I took the Love Languages for Kids quiz with Andy recently, and not surprisingly his love language is "Quality Time". My heart squeezed with emotion every time he would chose things like "Let's go to a movie together" instead of "I've got a present for you!" in the quiz. Notably, he also picked every single option that had to do with affection. I made a mental note to remember this about my baby as I do my best each day to make him feel loved.
Andy is so different from his sister. Raising the two of them so closely is a great illustration of how personalities can vary so sharply person to person, regardless of how they are raised equally.
There's so much to say about Andy that I'm not sure I could organize it fluidly in story form so I'm going to make a giant "About Andy" list for his 7th birthday. Since I've never published this list before, we'll start from the beginning.
The very beginning.
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David Andrew Vidal was born on October 9, 2006 via scheduled repeat cesarean. He was only 6lbs and 14oz, a small stature for his big parents. As it turns out, due dates were mistaken and he was taken out too early. He spent the first week of his life in the NICU because he had trouble keeping his oxygen levels up. After he was released, we never had any other issues. He had just been slightly under-cooked when he came out.
Andy grew his first two teeth around 6 months but then didn't grow any more until after his 1st birthday. He crawled around 11 months, walked around 14 months. He was always SUCH a good baby. I had learned my lesson with his sister about rocking children to sleep, so I put Andy in a co-sleeper next to our bed from the first night he was home until he transitioned into a crib. He never had any problems being laid down for bed. He was a quick learner, even then. A sign of times to come.
Andy started barfing shortly after his 1st birthday. It was the most puzzling thing. He would barf almost every day at least once but never with any particular kind of food. Sometimes he would barf with morning oatmeal, other times he would scarf it down just fine. He seemed to always be nauseated. Sometimes he would walk into the kitchen where I was cooking and violently gag. It was so weird. For weeks I tried to track his food with no luck. There was nothing that always made him barf or never made him barf. He seemed willing to eat food but physically unable to sometimes. We took him to the doctor and the doctor recommended we stop serving him dairy. We started him on soy milk and removed all dairy from his diet and just like that, the vomiting stopped. Over time we were able to work in dairy products but Andy still can't have too much "regular milk" (as he calls it) or he will barf. So the official diagnosis is lactose intolerance.
I didn't potty train Andy, he just made the decision to start using the potty on his own. I'm not kidding. He asked me for "big boy chonies" one day and from that day forward used the potty like his sister. He was less than 2 years old.
Andy lovedddddddd his binki. Unlike Elyse who was always ambivalent about hers, Andy had a deep attachment. It was a constant struggle to keep it out of his mouth. One day when he was over 2 years old (shame on Mommy!) I tried to brush his teeth and noticed his eye teeth clinked together instead of settling next to each other in a regular bite. Certain I had ruined his teeth forever, I stole his binki that night while he was sleeping and he never saw it again. His teeth straightened out in a few months and all has been well since.
Andy has always slept with his sister up until this year. His crib was in her room until he transitioned into co-sleeping with her in their queen sized bed. They both loved it. I knew there would come a time when one of them (probably Elyse) would be over it but it took longer than I thought. They are best friends and they were little snuggle buddies. Elyse wanted to share a room with her step-sister this year, and it's the first time Andy has been on his own. It was hard on him at first, but I think he's grown into it. Every time I put him to bed he asks me to shut his closet door for him, and turn on his dream sleeper. Speaking of, when he sleeps he grinds his teeth so loud I can hear it in my room. It's horrific and he gets that from me. He also has a weird habit of sleeping completely under the blanket, tucked in around all sides. He's the heaviest sleeper of all my kids. I could drag him out of bed and he would stay asleep. He sleeps like a little rock.
Pretty quickly, Andy's quirky sense of humor and outright weirdness started to emerge. He wasn't the social butterfly my daughter was. I remember sitting at a family party on a barstool and looking around to find Andy. I couldn't see him so I got up to look around and found him sitting directly under my barstool playing quietly with a toy. Content to be by himself, he just wanted to be by his Mama. He loved Buzz Lightyear early on and was always trying to do silly things to make us laugh. He loves dress shoes and sweater vests. He'd wear them year round if he could. (Note the dress shoes with the buzz lightyear costume below.)
Andy has an engineer's brain. I remember him declaring in the backseat at only 3 years old that they made pop tarts rectangular so that they could fit into toasters, "because that makes sense". When things don't belong, it is very disruptive to Andy's Zen. If I would drive David's car instead of my car, Andy would repeat over and over the whole way to daycare that I was driving Daddy's car, not mine. I remember we were in a hurry walking on a sidewalk and I saw a hair bow laying on the sidewalk. I knew if Andy saw it, he would have to stop and discuss how that hair bow got there. Who left it there? How do you think it got here? Do I think the person knows it's missing? Sure enough, we got three paces past the hair bow and Andy stopped abruptly, turned around and yelled "A HAIRBOW IS ON THE SIDEWALK MOM". I had to hear all about that bow all the way to wherever we were going. He has a lot going on in his mind, and he's very in his head.
Andy taught himself how to read. No kidding, it was JUST like the potty training incident. We sat down shortly before kindergarten and I decided to let him try to put the sounds together that he'd been learning about in pre-school and that child READ the book to me. I felt like calling the news. Elyse is like her Mama, we struggled with reading early on. I expected the same tears and challenges when working with Andy, but there he was reading me a book before he even started school. I swelled with pride.
Even now with school work, he just gets stuff. He blows through Kindergarten and 1st grade homework like it's nothing, often doing all of his worksheets for the week in one night. I was giving him a math quiz recently where he had to do as many of the problems in one minute as he could. I got to the end of a minute and he still had a problem or two missing. I said "Time's up!" he said, "Dang, I'm missing one problem but the others will be right." He said it was such confidence, and they were. It took him a second longer but he was certain that his work would be correct.
He often asks questions like ,"What is water?" "What is air?" "How do batteries work?"
"How big is space?" My silly, weird little boy has a lot going on in that mind of his that he is trying to figure out. I have no doubt he will have more answers than me in no time.
Andy relishes in being the class clown. He has a handful of close friends, but when you observe him in class - everyone wants to be his friend. The girls chase him and always want to hug him when he leaves. He is used to everyone complimenting his pretty eyes (much to his sister's dismay). He loves his teachers and just wants to be loved by others.
He loves video games and is a major Daddy's boy. His favorite sport is soccer. For the longest time he wanted to be Iron Man when he grew up. Before Kindergarten started, he asked me what he should say when people asked him what he was going to be when he grew up because he wasn't ready for people to know he was Iron Man. These days he says he wants to be a Police Officer. When I asked him recently what he wanted to be when he grew up, he said "I want to know how to be funny with people, like Cameron". It made my heart warm.
I will stand by the fact that Andy looks more like me than his Dad, forever. Although I can see his Dad's body in Andy's little frame, Andy's face is mine. He also has my stubbornness. He is a sweet, tender-hearted, weirdo.
My favorite is that whenever I tell him that I love him, he says, "I love you more." I let him win, even though I know that I love him biggest.
Behold my beautiful boy. 7 years into this life. Full of wonder and loved by all.
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