Bean, counting his birthday candles.
Bean had a good birthday. His favorite part was that it lasted “all of the whole day long”.
Current status. Negotiating for the car keys.
Yesterday some people were posting their all-time favorite photos. My contribution was a wedding photo of my parents wherein they look like American Gothic meets Buddy Holly meets Annie Hall.
This is my OTHER favorite photo of all time. The little boy is my brother. The girl I’m sharing the chair with has been one of my very best friends since we were six months old. Her name is Gemma. Bean and I went to visit her a few weeks ago and she kept picking him up and studying his face and saying, I can’t believe he’s yours!
(She meant that in a nice way.)
Bean started going to school in Grenada when he was about two and a half. He was the youngest kid in the classroom, which worried me a little at first, but it worked out well in the end, because the older boys made him their mascot.
He loved school. He had a uniform, a yellow and white checked shirt and khaki shorts. His hair had never yet been cut, so every morning his father slicked it back into a neat (and manly!) ponytail. Then I we walked together the three blocks to a church with no roof. The roof had been blown off during Hurricane Ivan, and was being repaired the entire time Bean attended, and so the place was kind of like a construction site, which of course the child loved, because he gets almost as much glee from cement trucks as he does from chocolate.
I say the roof was missing, and it was, but Bean and his classmates were well-covered, because the church was two stories, the school was on the first and the floor of the second story was intact.
On Grenadian Independence Day, there was a class trip to Grand Etang, which is a beautiful natural lake in the rainforest that sits right in the center of the island. I tagged along, and it was a wonderful day.
I took this photo in front of the school, in the morning while we were gathered waiting for our bus to arrive. The kids are all dressed in their “national colours”. Independence Day commemorates the end of Grenada’s time as a colony of the British Empire. It should not be confused with Thanksgiving, which celebrates the anniversary of that time some United States Marines landed on the island, sent there by Reagan in response to the (socialist) Grenadian Revolution.
(A photo very similar to this one ended up in the inside cover of the Grenada Yellow Pages. Click here and here.)
The last of the haircut spam. Pinky swear.
But seriously, folks? Does my kid have some jazz hands or what?
Classy baby is classy.
Bean is all about the driver’s seat. About a year ago, shortly after his third birthday, some firemen took us on a tour of their firehouse. One of them lifted him up and put him right behind the steering wheel of the big firetruck. Bean grinned, bounced around in his seat, and then looked down at the guy and said,
“You have keys?”
I know it’s bad manners to reblog myself in public. That’s why I try to only do it on Sundays.
Many times over the last several months, ever since he entered the phase where his question about everything he sees is “why?”, Bean has see me do something and then adjust or fix or redo it.
He’ll ask me what I’m doing and I’ll explain, “I made a mistake so I’m fixing it.”
“You made a mistake, Mommy? But… Why?”
My answer to that is a simple, “Everyone does.”
Thankfully, that makes sense to him.
(That’s my cousin Anna in the photo with him. He stayed at her house while I was in Chicago and they spent a lot of time in the garden.)
… and then he walked across it.
First, he got his sidewalk chalk and drew a ladder…
GPOYW Hungry Baby Edition
Obviously I don’t remember this photo being taken but I think I’m yawning here.
My Romance Studies advisor in college always said that yawning is about boredom and that if you yawn in someone’s presence it really means you want to eat that person. Devour them for the purposes of sating your ennui.
I think he might have read too much Sartre.
(Also, my ankles are doing a bit better today. One more day with my feet up and I may very well be able to walk without wincing.)
My BFF in Grenada just sent me this photo. No way am I cropping it.
“Check de child hand, nah!”
(large)
If you ask Bean what he wants to be when he grows up, he’ll tell you he’s going to be “a man with a beard like Daddy, but not like Uncle Bob because Uncle Bob’s beard is missing some spots.”
Bean will also correct you if he hears you describe a person as fat, because that’s “not nice and instead you should say ‘big’ because that’s nicer.”
A caption I never thought I’d write:
Here’s a photo I discovered on my three-year-old’s digital camera.
