Good News Abounding

Well, after my pissy little post tantrumming about my home, I thought I'd put together a bunch of good news, for the record.

Monkey's vocabulary is rapidly expanding. Although he is far from meeting or exceeding Jabber's huge vocabulary from the same age period, he has expanded a bit from his typical "dis," "dat," and "uh-oh" to include a few more words. For one thing, he has resumed saying "mama," and it even means other things besides "I'm hungry!" It makes me melt every time I hear him say it. Another vocab addition has the opposite effect on me: he has started saying "HIT!" which is followed by an enthusiastic smack, usually right across the face. Niiice. More constructive is his use of pointing to his mouth and saying "me eat," even though it does sometimes (humorously) come out as "eat me." :)

Jabberwock had a playdate, which is unusual, since I wasn't good at the whole dating thing the first time around, and since few of my friends have kiddos in his age range, it follows that he doesn't have a huge array of friends, either. But yesterday the two of us went to a local park to meet with a couple of siblings from his old daycare, and we all had a very nice time. Without Monkey along, I actually found myself able to converse with the other mom, which was super nice, and the kiddos played like crazy. We went for a little hike, had a picnic, and shared a sand cake, among other things. Jabber fell into the river a little bit (just his feet and one leg) while throwing stones and filling his bucket with water, and then he played in the sand for another hour or so. The result was a seriously happy kid with shoes I may just have to throw away.

Monkey took a blissful two-and-a-half-hour nap today, which allowed me to grade a bunch of papers and read a bunch of blogs.

We all ate a healthy lunch, which is wonderful since last night David brought home a pizza and jelly beans and I could not come up with a single reason on earth not to eat everything in sight.

Also, I found out today some interesting (to me, anyway) tidbits about Monkey's food preferences: Strawberries win out over all other food choices. Matchstick-cut carrots are second on the list, even winning out over string cheese and apple-cinnamon rice cakes. He will have nothing to do with meat of any kind (which we pretty much knew already, and since Big Brother is all about the meat like his dad, I have proposed a dual system of food preparation that made my husband almost threaten to ride off into the sunset alone. So I guess until I'm willing to do all the dual-meal cooking, I will continue to eat venison and poultry, or go hungry. Monkey still has his nummies, so he can take it or leave it.) Broccoli, even with yummy red pepper hummus on it, gets tossed onto the floor after one bite.

I was reading Parents magazine, an article about the sex lives of mothers (I know, I know), and it was about four moms who kept a five day journal about their sex lives (which seemed to me an awfully short period of time for a mom to document her sex life...but perhaps we need to step it up a notch around here, lol!). ANYWAY, both of the moms of infants were breastfeeding (yay!), and the mom of older kiddos said it wasn't abnormal for the kids to sleep in their bed. The fourth woman was still pregnant, so who knows. Anyway, good to see this in a really mainstream mag.

And Edited to Add: My last good news of the day was when I came downstairs in a little sundress, trudging reluctantly over to my stack of Shakespeare essays that need to be graded, and Jabberwock came skipping up to me and whispered in my ear, "Mama, do you know what? You look just like...a princess!" Then he kissed me on the cheek, without any begging from me or anything. This was especially nice since about an hour earlier he had informed me that he thought Daddy was the best daddy in the whole world, and he was pretty sure that his best buddy's mom (the one we saw yesterday on our playdate) was the best mommy in the world, and he was going to take Daddy and go live with her and his best buddy. Gosh, thanks, kid. I asked him what I was supposed to do without my two guys, and he shrugged. "You'll think of something," he said.