Happy Feet

My socks make toes feel good. Look, they are wiggling. Mommy, wanna wiggle toes? We wiggle toes together. Ooo, shoes are giving feet hugs. Awww! My feet feel happy. Shoes make feet and toes happy!

The Nugget loves The Good Humor Man and frequently plays ice cream man. When we actually go out for ice cream or give him a homemade popsicle, we like call it one of the flavors from the book, like Raspberry Rockets or Pineapple Pockets, because his eyes light up and he starts giggling. The Nugget chose strawberry custard at our local stand, so we told him it was Strawberry Swirl. He got super giggly right away and kept exclaiming, "I eating strawberry squirrel! Strawberry squirrel so yummy. It's a tasty treat. Mmm, strawberry squirrel." Another time, he just eyed us with a jaded sigh and said, "It's not Nutty Nougat Neat, it's just vanilla with caramel sauce." We don't eat a lot of desserts but ice cream is definitely our family weakness.

A recent development is that the Nugget wants to smell everything. Not just flowers and fruit, but strange things like eyebrows, books, boxes, sand, clothes (dirty or clean), the dog, and I even caught him sniffing dog poop in the yard. We had a long talk about germs, although I can't claim that any of it stuck. He claims that everything, "smells like apples."

The Nugget likes to scat. Although he has the ability to form full sentences and 95% of his words are easily understandable to the general public, sometimes he just likes to let loose a strand of random syllables: "Ablooo-bizz-dizz-doobie-doot. Aka-pizz-yah." If you ask him what he said, he'll just look at you blankly, because clearly the scat has no meaning. It's just happiness and music pouring out of him.

One thing I didn't know about parenthood is that you can't just tell a young child that violence is unacceptable in any form. You have to go through each little act of violence and victim separately - sigh. That means it takes about 3 months to teach them not to hit you. Then 3 more months to teach them they can't hit Daddy either. Then 3 more months to teach them not to hit Friend A. Repeat. Next you go through the same thing with kicking, scratching, throwing blunt objects, biting, elbowing, etc. Because the Nugget remains an only child, Doggie is his sibling stand-in (playmate and competitor for parental attention) and is thus a frequent victim. Today, the Nugget experimented with poking Doggie with a stick. After acts of violence, the Nugget gets "Nugget time" to cool off and reflect, then he tells me what he did wrong, then he "makes it right". He apologized to Doggie today by saying comfortingly and lovingly, "It's ok Dog, it's ok. I just poked you with a stick." Here is our valiant pooch, recovering from too much Nugget love.