It's been a busy week, and just got busier today, with Thanksgiving preparations well underway. Gabe helped me make the apple pie this afternoon, which was fun. I baked some other desserts, and made mashed potatoes, and everything else has to wait until tomorrow. But it'll all come together - it always does.
It was fun having him help me with the pie. Dante was asleep while we were doing that, so it was some nice Mommy and Gabe time. He's been seeming much older and more mature lately. I mean, don't get me wrong - he's still clearly a very immature 3 1/2-year-old boy, but he has shown more maturity lately. It's great, but it's also so very bittersweet.
We did three special projects for Thanksgiving - the handprint/footprint turkeys, which are hanging in the dining room windows. Then we also made placemats that I'll use on the table tomorrow - we glued colorful leaves to construction paper, sprinkled some glitter around them, and laminated them. And today, we put glue on a bunch of pinecones and then sprinkled those with glitter, and I'm going to put them in a glass bowl as our centerpiece. It's going to be a very sparkly table : ) I think the boys will be really excited to see their handiwork on display like that!
We've had pretty awful weather the past two days. We got out to the park Monday before lunch, but haven't been able to get outside since then - it's been cold and rainy.
They had a great time at the park Monday, though - we were the only ones there, and since nobody else was there, I didn't stop the boys when they decided it would be really fun to throw mulch down the slide. But I did mention to Gabe that if he went down the slide with all the mulch on it, he'd get all dirty. He replied "No problem, Mommy." I love it when he says stuff like that - he cracks me up; especially since, most of the time, I think he doesn't fully understand what it is he's saying. They had so much fun, though, and were having such a great time playing together - it was just fantastic to see.
I'm trying to make the most of our time indoors these past two days. We've been doing a lot of tent-making - draping blankets between chairs, and crawling inside with flashlights. They both seem to really get a kick out of that. And yesterday again they played together really nicely for a really long time in the "tent" we had made upstairs. They've been playing together more and more lately, and I love it. Still plenty of fighting, but that's to be expected. I'm just glad they're relating to each other a bit more.
Dante is seriously getting close to potty training. A few times this week, he's come up to me and pulled at his pants, trying to take them off, saying "pee, pee." So I bring him to the potty, and he pees. I don't think he's ready for full-on potty training just yet, but I am feeling very confident that he could be trained before he's three, which would be fantastic.
The only problem with all of this is that he's also learned how to take his pants off, and does so whenever he feels like it. It's one thing when he does it at home, but he's also tried to do it at the park. It's really funny, though - I'll be working in the kitchen, and he and Gabe are playing in the living room, and suddenly I turn around and Dante has no pants on!
Speaking of disrobing - after we got Gabe's hair cut last weekend, he was really itchy from all the hair that had fallen down his shirt. He refuses to wear the cape around his neck, so the hair gets all over him. And we were out grocery shopping, and he was whining about how itchy he was - scratching at his neck and saying "something's wrong." So I took off his fleece coat, and for a minute, he seemed better. Then he started complaining again, so we had to take off his sweatshirt, too. Now he was down to just his white undershirt, and he wanted to take that off, too! That's where I drew the line!
I explained to him that next time he gets a haircut, he needs to wear the cape so that he doesn't get so itchy, and he said "I don't want to go to the haircut place for a long time."
One of Dante's new favorite pastimes is to get on one of their little stepstools and bring it over to a light switch and turn the light on and off, and on and off, and on and off, and on and off. The other day Gabe was yelling at him to stop doing this, and I started telling Gabe about how he used to do the exact same thing when he was Dante's age (except he didn't need a stool because he was so tall), and he thought that was pretty funny, so he stopped being mad at Dante.
I can't even keep track of all the new words Dante is saying now. He's so chatty. He picked up a halloween book this morning and said "Hoween." And he also can say "olives" and "snow," and unfortunately, whenever Gabe says "why?" Dante follows up with his own "why, why, why, why?"
Gabe had a rough night sleeping Tuesday. He woke up at 2am and would not go back to sleep. He wanted to sleep in our bed, and I told him he couldn't, but he kept coming back down the hall and trying to climb into our bed. So finally I told him he could lay down on the floor next to our bed, but if he made any noise, he'd have to go back to his room. He padded off down the hall, grabbed his stuffed animals, blanket, and pillow, and set up camp right next to our bed. And apparently being in the same room with us was enough to make him feel better, because he went right to sleep.
And thankfully he slept fine last night, so I'm hoping that was just a fluke. I tried to get him to tell me what was wrong, but he just kept saying that his bed "isn't a nice bed." I have no idea what that means.....
But when Scott was talking to him about it later that day, we were reiterating how he needs to sleep in his own bed at night, so we had a whole discussion about it. Then Scott said "So, Gabe, you're going to sleep in your bed tonight, right?" And Gabe said "No." And Scott said "Are you going to sleep on the floor in your room?" And Gabe said "No." So Scott said "Well, where are you going to sleep, then?"
Gabe looked at him, and said in an incredulous tone, that implied disbelief that we would even have to ask him such a thing - "I'm going to sleep in your room."
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