Flip Fridays: Swoop Swoop Slide

I know it's Sunday, but this is video I took on Friday, when we met a couple of friends at Dracena Park.  Elias is turning out to be a fairly cautious kid.  Which is fine by me, but I have been encouraging him to explore the climbing structures, especially recently when it seems to bother him a little that other kids his age or not much older can wriggle their way through an obstacle without hesitation.  I noticed he tends to treat everything like stairs and if that doesn't work he'll ask one of us to help him by holding his hands.  But sometimes that won't work.  Sometimes he needs to climb across something using his entire body.  And on Friday, he seemed to get the knack of this by climbing up the slide and sliding down on his belly. Over and over again.



In other news, I think it's finally time for some sort of visual reward and punishment system for the bedtime routine that has once again gotten a little out of control.  Like a typical two year old, Elias stalls every step of the way, whether it's a bath night or not, from brushing his teeth, to putting on his pj's, even to the point of stopping in the middle of his fourth (yes, fourth) and final book in an attempt to essentially get a fifth one out of us.  Once we finally wrestle him into bed, he's allowed three return visits, which has basically turned into Neal granting three of a number of requests, one after another, including face massage, back rub, belly rub, and sitting on the chair in his room while he unwinds.  We (and by we I mean Neal, since Mama has no patience for these kinds of shenanigans and Elias knows it) do it because it works.  At the end of the day, an extended bedtime routine with ridiculous toddler requests is better than the post-bedtime-routine screaming that was happening pretty regularly a few months ago.  But kids are like computer hackers.  As soon as the authorities have figured out a way to secure information, the hackers have come up with a new way to hack into your system.  As soon as we feel like we've successfully dealt with the toddler shenanigans du jour, Elias pulls something new out of his sleeve and we have to go back to the drawing board.  Such is parenthood, I guess.

And I might have time to whip something up tomorrow (I'm thinking there's a very good likelihood that felt will be involved) since that whole three day work week thing didn't last too long.  Before it even really started I began to have second thoughts.  In other words, work got busy - insanely, unprecedentedly busy - as soon as I made the decision to drop from four to three daycare days.  I think I was reacting a bit impulsively to a really slow stretch last month and lost sight of the many pros that result from that extra day.  What a difference that one day makes.  Perhaps I had to rock the boat a little to realize that our family had struck a pretty decent balance after all.  Now I just have to keep my fingers crossed that the work keeps coming in.  And Elias will be in preschool before I know it.

Also, I haven't forgotten about that holiday post. Promise.

catching up

I'm working on a longish post about holiday shenanigans ('bout time, right?) and looking at this picture...

...of Elias enjoying a brief play-date with his buddy Henry, who was in town for the holidays, made me search my blog for this image of the two of them at play in Boston's Museum of Science just about two years ago.

My how they've changed.