Category: Toren

We’ve let Toren watch a lot of movies that could reasonably lead to nightmares for a 3 year-old: all of the X-Men, The Lord of the Rings series, all of the Harry Potter movies, every superhero movie you can think of (including the dark Batman series), etc.  Since we let him start watching those movies, he’s never once complained of a nightmare.

Last night we let him watch a show from the Disney Channel featuring Mickey Mouse (via Netflix, of course, we don’t have cable).  He woke up screaming twice claiming he had nightmares!

Logic insists that:

Disney = nightmares!

🙂

Toren wanted to watch an episode of Star Trek one night and we didn’t have enough time before his bedtime, so we told him no.  Here’s his response:

Toren’s Granmary (Debi’s Mom) made him a superhero comforter to go with his wall decals (he has superheroes all over his walls).  Here’s a video of him opening the comforter and checking it out:

Toren likes to put on these little shows occasionally.  For a couple of weeks he was pulling his shirt over his legs and bouncing around like this:

Here’s a nice little video of Toren hiking in his explorer jacket the neighbor gave him for Christmas:

We were talking to Toren last night while eating dinner about his daycare.  One of his friends, Bobby, had gotten in trouble during the day.  I asked him what happens to the kids when they get in trouble.  He told me that Bobby had to sit by himself while the teacher read a book to the other kids.  Then, when they went outside, Bobby had to stay on the chair for a little while, then he was “free” and could play again.

Toren’s current teachers seem a bit too punitive in their approach to us, but it’s not abusive, so we’ve let it go.  Even so, I then wondered if Toren ever gets in trouble, so I asked him, “Do you ever get in trouble at daycare?”

He looked at me sheepishly for a few seconds then said, “Sometimes.”

I followed up with, “And what do you have to do when you get in trouble at daycare?”

To which Toren, putting his hands together to show us, responded, “Play with your fingers.”

Debi and I burst out laughing.

He obviously is supposed to sit by himself and not do anything, which is the punishment.  But Toren has figured out that, rather than sit and do nothing, you can play with your fingers.  Brilliant!

As I literally couldn’t stop laughing for about a minute, I missed what Toren said next, but Debi heard it, “Then, when you get free, you can ride the bikes.”

Toren just recently entered a new phase, the “I don’t like you phase.”  When we would ask or tell him to do something he didn’t want to do, or if he had to do a time out for some reason, he started telling us, “I don’t like you.”

After about the third or fourth time of Toren saying that to me, I decided to have a little talk with him.  I told him that it was actually very mean to say to people that you don’t like them.  Plus, it wasn’t really what he meant.  What he really meant was that he didn’t like what we were doing at that moment.  So, I had him rehearse saying, “I don’t like what you are doing” a couple of times and tried to help him understand that saying that sentence would be a more appropriate response when he is upset.

Almost a week passed before we had an issue when I got frustrated with him.  He was at the table eating.  I’m fine with him playing around a little while he eats, but he was eating pizza and was playing around with it, then dropped it.  Dropping it one time was an accident and I was fine with that.  But he then dropped it three or four more times, making a substantial mess, at which point I got annoyed, told him to sit up straight, lean over the table, and hold on to the pizza with both hands.

With a thick layer of sadness, he looked up at me and said, “I don’t like what you are doing.”

Win for Toren.

Toren was watching an episode of Wild Kratts this morning while Debi and I got ready for work.  In an effort to remind him that he was going to be coming to my work for my tenure and promotion celebration, Debi mentioned to him that I worked with some biologists, that they might be at the party, and that they know a lot about plants and animals.

Toren responded, “I’m a biologist.”

Debi then informed him, “Well, actually, you have to college in order to become a biologist.”

Toren had an answer for that, too, “I don’t want to go to college.”

When Debi asked him why, he said, “College is boring.”

(While funny, it’s actually quite insightful on Toren’s part.  He’s asked several mornings if he can come to work with me.  In the interest of dissuading him, I’ve told him that I’m just going to teach classes and that HE would find them boring.  So, he was putting two and two together…  I guess I can’t say college is boring anymore.)

Toren picked up how to do hopscotch:

Toren’s Granmary sent some Valentine stickers that Toren immediately wanted to put up.  Here’s a clip of him applying them: