because he always rushes over to me, either for myself or (more often) to look at himself on the preview screen on the camera. Lately though he's been cutting me some slack. When he sees the camera now he yells "smile!" and stands in front for about 5 seconds...then runs around to look at the results on the back of the camera. I took a couple pictures of him by our pumpkin, so last time when the camera came out to capture his dragon Halloween costume he rushed over to it "Elias--pumpkin sit?"

Over the last month or so for the first time Elias' daily notes from daycare don't always read glowingly "I had a good day today," but sometimes say things like "I had a hard time listening today." Hm. Yea. Well, yes, he's 2. Really, though he's still pretty amazingly "good." His trials nowadays seem mostly to be frustration at not being able to do what he wants and/or be able to verbalize it. For example, tonight he was hungry and mad that I was making dinner rather than reading him a book, and stood in the kitchen, screaming. I told him Mommy was making dinner, and he could go cry in his room if he wanted. After pausing a moment to take that in and catch his breath, he did a crisp military turn and went to his room, where he continued wailing. A little while later he wandered back in, all tear-streaked but calm. I gave him a hug and he said "All done crying now Mommy." Awww! And by then dinner was ready so everyone was happy.