Sunday, November 6, 2011

Gabriel's Halloween costume

Last week was Gabriel's first Halloween in costume. He selected a rocket-ship costume at Target. A great selection because it matches his recent (well, a few months ago) interest in the space shuttle and NASA more generally. Ran around shouting "3-2-1 blastoff!" about as discreetly as one could hope for from a three-year-old, and mostly just seemed pleased to be wearing the costume.
In the attached picture, he's checking out the pace of construction at a construction site down the alley from our house-- an 8-story condo building scheduled for completion next summer. We've been stopping by every other day for the last few months.
On Halloween itself, we went to 4 neighborhood houses of folks that we knew, trying to reinforce a completely erroneous view of what kids do on that night. (That is, I want him to think that we visit a few friends and exchange gifts, not that he's meant to grab a garbage bag and demand loot from every house within a square mile.) He seemed pleased with the take, which was maybe 6 pieces of candy, and has been working his way through it at the rate of one piece a day. The crisis would be completely past but for the fact that we've got a mess of leftover Halloween candy of our own left over that didn't get distributed that night.
Our experience in handing out candy this year was very similar to past years-- starting at 6 PM, a trickle of young kids, usually in costume, accompanied by parents, and then a wave of older kids starting at 8 PM or so, usually with no costume and usually ignoring our instructions to limit themselves to two candies.
I may be imagining it, but it sure seems to me that you can see a behavioral difference even after one piece of candy. G seems more hyper, a bit less rational, and definitely less ready to be in bed at the scheduled 8-o-clock time. So we'll be happy when the candy season ends.

Sunday, October 30, 2011

A glimpse of the teenager to come

At three-and-a-half years (give or take), Gabriel is still blessedly in daily-nap land. On weekends, you can pretty much count on him to go down at 2 PM and sleep until 4:30, sometimes later. (Weekdays at Mundo Verde, my understanding is that they schedule between 1 and 1.5 hours, and that many (including Gabriel) don't really sleep during this time.)

But every few days now, the scheduled nap doesn't happen, usually because we've got an unusually busy travel schedule. The embedded picture shows a tall tree falling hard after an afternoon birthday party. He was conked out on the couch, lights on, shoes on, for at least half an hour in this pose.

Thursday, October 20, 2011

After-school snack

Post-school, Gabriel and I will sometimes walk by Locolat, a local Belgian bakery, if we're headed to the playground at Marie Reed in Adams Morgan, and grab a pain au chocolat to eat on a bench. Here he manages to look thoughtful even with melted chocolate dribbling down his chin.

My boy likes croissants.

He is also becoming more open to meeting new kids. This is especially the case when, as is usually the case at Marie Reed, there is only one other family unit of kids at the playground. He will always sidle over to see what's going on. Seems especially interested when it's older kids, and they create their own games. Last time he was a tiger and the boy he was playing with was a shark-- before that, he played with a kangaroo and he was a rabbit (the games focused on jumping that day).

Sunday, September 18, 2011

Pizza at the library

So, here's a sign that you're a bad parent: your kid associates libraries not with books but with pizza.
Vace Pizza was a family favorite long before Gabriel came along, and we've indoctrinated him to its joys as well. It's in Cleveland Park, which means it's one of maybe 3 reasons we ever use our car (the others being visits to Grandma in College Park, and trips to the beach).
It also happens to be across Connecticut Avenue from the Cleveland Park branch of the DC Public Library. And so now, even if we have no intention of actually going in the library, no trip to pick up Vace pizza is complete unless we have a little picnic on a bench outside the library to have a slice. This is something he insists on in virtually any weather. As it happens, the embedded picture is from a beautiful early-autumn afternoon visit to the neighborhood. And it's certainly not a book that is putting that smile on his face.

Saturday, August 6, 2011

A Pretty Good Day

Pretty safe to say that riding a big orange tractor is gonna be high on Gabriel's career highlights list for some time. This is from an August visit to Grandma Gardner. Grandma, amazingly doing chores at 94, is in the background.

Tuesday, May 17, 2011

Oops- forgot a year.

So it's been a year since we've documented Gabriel's exploits here. A bad thing, but also an indicator that we really love spending as much time doing things with Gabriel as possible-- and that doesn't leave a lot of time for documenting things.

In two days, G will be three years old. We'll have a small morning party at preschool with Dagim friends and Grandma Jan, who's in town for the week.

I keep waiting for indications of the "Terrible twos," and of course we're running out of time. The most unpleasant thing he typically does is holding a grudge against mama when she goes on a work trip. Last trip, Alison came home late at night and went in his bedroom to greet him when he woke the next morning and got "go away" as a response. This fades immediately, but is still no fun for her.

He's forming longer and longer sentences every day, usually indicating a detailed plan of action: "go to preschool with Dada and Mama and go to the park and take a nap and go to the firehouse."

He likes having a "dance party," which means we put "C is for Cookie" on the stereo, pull all the sheets and pillows off our bed, and he jumps up and down naked on the bed.

He sings or hums songs unprompted, as part of his regular play routine. He'll be playing with cars by himself and will just start humming "Itsy Bitsy Spider," usually in a pretty consistent key.

He went through a Mary Poppins phase a few weeks ago, in which he really wanted to watch the entire movie on Alison's computer as much as possible. Long before he knew there was a movie, he loved the music. We haven't been encouraging the movie thing at all, and right now he's not even asking for it. So he's seeing very little in the way of movies/TV. No TV at all, really, except for the few episodes of Sesame Street I downloaded before our Cancun trip in February.

Typical day:
G wakes up between 6:30 and 7, calling "mama mama!" or less frequently "dada dada!"
If we try to put him down again, we get "I want to wake UP!"
Play downstairs until 8:50, when Gabriel walks to preschool on dad's shoulders. This is a 7-8 minute walk to 16th and P, and always a pleasurable one. When he's too big to travel this way (a day which maybe is quite close) or when we're no longer walking distance to school (at least a year away), I will miss this a lot.
G gets dropped off around 9. Preschool all day, with naptime from 12:30 to 3:30 or so.
I usually pick him up around 5:15 on average. Then we walk home on shoulders, or if he wants we walk to Stead Park to play first, or to a local restaurant for a snack.
If he hasn't eaten his lunch (which is common), he usually wants dinner by 6. Then if the weather's nice we'll take a walk around the neighborhood, most often to the construction site a block away.
Then a bath or shower at 7:30 (he currently prefers showers almost always, but we alternate), then we read a couple of books and to bed.
Bedtime remains 8:30 (ideal), slipping towards 9 sometimes if we have a good outdoor expedition after dinner.
The latest development post-bedtime is that he'll call out several times demanding milk, or water, or just to "make me cozy" by tucking him in.

Will try to be better about regular updates in this space.

Sunday, February 6, 2011

Mexico visit

Gabriel poses outside his favorite Club Med playground.