Blah blah blah

There's a lot of talking going on around here. I've got scraps of paper in every room with quotes scribbled on them, so here's a round-up from the last few days:

Yesterday Isaac was exploring the walk-in closet in the master bedroom, and he noticed the detached side panel of his crib leaning up against the wall. We removed it way back in March to make his toddler bed, so I'm not sure he even remembers sleeping in an actual crib. I explained that his bed used to have four sides, and he thought about this for a moment. "Now it only has three sides," he said. (What do you think? Did he do subtraction? Or did he just visualize and count the remaining three sides in his head?)

By some lucky coincidence, Isaac has pooped on the toilet for two days in a row. (It's a coincidence because it's not like he asked to sit on the toilet either time, and I didn't expect him to do anything more than pee. But somehow he managed to deliver.) He feels pretty good about it. At first he said it made him happy, and then he said he wouldn't need the changing table any more, and then today he said, "Isaac getting to be a man."

This comment, however, contradicts another of Isaac's recent remarks -- after looking at his own bare chest, he said, "Those are nipples. Must be woman."

This morning we were supposed to meet a group of friends at a coffee shop / indoor playground in Oakland. We had never been there before, so I tried to describe it to Isaac -- it has a variety of pretend play areas, including a train table, a fire station, and a grocery store. To my surprise, he didn't want to go. He said very firmly, "I don't want to go anywhere; I want to stay here and play outside." I figured he would change his mind, so I started getting ready to go anyway, but he actually began whining and stomping his feet. So we didn't go. Instead we went outside and weeded the garden.

And just a little late for Thanksgiving, Isaac had a very sweet thing to say about the dinner I made for the two of us last night. Without any prompting he turned to me and said, "Thank you, Mama, for the yummy muffin. And chili. And corn. Thank you for the yummy dinner, Mama."

Since he often talks with such proficiently, I'm afraid that pretty soon I'm going to have to stop writing posts like this. When does it stop being interesting that your kid can string together a sentence? I mean, no one follows a ten-year-old around writing down everything he says so they can post it on the Internet. Well, maybe I've got a year or two left before I need to find a different angle.