Happy

Limelet is doing much, much better in his new class.  Several times now he has smiled as he waved bye-bye to me in the morning, which has never never happened before.  He does still cling to me and then to Mr. Luke (usually) or Ms. Sarah (sometimes) when I hand him over.  But he seems much happier.  He's also started interacting with other kids in public (like at the park) a lot more.

 

This morning when I dropped him at daycare, the class was outside in the little playground area, and some of the children were playing with a big plastic baseball and bat.  Instead of clinging to me as usual, he said, "They're playing baseball.  I want to play baseball!"  And he actually wriggled out of my arms and ran off with barely a goodbye.  This would have been unimaginable even a month or so ago. I'm so relieved.

 

Over the weekend we visited a new park and Limelet played with a little boy who was perhaps a year older.  Now in the way of most older children, this other boy was bossing Limelet around, which Limelet was mostly ignoring.  The other boy showed him a pile of wood chips that he was using to "make a pizza," and Limelet obliviously pushed the entire pile off the little ledge onto the ground.  The other boy got upset.  Not terribly, but in the way of "hey, you're ruining it!"  I translated to Limelet that the older boy was trying to make a stick pizza, and suggested that he help him get some more sticks.  Limelet became concerned that the other boy was upset.  "Oh, okay, I'm sorry.  Are you alright?" he asked, solicitously tilting his head.  It was really cute.  I'm happy he can apologize and make amends already, because that's a difficult skill that a lot of adults still lack.  (I attribute this to our willingness to apologize to him ourselves, instead of pretending we didn't do something or insisting we were right when we obviously weren't.) 

 

He still phrases some things awkwardly, and some phrases have even become ingrained family slang, such as "You want no?"  Meaning, "I don't want this."  But he's moving a lot more towards proper pronouns.