Saturday, August 26, 2006

Lost

For me, one of the hardest things to remember in parenting is how much I'll forget. Even after only 2 years, I can review emails to friends and have no actual memory of the child event that spurred the comments. I blame a lack of sleep for eroding my memory, but it may also be that new actions supplant the charming memories of the previous week.

So here, I am going to try to write down a few memories I will, no doubt, forget even if I do tell someone else.

  • Last week Q was wandering in and out of Grandma's house as the adults cleaned up dinner. Since there were three of us, no one of us was paying close attention, until Grandma looked up and saw that he had climbed into the grand piano. She pulled me over to check it out, and I could only stand there in amazement. There was no way he could have gotten in unless he climbed onto the piano bench, over the elaborately carved music stand, and then onto all the strings, and then, to top it off, the kid had turned around. Grandma and I stood there, heads tilted, puzzling it over as Q continued to investigate how the strings on a piano work. His father, however, took one look and calmly removed the child. Duh.

  • At the end of an adventure exploring New London this week, Q asked for a souvenir. His father tried many other possibilities, but that's the only word that seemed to match. They bought some postcards, and Q was thrilled to carry them back to the car in a bag.

  • We've noticed a new language development: filler. Q knows that we string together the basic parts of sentences with smaller words, but isn't clear on what those words should be. So sometimes we will hear a sentence strung together like this: "Daddy sha sha sha sha goto sha sha bank?" Sadly, it's sometimes hard to pay attention through the shashashasha bits long enough to hear the question or request being placed until the intonation kicks in on the last word.

  • Q has chosen one of my friends as a default, out of love or assumption, I'm not sure which. When the phone rings he asks, "Cygknit?" He's playing with a basket and declares it belongs to Cygknit. I ask him if he remembers who is coming over (real answer: Grandma) and he replies, "Cygknit?" Her self esteem is definitely responding.

  • When reading lately, on a tip from his Granmary, we've started pausing to give him a chance to fill in the words. This is almost unnerving. I had no idea how much he could remember of each of his books. Branching off of this activity is another fun activity, reciting. We've been reading Where the Wild Things Are and as we were leaving him for a nap the other day, he sweetly said, "Oh pease doan go! I eat yu up I ov yu so!"


  • I feel the exact same way.

    3 comments:

    NeedleTart said...

    Just wait until you are in the grocery store reciting books. I took the younger off to college this week and as I left he said,"The cow says, "Moo!" the sheep says, "Baa!" three singing pigs say...."Good times8-)

    CygKnit said...

    You mean it's not me? I'm not special?

    swan/dragon said...

    Live with my eleven-month old niece, know how you feel. They're just so freakin' endearing, aren't they?
    As for reciting, we have a Fisher Price DVD, Musical Baby, and whenever something great happens in my house, we say "YAY DRUM!" because we are all out of our minds with how many times we have heard the movie.
    Good times.