Milestone Minutiae

After a bath, Emmett sometimes complains of water in his ear. Not for long, so I've pretty much ignored it. The past couple of nights have been difficult -- he's more difficult to put to sleep and waking during the night. Tonight, David was putting Emmett to sleep when he complained that there was water in his ear. David asked him if his ear hurt, and Emmett replied "It hurts, and Mommy will take me to (doctor) Flanzbaum and he will give me a lollypop to take home."

Emmett is great at identifying basketball on TV. Yesterday when we were out to dinner, there was a TV far from us at the restaurant bar with a basketball game on. He started talking about basketball, and it took David and I a while to find what he was talking about. Today we took a walk in the afternoon. Emmett usually asks "What is he doing?" of any people we see. Today, Emmett saw a black neighbor standing near his car on his driveway. Then he asked me "What's the Laker doing?" The guy was friendly and waved, and Emmett waved back. I waited until we were a few houses away to explain to Emmett that he was just a neighbor who lives here just like us, not a Laker.

Well, when David and Emmett returned from Fry's, Emmett thought he was going to get a bath. So David is favored at least a little over a bath, in that time with Dad is selected first .

Tonight, I presented Emmett with a toddler version of Sophie's choice . It was 8pm and David was going to Fry's. Emmett likes going to Fry's with David, but I didn't want to just shoo them out the door. Instead, I offered Emmett a choice: Stay home and have a bath, or go to Fry's with Dad. He picked Fry's with Dad. For the record, time with Daddy is valued over even a bath!

I think I've previously blogged about how Emmett often asks us to "Fix it with some tape." He's asked us to use tape to fix a robot, a block with a crack in it, and even a dog treat that was broken in half. His newest phrase is "That will help." He picked it up from me when he was hurt or crying. I'd say something like "Let's go rock in the rocking chair. That will help." Yesterday when he bumped his head and we were rocking, he asked me to "Turn on some music. That will help." And this morning when Jenny was barking in the bedroom, he went over to his huge stuffed alligator and said "I'll play with the alligator. That will help Jenny stop barking."

Emmett wakes up most days at around 6am and comes to hang out in our bed. Today, after about 20 minutes, he asked to go back to his bed. I asked David to do it so I could keep sleeping. When I got up an hour later, I went looking for Emmett. He was in his bed sleeping. (!?)

Emmett loves to pick flowers. His little red table always has a little glass of water (and sometimes a real vase) with oxalis that he's picked. Occasionally, David will help him get a rose. Also, when we're leaving the house, he's been demanding that I pick lemons for him. He'll hold them in the car and sometimes bring them in the house. Fortunately, our lemon tree has about 500 excess lemons on it, so this behavior doesn't cause any problems for us. I do have to be a little careful about making sure to get the days-old lemons out of his bed, though.

Emmett has always liked playing in the dogs' water bowls in the kitchen. He likes to use spoons, ladels, wisks, and lids from the rice cooker and the crock pot. I have to pay attention, because he'll leave a lid on the water bowl all day if I'm not careful, and the dogs wouldn't like that. A few days ago, Emmett was playing in the dogs' water and David said "What are you doing?" Emmett's reply? "Cooking." Guess he won't be needing one of those fancy kid-kitchens after all.

Emmett and I went to the racetrack to watch David autocross the Vipers and the RX7 on his second day of driving school. There was light rain that day, so there were puddles everywhere on the blacktop. Emmett had a great time stomping in the puddles, eventually doing an unintentional bellyflop into one of them. The only thing that bothered him was that his hand got dirty in the process. He was fully drenched by the time he was done stomping, but I had a complete change of clothes for him so all was well for the ride home.

Oddly enough, Emmett has been asking to go into the pack-n-play playpen now and then. He'll play with the pinwheels and a ball that are in there, and sometimes ask me to bring him other toys. A few days ago, he'd taken the pinwheels off their sticks and was hitting a ball with them. I only noticed because he kept saying "I'm shooting the ball with my gun!" as he hit it. The only place he's encountered the concept of a gun before is in Winnie the Pooh And Some Bees , where Christopher Robin shoots the balloon so the air will leak out and Pooh will drift back to the ground. Guess it made an impression.

I put Emmett down to sleep a little early last night, so he wasn't as sleepy as usual (I left with music playing for him). A minute or so later when I was in the living room, I heard him loudly reciting the beginning of one of his favorite books. He continued until the song changed and the next track was a chant, which stopped him. It's become clear when reading to him that Emmett has large portions of many books memorized. He can do Molly's Monsters (a counting book with quite a lot of text) and Bear Stays Up For Christmas nearly from start to finish.

The family survived our first restaurant meal featuring candles on the table and cloth napkins! We were walking on a street populated with restaurants and wouldn't normally have picked a place that fancy, but they had a children's menu posted along with their regular menu, so we went for it. Emmett wanted the candle close to him, but didn't play with it so we obliged. He was great. Of course, places with cloth napkins aren't as fast as Chevy's, so when we were done eating, I went outside with Emmett and David paid the check. Whew!