Team Schuurman: Our Little Man Child

     No one is surprised, I'm sure, to hear me say that our son is a MAN-child. He's big. Not chunky or fat, but tall, stout, and solid. At a softball game Thursday night he played with a 3 and 4 year old part of the time. He was almost as tall as the 3 year old. The rest of the time he wanted to be throwing a ball with his daddy. Speaking of his daddy, he goes BANANAS when he comes home each day. He always says, "I hug him! I kiss him!" and then he goes in for the tackle. Once Mark's hands are unloaded it's either a game of, "I chase you" (meaning he wants Mark to chase him) or knock down. This is where Mark sits in the floor and Marcus gets a running start to tackle and knock him down. They both giggle and love it. They'll usually end up wrestling on the bed until supper is ready.
     He falls DAILY and his knees are constantly scraped, but he's yet to cry much about it. One day last week he had a bad fall that I didn't see and both his knees were bleeding, but the only reason I looked at them was because he calmly said, "Mommy, knees hurt." With the amount of blood, I was so surprised he wasn't even in tears!
     Don't get it wrong, the boy can cry and definitely has a set of lungs. He's started his "Terrible Two Tantrums" early and just recently started doing them in stores (boooo!). If he's not getting his way and I try to take his hand, he'll jerk it away and say, "no!" If I keep hold of it, he falls to the ground and screams loud enough for his Canadian family to hear. His loudest yet was at home (luckily) when I had to take his new toothbrush away. Let me tell ya, this thing has everything Marcus loves. It's a Snoopy toothbrush (1-dog), that has a baseball button (2-baseball), and it lights up or blinks for 60 seconds (3-lights). He had "brushed his teeth" for over five minutes and we had to leave, so when I finally had to take it from his little hands, you would've thought I broke his heart. We've since talked about it and SO FAR, he's done better about giving it up when he's done or when it's time to stop.
   He's talking more and more, but now he's announcing when he wants to get up from bed. This morning at 6:45 he announced, "Mama, get up!" from his crib. Mark and I couldn't help but laugh that a)he said that and b)how loud it was. I went in and shut the door behind me and he said, "open door!" I told him that he couldn't get out of bed yet so he reached for me and in the sweetest little sleepy voices, "one more song?" So I rocked him and sang one more song, and then laid him back down. The boy then slept until 8:30!!! He's not done that for a while! I normally won't let him get out of bed before 7, but 8:30 shows me that he must've been really tired.
     In other news, we went to the pool for the first time this summer and wouldn't you know, IT WAS COLD! Well, that's not true. It was just 70 degrees instead of 80. It warmed up while we were there, but the water was FREEZING. When we first got there I made Marcus hold my hand and he JUMPED RIGHT IN! I was stunned. He's not been near a pool since before he could walk (last summer), but he sure wanted to. But it was short lived since it was so cold and he immediately said, "I get out!" He didn't let the cold bother him, though. We took a sand bucket and filled it with water and he gleefully played for almost an hour. I am SO looking forward to taking him to the beach in a few weeks. Hopefully he'll like the sand and waves, but we will see.