there was a star danced, and under that was a bigger ben born

Editor’s Note: I began writing this blog entry on the eve of Ben’s 2nd birthday and I am just now finishing it. It’s been a little busy, this life of mine. Rest assured Benjamin is doing fine, as is his mama. Benjamin says hello to you from the living room, where he is currently playing tee-ball with everything in the room but the tee-ball itself. Benjamin also just asked me to apologize to you on his behalf for my neglect in writing this blog (he is so ashamed of me), and for not letting him have that last cookie. What?! Nevermind the cookie, Benjamin! It’s mine! No, Benjamin - it’s mine! No, mine! No, no! Mine!!!


April 16, 2007:
We come to this again: Twenty-four months, seven hundred and thirty days, a couple doctor well-visits and a couple doctor sick-visits, a sixth diaper size, and another five hundred fifty million worried thoughts. From size 2T to 4T. From those shaky, uncertain first few steps up the neighbor’s sidewalk, to a confident yet still wobbly run around the house. From a climb up five meager stairs in the hallway, to a climb atop the towering playground with a baseball bat in his hand and a handful of toddlers on his shoulder. Eating with fingers to eating with utensils (usually). Two naps cut down to one. From “mamma” and “da-dee” to “Happy Birthday to You!”, and “No no, mommy - that’s MY bread!”


Looking back on what I was thinking at this point last year [holy holy holy macaroni], I’m glad to see that some things haven’t changed. Ben is still one very happy kid, and he still has a penchant for making us laugh. It all started at 6 months old with his ear-to-ear grins [chuckle]. Then, when he figured out that he possessed the ability to make the people around him happy - and sometimes downright hysterical - he amended his comedic repertoire to include the “snort” [natural selection], which he loved more than anything to perform for his grandparents on Saturday afternoons, and a never-ending stream of goofy faces, a wiggly bottom, and cracker dancing [cracker dancing].

And he’s still big. Freakishly big. Have you ever seen an engorged lemur? Yeah, um. . .no - me either. But I bet Ben is a lot bigger. His latest trip to see Dr. Bolton provided us with the opportunity to plot his height and weight on this dandy little chart [see here]. If you look closely, you’ll see that his weight is plotted so far above the weight-curve, it almost makes it onto the height-curve. He’s the size of a large 3 year-year old. . . brontosaurus.


The funny thing is, he’s stopped eating. When he was little (now that’s an oxymoron) he would eat anything you placed within 30 feet of his face. Peas. Carrots. Chicken. Tennis shoes. Now, you could put an ice cream-covered cupcake with candy sprinkles and chocolate-covered yumminess on his plate, he’d take two bites, start playing with the frosting in his hair, then fling a spoon-full of cupcake at the wall until daddy gets too frustrated to watch anymore and has to leave the room to go watch baseball.

37 inches. 37 pounds. That’s an inch per pound. If he keeps this up, he’ll grow to be over 16 feet tall! He could be a professional apple-picker.

And now the talking. It’s taken him some time to get a good hold on the speech thing, but he’s finally coming around. He can count to 20, say his ABC’s (the song is a little muddy, but it’s cuter that way), and he has a few phrases and sentences that he uses with regularity. I think one of his favorites might be, “No no daddy!” because that’s just about the only thing I ever hear him say when I’m around.

Personally, I love it when he tries to mumble out a conversation that only he, I’m guessing, can understand. It’s so funny! You ask him a question like, “How was your day today, Benjamin?” and he responds - his chin half-buried in his chest, sheepishly looking back up at you with that crooked grin - with a low-volume stream of unintelligible vocabulary and cute mutterings interspersed with his tiny little breaths and just a few clearly-spoken words like “doggie”, “park” and “slide”. I can’t say that I know anything more about his day than I did before I asked (other than, maybe, that he met a dog at the park, picked him up, carried him up the ladder and pushed him down the slide) but hearing him try to hash it all out for us is well worth the time.


And of course, with all this growing, learning, and reasoning flying around his bedroom, we’re bound to experience a couple drawbacks. A few weeks ago Ben decided that he was too cool for his crib. And every morning at 5:00 a.m. he would let us know. Leaping out of his crib, Benjamin would prance into our bedroom, his two favorite stuffed-animals in tow, grab a children’s book on his way to our bed, and proceed to read to us while we slept. And by “read to us while we slept” I mean, “sat on our pillows while our heads were still there on the pillows and demand that we read to him RIGHT NOW or else he’ll go downstairs all by his self, turn on the television and mistakenly turn up the volume thinking it was the channel button until it gets so loud that it no longer seems worth it to stay in bed any longer dreaming of the days when 5:00 a.m. on Sunday morning meant you had 7 more hours to sleep before you even thought about waking up.”

So we set him up with a “big boy” bed, which (as I write this nearly two months later) he has promptly out-grown. Funny how that works.

So. . . I must go now. As Ben likes to say as he sees me off every morning. . .

“Bye bye, daddy! Go to work. Have fun!”