Jan. 27, 2011: Say my name, say my name...

You know, the thing about being a mom is that you really don't have time to update a mom blog. So, yeah, sorry about that. Doing the best I can here.

In big news today: Gavin asked for me specifically by name. While I was in the bathroom. So I didn't hear or witness this. But Stacy was pretty excited about it. So it must be real. As I said, I didn't experience this firsthand, but I have every reason to believe that it is true ("every reason" being that I want it to be true).

One of Gavin's favorite things right now is wearing grown up shoes. Especially Aunt Laura's boots. She has several pairs of Doc Martens that he loves to put on. The other day when I went to pick him up at daycare he was shuffling around in one gray ladies pump and one tan ladies pump. He was also wearing a 1970's fashion vest and carrying an orange purse. Where am I sending him, daycare or RuPaul University? I'm kidding. I thought it was adorable. Especially when Shelly, his daycare teacher, looked at his shoes and said, "Pretty!" So he digs playing dress up at daycare. This doesn't surprise me since we have put him in many articles of our clothing for our own personal amusement. Once Stacy tied her bra onto Gavin's chest and sent him out in the living room to show Aunt Laura, who then cracked up. That's how a lot of this stuff happens. He'll eventually realize that "Go show Aunt Laura" means we're making him do something ridiculous.

More and more words are being tested out around these parts. Gavin is really into "B" words and sounds right now. This morning he pointed to a baseball in an illustration on the front of one of his shirts and said, "Ball." He also says blue, button, ca-ca (which is peanut butter, because the Spanish word for "peanut" is "cacahuete," so Stacy calls peanut butter "something-something-cacahuete." So now he calls peanut butter ca-ca. Great. Thanks a lot, Spanish. I can't wait to explain to social services why my son's favorite thing to eat is "ca-ca"), down, here, drop, yeah, mas (Spanish for "more"). I'm sure there are others I am not thinking of.

Horsey is another favorite activity. Stacy gallops around the house with him on her back. In the mornings he often wakes me up by jumping on top of me and saying, "Jump, jump," which means he wants me to pretend to buck him off, which he loves. Going from "completely asleep to "playing horsey" is a little rough, but having a smiling, happy child staring at me first thing in the morning makes up for it.

A couple mornings ago Stacy heard a helicopter over our house and so she pointed out the sound to Gavin telling him what it was. He ran into his room and pulled his puzzles onto the floor. They're wooden sound puzzles, so the act of pulling them off the shelf involved many noises of various farm and zoo animals and cars and trucks. He came out of his room holding two pieces and ran toward Stacy. He was holding two helicopter puzzle pieces, each from a different puzzle. So I need to say we were blown away by this? He understands so much now it's almost unreal.

I spent a half an hour in my driveway after I got home from work wrestling with the cover for the car seat. I had some damage to my car a few weeks ago so it was in the shop and in the process of repairing it they got Bondo dust all over everything. They took all of the loose items out of the car and put them in the trunk and then they wiped the whole inside of the car out, but I didn't want to put Gavin back in his seat again until I'd been able to wash that cover. So, yeah, a half hour later and I have the cover off and I see that the label inside the cover says, "Do not machine wash." What? This is a cover for a car seat, yes? And the Britax people know kids are overwhelmingly disgusting, right? So why the hell is this thing so complicated to take off, for one, and why does it apparently not survive the wash. What am I supposed to do with it? Take it down to the river with my washboard and drape it over a rock to dry? No. Fuck you, Britax, seriously. Taking the cover off entails way too much contact with the cover. I kept thinking, "What if Gavin puked in here? I've got to dig around in his puke to find the straps and release buttons and whatever else holds my kid in his car seat? I wanted the thing washed thoroughly and so I put that cover in the wash on delicate cycle and hung it to dry and when I went the next day to put it back on, it looked as good as new. So Britax is a liar, basically. Still, I'm counting on them to keep my kid safe. Any other thought is untenable. The bottom line is that car seats shouldn't be so difficult to install and the covers should certainly be removable for cleaning. Is that too much to ask?