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Stuck--a field guide

Cole is finally talking more. Sometimes I wish I could say that is all he is doing more. Actually, contrary to the image you have in your head of a Terrible Two, he's turned into quite a well-behaved little boy. Unless he's not behaving. Which is mostly limited to when he's tired. But we're finding Leda to much more ill-behaved at 13 months than he is at 2 and a half. More about her tomorrow.

One of the reasons we didn't get him a big boy bed sooner is that we were worried we'd wake up in the middle of the night with him doing God-knows-what in some unspecified corner of the house. So we've been baby-gating him in addition to the closed bedroom door each night. But the funny thing is when he wakes up, we remove the gate, and tell him the door is open whenever he is ready to come out. Most of the time, he just sits in his bed making noises to let you know he's awake. This morning, I woke up to the sound of a mechanical roaring lion from his plastic flashlight. So cute.

As I've mentioned, he'll pile up the books for you to read. He loves to pretend "cook" with a plastic pot and a handful of small, cloth animals. He has a fascination with buzzers, alarms, ringers, and cannot abide by one that isn't turned off and dealt with appropriately. And he's even taken to handing toys (lesser, inferior ones in his opinion) to his sister as a way of getting the in-demand truck or item he wants. He vigorously waves hello now. And he's obsessed with a pair of too-small Muppet slippers that have Kermit on them. When they fit, he wouldn't go near them. Now, he demands to sit on my lap and have them squeezed onto his feet.

But it's the words that are killer.

Ba is not to be confused with ba-ba. Ba is bath. Always in the form of a question as in "can I take one?" Ba-ba is usually a question as well, but is more of a plea for milk. Car is self-evident. Book is, too. Our favorite, however, above all the rest is stuck.

Stuck is such a versatile word. And he uses it almost always in appropriate ways even if he twists the meaning a little on the liberal side when things--or himself--are not actually stuck. BUT they are usually stuck as he perceives them.

He can be stuck...in his high chair. Items can be stuck...toy people inside toy cars. He can also be "stuck" in his carseat meaning come get me out. He wants to be free! Things can be stuck because they are too big...large rocks too difficult to lift. Stuck is his philosophy and it gets him quite far.

Really, Kelly and I are impressed at the variety of ways he's come to appreciate how the meaning of the word can shift. Clothes can be stuck. Buttons can be stuck on electronics. He can be stuck in a swing on the playground. Or stuck at the top of the slide because he's scared to come down.

Scared. There's the other big word. That one is less definitive. Scared is the word he uses for all emotion including thrills and joy. The scary parts of movies make him scared. But so do the exciting good ones. Scared is his way of expressing feeling for the moment.

It makes me think of my college professor who used to say that children aren't going to say, "mommy I'm having free-floating anxiety." No, Cole is just stuck and scared...but sometimes that's a good thing.