My Big Boy

Tai is almost 3. How and when that happened, I'm not sure. Lately I've been marvelling at how grown-up he is. Some examples:


He orders his own food in restaurants. Granted, it's always the same order. "Do you have chocolate milk? And do you have mac n cheese?" And when the server comes by half-way through the meal to check on us he says "I'm all set" before they can even ask if we need anything else. (Perhaps we eat out too much?)

He can walk all the way around the block on his own feet, without begging to be carried just after the half-way point. Buttons is not a big fan of Tai's stop-and-smell-the-roses pace, but it's fun to do once in a while.


He's *nearly* potty trained and is quite good about using public restrooms. He recently delighted in selecting which port-o-potty to use from a row of about 8. Once inside he became fascinated with the urinal and (after I insisted he stop *touching* it) he requested to stand up and pee into that instead of sitting on the toilet. Afterward, he bragged to Minh about it.



No one has ever taken so much pleasure from doing laundry as my boy Tai. If he sees us with a load of laundry he insists that he be allowed to help with it. He sits up on the dryer and pours the detergent into the washer. He is also in charge of putting the Bounce in the dryer. Surely this obsession will last through his teen years and I'll never had to do another load myself, right?



He feeds the dog. By himself. For the past several months he's been helping me feed the dog and cats each morning. But the other day I was in Quynh's room changing her diaper when I heard it happen. "Buttons, down!" And then the sound of dog food being scooped into her bowl. And then. "OK, good girl!"



He selects his outfit each morning. Actually, we've started having him select it at night before bed, for the next day. This is an attempt to get us out of the house earlier on weekday mornings, but it has proven only moderately successful thus far. It's not so much that he cares what he wears, but he likes having a say in the process, I think. He's beginning to understand that the season have just changed and short sleeved t-shirts are no longer an appropriate choice. Except for that one favorite shirt I can't seem to get him to forget about. Now if he could just learn to dress himself, we'd be all set.