Things I want to remember

Some days seem to be all about tantrums and time-outs and taking deep breaths. But sometimes we have a string of days so cute and so funny and so priceless that I want to write it all down so I can remember it forever.

This post is like that — just adorable things I want to remember about the last 12 hours.

• Last night at bedtime, Eli burped. "Wow, I said. "That was a loud burp." He responded, "I have a lot of burps," then paused thoughtfully and added, "In my mouth."
• I turned on his twilight turtle, which projects a moon and stars onto the walls. Noticing three stars clustered around the moon, I said, "Look, a Mommy star and a Daddy star and an Eli star!" Eli exclaimed, "And a friends star!" He pointed up at the ceiling and said, "I see a Brandon star, and a Jonathan star, and a Ruby star..." and he started naming all his little friends from school. 
• We're in a Make Way for Ducklings phase, so when he laid down after we read it, he started naming all the ducks: "JackKackLackMack" and then asked me "talk to him" (this is code for "tell me a story") about them. This morning, he lined up his toy cars and playacted like the ducklings were waiting to cross the street. I can't wait to take him to the Public Garden in Boston this June :)
• Usually I wake up to the sound of Eli yelling for us over the monitor, but this morning I woke up to the sound of...classical music? Because last night I had brought the bunny alarm clock back out and told him in the morning to check and see if the bunny was awake, and if not, to go back to sleep. So this morning when I went into his room I said, "Who turned your music on?" and Eli said, "I did!" He had woken up, but the bunny was still asleep, so he turned his own nighttime music on and went back to sleep. Amazing. When I got in there, he said, "Bunny's awake! I'm so happy!"
• We were looking at some pictures on my phone and then Eli wanted to get up. He said to me, "Let's put your phone away. I'll help you put your phone away." He put it on the dresser and said, "There, now you can't use your phone anymore until you're a big boy."
• He was playing with his little Daniel Tiger figurines and he had Miss Elaina say "Hi toots!", which she says all the time on the show. I think this is a testament both to Eli's brilliance and also his high volume of Daniel Tiger-watching.
• I could tell he was stalling and didn't want to leave for school, so I made up a little song that goes "I love you all the time, I love you all the time, Even when I'm not with you I love you all the time" (to the tune of "The Farmer in the Dell"). Eli picked up on it right away and after ordering me to sing it "louder" and then "softer," he started yell-singing it too from his stroller as we walked to school.

The laws of toddler motion

This weekend we had a remarkably perfect unremarkable day. Eli woke up before 6 a.m. as usual and I presented him with a flashing Mickey Mouse cup, a Mickey spinning toy and a card full of Hot Wheels stickers in honor of Valentine's Day. In the morning Phil and Eli lounged in their pajamas building intricate towers out of magnets and blocks while I ran a frigid local 5K with the women of my moms' running group. When I got home we packed up and headed to Williamsburg for swim class, where Eli blew bubbles like a champ and had to be dragged bodily from the pool while insisting that he had to keep looking for "treasure." He slept in the car on the way home and then we all headed back upstairs for more playing before Phil's mom arrived to put Eli to bed so Phil and I could go on our Valentine's Day date at Luke's Lobster.

It was unremarkable because we didn't do anything out of the ordinary, but it was remarkably perfect because it was virtually tantrum-free. That's 12 hours without any meltdowns, fits or crying jags. There was no stomping of feet or banging of heads or flinging of toys, no wailing or shrieking or howling.

I wouldn't say that Eli is any more dramatic than your average toddler, but he can throw a temper tantrum with the best of them. He's been known to fling himself to the ground and beat it with his fists after, say, being denied a fourth slice of cheese. On one memorable occasion, he cried because he wanted to go inside the picture in his book and he couldn't because, well, it was a picture inside a book. A few weeks ago, while suffering from the lingering after effects of a virus, he was having such regular meltdowns over such inconsequential occurrences that Phil declared, "This is not normal behavior!" and insisted on bringing him to the doctor, who diagnosed him with a very grave condition: Eli, he explained, was 2 years old.

The mysterious non-patterns of toddler behavior are particularly difficult for Phil, who's an engineer, to understand. In his mind, a particular pattern of input should reliably produce a similar pattern of output (let's call this Phil's Second Law of Toddler Motion). He likes to analyze Eli's tantrums to review how we can change our behavior to prevent future meltdowns. (This Monday-morning post-tantrum quarterbacking is exactly as enjoyable as you can imagine.) So he's always saying things like: "Historically we know that when Eli eats yogurt for breakfast during a waxing moon phase, he'll require one or more hours of physical stimulation before 10 a.m. in order to facilitate optimal midday napping. So in the future we should ensure that all yogurt consumption is accompanied by early visitation to (a) the Hall of Science or (b) Twinkle Playspace."

But what Phil's Second Law of Toddler Motion repeatedly fails to account for is the Toddlers Are Bat$&!t Crazy escape clause, which decrees that every force you exert upon a toddler to produce a reaction will eventually be accompanied by an equal and opposite reaction. Like last night at dinnertime, which went like this:

Eli: "I want a meatball. I want a meatball. I want a meatball. I WANT A MEATBALL!"
Meatball is placed in front of Eli.
Eli: "I don't want a meatball! I WANT PEANUT BUTTER!"

So when we had this remarkably perfect unremarkable day, I had a realization that was a relief: We hadn't done anything differently than usual. We hadn't hustled Eli out of the house as early as possible to burn off energy or fed him a specially protein-packed lunch or infused the morning with the correct balance of screen time. We just had a remarkably perfect unremarkable day because, well, toddlers are bat$&!t crazy and this time it worked in our favor.

Rachel's Laws of Toddler Motion

1. A toddler in motion tends to stay in motion unless acted upon by a parent attempting to direct the motion of the toddler toward the door of the house because it's time to leave, at which point the toddler will plant himself in a corner and refuse to move. A toddler at rest has probably been clubbed over the head or plied with a pacifier and blankie.
2. The acceleration of a toddler toward an object is inversely related to the parent's desire for the toddler to leave the object alone (i.e., the more forcefully a parent expresses a desire for the toddler to stay away from the object, the faster the toddler will accelerate toward that object). More undesirable objects will require a greater magnitude of force to be exerted on the toddler: For example, a toddler's acceleration toward a toothbrush at bedtime will require a much greater magnitude of force than his acceleration toward a cookie.
3. For every action there is an equal and opposite bat$&!t crazy toddler reaction.

Only the lonely?

Lately, Eli is enamored with the idea of eating vegetables and vitamins to grow big and tall. So this morning, after I gave him a vitamin, he announced: "I'm a big boy, Mommy. I'm not going to be your baby anymore."

When we got to school, he took his own jacket off, handed me some cars and told me to put them in his cubby, independently cleaned some toys off the classroom floor and then sat down for breakfast at the table with his friends.

On Monday, he'll officially turn 2.5 (happy half-birthday!), but he's obviously already a grown-up.

When Eli had just turned 2, it seemed like all my mommy friends were pregnant or already had their #2. At first this seemed shocking to me. Our children were literally just born. How could anyone be onto their second?!

Then, somewhere about the time Eli started running his own nighttime routine by telling me, "Get in the bed. Lay down. Lay down all the way! We need two books. I'll get the books. Stay until the song is over. Kiss my other cheek!" ...I realized that time is a crazy mistress. Our children were not literally just born. Our children were well on their way to becoming threenagers.

I sort of always suspected we might stop at "just" one child. My husband and I are both only children. To be honest, I think it worked out pretty well for me. I was close with my parents growing up. I entertained myself and got comfortable around adults. I was independent and self-sufficient.

Of course, my friend Marissa would say I also never learned how to share. And as an adult with a child of my own, it makes me sad that Eli doesn't have any aunts or uncles or cousins.

But financially, logistically, emotionally, it makes sense that Eli will be our only child.

You've heard the expression "baby fever" -- that feeling you get when your own baby is now a bona fide big kid and you get to hold a sweet, snuggly infant? I don't think I've ever had real baby fever. I love getting to hold my friends' newborns and infants, but to be honest, it freaks me out at the same time. I once had one of these! Look at the creepy faces he's making! I forgot that weird graspy thing they do with their hands! Oh man, she's rooting, she totally expects me to breastfeed her right now!

I think what I want is not a baby, but my baby over again -- the chance to go back and hold a teeny Eli tucked in one arm, to see that delighted smile again for the first time. To squeeze his chubby thighs and rock him in the glider and sing him his goodnight song without him interrupting to request a different song altogether.

Still, I always feel a twinge of something when I find out another mommy friend is pregnant again. I haven't been able to figure out what it is, because I always search myself for the will to have another child and I can never find it.

Then I realized: Although I don't want another child, I'd sort of like to be the kind of person who does want another child. I'd like to be the kind of mom who isn't afraid to do it all again.

But I'm not that kind of mom. And for a long time I thought that those other moms were somehow stronger or more capable than I am -- you know, I can barely handle one toddler, how can they handle two?!

I'm envious when I see my Facebook friends post pictures of their kids together. But it's the same kind of envious I feel when I see that someone works on Sesame Street, the job I always wanted -- that wistful feeling of having chosen a different path.

So instead of thinking so much about all those lasts -- This is the last time Eli will ever sleep in a crib -- I'll try to think ahead to all the firsts we'll have as a family: the first time we'll go on a plane ride, or the first time Eli goes on a sleepover and Phil and I are weirdly kid-free for the evening.

For now, I've made one thing very clear to Eli: He is a big boy. But now and forever, he is still my baby.