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I haven’t written in a little while, and then for a second I think “who cares, nobody reads anyway”but then I remember half the reason I post these is is so I can re-read them later and be reminded of all these little moments in this weird little guy’s life.

We’ve been enjoying a period of increased anxiety. Back in June he became suddenly and extremely afraid of taking a bath, so we started giving him sponge baths because we didn’t want to force him into the bath and make the whole thing even worse. That was months ago, though, and the sponge baths weren’t a great time for anyone either, and we’ve been really looking forward to getting back to regular baths. So we started filling the tub with bubbles and toys, or with balls, and I put on my swimsuit and sat in the tub, and we tried to get him to play with the water while standing outside of the tub. He was hesitant at first, but after a couple times he thought it was the greatest thing ever. It took several times before he agreed to get into the tub with me. We’ve now been doing bubblebaths with a special submarine scooping toy (found at a thrift store for $2.50!) for about two weeks and he talks all the time about how much fun we had in the bubble bath. I’ve still been sitting in the tub with him, so the next phase will be me no longer having to do that.

He has also been very afraid of getting a haircut. His hair was getting so long that the front was poking him in the eyes and the back was getting pulled by his bike helmet. It needed to be cut. I tried twice to take him to the salon, several weeks apart, and he screamed like he was being tortured just walking through the door. I suggested a few times at home that I cut his hair a little bit with some scissors, and he said “all done, all done!” So we found a haircut book and read that for a while. He seemed to be thinking a lot about haircuts, and at preschool started occasionally picking up a pair of scissors and holding it up to his hair. A week ago he watched his dad use an electric beard trimmer and decided he would allow that to be used on the back of his hair. Then this past weekend he decided to allow Kyle to use the beard trimmer on the front of his hair. The haircut was not an aesthetic success but it got the hair out of his eyes. The next day Kyle suggested to him that they go to the salon and get it cut there, and he went and had a great time getting his hair cut. He kept saying to the lady “one more pass,” which is what he was saying to Kyle when he decided he wanted more of his hair cut with the trimmer. So she kept doing one more pass and now his hair is, in my opinion, far too short.

We’ve been back at our co-op preschool for about a month, and this year he goes Tuesdays and Thursdays for two and a half hours. On one of those days I help out in the classroom in an assigned area, and on the other day I am theoretically free to leave. Most of the parents have tried to ease into the drop-off days by only leaving for part of the day before they start just showing up at the door, shoving their kid inside and leaving. Those who haven’t, their kids have often cried the entire two and a half hours. But now that it’s been a few weeks, most of those kids are starting to get more comfortable and now other parents are experimenting with dropping their kids off and leaving. On the days when I have an assigned area, Boo has been very upset about me not just sitting right by him. He’s cried when I go to another room, and one of those days he got so upset about me using the bathroom that he continued crying during the singing time, which he usually loves. I’ve been nervous about him deciding he’s afraid of preschool, since we bike and it’s already difficult to get him into his bike seat and get his helmet on. If he starts haircut-or-bath-style crying I don’t even know if I could get us to preschool. So we’ve taken it very slow. Last week, on my “drop off day,” I left for the entire outdoor playtime, which is the last hour of the day, and he was great. This week I’m planning to leave a bit earlier, before snack time, and see how he does with other people helping him with his snack and shoes and coat. I’m looking forward to being able to leave him for the whole day, and I think it’ll be really good for him too. I’ve been reading a book called The Opposite of Worry, by Lawrence J. Cohen, about the importance of showing kids that things can be scary but also fun and safe. The premise of the book is that allowing avoidance of fearful situations is ultimately harmful, and throwing them into the deep end is also harmful, so it advises using play-based strategies for approaching these situations in a gentler way.

He still wants to read books absolutely all the time at home, which we love. He knows a lot of his books and recites them at random on walks. He has figured out that we can request books from the library, and if something catches his interest – for example, his shadow or a string – he’ll say “get shadow books from the library” or “get string books from the library.” So we do.

He still doesn’t really have tantrums, but the toddler defiance is at an all-time high. If I tell him to stop doing something, he stares me right in the eye and does it more. Last night I had to take two more things down from the wall because he discovered he could reach them and just stood there shaking the shit out of them. I don’t want my things broken, so they get removed and stored for later. But we’re running out of space to stick these things, and some things – like the living room lamp – we can’t put away because we need them. We’re all working together on how to navigate those situations. They make me feel completely defeated because I feel like there’s absolutely nothing we can do about it. But time will pass, which is another kind of defeat altogether.

He is, however, such a sweet, silly, happy little guy. When he’s not systematically ripping apart our entire house, he gives hugs and kisses and high fives and fist bumps. He plays goofy little games and he laughs and smiles all day long. And he knows every dinosaur, even if he pronounces pterodactyl like “dicketo-dacketo” and nobody else would ever guess that’s what he’s saying. And so what if he’s tall enough to reach the knife block on the counter now and that’ll be the next thing that has to get shoved somewhere ridiculous for the next who-knows-how-long – he’s a fun little guy who got a haircut and took a bath this weekend, and that’s pretty cool.

We’re still really into calling things “dirty” or “clean” over here, with these attributes being added to increasingly complex thoughts they have absolutely nothing to do with. “Dirty go back downstairs after the nap.” “Dirty mama getting more water.” “Dirty baby guy in the stroller” (possibly true). It’s all fun and games, but he doesn’t stop saying these things until I repeat them or until I let him know the thing is not dirty, and I’m getting a little tired of doing that four hundred times a day.

We have re-entered a heavy reading period, which Kyle and I are always happy about. Boo is really liking going to the library right now, and he isn’t quite so intent on just ripping everything off the shelves as he used to be. He picks out a few books and sits with us in a chair while we read them. This week he picked out a book about a tuk tuk, which for those not as well-versed as I now am, is a motorized rickshaw popular in parts of Asia. This book, which is sung to the tune of “Wheels on the Bus,” follows a tuk tuk driver (a wala) as he drives his tuk tuk through the streets of an Indian village. He encounters many hazards, including cows sleeping in the street, an elephant spraying him with water and a woman selling poppadoms to his riders. Boo absolutely loves this book, but he also seems really interested in the tuk tuk in general. Like he’s wondering why, given his interest in every other type of vehicle, this is the first he’s hearing about this particular one.

His other favorite book recently has been Little Blue Truck, in which a dump truck gets stuck in a mud puddle and none of the animals care because they don’t like the dump truck. But when their friend Little Blue Truck tries to help push the dump truck and gets stuck himself, the animals all rush over to help. Boo has been acting it out pretty often at home with a toy blue truck and a toy dump truck, along with whatever stuffed animals are within reach. In his version the trucks are helped by a Mariner Moose, a raccoon and a stuffed Alaska Airlines 737. It’s really fun to see him start to pretend.

Boo is now sitting in a booster seat at the table with us, eating with these plates I found at Good Will. We weren’t necessarily planning on transitioning from the high chair quite yet, but we’re mostly just vibing through this whole project and we weren’t thinking too much about when we might do it at all. I found a booster seat left out on a curb, though, so it seemed as good a time as any to give it a try. It’s going pretty well, so I think we’ll look for a new home for our high chair. Gradually, the specialized equipment this child needs is decreasing and I love that for us.

I had my final crochet class last Saturday, and Kyle brought Boo to meet me when it ended. They walked in and Boo came right up to the table, picked up the project I was working on and my hook, and started sticking the hook into the yarn like he’s seen me do. It was just about the cutest thing I’ve ever seen, and the one other participant who made it through all four weeks without getting angry at the instructor and quitting thought so too.

Right now, when he thinks something is funny, he gives one half-assed “ha” and then says “Boo is laughing.”

Boo went to the dentist this week, and I tried to prepare him. When he woke up in the morning we sat in the chair and talked about what the day held. We were going to go to the dentist, and a nice person was going to look inside his mouth at his teeth, and then he was going to get a new toy. He was completely on board. He talked all morning about going to the dentist and getting his teeth looked at. When we got to the waiting room he was still very excited. “At the dentist,” he kept saying. The moment they called us back the screaming started. “Go back out, go back out, go back out!” he sobbed as we carried him into the exam room. He cried frantically the entire time. Kyle had taken time off work to go because I thought I’d need the help, and I did – we both had to hold him down while the dentist looked at his teeth and applied the fluoride. When the assistant held out the toy box and told him he could choose one, he immediately grabbed for this thing, the EXACT toy he chose the last time we went to the dentist.

He calmed down quickly. By the time we walked out of the exam room he was pleased as punch to be carrying his little bag with the toothbrush, toothpaste, floss and business card with a reminder that he needs to be seen again in February inside. Back home he carried the little bag around all morning, taking out his treasures and talking excitedly about how he’d been to the dentist.

I’ve been trying not to swear in front of him because he has started parroting everything, and while it’s hilarious I don’t actually want to be the family nobody else wants to be around. When a postcard I had carefully addressed smeared, I said “gosh dang it.” He found that really exciting and took some creative liberties with it. For the rest of the morning he chanted “god damn dang it.”

Aside from swearing he’s mostly just been calling everything dirty. It’s because of this toy car, which we call the dirty white car, and a matching green car we call the dirty green car. Everything gets called dirty. He likes to pair that with also calling everyone “guy.” When he points to somebody outside we get nervous because we don’t know if he’s going to declare them “guy” (acceptable) or “dirty guy” (less so). At the Museum of Flight the other day he walked right up to two people, pointed and said “two dirty guys!” He calls everything dirty and when we correct him and say “not dirty” he usually repeats his phrase replacing “dirty” with “clean.” He eats his lunch and says “dirty cucumbers” and I say “not dirty cucumbers” and he says “clean cucumbers.” This goes on all day, every day. Occasionally instead of correcting to “clean” he corrects to “goodbye” to indicate that we’re done with the idea of the dirty item. Instead of correcting to “clean cucumbers,” for example, he might occasionally say “goodbye, dirty cucumbers.” I can’t figure out any reasoning behind which he chooses. Last night we were reading a book that said “world” and he said “dirty world.” I said “not dirty world” and he said “goodbye, dirty world.” This is why I wanted a child.

When we go anywhere, he wants to make sure he understands how we’re getting there. When we say we’re going in the stroller, he says “not in the car.” Then he repeats that, running down the list of every vehicle he knows. “Not on the train. Not on the airplane. Not in the semi truck.” We recently got Richard Scarry’s Cars and Trucks and Things that Go from the library, which, for those who don’t know, is like 50 pages of mostly made-up vehicles. This has really increased the amount of time Boo spends trying to figure out what modes of transportation we’re not taking. “Not in the hay wagon. Not in the five-seater pencil car. Not in the old time buggy. Not in the pickle truck.”

Kyle and I feel that this version of Boo right now would be pretty perfect if we could just pull all his horrible little teeth. He sometimes bites us when he’s frustrated, he sometimes bites us when he’s bored, but mostly he bites us when it makes no sense at all – when we’re in the middle of reading his favorite book, when he’s holding our hand walking, or when we’re putting him in his car seat to go on one of his precious adventures.

Aside from the biting he’s really pretty great though. We take him to a lot of neighborhood festivals, and there’s been a big shift from early summer to now in terms of how he prefers to spend his time. In early summer he was interested only in sprinting back and forth, or around the block, crashing into one thing after another because he didn’t care about anything but to RUN. We constantly had to pull him away from the street. Currently he isn’t trying to cover as much ground. He still likes to run around with his trike from time to time, but mostly he wants to sit at a table with us and play with his cars. The key has been giving ourselves the flexibility to get up and run around with him for a little while when needed. If we get carried away with the idea that he’s a sitting child now and try to take him to a full sit-down dinner, it still does not go well.

Also key has been this big bag of horrors. He has really taken a liking to little guys and little cars – any sort of small toy vehicle, or any deformed little figurine that looks like it came from a happy meal 30 years ago. He has a small backpack, and every week we dump the previous week’s toys back into the bag and refill it with a fresh mix. He loves to sit in a chair and take each thing out, describe what he sees and roll the cars up and down the cushions.

Some of the cars are from my own childhood, toys my mom has brought up for him from the collection she’s kept for grandkids. Most of the toys come from Goodwill’s big aisle of bagged little toys (which I call the stocking stuffer aisle). I’m very happy to extend the life of all these little junks.

He’s talking a lot more, too. He’s expressing more complex thoughts. He’s making very detailed requests, especially when it comes to what he’s about to eat for lunch. His favorites are still pickled onions and tomatoes. He has turned his back on blackberries, which he still requests but doesn’t eat when they’re given. Fortunate, because the season of finding them every time we walk out our door is nearly over.

When he falls down, which is often, instead of crying he now frequently crumples up his little face and says “oh my gosh!”