Jacinda*

So my little two year old seems to have a favorite friend in his class, and we hear about her all the time.  When my son was in the 12-18 month class, there was a little girl in there named Jessie* who he seemed to pair off with, but that was a little different, as they were the two highest energy kids in the class and so it made sense for them to naturally pair off and run around going bonkers together.  When he moved into the toddler class, he struck up a friendship with another little dude named Vince*, and for a while we heard a lot from him about Vince and used his presence to encourage him to get ready for school on days when he was moving slower than usual, i.e. “you have to finish your breakfast so that you can go to school and see Vince.” Vince is still there and still a friend, but there’s a new entrant in the situation, a little girl named Jacinda.*

With Jacinda, it’s different.  She is a triplet, with a sister and brother all in the same class.  Temperament wise, my son and Jacinda are not at all alike.  All three of the triplets seem very quiet.  For my son’s second birthday, we had a musician come to the house and do a sing-a-long session, and invited all the kids in his class.  Many of the other kids got involved with the singing and instruments, but Jacinda and her sister and brother sat quiet to the side and you could hardly notice they were there.  That doesn’t change the fact that three months later, we still hear all about the day Jacinda came to the happy birthday party as if she was the only one.  When we talk about going to school, Jacinda is always on the top of his list of friends he will see.  For thanksgiving, Jacinda and her family went to Hawaii to visit her grandparents, and every day they were gone, we got the update that Jacinda went on a plane to Hawaii.  At the children’s museum, in the big truck the kids can pretend to drive, when asked where my son was driving to, he said Jacinda’s house.  The other day while playing with his toy tractor, he said that he was driving and Jacinda was in the passenger seat. The kicker was tonight.  My son got a new electric piano for Christmas, and he asked me to help him move it.  I asked him where we were moving it to, thinking he might have wanted me to bring it upstairs, and he said Hawaii.  I knew where this was going, but asked anyway…”why are we going to Hawaii?”  “To see the airplanes” he replied.  “why do we need to see the airplanes?” I asked…and of course the answer…  “To see Jacinda!”

Her name comes up at least once a day, even on weekends when there’s no school.  I have no idea how or why this happened, or if the feeling is mutual on Jacinda’s part, but I’m curious to see where this ends up going.

*names have been changed to protect the innocent

Nice try, dude… (part 2)

As I wrote in this prior post, sometimes my son’s misbehaviors are really funny, and I know that laughing only reinforces them.  But sometimes I can’t help it.  One of the things he does that is really annoying but a riot at the same time is taking stuff he knows he’s not supposed to have.  I’m pretty sure that this started out as him being curious about some of our things, but I’m also pretty sure that I’ve reinforced this behavior into a game for him and that sometimes he takes things in order to get it started.  What he does is take something, for example my eyeglasses, and then when he sees that I want him to put them back he starts running away from me throughout the house.  Usually what happens is that he ends up running himself into a corner and then when he sees he’s caught, he throws the item on the floor, as a sign that he’s given up.  Yesterday he grabbed a marker and started to run around.  Except this time, when he got cornered, instead of giving up, he put his hand that was holding the marker behind his back and said “it went away”.

Then, there’s the case of the bitten foam.  We have those large, interlocking foam floor tile puzzle things in which each square is a letter of the alphabet.  My son loves taking these apart and biting the smaller pieces (such as the inner circle of the “O”), as much as we tell him not to.  A few days ago I caught him biting one and the consequence was to leave the room.  The next day when he returned, he found the bitten piece, and accused me of being the one who had bitten it.  He even tried to shove it in my mouth so that I would bite it right there and then and thusly prove himself right.

It’s been really interesting to see how his little mind works, and how he’s developing a tendency to advocate for himself.  I don’t mind that at all, the task now is just to help him use that for good rather than mischief.