A few minutes ago, I had to scrub Andrew's hands, after I caught him helpfully trying to scoop the dog poop in the back yard with his blue shovel. And his hands. He squawked with indignation when I interrupted his "very hard work."
Now, he is sitting in the next room, "reading" a book out loud. The story (as best I can tell from his dramatic rendition) is about a boy demanding peanut butter and jelly, often in a very loud, anxious voice. This is what the story sounds like this:
"'I want some peanut butter and jelly,' the boy said. 'Stop yelling,' he said. He wants to yell all the time. 'He wants to and he wants to,' he says."
A few minutes pass.
"And that's a great book!" (Incidentally, the book ostensibly about peanut butter and jelly is in actuality instead about a beaver trying to find a friend. Totally the same thing, right? I am sensing now that his story structure owes a lot to the "If You Give a Mouse..." books.)
We had a parent-teacher conference recently, and his teacher told me proudly that even though he's a bit shy of three, she saw some behavior that required an evaluation form for older kids, rather than two-year-olds. She was very excited, and remembered brightly: "Oh, that's right! He got a cup in the play kitchen, where he was playing with his friend, and he made his friend clink glasses and say 'Cheers!'" I blushed, dirtily outed by my sweetest ally.
He talks now, at length, to everyone--other kids, adults, animals, introducing himself to the world at large: "HI! My name's Andrew!" Last weekend, he made a new friend, and when his friend didn't feel good, Andrew chased him, trying to comfort him with sticky hugs. When we brought the cat home from the vet's the other day, he murmured to her on the car ride, "It's okay, kitty. It's all right. Don't be sad, kitty, we're almost home. Look, kitty, there are the houses, and there's some trees, and..." He remembers things from months and months ago, and astonishes me with the way he pieces together connections from disparate things or events.
[He's now moved on to making up a story about a fire truck and a rescue and some of his friends from school. He's asking them to go in his rocket ship, which apparently has to be cleaned first.]
We're making sporadic progress on potty training, but discussions of a "big boy bed" have been met with an indignant rant about how he has a CRIB to sleep in, not a bed. So offended was he at my suggestion that later that night when I said it was "time for bed" he quickly corrected me: "I don't sleep in a bed, I sleep in a CRIB, Mom, a crib."
He is obsessed with Bob the Builder, replacing his previous love, "Word World." He will sing along with the theme song; he's also started making up his own songs about various things. He also loves "Skinamarinky dinky dink" and sings it vigorously, grandly incorporating the gestures.
Two days ago, he managed to lock us out of the house, and when we'd finally found a neighbor at home whose phone we used, he was disappointed that we weren't going to go around to more houses.
He is funny and sweet and fearless and silly; gentle and kind but boyishly rambunctious. We truly are lucky beyond words.
