It’s a quiet night here so far at Children’s Hospital Boston, so I am going to bang out a draft and hope to post when I get home this morning.
Sticks
Walks with Jack and Sydney have taken on a completely different character since Jack will only stay in his stroller for a limited period of time. We usually go to the smaller, better groomed woods near our house now, so that both kids can roam and I just meander after both of them. The problem is that Jack usually ends up getting tired and I end up lugging all 27 pounds of him back up the hill to the car. What I’m lacking in aerobic conditioning, I’m making up in power lifting.
One of Jack’s latest obsessions is sticks. It’s Sydney-related, of course, since, when we go for our walks, I find sticks to throw for Syd. So now that Jack is mobile, he walks along picking up all sorts of sticks. I never realized just how many sticks there are in the world. In my ongoing struggle to get the kid to talk, I take each stick as Jack hands it to me and I say, “Thank you, Jack! What a nice stick! This is a skinny/fat/long/short/crooked/brown/heavy/big/small/nice/good/smooth/bumpy stick!” Sometimes, if he picks up an especially large stick, I will say, “Thank you, Jack! This is a VERY big stick! It’s a tree branch! Look! It was part of a tree!”
I love Jack more than anything or anyone else in the whole wide world, however, talking like this all day everyday can leave me a little, um, insane by the end of the day. I am excited by Jack’s every accomplishment and discovery, but sometimes it is hard to get excited about sticks or stuffed animals or piles of mulch or trash or whatever else Jack finds interesting. Sometimes I feel like I am an extra on Barney. Jack, God bless his pure and trusting little soul, takes my enthusiasm as authentic enthusiasm and I am rewarded with more sticks and big smiles and lots and lots of hugs.
The Ducks
On Friday night, Jack took a very long bath. It was prolonged by the ducks. Jack has 8 yellow ducks (one has a Santa hat and one is a mommy duck with a flattened and misshapen back that holds three little offspring, one has sunglasses and a tie and one has swim goggles. The other four are little yellow ducks) and he has enjoyed stacking them on the side of the tub for a few months now. Yes, go ahead, say it: the kid has his ducks in a row. Friday night, the duck stacking went on for about 40 minutes. It was as if Jack had a very specific strategic plan for his ducks: almost like a chess game with plastic yellow waterfowl. During the 40 minutes, Kevin wandered in and out of the bathroom, as he heard me exclaim over and over, “Look Jack! Eight ducks! Onetwothreefourfivesixseveneight! Eight yellow ducks! What does the duck say? Does the duck say, ‘Quack quack’? Eight yellow ducks!” At one point, Kevin said, “You must be ready for bath time to be over.” I was ready for a drink, goddamit.
But Jack will never know that I didn’t love counting the ducks over and over and over again. I am hoping to teach him to pour me a martini by his third birthday, though.
8:46:16 AM 
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