So Dante and I are at the park. He's decided he wants a snack, and I happen to have brought one, so we head over to this metal picnic table. He decides that he should sit on the table itself and I should sit on the bench, which is fine with me, since the bench is a little low for him anyway. As he's climbing up, though, I notice that his foot is about to come down on some sunglasses that somebody has left there, so I start stammering, "Oh, uh, erp, um..." He gets uncertain, says, "What?" and loses his balance.

He slid down between the table and the bench, whacking the back of his head on the seat. He didn't hit terribly hard, but it was hard enough to make him cry in pain. I held him and rocked him for a while, and when he was calm enough to talk again, he asked, "Do you still have love for me?"

To say I was taken aback by this question is a massive understatement. I was speechless for a second, and then rushed in with every reassurance I could think of, all at once. That he could never do anything to make me stop loving him, that it was an accident, that it was my fault, that I'll always love him, that he's worthy of love even when things go wrong, that my love will never stop, etc. etc. etc. He said, "I always thought that if I did something wrong, the love would stop." ("I always thought" is more or less equivalent to "I was just thinking.")

Laura told me he'd been exploring the same territory with her, trying to figure out if this whole parental love thing comes with any strings attached. We are nothing if not eager to assuage his anxiety on that score.

A few nights later, we're having the typical bedtime Q&A session, and out of pretty much nowhere he gives me a serious look and says, "My love for you will never stop." God, I tear up again just writing it down. It was amazing. He went on to a sort of mathematical approach. "We all love each other. I love you, and you love Mama, and Mama loves me. And I love Mama. And Mama loves you. And you love me." Even though I was trying to get him wound down and ready for bed, I had to bring him to Laura so we could all three have the moment together.

A few nights later, he was hugging his stuffed bears, Benjamin and James, who we call "the boys." He mentions to me, offhand, "My love for the boys will never stop." That made me smile. I said, "Yeah, I love you like you love the boys!", and he said, "But I love them so much!" "I know," said I. Watching him work out the mechanics of love is both heartwarming and heartbreaking to behold.

One more little story about this. Ever since before he was born, we've sung him The Beatles' "Good Night" as a bedtime lullabye. However at some point when I was singing the "Close your eyes and I'll close mine" verse, he objected. "But I want to keep my eyes open! If I close my eyes I won't be able to see." So okay, I'm flexible. I changed the lyrics, and now I sing, "Keep your eyes open and I will too / I hope you know I love you." And sometimes, every once in a while, he says, "I do."

You may remember the old Letterman routine "Brush With Fame", in which some audience member would talk about a rather quotidian meeting with a celebrity, and then Dave would say, "But that's not all that happened, was it?" At which point the audience member would acknowledge that yeah, there was more, and then relate some outlandish tale along the lines of "And then Ernest Borgnine saved me from Nazi frogmen!" while the words WRITER'S EMBELLISHMENT flashed on the screen. Or maybe it's just me that remembers that.

In any case, Dante totally pulled one of those today. There's some renovation going on next door to us, and Laura was telling me tonight that it was very noisy during their rest time. At which point Dante jumps in and says, "I woke up five times, and mama woke up NINE times!" Not only was this obviously a total fabrication, it is as near as we can tell not even based on any conversation or anything at all. Hilarious to me.

The language play thing is kicking into an even higher gear these days. It mostly centers around re-pronouncing words in wacky ways. It often takes the place of an actual reply, but just as often it is just conversational filler or even running commentary on somebody else's conversation. Examples:

DANTE: Where is your office?
ME: I'll show you.
DANTE: Ess-how.

ME: I've put some lunch on your table.
DANTE: Tah-blay. Tee-bull. Tee-a-bluh. Where is the milk?
ME: It's still in the refrigerator, staying cold.
DANTE: Reh-free-guy-ruh-tor!

LAURA: Did you call those people?
ME: Yeah, but there was no answer. Not even a machine.
DANTE: [From another room, mind you.] Ahn-swear!

There's also a spelling thing going on. A typical snippet of his conversation: "I was calling you! C-A-L-L-I-N-G." I'm starting to wish I was just wearing a wire all the time so that I could capture all this. It's classic, and writing it down doesn't do it justice.

What's 10 plus 10? Why?

What's 600 + 600? Why?

What's 25 + 25 + 25? Why?

What's 9,000 + 9,000? Why?

What's 9,000 + 100? Why?

What's 7 + 7 + 7 + 7? Why?

What's 7 + 7 + 7 + 7 + 7 + 7 + 7 + 7 + 7 + 7? Why?

What's 25 + 25 + 25 + 25 + 63? Why?

What's 5 minus 5? Why?

What's 1,000 - 1,000? Why?

What's 1,000 - 0? Why?

What's 0 - 0? Why?

I don't think of Dante as an especially anxious child, but his anxiety level has shot up recently, and it's all focused on one thing: flies. As it got closer to May, he started to say, "I'm worried about the flies." For whatever reason, he had it in his head that on May 1, warm weather would arrive and suddenly the place would be swarming with flies. He kept saying that he wanted April to have 31 days, or more, so that May wouldn't come. We reassured him, but he remained worried.

Lucky for us, May 1 turned out to be a cold, wet day, so it was easy to demonstrate that nope, the flies haven't descended upon us. The fly situation isn't that bad in Colorado anyway -- sometimes they can be around making a nuisance of themselves, but there are never bunches of them, and they aren't the biting kind. For many days after that, he'd say to us, "I always thought that on May first that all the flies would come." "I always thought" is a big speech formulation right now.

Still, the fear persists. Sometimes at night, or when he's feeling particularly tired or stressed, he'll say in this tiny, chokey voice, "I'm worried about the flies." I have adopted a five point informational program about the flies, which we rehearse together when this happens:

1) The flies cannot hurt anything they land on. They are too small to hurt people or things.

2) The flies do not bite.

3) If you are outside and you see a fly, it will just fly away. If a fly gets trapped inside with us, usually it just wants out. I am good at opening the door and persuading the fly to leave.

4) If the fly doesn't want to leave, we can whack it with a flyswatter or newspaper. [We bought a flyswatter especially for this purpose.]

5) You won't see a bunch of flies at once -- just one, maybe two.

Once we march through these points, he calms down and is able to sleep or whatever he needs to do.

From the department of not-at-all-amazing coincidences, this steep rise in anxiety corresponds exactly to Laura's hospital stay. For those of you who don't know, Laura developed a twist in her colon and had to have emergency surgery, then stay in the hospital for a week. (And for those of you wondering about the lack of updates on this blog, there's your explanation.) My parents helped a huge amount with the childcare, and Dante handled it all really well for the most part, but I'm quite sure that he's transferred a fair amount of his emotional processing over to this concept of the flies. The amount of fly fear is beginning slowly to decline, I think, so I'm hopeful that the reassurances are helping him work through the overall experience.

Dante has acquired a fascinating habit of language play in the last few months, and it's picked up and proliferated even more in the past week or two. For several months now, he's had the habit of stretching out the phonemes in a word. An example from tonight, with a bit of manners teaching thrown in:

DANTE: I want extremely cold water with ice cubes!
PAUL: [Saying nothing, I give him the "I think you're forgetting something" look]
DANTE: Will you please get it please? [He always says "please" twice once he remembers to ask politely. I've told him he only needs to say it once, but he seems to like saying it twice. Okay, whatever.]
PAUL: Good, I'll go get it.
DANTE: Please get kuh, yoo, buh, zuh! Kuh-yoobs! Not kuh-yoob!
PAUL: Oh, I see, you want me to make sure to give you multiple cubes, not just one?
DANTE: Yeah! Meltiple! Maltiple! Mull-tipple!

That last bit illustrates another thing he's started into lately, playing around with the phonemes and altering them just a bit to create variations on a word. Another thing he likes to do is skid and stutter on the last consonant sound. "Where is the bread-d-d-d-d-d-duh?"

Since Easter, I've noticed a new one: subtracting all the vowels from a word. The first time I really took in that he was doing it was as I was helping him do a headstand. He would slide backwards down my knees as I sat on the couch until he was on his head, and then raise his legs, just for a second. He couldn't balance much when I let him go, but he liked doing it. So he kept saying, "Let's do another headstand!"

Then it changed to, "Let's do another hdstnd!" (pronounced just like it looks.) Soon he was taking out most of the vowels as he talked to me. "Ddy! I wnt t d nthr hdstnd!"

It's amazing watching his brain become playful with language, now that he's getting more and more comfortable with it.

He's got these foam letters and numbers that he plays with in the bath. Tonight, he held up a number 8:

PAUL: Eight!
DANTE: How do you spell ate like food?
PAUL: Good question! Let me show you. [Picking letters out of the water and affixing them to the tile wall] It's spelled A-T-E.
DANTE: [Holding up the foam 8] This is an abbreviation.
PAUL: Yes, hilariously enough, people actually do use it as an abbreviation for the eating kind.
DANTE: [Puts the 8 after the ATE.] Ate 8!

***
He's periodically making up words these days. The finer teeth of a comb, according to him, are called "fleckletines." Which, I have to say, is an excellent name for them.

***
He was in a little play at preschool recently, where he played the smallest billy goat gruff. According to his teachers, his part was to stand on a table (aka bridge) and do a little dance. Which he did. Then, when the troll under the bridge threatened to eat him, he said (completely unprompted), "You don't want just a little snack!"

Dante and I walked to the park today -- well, he walked most of the way, and I carried him some, but it was still pretty good. He played on the playground equipment for a little while. For all his intellectual agility, he is often still pretty tentative about gross motor movements, so it's good to get him out and playing. In particular, he hit a new milestone today, though it's a bit hard to explain. Part of the equipment at this playground consists of something I can only think to call "bump stairs". It's a steeply angled ramp with evenly spaced bumps, each with a depth of about a third of the length of his foot. There are handrails on either side of them. Kids climb up them holding onto the rails, and kids with good balance can just climb up balancing on the balls of their feet.

He was always terrified of these stairs, and he still is, but today he decided he wanted to climb them. So I showed him how to do it, put his feet on the first bump and his hands on the handrails. He started making tiny, insistent distress sounds, and saying, "No no no! I'm going to fall!" I promised him I wouldn't let him fall, and braced him with my hands around his torso. I talked him through lifting his feet to the next bump, then moving one hand up the handrail, then the other. Then we did it four more times. He kept up the distress sounds the whole way through, but he made it, and all I was doing was bracing him, not lifting him. It was really exciting to me. Obviously, he's a long way from confident, but it's great to see him moving so far out of his comfort zone. He even came back down the stairs the same way, again scared as hell, but getting through it. He was very proud he'd done it. I called Laura when we were on our way home and told her about it, making sure he could hear. After I hung up, he said, "I want the phone!" He wanted to call and tell her himself. I told her he could tell her when we got home, and it was one of the first things he did.

Not only this, but bonus: he was so worn out by the walking, the playing, and again the walking that he took a nice long nap this afternoon. Woo!

And now, the thrilling conclusion to last week's cliffhanger. After thinking about atoms for a while, Dante suddenly veered into a riff on an entirely different book, Tick Tock by Lena Anderson and Elisabeth Kallick Dyssegaard. Each page of this book represents an hour in the life of a caretaker and his charges. They go to the park, enjoy some food, and he tries to get them to bed. We don't quite make it through the book, so spoiler alert: Will falls asleep at the end.

I've mentioned that Dante is on a science kick these days. Now here's video evidence, in which he and I discuss our friend, the atom. Note that this is pretty much raw footage -- apologies for periods of low sound or weird light.



Want to know what happens on that trip to the park? Tune in soon...

Lately, Dante will gather a bunch of similar items together, like clocks. (He asks me to take clocks down from shelves and off of walls for this purpose.) He arranges them to his satisfaction, then finds me or Laura. "I have a clock store!" he says, gesturing expansively to his inventory. "Which one of these would you like to buy?"

I'm a very interested customer. I ask if he's got a small one, or a blue one, or one with dots instead of numbers, or what have you. Sometimes if I seem to be having trouble deciding, he'll hit me with a sales pitch. "Did you know this one folds up? You could take it in a suitcase!"

My favorite part is that whenever I ask him the price, the answer is always the same: "One dollar!" It's really quite a bargain. Even more so considering he does not fully grasp the concept of money in exchange for goods, so more than half the time he pretends to give me the money along with the merchandise.

He's given me great deals on clocks, pan lids, and small glass beads. (On these last, by the way, it definitely pays to buy in bulk, since the price stays fixed no matter how many you're buying.) The only problem is that he can be kind of a high pressure sales guy. As soon as I've bought one clock, he says, "Now which one would you like to buy?" Still, you can't beat that price.

Let me tell ya about my new thing. It is Peggle! It is a game you play on the computer with a mouse. You click the mouse and a ball comes out, and it bounces around on a bunch of pegs. Then the pegs light up! And they disappear after lighting up. You have to get all the orange pegs to disappear, and when you do, it gets really exciting! It says EXTREME FEVER! And there are fireworks, and stars, and the ball turns into a comet! And lots of numbers flash!

There is also a bucket, and when the ball drops into the bucket, you get a FREE BALL! Oh, and sometimes there's a bounce and then it goes into the bucket, and that is a LUCKY BOUNCE! It is really funny. Other little words show up sometimes too, like if you get a lot of orange at once it is called an ORANGE ATTACK! Oh, oh, and sometimes you miss the pegs and miss the bucket and that is called a TOTAL MISS! HA! Then a coin goes flip-flip-flip-flip-flip and you either get NO BALL or a FREE BALL! I crack up when that coin starts flipping.

Oh, oh, oh, and wait! There are also MAGIC POWERS! They are like you can get MULTIBALL, which is like BWANG! Or SUPER GUIDE, which gives you the best idea of where the ball can go next, and there's a MAGIC LINE that you watch. Oh, and there's one that turns the BUCKET into a PYRAMID. I call it a PYRAM because that's a nickname I made up. You get the magic powers from green ones.

Mommy and Daddy put limits on the Peggle game, and I am okay with that, but I sure do love playing it when I get to play!

Dante is heading into a dinosaur phase. He got a dinosaur book from his school library (Cotton Creek does a weekly library trip for the kids) -- I think he was actually attracted to the big googly eyes on the front. Anyway, from this book he started asking us about dinosaurs. In particular, he was fascinated with what happened to them. He'd ask me over and over: "WHAT happened to the dinosaurs?" My answer goes like this, with caps approximating the emphasized words:

"Nobody really knows for sure WHAT happened to the dinosaurs, but SOME people think that an asteroid BANGED into the earth! When that happened, a HUGE cloud of dust came up and BLOCKED the sun's rays from reaching the earth for a long time. Without the warmth from the SUN, the dinosaurs got too COLD, and the plants they eat all went away, so they died. Then when all the dust settled, the dinosaurs were GONE."

This is usually followed about 30 seconds later by him saying, "WHAT happened to the dinosaurs again?" with a little grin because he knows he's saying something funny.

So from this point, we got him some more library books, including a great one called Did Triceratops Have Polka Dots? It's like a dinosaur FAQ written for kids. We read those a few times and he started pretending to be a dinosaur more and more. (The pretending thing is totally in full swing, but that's a story for another time.)

Then, this past weekend, Laura went on a mountain day trip to test out the new snowshoes she got for Christmas, so I had a long solo childcare day. Since Dante had been reading a lot about dinosaur bones, I decided to take him to the Denver Museum of Nature and Science so he could see some up close. We'd been to the museum before, and he'd been a little overwhelmed by the dinos, but this time he was enthralled. There's a T-Rex fossil put together right inside the door, and as soon as he saw it he said, "I am a T-Rex!" and started stomping around.

We had a little trouble getting into the exhibit, because the opening room of it is a loudly playing movie -- he definitely still has some sensory sensitivity issues, particularly with loud noise. However, with a little coaxing I got him through, and once he got to the main dinosaur room he was totally digging it. "I am a diplodocus! I am a stegosaurus! I am a maiasaura!" He kept returning to the diplodocus, I think because he was captivated by the size of it. He'd say to me, "I am a diplodocus and you are a t-rex! You are REALLY big but I am EVEN BIGGER THAN YOU!" Heh. He also kept saying, "I could not fit in a house! That is why I am going to stay at the museum when you go home!"

The room wouldn't have accommodated the tail of the diplodocus stretching straight out behind it, so they have it arranged to curve around the room above the other dinos. He kept saying, "The diplodocus is so big I have to turn in a half-circle to see it!" Then he'd do it. I swear, we'd have stayed in that room for three hours if it'd been up to him. As it was, we probably stayed for 45 minutes, which is a really incredibly long time to spend in one room of a museum.

After I finally got him out of there, we went over to look at some astronomy displays (which were also on the loud side, so we didn't stay long) -- he's also way into the planets right now. Finally, we stopped at the museum store and found the absolute perfect book for him, the aptly titled What Happened To The Dinosaurs?

When we got home, he kept insisting that he was a diplodocus, and saying things like, "My tail won't fit in here! It is going all the way up the stairs!" I'd occasionally say, for instance, "Hey little dinosaur, come over here and let's change that diaper." He would immediately come back with, "I'm not a little dinosaur!"

Tonight I was looking at Facebook on the laptop, and Dante crawled up next to me in a playful mood. "Is that a picture of you?" he asked incredulously. (He's been practicing his incredulous voice, and pretty much has it nailed at this point.) So I explained that yeah, this is a thing called Facebook where I can put my picture and my friends can put their pictures, and little messages that help me keep in touch with them.

Instantly, he was in major distress, choking back sobs. "But... I don't want... I don't want you to have friends on there and keep up with them." He whispered the last part, he was so overcome.

"Why not, honey?" I asked.

"Because," he whispered, "...because I want you to be my friend."

I hugged him and reassured him immediately that of course I'm his friend, that I'm his friend first, that I'll always be his friend, that having other friends would never stop me from being his friend, and anything else I could think of to calm him down. The words just spilled out of me.

Then he said, brightly, "I want to do Notepad!" Back to normal, just like that. Man, the raw emotion that kids are capable of just knocks me over sometimes.

Some Dante stories for you today:

Dante got some Lincoln Logs for Christmas, and when I came home from work tonight I saw that he and Laura had been working with them. He said to me, "I want to build a house that is tall!" Laura explained that she'd been building the particular log cabin that the instructions describe, but that when it was finished, none of his little toy people would fit through the door, so he wanted her to build a taller one. She did a bit of classic buck-passing, the old "Maybe Daddy can help you with that when he gets home" routine. So at the end of explaining this to me, she said to Dante, "Once Daddy has finished his dinner, you guys can figure out the Lincoln Log situation."

He said to me, "The situation is that Mommy can't get it together!"

Laura and I both lost it. We were laughing so hard that he started laughing too, just to join in the fun. The situation is that Mommy can't get it together. Poor Mommy -- who knew those Lincoln Logs were such an apt metaphor?

---

He's taken to cueing us a lot lately. By which I mean, he tells us our line, and then we say it, and he says his response. Like this:

DANTE: Say, "Why do you stack the little logs?"
ME: Why do you stack the little logs?
DANTE: To be support for the big logs!

This frequently comes up when he's running back and forth in the house, pretending to be some animal or other.

DANTE: [From another room] Say, "What's coming?"
ME: What's coming?
DANTE: [While running into the room where I am] A BIG RED DOG!!!

---

On the other side, man the questioning is just amazingly relentless right now. I read to him before bed, and tonight I must have answered thirty questions in the space of five pages of Paddington. Most of the questions are perfectly sensible, logical questions to learn about things of which he has no experience, or to follow the story, or to understand expressions, like so:

* "Why is there an up escalator and a down escalator?"
* "Why is there a stop button on the escalator?"
* "Where is Paddington right now?"
* "What's 'fifty pound fine'?" [After a bit in the story where Paddington reads a sign saying that the stop button on the escalator was for emergencies only, with a fifty pound fine for improper use.]
* [After the line, "A heavy hand fell on Paddington's shoulder."] "Why was the hand heavy?"

So I totally support these questions, but man, the intensity is just very high at the moment. He is paying close attention, and anytime there's something that's not clear to him, he immediately asks about it. Which is pretty much all the time.

He's also fallen into a bit of (I think) reflexive why-asking. He'll do it even immediately after explaining something to me:

DANTE: See this green part? It goes right here.
ME: Ah, I see -- it goes there.
DANTE: Why does it go there?
ME: I don't know! You're the one who decided that's where it goes.

Many statements get immediately followed by a restatement with a why attached. Ones like this he often doesn't even care about the answer -- it's just automatic to ask why. He'll frequently get immediately distracted if I take even a moment to ponder my answer:

DANTE: I am pretending to be a kitty.
ME: That's cool.
DANTE: Why that's cool?
ME: Uh, because I like cats.
DANTE: Why do you like cats?
ME: Um...
DANTE: I am eating raisin bread!
ME: I see!
DANTE: Why do you see?

Sometimes I have to stop answering and just laugh instead.

As I mentioned, Dante stayed with my mom and dad after Christmas, and now some video has emerged, taken by various members of my family:



Dante learns about magnets from my dad, teaches my sister about the paper shredder, and corrects my mom's reading.

Another Christmas is past, and this was a good one. Having Dante at an age where he can get excited about holiday magic makes the whole thing so much fun now. A couple of cute stories:

He was hanging ornaments at my parents' Christmas tree; they have a ceramic Snoopy as well as a ceramic Woodstock. He hung the Snoopy, saying excitedly, "This is Snoopy!" Then he hung Woodstock, saying, "This is yellow Snoopy!" When I thought about it, I realized that his only exposure to Peanuts was through A Charlie Brown Christmas, in which Woodstock does not appear.

One of his gifts from our friends Sian & Kelly was a little plastic thingy shaped like a camera, but operating more like a view-master, with a button and a viewport, through which you can see small pictures, especially if you hold the toy up to the light. This toy had a Thomas theme -- pushing the button advances to another train picture. He's looking in it, and says to me, "Is there a round photographic plate in here?" (We had just the previous night read a Paddington story where he uses an old-timey camera with a photographic plate, and he'd had me explain just what a photographic plate was.) I said, "Yes, sort of," and he said, "I think there's a wheel in there." That kid amazes me!

Christmas morning was quite sweet, in that when Dante woke up, he didn't immediately remember that it was Christmas. Instead, the 3 of us hung out in our bed together for a little while, as he gradually re-entered consciousness and his mood got brighter and brighter. He was pretending to climb me like a tree, and then he said, "I am going downstairs and then I will climb the stairs like a tree!" So we said, yeah, let's all go downstairs together... at the feet of the stairs were our stockings. He exclaimed, "There's a big juicy orange on top!" This is from one of his Christmas books, called The Sweet Smell Of Christmas. He has really keyed into this story -- at several points while we were decorating my folks' tree, he would say, "This is a lovely glass ball!" -- a direct quote from the book.

So then we opened gifts with him, and I think did a good job of keeping him from getting too overstimulated. He was quite happy with many of his presents, and I was very pleased with myself for a particular Thomas wooden track set I got him, with a water tower and a bridge. I always like there to be at least one gift that I'm really excited about giving, and for Dante that was it. For Laura, it was actually these things I found at Costco, little magnifying glasses with LEDs attached to light up whatever you're trying to read. Her "big" gift was money for snowshoes, which I tried to make a bit more fun by splitting into 5 puzzle pieces, each with $20 attached.

Then we went down to my parents' place and opened more gifts there, as well as hung out with my folks, my sister, and her fiance. We had Christmas dinner there, and then went home by ourselves for a blissful 48 hours of childfree time, while he stayed down there to be doted on by mom and sis. This is the greatest gift of all for me, since I already have a bunch of books, CDs, and DVDs, but I have difficulty finding the time to enjoy them! I do love being with Dante, but life sure is easier when somebody else is taking care of him. Laura and I spent both introvert time by ourselves and relationship time together. A lovely day indeed.

Dante and Laura and I spent Wednesday morning at the allergist's office for a FOOD CHALLENGE! I love that name -- it sounds like a video game or a reality show on the cooking channel, but in fact it's an allergy test. When Dante was about a year old, we did a blood test to check for allergies, and came up with three: eggs, peanuts, and cats. The cat isn't going anywhere -- he has about 8 years seniority over Dante -- though we do vacuum a lot and try to keep Dante's stuff hair-free. We have, however, never introduced eggs or peanuts into his diet.

I was sort of skeptical about the blood test, but then they did a skin test about a year later, and sure enough, big welts showed up under the peanut and egg drops. Neither allergy was listed as terribly severe -- he isn't one of those kids whose health is endangered by the slightest skin contact with anything that's ever been in the same room with a peanut -- but we've avoided both foods assiduously nonetheless. Actually, that's not quite true. We've found that he can have cakes, muffins, or other such baked goods that contain eggs. However, once we gave him fried rice, without realizing that it contained egg, and were rewarded with a big rash on his belly.

His most recent test indicated that his egg allergy might be lessening -- some kids do outgrow their allergies. So what's indicated in that situation is a FOOD CHALLENGE! What this means is that we give him a little teeny tiny piece of egg, and see how he reacts. If he's okay, then we give him a little bit larger dose, and so on until and unless he exhibits an adverse reaction. The whole thing is done inside the allergist's office just so that the appropriate equipment is on hand should the process go terribly awry.

That's what we did on Wednesday. They'd take his vitals, give him some egg, and then release us for 20 minutes. Then the cycle would start again. We brought a bunch of toys to the office and played with him there. He behaved really well, I'm pleased to say, even though it was a difficult situation in some ways. He was very interested in playing with the medical equipment, and our very kind nurse happily showed him how to use the pulse/oxygen meter and the blood pressure gauge, or as he called them, the biter and the puffer. (Biter because the pulse/ox has a little alligator clip that "bites" down on the finger for a reading.)

He ate the bits of egg (scrambled) without complaint, and without wanting them mixed in with anything. On his final, rather large dose, he started saying that he was too full to eat anymore, though I think ultimately he was just sick of eating eggs.

We kept building the dose, and he kept showing no reaction. In total, he consumed about an egg and a half, and he was totally clear of any symptoms. Allergist's assessment: he has outgrown his egg allergy! Hooray! That will open up some menu options, and also provide another possible avenue of protein, which we're always struggling a bit to get into him.

Today, Laura had this conversation with him:

L: Honey, I'm so proud of how well you did at the Egg Challenge, and the great news is now, you can eat lots of new foods, because a lot of foods have egg in them!
D: I don't know what foods have egg in them.
L: Well, there's --
D: Peanuts have egg in them! I can have peanuts!

Okay, he doesn't fully grok the concept yet...

Grandma gave us a special calendar called an advent calendar. It has chocolate squares! I always say, "Get chocolate square!" You get to have one chocolate square each day. I eat it.

We started doing the calendar on the 1 of December. When we started doing it I would say, "Get chocolate square!" lots and lots and lots of times each day. Every time I thought of it I would say it. Which was every few minutes.

Then Daddy made a rule. He said, you get to have the chocolate square when I am home and the sun is down. So now, when he comes home from work, lots of times the first thing I say is, "Get chocolate square!" And then we do!

On days like today, though, it is more confusing. He is home all day, and I keep noticing he is home, and I say, "Get chocolate square!" before even thinking about it. Then somebody reminds me it is not dark yet. Oh yeah. Mommy and Daddy say the days are short during the winter, but today did not feel short to me.

Anyway, when we finally do it, I search for the number that is today. Like today I looked for the 14. Then I open the door that that number is on. You know what is behind it?

A chocolate square!

Also, behind the square is a picture of something Christmasy, like a tree, or a snowman, or an ornament, and the chocolate is made to look like that thing. Tonight it was a church. Then I eat the chocolate square!

Tonight, after I ate it, I gave Mommy and Daddy chocolatey kisses. They seemed to like that.

Yesterday and today have been dubbed "Christmas Decoration Days" at our house, and they have been wonderful. I started out yesterday just hoping I could get a little bit of decorating done while I took care of Dante, but he charged into it with joyful abandon. He helped me unpack our artificial tree, and gleefully ran back and forth grabbing branches and setting them into piles. We spread all the little twigs out on each branch, and hung them in layers, bottom to top, until we had a convincing replica of a live tree. (Dante kept saying, "No, AN alive tree." I tried to explain the various uses of "live" and "alive", but I don't think much teaching penetrated the cloud of Christmas excitement.)

We hung the lights and the garland, and when we turned the lights on, he took a deep breath and whispered, "It's pretty." His face was radiant with joy. It was a time-stoppingly happy moment for me.

The three of us hung ornaments on the tree, and he had a fantastic time doing it. We had to keep reminding him not to hang them all on the same branch, but he could not have been cuter as he handled each ornament, exclaiming its identity: "Paddington! Santa! A star! A silver ball!" Once they were all hung, he kept showing them to us. "Look mama, a duck! Daddy, look, a polar bear! Daddy, there is something you love! Spider-Man!" (Yeah, we have a wide variety of wacky Christmas ornaments.)

Today he helped Laura decorate the rest of the house, fascinated with all the little candles, tiny trees, glass beads, and other such tchotchkes. He kept inhaling deep sniffs of a big cinnamon candle and then working his face into a hugely surprised expression. He's spent the last 48 hours running around and naming off all the exciting things he can see. (A snowman! A bell! A lit-up angel!)

It is, by far, the best time I have ever had decorating for the holidays.

Last Friday, Laura observed Dante's preschool class, and then that afternoon we had our first-ever "parent-teacher conference." I feel like I have to put quotes around it because, really, we're talking preschool here. Still, I was a bit apprehensive going into it -- besides being an unfamiliar situation, I wasn't sure what I was going to find out.

Well, what I found out is that I love Dante's preschool, Cotton Creek. We talked with two teachers, and they showed us a lot of what Dante has been doing, along with explaining some of their activities and teaching techniques. They report that he has been making huge progress socially, and good progress physically as well. Both the teachers we talked to were just wonderful people -- I enjoyed their company even aside from the subject matter. Fran, the site director, has 41 years of experience!

Have I mentioned that this is a public preschool? I suppose I shouldn't be so amazed by the fact that a public school is really good -- I got a public education and I feel really happy with it -- but I guess I'm still a bit flabbergasted by the fact that we checked out some pretty pricey schools, and the public one was better by far. For one thing, it's got a 4:1 student-teacher ratio, which nobody else even comes close to.

The "catch", if you want to call it that, is that every kid at Cotton Creek has been classified "at-risk" in some way by the state. Either they've been identified with some health issue (autism, disabilities, ADHD, etc.) or are in some other at-risk category, like "English not spoken in the home" or "Mother under a certain age" or something like that. Dante is in for his motor delays. I remember when we first visited there, and were a bit concerned about this, and asked Fran, "What does it mean to teach a class full of special needs kids?" She answered, "My philosophy is that all children have special needs. We teach them as kids, not as diagnostic labels." I think that's when my crush began.

Dante, for his part, was thrilled to show us all the stuff he plays with, the activities, etc. It was great to see him displaying such positive emotions in that setting, since I still see him complain a lot in the morning about going. Overall, coming out of there, I felt such a positive vibe, and felt so much gratitude that we were able to get him into this place. I feel like it's hugely helpful to him. What a blessing. It also made me really clear on the fact that if/when we move, we really need to stay in the same school district.

Laura had the same feelings that morning. She watched as the kids went through all their various routines, and whenever Dante needed help with something, somebody was always right there to help him. He got a lot of individual attention, and was much more at ease than she expected him to be. When he was reluctant to move during a little dance break, a teacher bent down and helped him move his arms; by the end, he was moving them on his own.

One quick story from that observation day. So they're doing a little activity where a song plays and the kids do motions to act out the song. It being near Thanksgiving, the song is all about turkeys, and the kids flap their little turkey wings and waddle around gobble-gobbling. When the turkeys run in the song, the kids run, and when the turkeys sneak, the kids sneak.

All except for Dante. Instead, he's just standing there, watching this process unfold, and then he says, in a loud voice that cuts across the music, "But I don't know WHY the turkeys are sneaking." This is such a Dante thing to do, and I just love him for doing it -- instead of just following orders, he's like, "Hey, wait a second, what's my motivation?"

Then Fran explained to him, well Dante, the turkeys are sneaking because they don't want to be eaten, and we eat a lot of turkeys around Thanksgiving. I really appreciate 1) that she gave him such a straight answer, and 2) that she gave him an answer AT ALL, rather than just saying, "Dante! Get back in line!" or some such. I feel like it's an illustration of what I saw in so many ways on that Friday: Cotton Creek is a place where he gets understanding and love. I am so thankful.