JOREN: 4 yrs. 3 mo.

JOREN: 4 yrs. 3 mo.
Joren, Joren, Joren.  AAAAHHHH Joren.  Joren is so cute and so frustrating.  He is so hard to get mad at because he has such a way of being endearing and appearing innocent and naive.  It's sometimes really hard to know how much he is messing with me and how oblivious he really is.  When I try to talk to him about something important he often interrupts me with some sort of completely unrelated comment or request.  He is incredibly physical.  It seems he must be hanging on, crashing into, jumping off of or swinging from something at all times.  Often it is me.  I pulled him out of preschool at the beginning of the year because I felt he was too disruptive to class and I felt his behavior was too unpredictable to expect Mrs. Tobias to be in charge of keeping the other kids safe.  It has been almost 6 months since then and during that time Joren and I have tried to work on those things quite a bit.  I feel he has grown up a lot and matured so I put him back in preschool this week.  So far it has been pretty good.  I am so glad he gets to go be in Mrs. Tobias's class. She is such an amazing person and incredible teacher and the opportunities he is getting are very special.  The moms and dads are very involved and the field trips are amazing.  The parents all come in to volunteer and the parents are all so nice.  It's great to be back in the group for me too.  It's one of the only times I talk to non mormons on a regular basis.
Joren collects bones.  He made me give him the turkey bones from Thanksgiving and he has them in his bone collection in the freezer.  He checks on it often.  I know, gross.  He also loves little things, like little tiny folded up pieces of paper and notes.  He draws little people all the time.  They almost always look the same.  I have pages and pages full of drawings of these little people in his journal.  They are heads with legs coming out.  Basically, there isn't much more detail than that.  For a while he was really excited to paint with me and do crafts, but then he started to refuse to do anything I brought out, or he would modify the project so much that it involved a whole different set of materials and way more time and effort and he would get really stubborn about it.  It has been difficult to get him to cooperate.  I started letting him direct our mornings like we will make tools out of sticks and rocks (his insistence) or fairy people out of sticks or go on nature walks, or make spiders out of pom poms or anything else he can think of.  I thought I could be a good teacher with him one on one, but I don't feel I have been very effective at all.  He scratches and doodles all over his worksheets and won't concentrate.  We sit down to do reading lessons and he will take 30 minutes to go over a few sounds and words.  He fills in the time jumping on me and making funny faces and saying gibberish and complaining.  Once he finally gets around to it, he knows the sounds and can sound out the words and he feels really proud of himself, he just puts up a real fight about it.  I am hoping all of this behavior is normal 4 year old behavior.   I think it will be great for me to be in the preschool classroom with Joren, and I am so glad he gets to go to young 5's next year at Park Lane.  It sounds like a great program for him.  Joren has 7 stripes on his white belt in Tae Kwon Do. He is the youngest kid in the class.  He sometimes has trouble concentrating and keeping the rules, but he tries really hard and he is so cute out there throwing punches and kicks.  Both Eirik and Joren love it.
Joren is becoming a great eater.  He is over the impossible, eat nothing stage and we are in a nice comfortable, "I'm hungry" stage.  It is a good place to be for a mom.  He eats a lot of things, but his favorites are peanut butter and jelly and macaroni and cheese.  (Of course.)  He still loves Diego and Backardigans.  He asks me all the time if he can go to foreign places someday.  He has a huge list of things he wants to do someday and places he wants to go! Huge!  I tell him yes every time, except when he asks if he can have a walrus or a deer for a pet.  (He asks that all the time.)  I tell him, the only way he can have a wolf or other viscous animals around him is if he works in a zoo.  He just might end up doing that.  He really wants a pet of every kind of animal.  He feeds his beta fish that he got for Christmas every day and loves him.  We caught a mouse in our house a few weeks ago and we had it in his little creature cage for a while.  Joren carried it around with him and he was the happiest little guy alive having that little mouse around.  He named him and talked about him constantly.  He died after only a few days.  (We think a trap wounded him initially.)
Joren likes to be naked all the time, likes to go outside with as little on as possible, won't wear socks and he has been making beds for himself on my kitchen cabinets.  He lays on the cold granite counter naked and tells me how comfortable his bed is.  He won't let me put covers over him except up to his waist at night.
He likes to mix up experiments with lots of various spices and food coloring.  He puts water in bags to freeze still.  He loves ice.  Paul took him to the Detroit Pistons game and Joren took off his shirt and was dancing in the isles like a little crazy man.  The people around him were saying "Go Joren, go Joren, go Joren" as he danced.  He does this little bent over scissor arms dance all the time that cracks us up.  He loves hard rock and gets really annoyed if I sing certain (lame) songs or play them on the radio.  He likes all things to be his idea so I have to be careful how I present them.  He likes to do things by himself.  He is a little man of action who uses words sparingly.  He is tender and loves to snuggle with me.  He loves to be read to and loves me to lay by him at night.  I love my crazy little monkey guy.