Keep up with the Breedorfs

Theo’s homeroom teachers email a “what we did today” report each afternoon and I love getting this glimpse into his day while I’m slaving away at work. The other day his teacher emailed the following picture to me during his nap time, and it was so sweet to have that practically live connection to him, to know exactly what he was doing and what he looked like just a few moments before. Even if he was being a little weirdo.

On the not so sweet side, getting Theo out of the house in the mornings has become such a challenge lately. Requests, bribes and threats to get shoes on feet, coat on back, and hiney in car are met by various forms of resistance ranging from the flatly stated “I not going to school today” to much howling and throwing of oneself upon the floor. My friend Robin told me about how her mom once pretended to leave without her, going so far as to back the car out of the driveway while an instantly repentant Robin pressed her horrified face to the window. I suspected that Theo would not be at all perturbed were we to do something similar and I turned out to be right. Matt tried it out the other morning. After loudly announcing several times that he was going to leave without Theo, he ostentatiously closed and locked the door and headed to his car. Theo watched out the window briefly but Matt hadn’t even gotten to the car before he had disappeared from view into the depths of the house. When Matt came back in (under the pretense of having forgotten something) Theo was parading gaily around the living room, banging on things with a wooden hammer.

This is a collage of outtakes from taking our holiday card photo this year. I set up a big mirror to one side of the camera thinking that Matt and I could make funny faces into it and thus get the kids to look in that direction and laugh/smile. Then we would also smile and quickly snap the shot. In my fantasy, we get a shot where we’re all looking in the same direction to one side of the camera and smiling sweetly. However, the remote on my camera has a bit of delay so we could never get the timing right with the goofy faces versus the smiling ones. Plus the camera would make a beeping noise to alert of the imminent shutter release and part of the time the kids would look at the camera instead. Or we would. Or none of us would be looking at either the camera or the mirror. Or some of us (I won’ t name names) would go running off, or put our shoes on our hands and bang on the window, or just be really damn squirmy.

We dragged our Christmas tree out of storage in the garage this past weekend. I had these lovely visions of Theo and me hanging ornaments on the tree together as Christmas music played softly in the background but he just wadded a bunch of tinsel and ornaments together, lobbed the resulting mass into the depths of the tree, then wandered off to play with his train table.

Oh, one more thing. We were eating grapes after dinner the other day and when Theo got down to his last two, he did something rather odd. He named them “Grandpa” and “Keiko.” (Then he ate them.)

We’ve been taking Theo to swim lessons once a week for the past few months. He always gazes wistfully at the diving board from the shallow end where the toddler class is held. Tonight was the last night and the instructor said he could go on it! I love the way the life jacket makes him pop to the surface like a cork.

Theo went for his first dentist visit today. We’ve been talking it up for a while, especially the part about the special chair that moves up and down. Nana sent a book “Barney Goes to the Dentist” a while ago that we’ve been reading pretty regularly. There’s a little girl named Ashley in the book, who, yeah you guessed it, goes to the dentist! When we were done with the visit, Theo asked me where Ashley was. But I get ahead of myself. Despite all the preparations, I was significantly apprehensive about the appointment, especially when Theo started the morning off by throwing a granola bar on the floor of the car in a fit of rage over it being — horrors!– sticky. Then he sobbed and sobbed and sobbed, and I started feeling verrrrrry nervous about how things were going to go. Well, it turned out that I had nothing to fear. He was such a little champ, clambering without hesitation up onto the chair and informing the technician that it moves up and down, lest she forget to use that feature for him. He obediently opened his mouth when asked (and even before he was asked — watch the video to see this). He selected the chocolate flavor for the cleaning paste and later told his classmates at daycare “I ate chocolate” and pointed into his mouth while they all peered in trying to see it. He tended to answer all questions (”how old are you?”, “do you let mommy brush your teeth?”) with long-winded and irrelevant stories about trains but we’ll let that go for now.

We’ve been having my favorite kind of weather lately: crisp fall sweater weather. (Speaking of sweaters, I want to explain those photos of me in my various outfits that you’re seeing on the Flickr page recently. I joined this group on Flickr where people post pictures of what we wore to work that day. I’m finding it entertaining and inspirational to see what other people are wearing, so I’m participating, too. It’s been fun, plus it gives me incentive to try to put myself together a little. It’s also a great litmus test for an outfit — I assume that complete lack of supportive comments from other members is an indication that the outfit is a dud.)

Anyway, as I was saying, lovely weather lately. We went on a walk in the woods on Saturday, photos on our Flickr page.

Polly is crawling all over the place. Theo spent months scooting backwards before he finally mastered going forward at about 10 months. Polly is just 6 months old. Of course I’m proud of her and all but I wish she wouldn’t grow up so fast.

I also kicked her out of our bed this weekend. The first night she cried for, oh, 30-40 minutes (with periodic visits from me to soothe her) before she went to sleep. That was tough, and I did a fair bit of crying, too. The next night took about 15 minutes and was much less intense. Tonight it took about 5. Hopefully that’s a trend. The best part is that she has slept all night each of those nights instead of waking to nurse every few hours as she did when she was sharing our bed. Hopefully, that will continue. The crazy part is that *I* keep waking up every few hours anyway. I think I miss her warm little body snuggled up against me all night.

In other news, Theo choked the other day. Maggie was over for a play date and they were having lunch. Robin was watching them while I was in Polly’s room, changing a certain baby who had had an Xtreme Blowout. Theo was goofing around, stuffing his mouth full of cheesy bread then tossing his head around and laughing. I heard him start making this horrible noise and knew exactly what was happening. I tossed Polly into the crib - she had poop all up her back and was wearing nothing but a pair of green socks - and went running into the kitchen but Robin had already performed the Toddler Heimlich on him. He was scared and crying but okay. Still, I kept thwacking him on the back until Robin said, “Uh, Jen. I think he’s okay now.”

I uploaded a bunch of photos from the past several weeks to our Flickr page, including our day at Remlinger Farms, our trip to San Diego to visit the Ritchies, and our weekend at Cama Beach.