"dee"

For a few weeks now, I've had Jonah "help me" with the dishes regularly. He's obsessed with the dishes now. He pushes a chair up to the sink and begs me to help him up to do the "dee". Usually he just stands there and pours water from a cup into a bowl or something akin to that. Today he really got into squeezing the life, I mean water out of the sponge. He looked like a weight-lifting olympic competitor, straining to squeeze as hard as he could. Yes, the dishes are a new passion. Now if I could just get him excited about something like dusting!

favorite sentence

My favorite phrase of Jonah's these days is "Come on." He enunciates the first syllable with such gusto. The other day he even said, "Mama, come on!" We both laughed.

Yesterday I was driving and trying to verbally hurry up someone in front of us, "Come on, slow driver." Jonah was sitting quietly in the back. About a minute later, he surprised me with none other than my favorite phrase: "Come on." It was perfect comic timing.

beach

Just got back from a Valentine's Day trip to the beach. This was a surprise present from Tim. What a fabulous idea. Our room was truly luxurious - a spa tub big enough for the whole family, a gas fire place, and a kitchen! And all within a half a block from the beach. The weather was a bit yucky, but we didn't care. I put some more pictures from our getaway here.

friends

Jonah loves his toddler friends. Ira just turned one on the 13th and Finn, whom Jonah played with earlier this week, is nine months older than Jonah. Here is a pic of the two of them looking out the window.

Jonah is a year and a half!

as of yesterday - the 11th.

my bad

Remember my anti-racist parenting post a while back? Well, I learned a lesson. When Jonah started crying at the store last month, I thought he was crying because he was scared of the cashier who was black. Last week we went to the same store and our cashier was a white woman about my age. Again, I had to step closer to the credit card machine as she pushed the shopping cart behind the counter to get the groceries out of it, thus separating Jonah, still in the cart, from me. And... Jonah began to cry. The separation seemed too much and he was scared. The same exact scenario played itself out again today. Again, the cashier was a young white woman. So much for projecting racialized reasoning onto my son. Interesting the way my adult mind connected things like that. Shouldn't be so quick to judge. My bad.

perfecting the skill of persuasion

Jonah's been making requests for a long time. They started off as a set of urgent "mmm's" that over time transformed into one word pleas like "vo" for voda or water, "bread", "apple", "up", "down", and more recently "shy," his toddler pronunciation of "outside." The latter is more advanced because it's more of an abstract concept. When he first started to ask me to take him outside, I didn't understand him. To make sure I got the point, he went to the door and tapped his palm on in a few times, repeating "shy, shy, shy" with an upward inflection and a sense of urgency. "Oh, go outside. You want to go outside." I got it. That was just a few days ago.

Today Jonah took my breath away. We were lying in bed, just resting since Jonah's been sick with a nasty case of a cold - fever and all. Out of nowhere he said, "I" the first syllable of the name of one of his two best friends Ira.

I was confused, thinking that maybe he was saying "eye", but then again he doesn't know that word, so I let him repeat himself a few times. "Ira?" I finally asked him. Sure enough, his face lit up. "I, I.." he kept repeating. Then he got up off the bed, started for the door and said: "baby." I asked him if he wanted to see Ira. Jonah repeated Ira's name. I said, "Oh, you want to go play with Ira." Jonah repeated, "play."

Next, he gave me a quizzical look and said "car" almost as if it were a question. Just to make sure I understood his point he brought me his shoes, saying the word in Czech then in English. Finally, he said "call" and "phone." I couldn't believe it. He just spoke in a toddler-style paragraph. Unprecendented in Jonah's life. I felt terrible, because I had planned to go to 'indoor park' with Ira and his mom, but Jonah was (and still is) sick, so we had to cancel our plans and stay home. It broke my heart to not be able to take Jonah to see his friend, especially after such an amazing first oratory!

bike

Jonah got a used tricycle yesterday. He was beside himself. Love at first sight, to say the least. He calls it a bike and still doesn't know how to ride it, but he likes pushing it, examining it, standing on it, and petting it. Come summer, I imagine he will be zooming on it around the neighborhood pretty well.