My squishy Tobin,

I started writing this just now, and I entitled it “The Tobin Times #22.”  Then I looked back at last months, and I realize I did the math wrong:  you’re only 21 months old now.  That’s good news.  It’s like I get a bonus month with you.  It won’t be long before I have to do some serious calculations to figure out your age in months, but I thought for the time being I could still keep a tally in my head.

Photo by Denny Crall

I guess that goes to show how cluttered my head is.  Things have been busy lately.  We’re just wrapping up our mini-vacation, which involved a trip to Lincoln for Uncle Tyler’s wedding (technically this occurred after your 21-month birthday, but it’s fresh in my mind now, so I’m going to write about it for this month).  We had such a good time.  You were a very good boy in the car, only getting a little antsy a few times.  You love Skittergramps’s blue van, so it was a treat for you to have some extra rides in it.  We went to the Lincoln Children’s Museum, which was so much fun.  You really liked the big red truck, the water table, and the stage.

When you played on the stage, you put on a fierce face and said, “I bad guy.”  I thought it was so cool how you’re learning to pretend, to separate fantasy from reality.  You understood that a stage is a place to act like someone else, and you showed us just whom you wanted to be.

I knew it was just pretending, because you’re really not a bad guy at all.  You have stinker tendencies sometimes:  today you threw a ball right in your brother’s face.  But you’re getting better at acting contrite when we scold you.  You say you’re sorry and have the decency to act sad about it, rather than laughing like you used to.  Well, you still sometimes laugh when you throw food on the floor.  I guess I should just be glad that you seem to realize hurting others has negative consequences.  We’ll keep working on the food-throwing.

Another fun Lincoln adventure was a trip to the Lincoln Children’s Zoo.  It’s a small zoo, but a fun and nice one.  You really liked riding a pony, seeing and petting the baby goats, and getting a look at some more exotic creatures like peacocks and tamarins.

The biggest highlight of the trip, of course, was spending time with Uncle Tyler and your new Aunt Oxana.  We got to meet Oxana’s family from Russia, and they thought you and your brother were very well behaved, though they did comment on your high energy levels.  You were so good during the wedding.  You didn’t cry or cause much distraction during the ceremony, and you tore up the dance floor with your brother and cousins during the reception.  You got to stay up way past your bedtime on more than one of those nights in Lincoln, but you adapted well and were generally a great kid to have around.  You can say Oxana, though I’m not sure you ever said it directly to her.  You have plenty of years left to do that.

Oxana and Tyler and building a new house, which is still under construction.  We stopped by the site, and it’s going to be a lovely house,  it wasn’t a very safe place for you to roam free.  There were building materials lying around and wet joint compound on the walls and floors.  You got wiggly while we were taking the tour, so finally I found as safe a place as I could see and let you down for a bit.  You immediately found a pile of lumber scraps and build a block tower.

You continue to say funny and interesting things.  Your favorite word right now is enormous, which is pretty cute to hear come out of your little bald baby-looking head.  You really liked the enormous windmills we saw on our drive through western Iowa and Nebraska, and you talked about them a lot.  You also recently used the word yesterday in the correct context.  We were outside on a Sunday, and you said, “We dig in garden yesterday,” and in fact we had.  I think it’s pretty cool that you’re gaining a conception of relative time.  That’s hard to grasp and hard to explain.

Photo by Gary Clarke

You love attention from big kids, such as your brother, his schoolmates, and your cousins.  At the wedding, some cousins were kind of manhandling you, but you loved it.  The downside is that your brother learned some bad habits, like picking you up.  The even downer downside is that you laugh when he does it, which isn’t much disincentive.  You guys still get along quite well.  Your only squabbles are about sharing toys, pretty much.  You want to do everything he does, including ride on the big-kid part of the double stroller.  That doesn’t always work out so well.  But you are always ready to go get him when his school day is done, and he often greets you with a big hug.  I think you’ll miss him when he starts going to school until 3:00.

We don’t have too much planned for the rest of the summer—maybe a long weekend in Chicago, but mostly just hanging around, going to the library and the Natural History museum, eating flavor ices and frozen yogurt, playing in the garden and at the playground.  I’m sure you’ll have fun in the sprinkler and at the pool.  Enjoy the warm days ahead, little Tobin.  I’m excited to spend them with you.

Love,

Mommy