Prefixes

Tonight, Wild Thing was grumpy. He was tired and had a lingering low-grade fever. So it's not surprising that he got angry with us and decided to go mess up the living room. After moving some boxes and toys around, he returned to the kitchen and proudly proclaimed, "Daddy, I un-cleaned the living room."

Obviously, this whole "coming back online" business was somewhat oversold

But I am going to try to start updating this again at least weekly.

Wild Thing has been less wild over the last week or so. Something seems finally to have clicked with him--this ability to regulate emotion that we've been reading about is finally starting to kick in, I think. Part of this might be sleep-related, too--he's sleeping about as much as he did six months ago, but he seems to need it a bit less. He is decidedly tired at the end of the day, but he no longer seems completely drained before we even start eating dinner.

Tonight I expected a relapse at dinnertime. He'd been acting a little testy, and when we asked him to wash his hands for dinner, he initiated the startup procedure for a meltdown: yelling, taking a tiny little swing at me, crying. But: he then announced that he was going upstairs to take a nap. He disappeared for a few minutes, and then came back downstairs with equilibrium restored. He announced that starting he was never going to cry again and would always listen to us from now on.

Now, we want to keep reassuring him that crying is fine and all that. But this sort of self-calming is something that he's really mastered only in the last little bit. And WOW is it a relief ...

Romantic poetry for preschoolers

Wild Thing's latest obsession is pirates. Tonight at dinner, he made the following request:

"Daddy, can you tell me a story about the buccaneer who shot the bird? Not about the time he shot the bird--a different story."

I was at something of a loss. Buccaneers shooting birds? I thought he'd perhaps picked something up from the cover of one of the various eighteenth-century travel narratives I have lying around the house. Then it dawned on me ...

About two weeks ago, at something of a loss when asked for a story to tell him, I for some reason offered him summary version of Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner." This is what he gets for having an English professor for a father. I usually assume these things are like water off a duck's back, but apparently this one stuck with him. I told him that, given the nature of the Mariner's story, there could be no other stories about him, but that I'd happily tell him a story about a different buccaneer. Happily, this proved to be an acceptable alternative.