spring bb fest 2k26

Brother and his wife moved house a couple weekends ago. The new place is a big two-story house with a basement. Now my parents get a guest room. I’m still sleeping on the couch, but it’s in the basement, which is much nicer than the middle of Grand Central Station. They plan to get a new couch for the living room, but they haven’t done so yet, meaning the entire room is just a massive BB Toy Zone and it’s glorious.

I gotta say, they’ve done way better with the unpacking than I would in just two weeks. BB has also settled in like he’s always lived here. He’s even switched to a big boy bed (close to the ground, with a half-railing so he doesn’t roll off).

Activity-wise it was a mostly lowkey weekend. On Saturday we went for lunch at a Mongolian stir-fry & hotpot place (technically Mom’s birthday lunch). In the evening we took BB to the park. It was 70 degrees out. Sunday it was 40 degrees and blustery so we were clearly not going anywhere; we just hung out at home before leaving at around noon.

BB is talking so much now. It’s so fun. At Christmas he was getting into sentences, but it was mostly statements about himself (such as the iconic “I make spicy soup for you”) or requests for things (“Where’s my milk?”). Now he’s getting to the point you can almost have a whole conversation with him. For instance, on Sunday morning, I asked him “What should I draw?” and he said, “First day of school.” (The day before, we had read a couple books about someone’s first day at school.) I asked him, okay, what is happening at school? He thought about that for a while and said, “Lunch.” What’s for lunch? “Soup.” I drew a bowl of hot soup, and we both blew on the picture to cool it off. But it was still too hot to eat. “We just have to wait,” BB told me. Then he said, “When you eat all your soup, you can go to the park.” (What a big sentence!!) I started drawing the park, and he told me someone didn’t go to the park. “Because they didn’t finish their soup?” I asked. “Yeah,” he said.

He's also very much into singing (a new skill since Christmas). He sang the ABC song SO many times. One time I sang the coda as “next time won’t you play with me” instead of “sing with me” and he told me NO. I got the song wrong. Also at one point he had a sticker on his finger and decided it was a jingle bell, and started singing Jingle Bells, and then would bust out the song intermittently for the rest of the weekend.

Unfortunately, he’s getting into the “terrible” part of the terrible twos. He was pretty chill this weekend, but he’s apparently less so when it’s just him and his parents. Every part of the bedtime routine is a struggle—leaving his toys to go upstairs for bath time, the actual bath, brushing his teeth, going to bed. But I put him in a good enough mood he’s willing to do stuff. On Saturday, I was helping out with bedtime and put him in bed. Then his mom popped up at the door like “Oh. Guess we’re not brushing teeth tonight.” I was like “Oh whoops, I didn’t realize! Hey BB, you gotta go brush your teeth.” And he got up and did it, no prob. Normally he kicks up enough of a fuss they often drop the morning brushing of teeth just to have one less thing to fight about. His mom said if I lived closer they’d probably yoink me to help out more often.