Weston turned two yesterday and he has taken to the part of the family two-year-old with great panache. He has become quite the mischief maker lately, and always with this half-grin on his face, as if to say, "I know I'm not supposed to, but I'm so cute...what are you going to do about it?" He's lucky he's my second child because what I do about it is (try to) distract him and move on with life. If he had been my first, I would've been far more concerned about the possibility of demon possession.
He has an amusingly expressive face and he can distract you from being irritated by his behavior by pulling down his eyelids or sticking out his lips or doing any number of strange things. Yesterday morning, Yellow Cat woke him up by yowling in his face and instead of being annoyed, he sat up, got within inches of Yellow Cat's nose and proceeded to puff out his lips and flap them around until a very confused cat went slinking out of the room. Whenever he's in trouble, he puts on a great pout and says, "Awww!" in this disappointed tone and makes all manner of grumpy faces and it's hard not to be distracted by how adorable he is.
He's pretty suspicious of people he doesn't know and takes a few minutes to warm up even to some of our friends whom he sees a couple of times a month. His deepest desire is to never, ever be unclothed. If I get distracted while changing his clothes and let him wander around in his diaper for a few minutes, he hunts down clothes for himself and then brings them to me, insisting that "Weston need new pants. Weston need new shirt, too."
He imitates every noise he hears and is usually surprisingly accurate in his re-creation of the original noise. Often, when I read him a book, he repeats after me and gets annoyed if I don't pause to allow him to do so. I've had to start being cognizant of what's on the radio again, even when Luke isn't in the car, because Weston will repeat phrases he hears at rather inopportune moments.
He takes great pleasure in eating, especially foods that have a lot of flavor to them. He passes up typical kid foods like chicken nuggets and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in favor of things like pot roast or chili. We went to The Fresh Market to pick up some things for lunch yesterday and I let him choose our menu since it was his birthday. We ended up eating bananas, oranges, cucumber, ham, lentil soup, and a fruit tart. He suggested strawberries, asparagus, and cupcakes as well, but I thought that might be overkill.
He loves little toys that he can carry around--little lego people and action figures and dinosaurs and animals. He builds things with the tiny, little legos that are supposed to be for Luke because he likes all the wheels and wings and sticks and accessories that are involved in those. Of course, he can't always get things to fit like he wants them to and comes to me for help, but gets seriously annoyed if I put it together in a way other than what he had planned. He throws some rather fantastic tantrums--the kind that involve him going into the downward dog position and crying loudly in the middle of restaurants, stores--really, the most public locations possible. It's helping me feel much less self-conscious in public. You'd think it would have the opposite effect, but as it turns out, there's a upper limit to how much embarrassment you can feel in such situations and we have passed that limit.
He has recently really started enjoying being read to and he and Luke now fight over who gets to pick the books I read to them. Usually, when we go to the library, we get a stack of books that are more appropriate for Luke and a couple of board books for Weston. Last week, I got him a couple of "big kid books" (ie-with paper pages instead of board books) and he was so excited when I took him out of the bag. He still gets a little too excited with them and ends up tearing pages while turning them, but he's learning and in the meantime, we're stocking up on scotch tape.
We've realized just how much he gets hand-me-downs and has to share things with Luke because during the past couple of days, he has been getting birthday presents and we haven't required him to share those the first day that he has them and he has been so careful and possessive of "his" things. Luckily, the novelty wears off within a day because if he had to wait any longer, Luke might have exploded with his desire to get his hands on the new toys and books!
The conversations we have with him are always a little bit surreal. For example...
Weston: Roar!
Me: Ooh, what's this roaring at me?
Weston: Dinosaur roaring at you! Roar!
Me: Oh, my, a dinosaur!
Weston: Nooo! Not dinosaur!
Me: You're not a dinosaur anymore? What are you then?
Weston: I Weston. Luke-Bear is dinosaur.
Weston: I eating apple.
Me: Um...I think that's a potato.
W: Apple! It's apple!
Me: Fine. It's an apple.
W: No! Potty, booty, yuuuuuck!
Me: What?
W: Potty, booty, poo-poo, ewwwww, yuck!
W: What you making?
Me: Dinner.
W: What dinner you making?
Me: Chicken.
W: Eat that chicken now?
Me: Nope. It's raw right now. It'll make you sick.
W: No! No sick! I crocodile. I chomp that chicken. Chomp! Yum.
Me: Oh, my, a crocodile has eaten our chicken. Now what will we eat for dinner?
W: Banana, Lara bar, beetle juice.
