FEB and March 2010

We are riding out winter here....it's been springlike the past two days, so we look forward to being outdoors (and warm) soon! This is a hodge-podge post (my second, I think), so beware of my rambling narrative and ubiquitous three dots.

There was a lot of sledding at Robbins Farm Park - some scary downhills, but no fence to run into at the bottom (like the one at our neighbors' hill)...Petru learned that snowboots and warm tights have some merit (vague memories of the struggles to get a hat on his lil' blond two year old head emerge). Other sledding happened with Michael, Helly, and Pillar in the backyard, but aside from this fun, winter seems to have shut us in (so bring on the spring!).

How else did we break up the winter malaise?? There was a train trip to N. Billerica on Presidents' Day - only three railroad crossings, but those three left a lasting impression. And there were excursions on the subway - once to visit Nana at the hospital and once to just get out of the house and wander around Boston Common and the Flower Garden. Petru also started tumbling with his Tumble-bear friends on Tuesdays. He is the tallest Tumble-bear and having a lot of fun (though he is keenly aware of gravity and potential not-so-soft landings). Hopefully, his Romanian spirit and enjoyment of the group will build his confidence. He's certainly flexible and does well imitating certain body movements - jumping along the long trampoline with legs out, then in. Soccer starts today at the Y and I know he's got a strong kick in those wiry legs.

Petru has spent less time drawing than he had been. We usually only get 2 pix from school, usually of RR crossings - sometimes they're like little maps with roads and rails, but mostly he shows the details of gates and lights. His art has really evolved in the past 12 months. His preschool I teachers first alerted us to his interest when the class did an animal book and Petru spent an hour or so making detailed ridge's on his alligator's back. Last summer there were literally hundreds of pix he made of 1) lighthouses 2) traffic lights 3) bridges. He even began copying lighthouses from one of his numerous lighthouse coloring books, doing an entire book's worth (40 pix) in one evening (there was a time when we let him color as much as he liked for special bedtimes - before we realized his true, tortured-artist, up-til-dawn nature).

Last note before signing off here...Petru received several lighthouse calendars for Christmas (we have six 2010 lighthouse calendars!) and is very fond of perusing them, learning their names and locations etc. Last Thurs. he wanted to look ahead in the calendar on the fridge and we saw that April's featured lighthouse is Cape Disappointment Light (in Wash. state). Petru wondered why it is called that and I said something like "maybe there was a shipwreck there or??" and Petru chimed in that "probably a boy went to the lighthouse and saw that it was on a little island, but he couldn't get there, so he was disappointed".