Peer pressure

On the plus side:
Hanging around other sockless kids finally made Jolly abandon his Socks All The Time (At Least One Pair) policy. He voluntarily goes barefoot sometimes now, which is fabulous. The warmer weather might have had something to do with it, also. The toe fungus seems to have been beaten into submission. Score!

On the minus side:
We've been having more complete sentence-resembling statements and phrases, but there's been a corresponding shift to mostly English. Crap. I think it's probably also the hanging out on a regular basis with other kids (right now we have weekly childcare swaps of a morning of us watching a very verbal friend, an afternoon of him being watched by the mom of said very verbal friend, and a morning at the beach with other families). Even the "Das?" that has so long been his staple phrase has been replaced by "Wha[t']s this?" I do think socialization is important, so it's not like I'm going to retreat into forcing Jolly into being a recluse, but I'm pushing hard to see what I can do to keep up the bilinguality short of that. If he talks to me in English, I try to repeat what he's saying in German. If he's trying to get me to do something (excuse him from dinner table, give him chocolate or coffee, go outside, swing him vigorously up and down by the arms) I make him request it in German. With a tacked on "bitte?", of course. We'll see where this battle of the wills ends up. I'm prepared to bunker down for a long fight for the second language making it to the expressive verbal stage... and I'm pretty stubborn. 

Some other notes on doing what others do:

• We're having some ongoing issues with too much enthusiasm for eating my Fiber One cereal and also their granola bars. I fix Jolly his requested breakfast of whole milk yogurt and granola and a piece of fruit, then sneak in to join him once I'm done faffing about cleaning up the kitchen. At some point he realizes that what's in my bowl is the coveted Fiber One and he says "HAVE!" and points imperiously. I give him a few small twigs and stir them into his granola. He painstakingly picks them out to eat them, and we repeat. This wouldn't be a problem except that he's a wee skinny thing failing to follow his "barely on the charts" growth curve already and he really does not NEED to be eating a super-low-calorie, super-filling breakfast.
• I, however, do. Sadly. Because I'd gladly trade with him!
• Yesterday there was consumption of a leafy green salad for the very first time. Enthusiastically and in large amounts. That is tremendously exciting news, since leafy greens have long been disdained. It's totally a "but you're eating it, so I WANT it" thing - I just made myself a salad and started eating it, and he really wanted to do what I was doing. I like to think perhaps my super-awesome homemade yogurt-mustard-dill dressing also had something to do with it. He needed help spearing the salad onto the grown up big fork, but kept requesting it with "helfen!" and "more!"
• Jolly was nearly beside himself with joy when I made a pot of decaf coffee and let him at it without the "just ONE sip" condition that Ephiny's full-octane coffee gets. (Then there's always ensuing disagreement about the fine line between a sip and a chug, and our child also forgets everything he otherwise knows about the meaning of the word "one".) He couldn't believe that I just handed him the mug. I don't know that it's quite explainable by peer pressure: I learned that Jolly is perfectly amenable to drinking black coffee in large quaffs and will just finish my mug off. 
• We now have clothing stains that are even more embarrassing hallmarks of lassaiz-faire parenting than the time Jolly got chocolate cake batter on his neck (in the process of licking the beaters) and thus smeared along the collar of the onesie he was wearing.
• The onesie stains make me smile everytime I put the shirt on, though. 
• Because no, he didn't get salmonella.
• I suppose we're setting him up for fitting right in to the Seattle area coffee cliche, though. If he's at black coffee at age 2, he'll probable be achieving some stellar heights of coffee snobbery as a teenager.
• I am contemplating taking a straw cup of milk AND a straw cup of decaf coffee with us to the beach tomorrow morning, just for the sheer wrongness of it, and also because *I* would like some coffee with me, now that I'm well out of the second trimester and thinking the small amount of caffeine in decaf is probably okay. Plus, it would help balance out the two insulated pockets in our new diaper bag.