Happy 2009 from an Ornery 2-year-old

Wow! It’s 2009 already. How did that happen? As predicted, we barely made it awake to see the ball drop and see the end of 2008. But we sure do have a lot of great memories from the year. In the recent past, we did our whirlwind tour of the midAtlantic for Christmas. We started out at my brother’s family’s house where the 2 year old in Rinat fully surfaced in the form of pushing his sweet cousin when she got too close to ‘his’ toys. That did not go over well with us. But we had a ton of fun while we were there- trips on the train to see the singing bears, the gigantic indoor 4 story high jungle gym (why do we not have one of those here?- and btw, it scared the bejeezus out of me), exploring the supercool children’s library, and just hanging out wrestling with his cousin. It was great. Next stop- LBurg. We got there a day before Christmas Eve to find out that the Santa gift had not arrived so of course Peter had to go shopping at the last minute and went totally overboard as usual. But I have to say that he did enjoy putting the train together during cocktail hour after Rin went to sleep and that’s half the fun anyway, right? And it was well received by our little conductor wannabe. He completely understood the Santa thing and knew exactly what to do when he got up. For my own sanity, and because I wanted to make sure everyone else was up before he came down, I told him Santa wasn’t finished delivering gifts until the sun came up so we hung out in bed for a while and waited for the sun. He kept asking “Santa come?” and so after hearing everyone already downstairs, we went creeping slowly down. He saw the huge display that the jolly guy had left and tiny cautious little smile took over his adorable face. It looked something like “Oh my gosh, look at that train- is it really all for me?” and looked at us for reassurance that it was true. It was kind of reminiscent of when we first saw him in the arms of his careworker at the baby house- Is it real? Can I believe it?- and I looked at Gulsanna to see if it was really true the way he looked to us for the same thing. There were, of course, a multitude of gifts and we could hardly fit them all in our car when we drove back to DC. For his 2nd birthday (Dec 26 for those who don’t know) we just made some cupcakes and he spent most of the day at our friend Tray’s house visiting with the menagerie that they have. It was a good day. But I can’t believe how quickly he is growing up. I know I say it every single time, but it is just flying by and it makes me a little sad. His speech in particular is sounding more and more grown up every day. Now, instead of calling the cat “BowBow” (MeowMeow), he has started calling him Massie and saying ‘meow’ like a big boy. And ‘water’ instead of ‘wawa’. What’s next? Oh yeah, we were at a party over Christmas and he heard everyone calling his Dada “Peter” and started calling him that recently. Boy is that kid observant. I sure hope he gets into a good preschool because I don’t know what else to teach him these days! Coming up in the near future is a cross country flight to visit Grandma Shay and Uncle Ted/ Aunt Liz so if anyone had foolproof tricks for dealing with a toddler who hates to be confined and has a penchant for shrieking at the top of his lungs when told No, please send them my way. Happy 2009 everyone! -m