Torsten/picture catchup post #9: 16 Months – The total toddler

(N.B. This is yet another way-after-the-fact post with more pictures than content because my memory is bad and I’m trying to catch up. Yes, I know there are too many pictures. Forgive me. My son is cute. )

Dearest Torsten,

This month marked the end (sort of) of an era in our life. This was the last month where you were always home with Mama (and sometimes Papa) all the time as your sole caregivers, and so it sort of makes sense that there are so many pictures from this month, and not so many from the next.

Not to say that you didn’t have plenty to do at home… there was lots of playing and talking and cuddling and running, of course… and you were getting huge and were pretty much always into everything. We had to give up on our gated-in living room (the biggest playpen ever) and just let you take over the first floor of our house – every childproofer’s nightmare. SuperToddler had arrived!

And there were lots of trips to the park with Mama or Papa, which was always great fun (I suspect you enjoyed it more with Papa, though, because “swing” was one of the few words you would only say in German for a long time).

This was also a month where you really started to eat on your own a lot more. Oh, sure, it was finger food, mostly, but we’d been having such trouble getting you to want to eat food at all that this was actually a really good development.

We also made a lovely little video and set of photos for your Uncle Patrick for his birthday. This kind of nonsense is probably one of the many reasons you were so thrilled when we started day care

Still, though, there was fun stuff to do at home… even though Easter wasn’t for almost a month, we dyed Easter eggs and had a good time with it. Sure, you still didn’t really get was it about (though you like eggs, so I don’t think you cared), but it was fun and sort of messy, so all good. One of the hallmarks of this age is that you loved to pull things off of the table onto the floor (you still do, which drives me nuts), so I’m really surprised it wasn’t messier than it was. But you had your job (washing off the egg dipper and putting the occasional egg into the egg dye), and you were quite happy with both being able to get messy and to splash in the water you spilled (something (getting messy, that is) that after a summer with Oma, you enjoy much less, and it makes me a little sad).

Fun times.

And of course, what would a Torsten letter be without another round of snowsuit pictures? While this wasn’t the last snow of the year (next month’s letter will show a drenched Torsten after having gotten stuck in one of the last and slushiest of the bunch), it was one of the best to play in, and you and Papa made snowmen and shovelled together.

Did I mention you were eating? Fruit and toast, mostly – you were big on texture (you still are) and meat just didn’t do it for you. The funny thing is that you almost always wanted two of whatever you were eating – one for each hand – but it was very cute.

The improved eating skills were important, of course, especially since someone else started to take care of you (though I’d say she is largely responsible for how much better they got over the next few months just because you were somewhere else and were hanging out with a big boy who ate real food all the time).

Things were getting busy around our house, and being a full-time Mama was both overwhelming for me and depriving you of some social time with others. Mama couldn’t even consider getting a job because there was no place for Torsten, and finding good available day care actually in Denver (as opposed to the suburbs) that was both affordable and not creepy was really tough – at day care centers, anyway. We couldn’t even get a call back from most places, and the Montessori school we visited that had a toddler program (Mama is a Montessori fan and you probably would enjoy the Montessori approach) was kind of flaky, didn’t really run year-round and had about 4 different versions of its prices and school schedule available. I just got kind of weird vibes about it (maybe it was ok, though I talked to another mother later, shortly before we left Denver, who had visited there and had the same kind of feelings, so who knows), and there seemed to be no other options. Alison, your weekly babysitter, was fantastic, but she had a real job during the day, so that wasn’t an option.

And then… then we found Sherice and her family. And they were a godsend. Oh, you couldn’t start going there right away because they were moving up to Denver and we couldn’t get down to where they were moving from without a car in order to have you start down there, but several mornings a week, Sherice and her almost-three-year-old would drive up and you guys would all spend the morning together. It was sort of a trial period, and you loved it. You guys took walks and went on the bus and went to the mall (the nearby mall had a neat little playground) and you had your first real friend and another trusted grownup to be with.

This was a good thing, because unbeknownst to anyone except Mama and Papa, there was other stuff going on that had the potential to shake up everyone’s life as well. See, Mama and Papa had been talking. And talking and talking and talking. We’d talked for a long time about maybe moving abroad someday, but we took a look at our situation and the world situation and decided to start thinking about it really hard about then. We’d thought about a lot of places, but for a lot of reasons, we were heavily considering moving back to Germany, and around this time is when we started to think about it as a very serious possibility. Mama had filed some applications and Papa had filed some applications and we were just waiting to see how things worked themselves out so we could make a decision about whether we would leave at all, and if so, when and how.

All of this was going on in the background on top of everyday life, so the next few months had a lot of stress in store for everyone. It was a really, really good thing that we had Sherice. You did fine, and Mama did fine, and everyone did fine, which is all anyone could ask for, right?

I will say, though, that I’m sorry we ended up throwing such a wrench into your life, because the end of this month started you into what I think you really thought was an enjoyable routine, and we ended up throwing that all into chaos in the middle of the summer. But more about that later.

(Life will of course hold more of these travails for our little family, but one thing you can be sure of – we will always love you.)

More Torsten letters soon! Mama is on a roll (with mustard and cheese)…

Love,

Mama