Did you see this picture on facebook?
Here’s a quick rundown of the week and the current status of the munchkins:
That kid with the hair in his eyes? That’s Karel. Karel has refused a haircut for the past month, but sometime this weekend there’s gonna be some trimming going on. I can’t take it anymore. Even the hair wax he used to make his hair ”look nice” for church on Easter Sunday didn’t hold it back. His hair also covers his ears, which we have established does not, in fact, impede his hearing.
When we had the standard 5 year-old well-child check, the nurse talked a bit about how this stage of development is kind of a mini-adolescence. Eye-rolling? Check. Blaming of parents for everything/anything not right in the world? Check. Experimentation with power (”I’m bigger, faster, and stronger than you, Emil Birk.”)? Check. And the gun play I managed to avoid for so long has now entered into our home…and trickled down to brother #2. I know it’s normal, I know it’s okay, I know I’m too defensive about it, but I’m not ready for my baby to start knowing that sometimes people hurt each other on purpose, not ready to hand him the fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. However –note to self — it turns out that our children are actually individuals in and of themselves, who don’t really care so much when I’M ready for something.
Anyway, Karel finished the first round of swimming lessons and is now starting track and field and his indefatiguable energy is often mentioned when they go ”på tur”/looooooong walks at barnehage. And just like every other big boy, the bravado comes off at bedtime and I get to go back to snuggling him like a toddler.
Emilian Birk, on the other hand, loves a snuggle at bedtime but can’t stand the heat. ”Æ e så VARMT!” / ”I am so WARM!” Last week when it was still cold at night he was in bed, shirtless, and asked me to ‘‘kaldt mæ opp” — to ”cool me up”, which is evidently the opposite of ”warm me up”, with my cold hands. Emil is the child who runs outside shoeless into the snow. The child who refused to wear socks inside his boots — who actually took off his boots, then his socks, then put the boots back on again — and still has warm feet. He’s coming into that awesome (read: extremely time-consuming minefield laden) age where he has an opinion about what clothes he wears. This morning he needed a shirt that didn’t have anything on it. Nothing. Fortunately I found one, able to finally fulfill a request that thankfully wasn’t physically impossible. Unlike yesterday, when he wanted to stop and have a picnic with a drink of water in the middle of our walk. Found a lovely little picnic spot and sat right down. I didn’t have any water. I was also unable to magically conjure some up on the spot. This inability to conquer the rules of physics, time, and space is a huge flaw in my ability as a mother, and Honest Toddler blog posts reel through my mind every time I fail. Thank you, Bunmi Laditan, for keeping my head from exploding.
ANYWAY, Emil Birk has started swimming lessons now, he’s started talking again at barnehage, and is in seventh heaven now that it’s spring and the bugs are out. We spent a long time checking out the ecosystem of bark and ants and spiders and moss on a neigborhood tree yesterday (after I managed to distract him from the picnic crisis). He sees the tiniest insects, and rejoices over every single fly that buzzes against the window.
And then there’s Cai Ruben. Whereas Emil Birk thinks he’s a grown up, Cai thinks he’s a big boy. In the last few days he’s learned out to get down from things — the bed, the stairs, the couch, and overturned box — and practices at every opportunity. On our walk yesterday we stopped at a little park nearby and he got to swing for the first time. Little adrenaline junkie that he is, he totally loved it. He also tried to practice his ‘getting down’ skills on the steep enbankment at the edge of the park.
I feel like I’m pretty relaxed as a mom. I mean, the constant risk-analysis calculator is constantly whizzing in my brain, but more often than not the risk isn’t so great and I let them get on with whatever they are doing.* With some exceptions, of course. Emil Birk, despite his constant asking, is not allowed to climb onto the roof. So really, really? is it asking too much for the one year old to stay away from the embankment and the 3 year old to keep his shoes on?
‘Yes’ is the obvious answer to that question.
(Let me just say that yesterday was one of those days I haven’t had for a while (while = week) when I’m shoving chocolate into my face at every opportunity. Managed to hold off on the wine until after Bjørn got home at 7 p.m., so go ahead and applaud my self-control.)
ANYWAY, Cai’s latest cute, non-dangerous trick is playing peek-a-boo with his hands. He covers and ear with one hand and squishes a cheek with the other and says ”BUH!!” It is quite possibly the cutest thing I have ever seen in my entire life, and he will not do in front of anyone else. So I just keep describing it to people, which is much less cute and probably much more annoying.
In other news, we’re working on selling our house. Moving within the same town feels kind of anticlimatic, but we figure normal people do it all the time, so we can too.
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