Thursday, July 18, 2013

Child by child rundown

I.

So, the little guy needs glasses. My wife picked up on him closing one eye and/or squinting when he was looking at books we read him or watching tv, and once she pointed it out to me I couldn’t help but notice it as well. So earlier this week she took him to an eye doctor and he very bravely underwent the various exams which ended up with a prescription, which he’ll be picking up next week. This may or may not end up being a lifelong thing for him; apparently we caught it early enough that if he spends some time bespectacled then it’s possible his eyesight could be corrected and the prescription can be ramped down until the glasses can be ditched altogether. Or, maybe not, so all we can do is wait and see (so to speak). But for what it’s worth at this point the little guy is pretty sanguine about it and hasn’t balked at the idea of wearing glasses, in theory. He’s had friends in daycare who had glasses so it’s not a frighteningly foreign concept. Not to mention that he has fair, light-sensitive baby blues which have already made him a pro at wearing sunglasses. Honestly at this point my biggest concern is whether or not the glasses he obtains in a few days will survive unscathed and unlost between now and the first day of kindergarten. Even money?

II.

The little girl continues to follow her big brother around devotedly, which is for the most part all well and good (although the other day I did have to come down on both of them because he was coaching her on the best ways to become airborne by jumping off furniture, despite numerous admonitions not to engage in such behavior). Recently the two of them were playing in the front yard, running through the sprinkler. We have an oscillating sled, the kind with a bar that rotates back and forth letting the water out of a row of holes in a big back and forth fan pattern. So the little guy would run around in the grass and then approach the sprinkler from the side and wait for the fan of water to be at its lowest, almost parallel to the ground, and then he would run through the stream as it started to rise upwards, and the water would hit him in the legs as he went through. His sister would then immediately follow him, but of course (a) the water would be at a higher angle and rising and (b) she is a bit shorter than him, so instead of hitting her in the legs the water would mostly hit her in the face. I do believe there’s some metaphorical harbinger in that somewhere, big brother inadvertently leading little sister into places where she’s in over her head? I certainly don’t see it stopping any time soon.

III.

Last weekend we visited some friends of ours who have a daughter a year older than our little girl, and a son a month older than our baby. At one point the two moms were sitting on kitchen chairs facing each other, each with an infant on her lap. It was really the first time either of the babies had seen another age-peer live and in person, since neither of them is in day care. And they were both pretty stoked! The words “baby bromance” were bandied about quite a bit, but mostly this is just an opportunity for me to say that our baby is just really, congenitally happy. And he has a killer smile, which was fully evident when he found himself face-to-face co-dandled with another similarly aged tyke but honestly is something he breaks out pretty much on a daily basis. My wife and I have often acknowledged that we’re in uncharted waters with our third; she is one of two kids and while I am one of three, my Very Little Bro didn’t come along until I was 13, so the concept of a trio of little ones who are all little at the same time is still a novelty. But the baby is taking it all in stride with a laugh, so that’s reassuring.

I was looking back over the past few weeks of the blog and it seems like I haven’t put the spotlight on the kids very much, what with Thursdays happening to coincide with birthdays of either the spousal or national variety. And also, you know, the kids are just good. No dramas, no traumas, they’ve been getting along with one another fine and toeing the line of our parental demands reasonably well, they’re all healthy and happy and utterly unremarkable. Which in and of itself is kind of amazing, I admit. I wouldn’t want it to be said that I’m not grateful or I take the good times for granted. So here I am, acknowledging that my lovely children are just that, and that is more than enough for me.

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