Sliding Quickly Into Three

So, yeah. I'm worn out. Keeping up with Linus requires a lot of energy. We've been busy with the usual stuff: laundry, playing trains, pretending we're snakes, reading about meerkats, baking bread, playing in the yard, etc. The biggest thing to happen since my last post is that Linus is in bink recovery. After telling him for several months now that he is nearly three and needs to give up bink, we pulled the plug (pun intended) on March 1. The picture here is the one I took before I hid away his two binks. I didn't just throw them away because I wanted to honestly say that they were put away in a safe place. He cried the first night and I teared up a bit too. I think this is the first time we were pushing him to grow up. He has gotten over it quite quickly and I shouldn't have underestimated him. He asked about it each night at bedtime for about a week, but now it is as though he never used a bink.

One person advised me to cut the tip off of the pacifier and tell him it was falling apart. Then over a couple of weeks cut it smaller and smaller until it isn't satisfying for him any more. Neither Matthew nor I felt comfortable with deceiving Linus, so we went the cold turkey route.

Some things Linus has said recently:

He asked me what grape starts with. After I told him he paused for a bit and then asked, "Do all grapes start with G?"

Matthew worked late one night and Linus offered to help me do the dishes. When we let the water out of the sink he asked if the water was going into the recycling. (We keep our recycling under there.) I couldn't believe we hadn't addressed this yet because he asked about the bathroom plumbing a while ago and seems to understand that. We crawled under the sink together and I showed him how one sink drains into the garbage disposal and then joins the water from the other drain to go down through the basement, etc. When we finished he said, "That's fascinating! I'm so happy you showed me. "

While putting honey on his bread he said, "The honey smells like the bees that made it."

While eating lunch together he said, "I'm so proud of you and Matthew for things you do for me. Like drive the car and go places with me. And plant things with me. I love you." Okay, that earned him a few points back that he lost for throwing some tantrums lately.

(Other pictures are of Linus insisting that his stuffed animals get to have cookies with us and of Matthew and I as we got ready to go on a date to celebrate our fourth wedding anniversary.)