Posted by Patrick Corkum on May 8, 2010
So, I had to watch Ty yesterday afternoon all by himself. I can’t get much done inside with him, so I took him outside to play. He is quite good at entertaining himself in there. Well, he’s pretty good entertaining himself inside too. Outside, he plays in the sandbox, on the slide, with trucks and all kinds of constructive things. Inside, he screams, yells, whines, bangs things, and anything else that he can think of to annoy the heck out of me. If the other two are home, he will add hitting, taking toys and bugging. So, outside we went. Besides, I had plenty of work to do in my garden.
So, he played for a good while and was generally behaving, which doesn’t happen all that often. I was off watering the plants, tying back the raspberries, building a “trellis” for my peas and green-beans and a support thing-a-ma-bob for one of my grapes. Ty comes over to me and tells me that he wants to ride on his scooter. I tell him, “no, go play in the sand, you can’t ride your scooter with flip-flops on.” He goes away and plays with trucks. He comes back over to me and says “Daddy, I want go inside. I hot.” “Ty, it’s not hot out here [it's like 72... in the sun]; we’re staying outside. Go play in the sand.” Ty walks slowly over towards the sandbox… walks right past it, finds a chair in the shade of the red maple, and climbs up. He then puts his head on the arm rest and doesn’t move for the next hour and a half.
I love how some people can just pick a spot and sleep. I can’t even climb into a hotel bed and sleep, no matter how tired I am. Some people have all the luck!
Posted by Patrick Corkum on April 12, 2010
My son Ty is a statistical improbability. There are so many aspects about him, that just should not be. First of all, he was born WAY premature. As a matter of fact, the people at Holt Korea had only had one child that they had worked with that was born at an earlier gestation, and that was only by one day. He was the lowest birth-weight they had dealt with, though. His stubbornness is the only reason that he is alive. Being born that early, he was at an extremely high risk for all kinds of medical issues. We got all kinds of medical documents and thought that it was almost for certain that he would have CP. He is completely healthy. If people at the US agencies had followed their processes, we should never have even got his adoption referral. My wife has chronicled all of this on her blog in some older posts. Anyway, he continues this trend today.
Ty is extremely stubborn, which is probably why is is even alive. Yes, I consider this irony. We often joke that he got his stubbornness from my side of the family. Fortunately, I win most battles of the stubborn. However, there are some that it seems that I will never win. For instance, you would think that he would put his shoes on the right feet at least 50% of the time. No. It is more like 1% of the time. Perhaps his jacket on with the hood facing the sky, not the ground. Nope! He is 3 and no matter how many times I have to correct him, he still eats anything that is flat (pizza, cookies, bagels, etc…) with the flat side facing his mouth. For some reason, he does not correlate this to why there is pizza in his hair or peanut butter on his nose and under his chin. Oh well, I hope my stubbornness out lasts his!
On a side note about these improbablities, is it just me or when there are multiple light switches on a wall together do you always seem to flip the up the wrong one?
Posted by Patrick Corkum on April 10, 2010
Last night both my youngest and my wife were in the bathroom kneeling before the throne, emptying their stomachs. Okay, my wife was. My youngest I think was just out to get us, puking twice in his crib and forcing my wife to do laundry in the middle of the night as he soiled EVERYTHING in his crib. Seriously, I have NO IDEA how puke got in some of the places it did. It is almost as if he was the kid from The Exorcist, and his head spun around as he was puking. I think kids just have a knack for making things as complicated as possible. After the two incidents, we put a Pack & Play in our room and let him sleep in there. He proceeded to throw up yet again. This time, we were prepared for we had given him the Happy Bucket! So, we told him that if he had to throw up, to do so into the Happy Bucket. Indeed, when he threw up, he did. However, he is three, his English isn’t great yet and he is not the most intuitive child in the world. So, when he needs to throw up, he laid the bucket sideways and threw up into a horizontal bucket. He might as well have thrown up on a table. Oh well, fortunately it wasn’t much. After we learned that he couldn’t use the Happy Bucket effectively, we taught him. We sat there and made him practice until he could get the action down three times in a row. So, we said, “What are you going to do if you have to throw up?” So, he lays the bucket on it’s side and makes a funny pretend puking noise. No. No No No No No. Okay, we sit him up, “Sit up, then throw up.” Ask him again, “What are you going to do if you have to throw up?” Again, he lays the bucket on the side, repeat whole process. Again…. Again…. Again… Finally, through my irritation, he gets a stern talking to about listening and doing what daddy says. Well, that fixed him good… three times in a row, he sits up and makes his funny throw up noise into the bucket. It is days like this that I am SO excited to be a parent!
Update…. My wife comes over and tells me that my potty-trained 3 year old has diarrhea in his pull-up! Hooray!
Posted by Patrick Corkum on April 7, 2010
Okay, so I’ve done PJ and Mia on the past two days. Now it is time for me to express Ty’s personality through pictures taken on Easter. Please remember, the point of this gallery is to express his personality. I needed a much bigger gallery this time than the two before. Please be sure to click each thumbnail as the pictures are intended to be seen in their full size!
