Settling into "Rittenhouse"

It has been a couple of weeks and we are finally starting to get settled in.  There are fewer boxes, things seem to be finding their proper place and everyone is starting to feel more at home.  We still have several projects, both big and small, to tackle in the coming months, but life is good here.

Oliver seems to have no regrets about the move.  He calls the house "Rittenhouse" (we live on Rittenhouse St.) and sometimes "the new house."  His love of being outside is finally compatible with our home.  He goes to the park nearly everyday and loves to take walks around the neighborhood.

For the first week, there were boxes everywhere, which was compounded by the fact that Oliver views each box as a new garage, barn, house, boat, tunnel, etc. for his toys.  So even when a box was emptied, we could not get rid of it because Oliver had claimed it as, e.g., his new fire station.  We are now down to just one large box at the bottom of the stairs (one of Oliver's favorite places to play when inside), which functions as a multipurpose garage.

Packing our precious cargo:  Oliver and Myrtle

In the new house, Oliver and Myrtle find a place to play.

He has also taken to helping with "Mommy's garden."  While Joe has been slaving away at getting our home in order on the weekends, Oliver and I have been pulling weeds and planting flowers in the yard.  Joe says we are being helpful by staying out of the way while Joe works, but I think it is clear we got the easier end of the move-work delegation.  If I get home before dark during the week, Oliver asks to go out and water his flowers.  In particular, he has a Dahlia that he is very fond of and will say, "Mommy, let's go outside and water my Dahlia."  He is pretty gentle with the flowers and will follow me around with his bucket, set up wherever I am working and set to watering a flower with his shovel, one scoop of water at a time.  After the first week, we learned the hard way that we can only work in the garden before dark.  Even with bug repellent on, Oliver had several welts on his hands, arms and face from mosquito bites.  Even though he did not complain, I felt terrible.  So no more late night gardening for us.

Home Depot trip for flowers with Oliver and Myrtle.  There was an "incident" when Myrtle fell in the mud and was too soiled for Oliver to hold.  He proceeded to tell everyone in the store who would listen that "Myrle fell in the mud, but she will be ok because Myrtle is a trooper."

The commute is not great.  I am still adjusting.  The move coincided with one of my busiest work months in the last year.  Fortunately, Joe was able to take a few days off to facilitate the move, but I was not home much in the evenings and had to work on the weekends surrounding the move.  Oliver has been so enthusiastic about the move and loves the house, but shortly after moving in he has shown a few signs that the changes might be effecting him.  There are a few things he asks for regularly:  he asks to go to the museums, to go to story time at the library on Friday, and to "walk mommy to work."  The first two are very impractical given our current distance from his old hangouts.  The third is obviously no longer possible, but can be replaced by going for a walk around the block before I get in my car.  Unfortunately, with my work schedule in May, I was not able to do this everyday and it was clear that he had a harder time with me leaving on those days.  I am trying my best to fit the walk in on as many mornings as I can now.

Oliver has also been experiencing a little bit of language disfluency (which according to what I have read is not uncommon at his age and given his verbal development).  His vocabulary continues to grow and get more sophisticated, but he has been stumbling over his words more lately and sometimes seems to be struggling to get his sentences started.  This is most typically when he is expressing a totally new thought or observation (i.e., putting together an idea or concept that we did not describe to him first).  He can still recite lines from books and his nursery rhymes without missing a beat.  It is also more pronounced when he is excited or tired.  Once you give him time to work through what he wants to say, he is almost always able to finish his thought and moves on to the next thing he wants to say.  I have read that it can last a couple months or more, so I am hopeful that this will pass.

Oliver enjoying the empty dining room floor with the ever present train tracks.

  While not as smooth and clear as a few weeks ago, he is not talking any less.  Instead, he seems to have even more to say these days.  He has his own opinions about everything and chimes in on most topics that we are discussing or reading about.  He will point out things he sees and say "that _____ looks like ____" (and sometimes he will also point out how they are different) or tell us stories about something he did or saw days or weeks ago.  He also seems to be a little encyclopedia when it comes to topics that interest him like trains/planes/automobiles/tractors, water turbines, energy, the solar system, etc.  This morning, we were reading a new book about electricity.  The book mentioned power plants, and I said power plants make electricity from things like coal.  He looked at me and said, "coal is a fossil fuel."  Something we had read about a few days before in a different book.   He also loves to rhyme.  He has gotten a kick out of rhyming for a few months now.  But, lately he seems to enjoy the challenge of trying to come up with a rhyme for almost anything.  He is so funny and fun to be around.  It is hard to believe he is already this independent clever little boy. 

Another box put to good use, he was playing "Jack in the box" with Sheryl.  Note his forehead, arm and hand mosquito bites from a little too much gardening.