We Miss You Mommy!

Holly left for Poland one week ago today. The wonderful Witkacy Theatre in Zakopane is having their 30th anniversary festival, and they loved Holly (and yes, the rest of the Trap Door company) so much that they flew them out to put on three more shows (which just ended hours ago.) This means Brock has been back on the single-daddy treatment. 

Brock has been a super-resilient dude through the entire experience. He certainly misses his mom, and frequently asks for her with a pouty voice. I'll simply explain that she is in Poland (which he must either think is some super-serious version of "work" or my phone which we use to webcam). A few moments later he'll get distracted by something fun to do, and we'll be back at play.

We've had tons and tons of fun, and I've documented some of it, but I've been pretty tired at night and have done a terrible job of posting. (Sorry Holly!) Well no more excuses. Prepare for a wall of stuff. 

Why not start out with some tickling?

and then some random giggling

We've spent a lot of time stacking dice

And developed a love for broccoli at nearly every meal of the day. Breakfast is serious business. 

Last weekend we went to the nature museum. They have a play area in which he finally mastered going up the stairs and down the slide himself. It was endless trips of giggling. I sadly did not get a video as I was nervously preparing to catch him slipping or tumbling, which he never did. Wrangling a rambunctious and curious toddler through an overstimulating environment apparently makes it difficult to also line up good photos, so here's the lone shot from the trip: Brock investigating the skipper family. They are not moths. They are not butterflies. They are skippers. 

By the time we got home, he was pooped. 

Sometimes he likes to sit in boxes. 

Brock has been less and less into wearing clothes these days, but after a recent shower he decided it was time to bring slap bracelets back into fashion. He has a really hard time operating them, but he loves them nonetheless. For a second I thought I'd fashion a tiny bow tie an attempt a chippendale-inspired shoot, but Brock had more of a rodeo thing in mind. 

It's been really nice to webcam with mom using my phone, as Brock is rarely content to sit in one place for long. The only drawback is that now when I pull my phone out to take cute pictures of him, he will reach for it and ask, "mom?" It's both adorable and sad. Additionally, it really makes it tough to take videos of him when he insists on viewing the screen in hopes of a mom sighting. Once, while trying to capture his kitty puppeteering skills, he was manhandling the camera so much I had no choice but to go front facing camera and let him watch himself make movie magic. 

Brock continues to amaze with his advancements. His color skills are quite sharp. His yellow  spectrum appears to be wider than most, so yellowish-greens are yellow, and any lighter orange will be yellow. I can't blame the kid. This subtlety is hard. When you give him a bold basic color though, he's excited to tell you what it is, and frequently he will point to new objects of which he doesn't know the names and yell out their colors. 

As far as numbers go, Brock has 1, 2, 3, 8, 9, and 10 down pat. Four through 7 he can identify about 50% of the time. In one bath time this week I wrote the numbers 1-10 out in bathtub crayon and asked Brock to read them to me. He picked up tremendous speed and excitement yelling out, "one, tooo, tree, one, one, one, one, EIGHT, niyne, ten!" We're getting there. I've tried some counting with him, but I realize he's a bit young for the concept. There is some evidence that he gets the concept of two. He'll frequently point to one thing and yell "one" and then pick up two things and yell "two," which I will tell him is correct, but I can't get him to successfully fulfill commands with the number two in them, like "bring me two blocks." I had him attempt to count the rolly block chairs in our living room as I pointed to them. Brock went, "one, two, yellow, orange." He wasn't wrong. 

He is also mastering a few more letters. The most adorable part about his interest in letters is that, much like his interest in animals, he finds the sounds the letter makes way more interesting than the name of the letter. So "T" is "ta" and "S" is always "ssssssss." I'm hoping his preferred associations will eventually make reading easier, and this habit already leads to moments where Brock is essentially trying to read the shampoo bottle while we are in the bath. He doesn't start at the beginning, or even stick to a single word at a time, just scans the bottle muttering whichever letter sounds he sees: "sss keh keh ta ba ba ba." I'm sure he'll be belting out, "sodium lauryl sulfates" in no time. 

Brock's favorite books have also taken a significant turn. He no longer wants short board books. Brock wants a STORY. His current favorite is everything in the Big Blue Beginner Book. It's got Let Me in the Zoo, A Fly Went By, Are You My Mother, Go Dog Go!, and a couple other classics. He'd been dabbling in the book before mommy left for Poland, but he'd only take one story at a time. Sometimes a story would be too long and he'd shut the book. Now Brock is a marathon man. One time we read straight through the first four, and I thought for sure that we were going to go cover-to-cover. Then Brock through me for a loop: "again!" (ok, he actually just says "ginn") Go Dog Go! had just become a favorite. It would be read 4 times in row. This amounted to nearly 500 pages of continuous attention to a book. I am now a tireless slave to "big book!" as Brock calls it, another initiation into the fraternity of parenthood. There is one lone exception to Brock's demand that books have floppy pages and actual story lines, and that is Mommy Loves, the story of how all mommy's love their babies. Nearly every night before bed, Brock makes me read it to him four or five times. He'll stop the book on the last page ("and most of all, my mommy loves me") to point out the two people. 

"Mama!"

"That's right"

"Brock!"

"Yes, that's you Brock."

"Mama?"

"She'll be home Sunday Brock"

He doesn't really know what Sunday is, but he knows that it will be fantastic. Get home safe mommy, we miss you!