(See other lists here).
Mine.
1. Your “I spy” turn. We play it in the car. You said yours started with “sh” (and you knew the letters ‘s’ and ‘h’ spelt that) and your clue was so clever and the word turned out to be “shade” which I loved. I didn’t guess it.
2. You asked your father why the moon doesn’t fall down.. and I love your father, because he explained why, including showing you various forces using play dough and bowls and such, right off the top of his head.
3. Your drawing is incredible, and your painting really beautiful. That big canvas you did for me when you were at your grandmother’s house under her tutelage, of me and a horse and foal in a storm is on my wall, and years from now I will need to remind myself that you were only 4 when you created it. You are quite precocious with representational drawing. But then, there are a lot of artists in your family.
4. You walk, you now love walking. I especially enjoy our walks in the evenings.
5. The way you set yourself these goals and you work away at them until you can achieve them. Like learning to swim, learning to balance on your scooter, learning to read, learning to draw a horse.. and now trying to learn to ride without training wheels on your bike.
6. How much you enjoy socialising now. How you beg me to organise play dates and how you congratulate me on the arrangements I make for us both. Your confidence with other children, especially older boys, and in making new friends. How far you have come.
7. The gratitude you extend to me when I submit to a craft project with you. Sadly this also makes me feel a little guilty. I could do more and I will try to make more effort this year.
8. The care you take in the clothes and accessories you put together. Your enjoyment in creating a look, your versatility – you’re just as happy to put together a very ‘boyish’ outfit for yourself as you are to be dressing yourself in something incredibly ‘girly’. I could do without the multiple outfits in one day, and the putting something wintery on though a heat wave is predicted.
9. When we get to swim together without Cormac and I can race you from one end of the pool to the other and scoop you up and throw you in the air and grab hold of your slippery little limbs and cuddle you close and give you me all to yourself.
10. That you have always been and remain to this day a very cuddly child.
His.
1. Sleeping with you every night. The only nights I like more are the ones where you leave part way through to join your mother and your brother and I get the whole bed to myself.
2. The sentences you are constructing and writing yourself. Surprisingly decipherable.
3. Your drawings and how you combined your own words with your own pictures to recreate an aeroplane safety guide based on the one you studied in the plane.
4. Not having to worry at all about you going to kindergarten, that you have (finally) totally and completely settled in.
5. Your friendship with your new best friend at kindergarten. How you copy things she has done, how you speak of her, how I can glean things about your developing relationship from this.
6. I find your heartless competitiveness quite amusing.
7. When you get really angry and say “ask hole” and that you think your best friend’s mother believes “beach” is a rude word. And that you think just about the worst insult you can use is to call someone “a big dull”.
8. Your great sense of humour, how playful you are.
9. How after two swimming lessons you suddenly jumped in the pool and did a little loop and swam back out of the sheer excitement that comes from deciding that ‘soon’ you will be able to swim. You must have shocked yourself with that achievement.
10. Seeing you with your little brother and despite the enormous provocation something like this could provide to someone with your personality type how you are nothing but incredibly sweet with him. The other day when I was getting ready for work and Cormac was being left to cry you announced “when I grow up and have babies I am going to look after them properly“.
Love the list. Can we see the painting??? Pretty please?
Oooh. I am intrigued by the parents sleeping in separate beds with different children. We are currently doing this in our house–I’m with the 16 month old and he is with the 3.5 year old. Neither child can stay asleep if they roll over and find themselves alone in the night. And we do not have a king sized bed for all of us to share.
Do you have plans to change your situation? Is it driving either partner bonkers to not sleep next to their significant other? I am hoping that I can place my toddler in the same bed as my preschooler in the coming months where they can sleep together to solve the angst the situation is starting to cause their parents.
westwardbound sorry I have taken soooo long to get back to you on this one. We are mostly ok with the current situation of sleeping apart but every now and then it really grates on us.
We have only been doing it for a few months so far and we have plans to change it in the nearish future back to the adults sharing a bed together, but while the baby is still breastfeeding quite a bit during the night it makes more sense to sleep apart and each with a child.