Sixes and (almost) Threes

The less frequently I blog about the kids, the harder it gets to blog, because it feels like there is sooooooo much to say! I realize I just need to do it. So here are some random thoughts:

Luke continues to ask about ex-say, with less frequency now but just as much guilelessness. I continue to hold to my instinct to honestly answer whatever questions he asks, but just stick directly to things he's asked. I told my friend Beth I needed my copy of Everything You Never Wanted Your Kids to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid They'd Ask) back, and when I reread to see if I was traumatizing him with too much information I found (happily) that I was doing just what they recommend. Thank goodness. Sorry to be so cagey. Tina says the irds-bay and the ees-bay have been starting to show up enough in this blog to become a major theme, so I need to tone it down. I hope this counts.

Six is soooooooooo much better than five. Luke is in such a wonderful place right now. Spending time with him is truly enjoyable, something that was not so much of a sure thing when he was five. He is rocking first grade. By about the second week of school, he said to T, "I can read now, Mama." And he can! I know it didn't happen overnight, but in a way I agree with him that it feels like it did. It's watershed. On Tuesdays, the one day that I can pick him up after school and then spend the whole afternoon and evening with him, I really love doing homework together. It is sooooooo much less stressful than doing homework was last year. I think a lot of it is that his current teacher's assignments make so much more sense. Last year's teacher, although I thought she was great in a lot of ways, constantly gave the kids this homework that involved filling in the missing letters from complicated words in the daily class news. It just didn't make any sense to Luke, and it was frustrating for both of us. And he had to do it the whole damn year. Now that I think about it, that really was pretty dumb.

Then, there's Teo. I know two has a bad reputation, but I must say that almoooooooooost three is far, far worse. I'm sure it's part of the design plan to maintain parents' sanity, but sometimes I wish they would both go through bad periods at the same time so they could also team up on the wonderful, easy spells. Oh well. Lately Teo has been a real handful. I know that people who don't live in our home will find that impossible to believe and think that I am totally out of touch with reality. So I have prepared some evidence in my defense (and his prosecution, I guess!).

First of all, last week Teo decided to become un-potty trained. Just like that, almost three months after we said goodbye to diapers. I think it may have started with a mild stomach bug that gave him some loose stools. After he'd had a couple of accidents, maybe he just thought, "Hey, this isn't so bad. I remember going like this and it saved a lot of dreary walks to the bathroom." I don't know. I only know that A LOT of laundry is involved, as well as some seriously disgusting messes on chairs, rugs, kitchen floors, and many other household surfaces. We've tried a number of different tactics, and finally managed to get him down to one accident a day. Which still sucks if you're the one cleaning it up.

Teo's enunciation has gotten so good that it's hard to remember that kid that Birth to Three evaluated last year who didn't use consonants and couldn't be understood even by family members. Now total strangers comment to us on how clear his speech is. The speech pathology was pretty amazing, because he very clearly got the message that enunciating and saying letter sounds very carefully was the key to being understood, and now he enunciates things very carefully. It's sort of weird to hear coming out of such a little guy, but he can be understood. It's cool. AND YET, the child really only needs one word: no. He says no to everything, even things that he actually wants. He'll say no, then scream at us when we take the offered thing away, because he really did want it even though he said no.

He continues to be impervious to most forms of behavior modification. At some point, with Luke, I started doing that thing where you start counting to three in a slow and menacing way. I don't do it often (I'm not proud of it, but hey, sometimes it gets you through the day) but with Luke it has always been 100% effective. I have never even gotten to three, notwithstanding the fact that Luke has no idea (nor do I) what would happen if I did get to three. No, he's not waiting around to find out, he just hops to it, even now.

Teo has no intention of doing what I tell him to do unless of course he already wants to do it. So the other day when I told him to get back in bed (this at almost 10 p.m. when he'd been up and down like a jack-in-the-box) he said, of course, "No." I instinctively started counting, one....two.....threee! He looked at me, clearly thinking, "Cool! What happens at three? Bring it on!" Then of course I had to do something, even if it was pretty lame. Thank goodness his brother was already asleep or the little scalawag may have wrecked the counting thing forever. I carried him up to bed and told him he was being very naughty and I was getting very angry.

The other thing he does when we're asking him to do something that he doesn't want to do is say to us, "I doin' it!" with an emphasis on the "do", exactly like a petulant teenager.

We have had to totally give up on the idea of him staying in his bed. A few weeks ago I took apart the boys' new bunk beds and set them up in the room as two twins so that Luke wouldn't be so high up. I took apart the crib and put it in storage and moved all the furniture around. It looks awesome. The night before last, though, we realized there was nothing we could do except put the crib back in there. I was about to haul all the damn pieces back up and get my tools out and build the damn thing in front of him at 9:30 at night, but luckily Tina remembered that we have a Port-a-Crib. We set that baby up in the middle of the room in about two minutes and plopped him in it. Then he finally went to sleep. Last night, though, the two boys were cracking each other up so much being silly that we had to put them in separate rooms to get them to go to sleep. At the moment it's 9:20 and Teo is still up there slam-dancing in his Port-a-crib and keeping up a constant stream of verbiage. He doesn't nap, he stays up late, and when we have to get him up for school in the morning, he's cranky as a bear disturbed from hibernation in early February.

A couple of weeks ago, he was watching a videotape downstairs and it ended. He got up, ejected it, put in a new tape, and watched that one. Luke, at six, still can't turn on the t.v. and get it to channel nine without assistance. He has excellent computer skills, and will sit in front of Luke's laptop totally engrossed in Kid Pix for more than an hour. I figure he'll be hacking into government mainframes by the time he's ten, but he'll still be wearing pull-ups.

Meanwhile, he continues to look and act adorable, compliant and charming outside the house or any time there's a witness from outside the immediate family. I swear to God it's all part of a conspiracy to do....what? Wait a minute...do the kids get our life insurance payouts if we're institutionalized?

Okay, okay, enough whining. I have to say, as annoying as a lot of Teo's current behavior can be, I also know that it's all good, important stuff. He is becoming his own person, separating from us just the way he's supposed to. "No!" is his way of figuring out where we end and he begins. And as easy as Luke was in many ways, we worried a lot more about Luke. It's funny, lately I've been relaxing so much more than I ever have, saving projects for the weekend and lazing around on weekday mornings reading a book, then when the weekend comes deciding to have fun with my family and putting off the projects for a time when the kids are at school...then putting them off some more when the next week comes. And although I do have some guilt about it (although Tina says, "Who's watching?"), really it's great. It's my own way of becoming me, figuring out where other people end and I begin. It's very, very hard to do at 37. But luckily, I have a really good role model.