Part of Ju's prepping for school is working with his fine motor coordination. He has loved to paint and color since he was 1 and he has been beading with pony beads for the last 4 months. About a year ago, I got him some plastic (yes, even the blades) safety scissors to practice with, but after a few runs, they wouldn't cut anything anymore, so I started letting him use the pink handled kid's scissors that Sheila left here two years ago. Mostly, he would just cut little pieces off the edges of papers and that was interesting for him and I let him make little messes all over. Then they disappeared and he went over a month without cutting anything. This past weekend I bought a new pair of standard kid's school scissors for him and now it seems somewhere in this month of no-cutting-time he has matured to a "cut strait lines through a piece" stage and is now making many paper strips here at my feet.

Today I wandered around a toy store, looking for new things for my classroom. Ju came. He was reasonably well behaved and left without a tantrum AND without getting anything. It was amazing. Now... could I risk taking him into Toys R Us next time we visit the States? hmmmmmm.......

Last night we went to the "Praia 24 horas" event to see some bossa nova played on a stage in the middle of the ocean (while the audience all sat on the beach). It was great fun - lots of food and drink vendors walking around, we met up with some friends, parking wasn't too much trouble, and you could swim out to the stage and tread water watching the artists sing and play right in front of you. I stayed out for half of one guy's set - I had forgotten I could just tread water like that for that long. (I actually think I swam a lot more last night than I really have since I moved here - I have a terrible fear of ocean currents and waves and rip tides that I'm not sure when and where it came from.) The event was well organized and safe and pleasant for a free event in Bahia; I was quite impressed. We even went so far as to take the digital camera for some nice random shots.

After we dropped off Isis and Vito (family friends; Vito is Ju's age minus 3 months) at 11:30, we came home and Gustavo had the great idea to skinny dip in the condo's pool. I have not skinny dipped here since I first moved here, mostly for fear of seeing my neighbors, or worse their kids, who are often out later than late. The good thing is that our house is right next to the pool, so anyone looking out of their windows to see us incognito would have to be doing it from ours - no worries there. I was rather nervous about it at first, since it's much easier to see that a woman is naked in the pool than a man (although because of tan lines this late in the summer, it is quite obvious) and I actually let my hair get all chlorinated in hopes that it would shield my embarrassment should we suddenly have company. After some time playing with Ju, who has gotten over his fear of going under the water after two months of swimming classes, I forgot I was naked until Gustavo pointed out that I had done so, at which point I started hearing voices and decided to get out before someone saw me. About 15 minutes after we got out, a bunch of teenagers took over the pool area until well after 2 am. Good timing!

Ju thourally enjoyed the experience and promptly asked to go swim naked as soon as he got up this morning. I explained to him that mommy and daddy can't swim naked during the day but that because he is small still, he can swim naked if he wants to, at home. He seems pretty excited about the prospect of going back into the pool and trying to swim, naked. Hopefully it will work the same way if I make him wear his sunga again.

At least it's healthy....

Ju has developed some rather strange eating habits. I chalk it up to my basic rule that snacking is okay as long as it's on healthy stuff. Don't all these health magazines keep telling us that grazing all day is more healthy than several full meals. A basic day of food might run like this:

7 am - yogurt with wheat germ
8:30 - banana squished up with powdered milk
10 am - two apples
11:30 - rice, beans, some frozen peas and maybe a can of sardines
3:30 - another apple and a yogurt drink
5:30 - 1 tomato, juice, a pear
7 pm - half a french bread roll, juice

Last week he would only agree to eat his veggie soup if I would let him dip his apple in it. He ate the entire bowl as a dip. On Monday we went out for sushi and he ate all the cucumber garnishes, the sea weed off several shrimp wraps, and the roe from the sushi rolls (large orange fish eggs that look like tapioca balls).

Everything these days is "mommy, papai, Juju" - three butterflies, three cups, three paint brushes, three rocks... Each set of three has a representative of each person in the family.

Ona is more and more decrepit by the day, not really walking so much as dragging her back legs along the floor to support her behind. The consequence of this is that she will often come in and poop on the tile floor somewhere rather than try to step into her litter box. Ju knows that coco is dirty and he can't touch it, so when he finds some, he usually comes to tell me and then watches as I clean it up.

This morning he found there was some on the veranda next to the litter box, and told me so, but since it was out there and not in the middle of foot traffic, I just said "okay, don't touch it, it's dirty. mommy will come clean it" and continued drinking my coffee. A little while later, he came to the top of the stairs and told me again, but this time accompanied by a long stretch of Ju language that I was unable to decifer, so I thought I'd better take a look. When I came up stairs I saw he had a diaper sitting in front of him, and inside it was the cat poop. Outside on the veranda I found another diaper with more cat poop in it. I guess he just wanted to help.

Some interesting random things from this week:

Since I took one side off Ju's crib, he's been climbing in and out several times a night, sometimes falling out onto the flip out chair we leave beside it for that purpose, and sometimes going to sleep in the hammock. The other night Gustavo went into say good night and he wasn't in any of the former listed places, but UNDERNEATH the crib, sleeping away on the hard tile floor in just a diaper. Gustavo reckons he was hot and got out to sleep for that reason, as it runs in the family (Gustavo will slither off the bed onto the floor if he's hot and NEVER sleeps with covers, even in the winter, usually). I think it's more likely he just rolled off and found his way under there.

Ju is getting very resourceful and is climbing everything! I had to take his Spiderman ball from him today and put it up on the bookshelf because he kept throwing it at the computer screen, so he just climbed right up the shelves and got it down again. This was a real test of limits for him, as he did it right in front of me, laughing the whole time. I should also mention this shelf is eye level for me, so he was up pretty high for him. Later, he kept doing the same thing with a straw hat, so I took it and placed it carefully on top of the standing fan. He went over and shook it a bit, to see if he could get it to fall off. When that didn't work, he looked around, spotted a t-shirt I had left hanging on the dining room chair, took it and started whipping it at the hat until it fell down. Where do they learn this stuff?

The things you learn from television or perhaps parents trying to be funny....

Ju has been obsessed with Cookie Monster since he started watch Sesame Street videos he got for his birthday. This slowly evolved into a Cookie Monster imitation of daddy being "papai monster" and pretending to try to eat him. About a month ago, Ju started tearing all the foam letters and numbers to pieces with his teeth, and recently discovered the joys of doing this to onion skin and spreading it around the house. Today he went one step further and did a cookie monster with his soup for dinner. He seemed to understand that this was not appropriate when I told him I was upset about it, and then proceeded to ask if he could go do it with the onions instead - "a cookie monster widdy uhn-uhn, num num num."

Strange finger positions. I'm sure this is genetic, but it's not from either of his parents.

Ju is now in a "what's this, mommy?" phase. I hear this question about 50 times a day and always try to answer it (how long do most moms stand this stage before they stop answering?). He is also trying to count "1,2,3,4,6,8,9" and everything is a "1,2,3 fill-in-the-object" And everything has the potential to be a car - a cracker, a shoe, a stick, a ripped up foam number...

Independence comes with a price.

Ju has been wanting to do things himself, like close doors, put things away, turn on the T.V. etc. This is a great development and I usually encourage him to do his own thing. He even has been waking up and coming downstairs by himself in the morning, usually right before I go out to catch the transport to work, and I leave him to watch a Sesame street video on the couch while daddy takes a shower. The nanny often arrives about 5 minutes later, and as far as I know, he has not gotten himself into trouble with his early morning activities unobserved.

Until today.....

On the weekends, Ju usually wakes up, comes to our room, sees we are still sleeping, and goes back to his room to play until he hears one of us in the shower. It's very polite of him to let us sleep and I had really stopped worrying that he would fall down the stairs or otherwise hurt himself. This morning apparently he decided to come down stairs to play, and by the time we got up at 7:30, he had found his way into the storage room (probably under the pretense of feeding the cat, which is his job every morning) and had made the biggest mess I have ever seen him make. Cat food had been thrown around the room, mixed with some sunscreen he had emptied onto the floor outside the door, a pile of stuff including a keyboard, old motherboard, and painting supplies had been knocked over and spread around, and he was digging in the bin of cat food with his beach shovels and rake. Not to mention that he had a huge poop in his diaper and it was slightly escaping down his legs. We removed him promptly and put him in time out (luckily on the stairs and not on the couch considering the mess he left when he got up later because of the leaking diaper problem) for the duration of cleaning the room, and then threw him in the shower. Does this mean we now need to close his door at night so he doesn't escape?

Ju is eating canned sardines and pumpkin and rice for dinner. Mmmmmm, healthy.


Ew, and he just called me in there to show me a maleka he picked out of his nose! Are all boys this gross? Makes you wonder how they grow up and marry....

Ju is actually forming full sentences, even if they aren't grammatical. I haven't really heard him doing it in Portuguese because he doesn't talk to me in Portuguese anymore, but yesterday he said this: "kitten papaya no want it" which translates into "the kitten doesn't want papaya." This sentences is probably the result of all the times he has thrown food at the cat, trying to see if she will eat it, and my telling him that she doesn't want it or doesn't like it. The interesting thing about this sentence is that he isn't recalling an utterance exactly from memory, because then it would probably be grammatically correct. It doesn't seem to be translated from Portuguese either, because the order would be different. I have no idea how normal it is, having never interacted much with native speakers of English who were less than 5 years old really (not counting baby sitting years - who can remember what happened before high school?), but it's really cool to see him take these sudden spurts of development in his language. He has also started saying "I sorry" when he does something wrong, and comes over and kisses me and says "I love you" if I am angry with him (how do kids know this makes us forget the broken DVD player, just for a moment?) . Which reminds me - today he broke the DVD player, no one is sure how, so getting him over his Thomas and Sesame street addiction should be easier now.

Funny story - There is a group of guys who walk around our neighborhood as security who blow a whistle to let us know all is well. It's part of the background noise to me, like the barking dogs and traffic sounds. About a month ago, Ju suddenly became aware of them and kept saying it was a bird ("passarinho"), and I kept telling him it was the "segurança." Finally last night when he heard the whistle, he said "bird no. Seguarança." A little while later we were looking at a book with a parrot in it, and I told him something like "it's a parrot, a bird that is a parrot" to which he replied "parrot no. Segurança." I love how kids' brains work.

Ju has some kind of stomach thing, possibley rotavirus, and is pukey, feverish, and generally cranky and whiney. We travel tomorow; 18 + hours on planes, 4 airports, to go visit my parents for a month. I hope we can deal with the issues. It's too bad, because he is usually wonderful on flights, one of those kids who everyone sees and dreads having on their flight, and then compliment his behaviour afterwards. He doesn't want to eat much, and won't really sleep very well either, and generally cries a lot. He has been drinking pedialyte out of a medicine dropper because most things won't stay down, but we won't be able to take it with us on the plane, so I am not sure what we will do for him.

At the moment he is laying passively on the couch, watching Looney Toons. I am not an advocate to plugging your kid in, but when he's this whiney, it's a life saver to have him loose his focus on the uncomforable feelings he's having and just veg for a bit so I can type or pack suitcases. I'm not sure how much of his whining is due to genuine pain and discomfort and how much is due to the fact that he has percieved he is getting a lot more attention since he's been sick. Yesterday he got to be in my lap the whole day and slept in our bed with me and has been carried around all day. He's getting spoiled.

The battle for sleep continues. Unfortunately, daddy is sabotaging all my hard work because he misses his son ( can't blame him ) and goes in there to keep him company while he falls asleep. Now here I am, daddy working late, and Ju is up there, crying alternately for mom or dad. He already knew it was going to happen when I put him in there - as soon as I started reading the goodnight story, he starting crying and throwing a fit. If he keeps it up, he may stay awake until daddy get's home at 11.

Is there like a switch or something? Kids pass the two year mark and suddenly - snap - there are the tantrums, the throwing on the floor, the indecision game playing, the pinching, the finicky eating... It's amazing! Another switch that has been flipped is the "potty peeing" switch, brought on by the interest in wearing a "tecka" (cueca - underwear). No interest in doing the same for coco though. oh well.

I have come to the conclusion that my lack of posting is not due to my lack of time (although actually turning on the computer and writing something before I fall asleep with Ju could make a difference), nor is it due to my attention being constantly diverted to other habitants of this house. It seems my inspiration to write comes only when I am far away from the computer, or at school, where the computer is even slower than this one (hard to believe, I know!). It's hard for me to feel disaplined enough to sit down and write when I feel like it - there always seems to be something else I'll do online and forget about it. Or worse, I am out somewhere and think "I will write about this today" and then by the time I get home it is only a vague inclination and lacking in all the inspiration that I felt at the time the idea was concieved.

For instance, last weekend was a lunar eclipse. I cannot remember the last time I saw one really, not when I knew that was what I was looking at. I had totally forgotten about it until someone else at the party I was at pointed out that the moon was doing something funny. Then it took us another half hour of observation to convince the rest of the guests that it was in fact an eclipse and not just clouds or phases of the moon. I was so inspired to watch it, but at the same time thinking "well, there will be another one in August, so really, why bother." I tried to recall how we had watched eclipses in the States - I couldn't remember. I imagined everyone would be out on their porches, gazing at the sky, watching in awe in the cold (probably very far from the truth). And then I imagined that people around the world were watching it with us. And then we left the party and driving home I saw that almost no one on the street (and there were a LOT of people out, being a Saturday night and all) seemed even remotely aware of what was going on. No one was looking. Like comming back to reality, by the time we got home, I had forgotten it, and so I wrote nothing.

Ju has become a three word sentence maker. I think I did post that before. He also suddenly has the ability to recognize shapes. He has a turtle-put-the-cups-in-the-same-shaped-holes-toy that I got for him when he turned 1 because he was so into putting things inside of other things. He never figured out that the star shaped cup goes in the star shaped hole, the flower shaped cup going in the flower shaped hole, etc. For half a year he played with this thing off and on. The last time he had it out was in December. Suddenly on Thursday night he asked to play with it and so I got it out. He immediately put all the cups in the correct holes. Just like that. Suddenly he can do it. I almost cried I was so excited.

"não não ah-oo gato" = don't put water on the cat

"pum bapeesh" = I farted on the crayons

Ju has begun to draw lines, very nice strait ones, with his crayons. He has been coloring figures for a while, but now he will hand you a crayon and tell you "gato" if he wants you to draw a cat so he can color it. We made a very nice drawing on Thursday night that I took to school on Friday to show off and display. Like all people with kids, or with new-anything-living (this includes puppies, cats, nieces, nephews...) every new development is an amazing step into the world. Actually, having kids makes you want to do a degree in child development, just so you can compare "yes, he did this, no not this...." etc.

The weather here has taken a turn for the "winter-like" a little early this year. Usually this rain/sun/blow/hot/cold all in the same half hour confusion doesn't start until at least April. I don't mind it unless it keeps the kids inside at school and they turn into loud little bouncey monsters because of lack of running space. Also, Ju is watching an absurd amount of TV because I can't take him for a long walk in the rain. His obsession has moved from "Cars" to "The Lion King," until yesterday when I brought home a DVD of "Bear in the Big Blue House" about potty training (innate messages can't hurt, right?) that he seems to be enjoying quite a bit. He likes to watch things that he can identify and say the names of the animals or objects - there is a "mah-oosh"(mouse), a "moon," and he seems to enjoy the shadow puppet part. Even now he is trying to call my attention from the computer to watch the beginning part where the bear sniffs you. So cute.

Adjectives! Today Ju said "bih mesh" - BIG MESS!