If Limerick hears water running, he is there in seconds begging to be included.
When my husband goes out in the morning to water the garden, Limerick bursts into violent tears if the back door shuts him out.
When I turn on the bathtub faucet to get in the shower, Limerick is somehow immediately there frantically trying to climb in.
And whenever anyone attempts to wash the dishes, he clamors to be lifted up to “do dishes!” too, throwing himself at us and the counter until we set him up by the sink.
tucked between the sink and the drying rack, surrounded by towels to catch the overflow!
Because he loves “helping” with the dishes so much, we usually let him continue to play with the sink after all the dishes are actually clean, giving him a few bowls and cups to fill and pour, and he will contentedly occupy himself with those things while Rondel and I clean other nearby parts of the house or prepare dinner – so it is really quite a useful thing!
Besides which, the practice of balancing the full cups and bowls, and the dexterity required to pour them out into another bowl, is really quite valuable for fine motor development.
Right now, at 19 months old, Limerick loves to draw and write. He’ll head downstairs by himself, run to the office, pull out his box of crayons and some paper, and start drawing! (Well, usually he’ll find some paper or a coloring book – other times he just starts coloring the doors, walls, and floors! I’ve hid everything except the washable crayons, which are my new favorite thing…) Lately he’s been drawing and stamping on a magnetic drawing board as well, to the exclusion of most other toys and activities. He doesn’t need the added attraction of anyone else’s presence to find it interesting; he’ll even abandon Rondel or a game they’re playing together to draw.
The other day, at my mom’s house, while Rondel set up the race track and played with cars to his heart’s content, Limerick got to draw with colored pencils. He was enraptured.
(He was drawing with a yellow pencil in this last shot so it doesn’t show up on the paper very well!)
One of the great benefits of reading aloud for this little boy especially will be the exposure to so many different styles of beautiful illustrations, to give him a myriad of inspirations for his own art as he masters the basic elements of control and direction 🙂 Seeing beauty in so many different books, he’ll begin to notice the details that take a picture from mundane to exceptional, from mediocre to great; he’ll (hopefully) begin to see how pictures can enhance or belie the story that the words are telling, and catch the hidden humor or depth in them; and he’ll be able to create more beauty and tell more stories in his own way.
Of course, he could lose interest in drawing by the time he’s in kindergarten 🙂 He’s rather young for me to be picturing his life path already! But his interest is so much greater than Rondel’s ever was that I can’t help but think there is some deeper natural inclination there. Who knows – but he certainly loves it now!
Bedtime with the boys has become one of my favorite parts of the day, a routine just as reassuring to me as it is for them, wrapping up our day together. I love the moments snuggled up together reading our bedtime stories, and then getting to tuck them each in bed in their own special way. And then after lights out comes one of my favorite parts, an unexpected perk of moving the boys into the same room: as they babble themselves to sleep, they echo and copy each other, winding themselves down in a duet of sounds and stories. It brings back memories of the countless nights my sister and I would invent stories together in the dark until we fell asleep in the middle of them – and I feel so lucky to get to hear a second generation getting started on the same kind of thing.
At 18 months, Rondel had no interest in letters, writing, drawing, or the written word, except for being read to. (He was so obsessed with cars that he could distinguish makes and models more accurately than I could, though!)
Limerick, however, is utterly captivated by everything having to do with writing and words. He can identify all 26 letters in both their uppercase and lowercase forms; he sings the alphabet song all day long; he draws on every surface in the house and cries if you take his crayons or pencils away; and he is starting to realize that the letters can work together to make words.
Last night, my brother was writing names on a paper for Limerick, spelling them out and telling him what they said. Sometimes Limerick would ask for a specific word and my brother would write that one. And every time he picked up the pencil to write, Limerick would crane his head around to get a better view of the writing process, his whole face animated with focus and fascination. It was so neat to watch!
It is always special to see a young child become intellectually excited by something, whether it’s patterns and puzzles, cars and trucks, or colors and art, and Limerick’s interest in letters is especially fun for me because of how well it ties in to our family culture of books and reading. A love of books and a love of language are such good foundations for a love of learning and the ability to think and critically, coherently, and eloquently – and those are things I definitely want for my children. I see how crippled many of my peers are by an inability to assemble words beautifully or even functionally, and I believe that it is at least partly due to a lack of sophisticated and eloquent aural language input during their childhood years. When we read silently, we can skim over the sentence structure to get the content faster, but in the process we lose the repeated exposure to high-level style that helps develop good language skills.
Ok, enough of that soap box 🙂 I am just glad to see Limerick enjoying himself so much with his letters 🙂
Well, the boys and I managed to finish our teaser project from last week, and while it didn’t turn out quite as nicely as my Pinterest-addled mind envisioned, I’m still pretty happy about it 🙂
{pretty}
{happy}
The second picture has better smiles, but something about the first picture just seems fitting for two boys expecting a new sibling! Rondel’s somewhat suspicious face says, are you sure this is such a good idea? – while Limerick just looks slightly in shock! So I can never decide which one I like better…
{funny}
Of course, most of our takes ended up along these lines:
L: Mom! It fell off again! Me: Stop pulling it off then!
It would have been cute as well to have me holding the number 3, but that would have required another photographer so it wasn’t logistically going to happen this week. Another pair of adult hands would have simplified the process greatly though! No sooner would I position the kids and run back to the camera than they would start scooting around or becoming distracted by everything around them. I just considered myself fortunate that they were mostly happy throughout the proceedings 🙂
{real}
They were much happier when I let them run wild on the little walls and hills and explore the number boards in their own way! I have no clue how professional photographers get toddlers to look so good in posed pictures.
So… the details? Our new little one will be arriving sometime around Christmas, and we are so excited to welcome him or her into our family. I’ve been significantly moodier and queasier with this pregnancy so I have my suspicions that it may be a girl, but we’ll have to just wait and see – it could be that I’m just out of shape so my body is protesting more 🙂
I am beyond excited to be able to walk through this Advent season with Mary, growing heavy with child, pondering the mystery of the Incarnation as the mystery of new life blossoms within me (and probably aching for the pregnancy to be over like she must have been at the end as well!). It just seems like it will be a special way to experience Advent and Christmas, a new way to see the wonder and the gift of the baby Jesus. Hopefully I will be able to hold to that instead of letting stress and busyness run my days.
The boys being very excited about painting for various and sundry reasons, I pulled out my previous finger paint recipe and took the boys outdoors with some paper and sponge brushes. (A cornstarch-based edible paint would probably be less messy and sticky, but I didn’t have enough cornstarch to make it work. So condensed milk it had to be.)
{pretty}
I mixed up just the primary colors to avoid ending up with just a brown mess, and I love the way the different colors combined on the paper, brushes, and sidewalk. It was also interesting seeing the different ways the boys painted: Rondel using wide sweeping strokes on the paper, blending the colors together thoroughly and without subtlety; Limerick flinging the brushes in the air above the paper to make fine strings and drips of paint below, far more into the process than the product.
{happy}
Rondel absolutely loved everything about painting. He loved mixing the different colors, testing the different brushes to see what they produced on the paper, and creating something from the raw materials available. He didn’t complain once about the stickiness of the paint, even when it dripped on his legs or when he decided to paint with his fingers to see how it compared to the brushes – which is a huge deal for this little boy who is (or used to be?) so sensorily sensitive. He also didn’t panic or get upset with Limerick at all, even when they wanted the same brush or color paint. It was good to see him so involved in the process of creation that he was able to tune out or ignore the physical discomforts of a hot sidewalk and sticky paint as well as the emotional distraction of a younger brother sharing the brushes and paints.
{funny}
Limerick dove into the painting process with his characteristic no-holds-barred exploratory attitude (which is one of the things I enjoy most about his personality!), dripping paint off his brush onto the papers and sidewalk with intense interest in how the paint flew and fell, with the side-effect of becoming very sticky and colorful himself… and then suddenly he realized how sticky he was and fell apart, attempting to cling to me with wriggly snuggles in his upset. Being set in the bathtub cheered him up considerably 😛
{real}
In addition to their free play exploration painting, the boys helped me with one of my projects with some acrylic paint on wood. But since I haven’t yet finished the project, all you get are the teaser photos 🙂 I promise you it’ll be a good one when it’s done, and I hope to have pictures of the final product up next week!
Head on over to Like Mother, Like Daughter today for the link-up and share your captured moments of everyday contentment with the rest of us!
My worst parenting moments are typically in the middle of the night when one of the boys is taking an uncharacteristically long time to fall back asleep after waking. It’s a combination of three difficult factors: my tiredness, the unexpectedness of the problem, and the baby’s insomnia. I could probably handle things with more grace if only one or two of those factors was involved, but together they are a deadly trifecta to my parenting calm. Because I’m tired, it’s harder for me to assess the situation and come up with a solution; because the wakefulness is unexpected and not a normal event, I have no routine already in place to deal with it; and because the baby is also tired and out of sync with his normal routine, he typically can’t express what exactly is bothering him and keeping him up. Limerick has been known to scream for a good 30 minutes straight before managing to sob out that he wants a bottle of milk instead of a bottle of water, for example, which is a far cry from his communicative daytime self.
It is in those moments that I most desperately need to turn to God for help. That is when I am most helpless, most frustrated, least buoyed up by my own reason, most emotionally and physically fragile and worn out. And yet I don’t often find myself searching for grace and peace at those times. The immediacy of the problem blots out everything else from my mind, unfortunately.
And that is one of the reasons why it is so important for me to bathe my parenting in prayer in all the other moments – to keep praying for grace, wisdom, patience, and strength even when everything seems to be going well, so that when things get hard and my sleep-fogged brain can’t see past the crying baby, I’ve already asked God for the help I’ll need to get through it with love. I have to cultivate my relationship with Him, my dependence on Him, through all the easy times, the happy times, the normal times, so that my anchor and foundation are already secure when the challenges arise. It would be foolish to think the challenges would never come, and even more foolish to think I’d be able to handle them without a consistent effort to walk with God.
So tonight I think I’ll be preemptively praying for patience, wisdom, and compassion, just in case Limerick is up for hours in the night again – and maybe that will help me when I can’t see past the irrational tears and my body is crying out for sleep. If the Spirit is there reminding me of the reasons Limerick might be up (last night he was in some sort of pain and it took a dose of Tylenol to settle him down), helping me find solutions, helping me think despite my fatigue, maybe I won’t get so frustrated with my little guy, and will be able to better respond with gentleness and love, just like God consistently responds to me even when my complaints and tears make no sense at all in the light of the bigger picture that He can see.
Limerick turns restlessly on his crib, mutters into the darkness, settles himself back down with his bottle of water.
Rondel lies curled up against the back cushions of the couch, pillow beneath him, blanket kicked aside, breathing quiet and small in the darkness.
And I hope that as they sleep they are healing, so that when they wake the pain and fatigue will be gone, and their normal energetic exuberance can resurface.
When the normal pattern of our life involves hours spent running and climbing and laughing outside, days in a row snuggled up on couches, dozing on and off, quiet and slow, feel foreign and strange. When bright eyes are dull and weary, when little faces are pale, when active limbs are still and calm, nothing seems right.
And I think to myself, this is only a stomach bug, and they’re going to be better in a few days, and however do mothers cope when this becomes a new normal, and sickness buries its talons into a family? How do they not break with the pain of it, loving so deeply and being so horribly unable to stop the hurting and restore health and energy to their baby? It takes my breath away, how lucky I am, how many good cards I’ve drawn in this game of life; and if it were all to fall apart, would my faith hold firm? I hope that it would, but I pray that such a test will never come.
This week has had some highlights and some rough spots, and both of them have emphasized to me the goodness and beauty of family.
At the beginning of the week, my husband’s brother (the oldest, and the only one of the five brothers that lives out of state) came back into town for a few days, so the five of them had a night out and I invited my two sisters-in-law with children to come up to our place for dinner and to give the cousins a chance to spend time together. It was really a fabulous evening 🙂 We had ribs and watermelon (easy for me to throw together in a crockpot since this all happened on a 10 hour work day, but maybe in hindsight not the neatest meal when there aren’t enough chairs for all the toddlers) and then took the kids outside to play in the water on what was conveniently the warmest day of the year thus far. With six kids ages three and under, outside play was far less stressful and more fun than inside play would have been!
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my local sister-in-law, with the current youngest cousin, just 3 months old!
My sisters-in-law are some of the sweetest and godliest women I know – I really am blessed to have them in my extended family through our marriages. It was such a pleasure for me to able to have this time with both of them, even if it did end up mostly centered on the kids! My out-of-state sister-in-law (hyphen overload, my goodness) has shared a lot of parenting wisdom with me over social media, and it was really awesome to see her put it into practice with her daughter during our time together.
{happy}
And my worries that the cousins would end up having a lot of conflict proved utterly groundless. They all seemed so at ease with each other, and enjoyed the time playing with each other. When they had all left and I shut and locked the front door, Rondel looked up at me and asked, “open door so cousins come back in?” It was so adorable 🙂
{funny}
In the smaller context of the immediate family, I’ve been so thankful that my boys have each other, to balance each other out and to give each of them a different personality to bounce against and play with and learn about conflict and friendship with. Whatever kind of sibling struggles you may have in childhood, your siblings end up being the people who are still part of your life in adulthood, when other friends have moved on or drifted away. So right now, one of my biggest goals for my boys is to help them learn to love each other well, whether in play, conflict, or service. We did a lot of playing together this week:
Rondel climbed in, so Limerick climbed in too! And this time, it was Rondel’s idea for Limerick to join him, and Limerick thought it sounded like fun. Cloth diapers in laundry baskets are apparently pretty awesome to wiggle down into and bury one’s legs in 🙂 Then Rondel decided to hug one of the diapers, so of course Limerick had to do that too! He loves to do whatever his big brother is doing – and his big brother is starting to pick up on it, and occasionally tries to encourage him to copy him doing something silly.
(Also, yes, I’m aware of the sharp kitchen knife casually lying on the floor next to them… Rondel was using it, under supervision, to cut the banana that Limerick was finished with.)
{real}
We’re finishing off this week, that started so well, with a nasty stomach bug. So far no one’s been sick except for Limerick, and we’re hoping it stays that way, because one miserably sick vomiting person in a household is enough!
But his sickness has made me realize again how blessed I am by my family, and how valuable family support truly is. When Limerick first got sick yesterday, it was about 30 minutes before I was supposed to leave for work, and I already had the boys at my parents’ house so my mom could watch them for the afternoon. And I could go to work without feeling guilty because I knew that she would be able to care for Limerick with all the common sense of an experienced mother and all the doting love of a grandmother. I could borrow clean clothes from her to wear to work so I didn’t have to drive all the way back home first. I didn’t have to worry about making dinner to feed the rest of us because my brother made dinner for the whole family at my parents’ house. We were incredibly buoyed up by their presence and support on a difficult day.
Today again, watching both boys after I got home from work, I saw how beautiful family could be when Limerick, who had otherwise been just lying wherever I put him with a tired and zoned-out expression on his face, broke into a smile and actually started laughing because of Rondel’s silly antics around him. I saw the power of brotherly love when Rondel came up to his sick brother and covered him in kisses and hugs, and lay down beside him on the bed to snuggle to “help him feel better.” I’m sure it didn’t help physically, but I’m equally sure that it helped Limerick emotionally.
how Limerick has looked since about noon on Tuesday, with intermittent bouts of sleep, vomiting, and crying; only Rondel can really make him smile.
It makes me so happy that they have each other, to share laughter and silliness, and to learn compassion and love.
Head on over to Like Mother, Like Daughter today to join the link-up or just to be encouraged and encourage others, as we all try to figure out this marriage-and-parenting-and-striving-for-holiness-in-Christ thing together 🙂
I got some pictures of our baby sweet potatoes in the garden!
{pretty} and {happy}
One of the little slips didn’t make it – I think it was just too small to be transplanted – but I kept one of the purple potatoes and both orange potatoes in their jars anyway, so I’ll be able to replant in that location when the more sluggish slips have reached a better size.
Right now, they look like they’re doing rather well! Even the orange potatoes, which have been slower to root, have a few slips with both good little leaves and decent-sized roots, so maybe I will plant them sometime this upcoming week.
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Of course, the difficulty with having those tiny new plants in the garden is that the boys have to show some caution now when digging in the dirt. Rondel is pretty good at understanding the idea of being gentle with the baby plants, but Limerick seems a bit more oblivious… I just hope they will learn and that the sweet potatoes will survive!
{funny}
Apart from the garden, Rondel’s sense of humor has been growing all the time. Last night he came running out of the bathroom with an extra pair of underwear asking to wear both. When we told him that only one pair would fit on his bottom at a time, he decided the other pair should go on his head! And he found another hat to top off the ensemble:
I think the laughter he brings just might make up for the sleep deprivation he causes…
What’s been going on in your world? Head on over to the link up at Like Mother, Like Daughter to share with everyone else!
little thoughts 