Jacob Stories

In the past couple months, Jacob's vocabulary has exploded. While he's been the size of a 5 year old for awhile now, the fact that he couldn't really express himself always caught the older kids off guard. Kids walk up to him and start talking and he would respond, but he would sound like the two year old he is. But lately it seems he has taken off. He has developed the ability to pretend and he has become familiar with the idea of birthdays. He is generally good at cleaning up his toys and putting his clothes in his hamper and he's very specific about what goes where. Last night when I told him to say goodnight to his cars before bed he turned each one so it could go to sleep too.

Jacob loves to use my phone. Although I do not have Angry Birds on my phone (with which he has a little obsession), I do have a grocery list app which he likes to check off when we go to the store. Unfortunately that means I end up with a lot of pictures like this on my phone:

You can tell this picture is from Costco by the way because in addition to Jacob's knee and shoe, you can also see Alex's foot. Alex has an aversion to socks - at least to wearing them on his feet.

The other day when we were cleaning up Jacob found a calculator. He called it his elevator. He opened the cover and pressed the buttons and told me that he was sending a message to Daddy. Then he told me that I could call Grandma on my phone and he would call Daddy on his phone. He put the calculator to his head and said "Hi Daddy? You still at work? OK, see you later" and then insisted that I put it away in the pocket of my purse where my phone goes. Yesterday, he used his calculator to call Nana and Grandpa, Grandma, Grandpa and Grandma Laura, and Aunt Jenny. The calls went like this "Hi ? What are you doing? Okay bye". When I asked him what the person was doing, he said watching TV.

The flip side of this imagination explosion is that he also has been having problems with monsters. I mentioned previously that he had been having nightmares and was really clingy. It turned out to be a combination of two things. First, one of his classmates told him that I was not going to come pick him up at school. It was a misunderstanding: the other boy's father picks him up. But for a couple weeks he thought that when I left him at school I wasn't coming back. One day I picked him up early and his friend was still there. He got all up in this kid's face (which is pretty funny since he had to bend down to do it) and said "SEE! My Mommy is here! She comes to get me!". On the way home we talked about it some more and we haven't had a problem with clinginess since then. But any time I ask about the nightmares, he tells me that monsters come into his room at night. A friend of mine swears by a spray bottle full of water labeled "monster spray" to help kids feel empowered during this phase. Frankly it was going to be a few days before I got a clean spray bottle so we tried something different. Every night before bed I ask him what he's going to dream about to have good dreams (he always says watching TV ). Then he tells me that if he sees any monsters he'll say GO AWAY MONSTERS GO AWAY! and they will go away. It seems to have made a huge difference. Often at dinner he has a piece of pear or sandwich come toward me and tells me it's a monster. I say "go away monster go away" and it then runs away. Sometimes I wish I could get inside his head and see how things work in there!

We are also working on potty training with limited success. Sometimes it seems like Alex will be there before Jacob will but then others he seems to be really making progress. He cannot move to the next class at school until he has it figured out so we shall see.

On another note, we had our first rain of the season a couple weeks ago. You have really never seen anyone so excited about rain. He told me it was raining. He told me his head was getting wet. And the car. And his backpack. He told every single person who came in or out of daycare as I was getting Alex in the car. To be fair he hadn't seen rain since May, but he should be seeing plenty of it soon. I wonder how he will feel about it in another 5 months!

Jacob modeling the bird costume we use at work! We needed to make sure it would fit on a 5 year old...