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One of my favorite features of the Jolly model infant and toddler has been sleep. I think we did some things right to encourage him to be a sound sleeper (vaccuuming, having parties, playing inappropriate grown up punk during naptimes) who puts himself to sleep (Dr Ferber we still love you!), but I think a lot of this is just that we got very lucky with a kid that has innate talent for sleeping to work with. He goes to bed sometime around 8-8:30 ish and he might motor his trucks around his bed for a while, or make some imperious demands relating to the color of his blanket and the fact that his baby doll needs to sit on the potty, but then when he decides it's time to go to bed he's usually out for a good 11+ uninterrupted hours.
Sometimes there are exceptions, like this morning when he woke up at 5:30. Ephiny mumbled, "It's too early for him to be awake." I went in, told him it was time to sleep. "Mummy?" "Wants very to go back to sleep. It's too early to be awake." "Mama?" "Is sleeping. And it's time for Jolly to go to sleep, too." I put the baby doll back on the potty and shoved the bottle into its mouth, and then went back to bed where I belong at 5:30. Ephiny had another go round also telling him that it was time to go to SLEEP, seriously, and then he totally believed us and went back to sleep. He slept through our cat's irate "my food dish is insufficiently full" caterwauling, as did I. I had several delicious cycles of "goodness, I think I'm awake and no one is shouting! Oh, hi Iceman! La, what a great toddler I have." and then drifting back to sleep. Totally the nicest sleep-in ever, as I finally rolled out of bed at 9:20 and Jolly woke up at 9:30. OMG.
And then Jolly was uncharacteristically jolly upon waking up, too. Super!
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I think there's something to it that people have great affinity for products, places and professions that mirror their own names. I have definitely increased my enthusiasm for Jolly Ranchers, as well as Jolly Time popcorn, in the past two years since we have a Jolly of our own.
I hope that doesn't predispose our son to becoming a professional pirate (through the Jolly Roger connection).
Though the island sports teams are the Pirates, and I'm delighted to be a football or soccer or whatever mom.
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We bought a glass oblong decorative 'pebble' labelled "Jolly" on a frosted background last Christmas at the farmer's market, picked out from a big bowl of other seasonal sentiments. Jolly loves to play with it, and he asks for it by shouting "JOLLY ROGER!" repeatedly (much to Ephiny's initial confusion). I have NO IDEA where he got this from, although it's clearly one of us. (And no, his middle name is Max, actually, not Rodger or Roderick or Roderigo or any similar item.)
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We did debate whether perhaps we should have picked Thor as a middle name instead, given Jolly's extreme penchant for banging on things. He loves the tool kit he got from his grossmama and grosspapa last birthday, but the hammer is without a doubt his favorite. When he does not have the hammer, he will cheerily employ a whisk, a button labelled "Cool Kid" that he got on a birthday card from a distant cousin, a car, or his bare hand to bang on sundry surfaces, shouting "Bang!"
It IS a great middle name.
Iceman's middle name will not be Thor, though, for the simple reason that we don't know if he'll be similarly hammer obsessed. Nor Odin, which Ephiny proclaimed an even better name.
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And yes, I'm going to assuage grandparental worries and state for the record that Iceman is just a code-name for in-utero and will not be going on the birth certificate.
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Iceman is gestating uneventfully, and kicking every day now, which is tremendously reassuring especially after several losses.
Jolly is increasingly excited about the upcoming baby addition. He's prone to proclaiming "Have a little brother!" and "I'm a big brother!" at random intervals throughout the day. Also, he shows as long an attention span for books about little brothers as he does for books about garbage trucks, which is saying a LOT. We had to read one very lengthy tale of a boy obtaining a little brother twice, back to back, for bedtime the other night. First mummy had to read it, and then mama had to read it. (Did Jolly perhaps want to read another book instead? No! This one about the bunnies? NO!)
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Our Legolas and Eomer action figures are some favorite toys. This makes sense. Eomer has a cool removable cape, and Legolas has a bow with tiny pieces to strew all over the house! They are little wee men that can go on adventures! What makes much less sense is that the adventures always end up IN THE BLENDER. Jolly happily proclaims, "Legolas in there! Man in there!" and then if they don't squish in tightly enough to put on the lid he seeks out one of us and makes us shove them in further and more compactly so that he can put the lid on.
Our blender is feeble and ailing, and I'm glad someone is getting so much joy out of it, though maybe not Legolas and Eomer.
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For whatever reason, the pocket sized French dictionary is an absolute favorite book. I'm guessing because it's a grown up book that is child sized. Perhaps also it's because his requests to "READ BOOK!" are rejected for this particular volume. (Note: we also refuse to read Lysistrata to him. That's the other book that gets picked out of our bookshelves at a greater than random chance.)
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Somehow Jolly has decided that being kissed by a parent in the spot that he bumped makes it all better. This leads to a lot of imperious commands of "KISS THE [body part]!" This is generally pretty adorable, and it happens pretty often because our child is a barely-controlled whirlwind of activity at all moments.
It does, however, sometimes lead to declarations of "KISS THE BUTT!" and then we tend to be too busy laughing uproariously to comply with the demand with the desirable speed.
This leads to far more adamant commands of "NEED TO KISS THE BUTT!!!" issued at far louder volume, which just gets funnier.
(We do not actually directly kiss all body parts. Kisses can be applied to the hand of the parent and then patted onto dirty feet, knees, legs, bitten tongues, and yes, bottoms.)
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The fun added bonus is that the diapers they were being sold with were the Huggies Limited Edition Jeans diapers. Ephiny had emphatically vetoed these when they first debuted on the grounds that they were ridiculous and ugly, and even if they weren't, there's really no point to springing for attractively patterned diapers because our kid always wears pants. I think the creepy ads had something to do with it, too.
But hey, at diapers.com this brand of swim diapers are $11.99 for 12, and the big combo box at Costco was $9.99 for 28 swim diapers AND an equally big sleeve of the jeans diapers, so I figured the jeans diapers were just a happenstance by product of purchasing the swim diapers we really did need.
They are in fact totally ridiculous, with a faux-fly in the front and faux-pockets in the back, and they are clearly very papery looking and the print quality would fool no one. However, Jolly thinks they are super-great and totally requested one for nighttime tonight. (Alas, was a no-go because he needs a size up at night to keep up with his long stretch of sleeping).
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Climbing and jumping: still the main pastime in these parts.
He now declares "BIG JUMP!" as an indication that he would like for you to hold his hands before he hurls himself off some precipice. This is generally pretty helpful, but also sometimes comes out sounding like "BIG DUMP!" which is pretty hilarious.
Ephiny suggests that I am going to be brilliant at parenting during the preschool age when poop jokes are uproariously funny for indefinite number of repeats, because I am still laughing when Jolly yells "Want a BIG DUMP!", even if it's for the hundredth time.
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It astounds me that we ever thought cloth diapers would be a good idea.
There's a lot of moaning by both parents in our household about having to rinse small amounts of poo out of onesies on the rare occasion when a diaper has been asked to do too much and seeps a bit out the leg openings, and really, that happens once every few weeks.
Recently there was a more spectacular blow-out as a result of eating many many many servings of dried blueberries with a chaser of some Fiber One, Ephiny was moaning quietly about the indignity of the scrubbing out of the poo (she is a champion for sparing my already-superior olfaction further spurred into overdrive by pregnancy, so she is totally entitled to having a good whine while doing it)... when it occurred to me that if we were doing cloth diapers we would be doing this about three times a DAY right now, and gearing up to greatly increase on that number in October.
What on earth possessed us to think that we'd be up for that? Seriously, there's no way that a faucet attachment to your toilet would make that task any more pleasant, because no matter how you try to think about it, you are still scrubbing someone else's feces out of clothing.
And if you're pregnant, you can potentially deal with it and your own vomit at the SAME TIME.
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Other parents of same-aged kids have either potty trained their kid a year or two ago, are newly enjoying a potty trained kid, or are at least making major strides towards that direction.
In our house, we're really excited because now Jolly sometimes announces after he's soiled a diaper in a solid way. (Not by shouting "BIG DUMP!", fortunately, because that would get easily misinterpreted.)
It's a good thing we have an effective diaper system that we like, because I think we'll be using it for a while longer. Although Jolly is stellar at yelling at his baby doll to use the potty, he displays absolutely no interest in sitting on his own potty ("do you want to sit on the potty?" "NO!"). Any forays into sitting him down on the potty on route to/from the bath are met with angry howls, and this is not something we want to make into a battle field, because input and output are seriously the only things that toddlers CAN exert ultimate control over, so I suspect it is not a fight we would win.
I'd bet Iceman will be potty trained rather early, though, given Jolly's burgeoning bossy big brother tendencies with the baby doll having to sit on the potty ALL THE TIME.
(I was a super-bossy big sister -- sorry, brothers mine! -- so I think the bossy big brother streak that's Jolly's already showing is actually pretty adorable.)
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I would like to congratulate myself forgetting onesies up to the 24 month size when I saw them for sale about two years ago. I'd purchased these largest-size onesies thinking they'd be useful to keep our child from removing his own diaper, but given that our child has Victorian standards of modesty built in, that turns out not to be necessary. Not only is potty training NOT HAPPENING anytime soon (see previous Victorian standards of modesty), which would be the argument for leaving them behind, but they're very helpful at keeping debris out of the diaper. Otherwise, our child ends up having an unbelievable quantity of woodchips, sand, and dirt fall into his diaper whenever he's outside, and they all lodge there until the Diaper Change Of Great Woe. Some dirt/sand/woodchip debris still makes it down the neck of a onesie, and gets funneled into the diaper, but it's greatly reduced levels (can be managed by a wipe rather than having to immerse child in a bath), making the diaper change less woeful for everyone.
I'm totally sad about the fact that onesies stop being offered after this size.
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When Jolly commits a dealbreaker level offense (hitting/biting/pulling/otherwise hurting another person or animal) he will not infrequently suggest that he should go into time out. Otherwise, all it takes is a parental mention of "Time out!" In either case, he then motors off into his room on his own, shuts the door, and starts to howl until we retrieve him.
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We are officially on our last round of teething for Jolly. The only indicator has been that he's crammed his hands into his mouth with even more than the usual enthusiasm over the past week or so. Well, that and the fact that Ephiny finally spotted all four back molars peeking through when brushing teeth last night. Jolly is the world's most stoic teether, I think.
There we have it, the "two year molars", right on schedule.
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At his 2 year check up, Jolly weighed 25.9 lbs (albeit in his clothing and on the grown-up scale) and is 35" long. This means he's continuing to track his growth curve and has not fallen further off the weight-per-height growth chart, which means we can stop freaking out so much about what our child is eating, which is nice. He does eat a fair amount, but he likes a lot of low-calorie-density foods and also converts nearly every calorie taken in to kinetic energy right away.
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Counting according to Jolly goes "Eins-zwei-vier-sechs-sieben-neun-zehn!" He's skipping three, five and eight, and refuses to acknowledge any correction of inserting the other numbers in there. In English, he also totally ignores the three. If you give him three cookies and ask him how many there are, he will give an answer of 4, which is also the answer you get if you give him four or more cookies.
I think the ignoring of three might be because we do a lot of counting "1...2...3 and go!" for jumping, and right after 2 his brain sort of short circuits with the excitement of anticipating the impending jump.
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Activities clamored for:
1. Outside!
2. See [name of friend]!
3. Library! (Which means library and then park next to the library.)
4. Shopping!
5. Go to the beach!
It can be correctly inferred from this list that we are having a pretty awesome summer!
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All in all, we're having a lot of fun with this age. Yes, there is whining and yes, there are struggles of the wills, but all in all, this is such a great stage of figuring out the world and talking more about everything. I'm trying to soak it up because I'm sure that when the Iceman cometh, the amount of negative behavior will ratchet up tremendously for a while. But for now, I'm really enjoying spending the days with my adorable, sweet, funny toddler!
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