Bread and butter

Carter's favorite food is bread and butter -- but not the crust. He wants it for breakfast, lunch and dinner! I pick up a loaf of ciabatta at the bakery from time to time, and he goes through it pretty quickly.

Santa brought a bike

A Star Wars tribute

Carter performs his homage to Star Wars. My favorite part is when he starts breathing like Darth Vader. And yeah, he's doing this before bedtime, when he's supposed to be winding down.

Dr. Carter's diagnosis

One of my favorite people has started a blog and Web comic about parenting and life in general. Her son is about 13 months younger than Carter, and I'm really looking forward to where the site goes from here.

I swiped one panel from her comic (is that ok, Maki?) because it features Carter. This is usually the diagnosis we get when Dr. Carter breaks out his medical kit:

(Words and art by Maki at Tiny Concorde)

Portrait of the artist as a young man

Carter's painting got picked for display at the hospital his preschool is affiliated with. Here, Dad tries to get him to hold up the painting and smile. You can see how well that went.....

The never-ending bedtime

Carter HATES going to bed. He doesn't seem to get tired. Ever. He'll play nonstop until we force him to get into bed, and then he jumps on the bed for a while because his energy is still overflowing. If we're really lucky, he'll fall asleep by 9:00 and wake up at 8 a.m. If we're unlucky, he's awake for another hour.

My latest strategy has been to make him get into bed at 8:30 or so. Dad reads him three books and then leaves. Carter's not allowed to get out of bed, but he doesn't have to go to sleep. We don't talk to him, which means he usually sits there yelling things at us that go unanswered. Eventually, he gets bored and falls asleep.

He tries everything he can think of to get a reaction. Here are some of the things he's been yelling at me:

"Come here! It's an emergency!"
"I'm nocturnal!"
"My room is on fire!"
"You're a bad mommy."
"I'm not going to give you anything for your birthday."
"I didn't like any of the presents you gave me for Christmas."
"When I wake up in the morning, I'm going to hit you."
"I'm going to throw up!"
"My tummy hurts!"
"I got scared because I saw Mickey Mouse's shadow!"