Suiting up

After all my kvetching yesterday, the sun has come out in glorious force--it should get up to 70 today! Gabriel has a half day on Wednesdays, so it's perfect timing for us to have a picnic and some ice cream and wander around outside with just him and not the baby, who is happy as a clam at daycare (although I have an ongoing struggle to get them to offer bottle before food and not vice versa...I'm afraid Eloi's weaning and I don't want it to be because they aren't doing what I ask them to...).

Somehow, on Monday morning, Gabriel got fixated on the idea of going to the beach. The Mister kind of played along as they had breakfast, which must have turned a pretend scenario into what to him was a fact and concrete plan for the day. So when I started making his school lunch, he cried and said "We not going to school," and when I said very clearly that indeed we were, he burst into genuinely devastated sobs. "We goinna beeeeeach!" (The plan also somehow involved a truck, but I wasn't around for the development of that so not sure how it fits in.)

Poor kid. I wish we were going to the beach too. He has remained stuck on the idea, to the point where he is reluctant to enter his classroom in the morning (it's not the beach) and asks to go to the beach as soon as I pick him up from school. We've explained that when we fly to Boston and visit grandpa and grandma in a few weeks THEN we can go to the beach, but though he gets that idea and talks about going on the airplane to go to the beach, the amount of time he has to wait until then is hard to understand for a three year old.

The latest development in the ongoing saga occurred this morning, when I was dressing him for school. He balked at taking off his pajamas because he saw the clothes I had picked out, and said, "I want to wear a...a... suitcase." Confused, I thought maybe he was thinking about packing and told him we'd put his clothes in a suitcase when we fly to America, but he said no, WEAR the suitcase. To go to the beach.

AH, I said. A swimsuit?

Yeah! With turtles on it. (He is remembering his swim trunks from last summer, which he hasn't seen since last August.)

SUITcase, swimSUIT. Language is funny, kid.

(In unrelated language funnies, he has taken to asking for "cozy bread." Which means, NOT toast or dry bread, but soft. Which makes perfect sense--all the other things we describe as cozy, like his bathrobe, a blanket, his fleece pants, and snuggling on the couch, are soft and squishy too. So cozy bread it is.)