An Average Day at Pre-School

It must be great to be a child. I can't even imagine how wonderful it would be to live in a world where everything is not only plausible, but actually happens--regardless of what all evidence to the contrary would suggest. Every day, Gabe creates some sort of strange event or story that he tells me that is SO out there that I can't even follow the basic storylines--and he tells them as if they are simple recountings of easily verified events. Of course, he can't really tell me a coherent story about easily verified events, so I suppose it's not surprise that fantasy and reality would so easily intertwine in his mind.

Just yesterday, Gabe got into BIG trouble. He pulled out this little rug he got for his birthday that has a series of roads printed on it so kids can drive cars all around. He wanted to unfold it in the dining room and play with it. So he dropped it on the floor, which is usually the extent of preparation that he's interested in putting forth. He went to gather a few cars while he sang out, "Daddy, come fix my rug for me!"

"You can do it yourself, hon. You know how." This, not surprisingly, is a pretty standard response to most of what he would prefer that I do for him these days. I tend to give it two or three times before admitting that my options are to keep repeating myself for the next half hour or do what he wants me to. This time, I guess I should have done it the first time he asked.

He turned back to his rug and Norah was standing on it. "No baby!" he said, and before I could even think enough to respond, he bent over, grabbed the rub, and yanked it out from under her. She spun and smacked head first into the hardwood floor.

Much wailing and gnashing of teeth followed, from both of them, because Gabe got an earful.

After things had settled down, I sat Gabe down on my lap and tried to work through what, exactly, he had done that was wrong so that he could, hopefully, learn from the experience (so far, these little teaching moments haven't been paying off much, but I figure they have to eventually, just because he'll want me to quit bothering him all the time).

"Why did you get in trouble?" I asked.

Between sobs he said, "Norah was standing on my rug." So far, so good.

"And then what happened?" I encouraged.

"It's not Norah's rug. It's MY rug."

"Right. But you know that everything you play with that she can reach is BOTH of yours. That's why you play with your toys on the table or upstairs if you don't want her to mess with it. But what did you do to make Norah cry?"

He looked at my like I was speaking Esperanto. I repeated the question. Eventually, he said, "Norah was standing on my rug," again, and that was all I was able to get out of him. I reminded him that he had pulled the rug out from under her, but he insisted that all he remembered was that Norah was on his rug. In other words, it was her fault. The kid's got a bright future in politics.

But that's pretty typical. He can remember the most obscure things from months ago (last night, while we were in the car, he quoted a line from Monsters Inc., a movie we haven't seen in at least two months, completely out of the blue--we had no idea where it was from until he said it was something Mike said, then we put the pieces together), but he often can't remember what he was doing two minutes earlier.

So today, I picked him up from pre-school and asked him what he did today. I talked to his teachers as I was waiting for Gabe to come over from the playground equipment. They said he was cracking them up this morning because, for some reason, he kept sticking everything up his nose. Anything that would fit, went up his nose. I'm glad they were cracked up by it instead of being disgusted. Both of our kids, probably because the whole family has been fighting a cold for the past week, have been spending an inordinate amount of time plumbing the depths of their nostrils. I try to discourage it, of course, but what can you do?

Anyway, so we were back in the car and I asked him what he did today. "I road a dinosaur with a crook," he informed me.

"You road a dinosaur with a crook?" I asked, assuming I had misunderstood him, which I often do.

"No," he said like I was a fool. "I road a crook with a dinosaur."

"Er, what? You road a crook? What do you mean, 'crook'?"

"Crook!" he insisted, but he offered no explanation.

"Do you know what a crook is?"

"Crook!" And that was all he was saying on the subject. The rest of the way home I probed for further details, but was able to gain little further information. He did say SOMETHING that I think was in explanation, but I couldn't make out half of it. I'm pretty sure I heard the words "robot," "fire truck," and "helicopter," but I have no idea how any of it linked together.

Man, it must be fun to be a kid and live in a world where all of that kind of stuff makes some kind of sense.

Oh, and I couldn't get him to admit anything about sticking stuff up his nose, either. I'm pretty sure he doesn't even remember doing it.

Gabe Has a Conversation with His Junk

For awhile now, Gabe has been doing "voices" whenever he's pretending to do stuff. Usually, his "voices" are more a "voice" and that voice is a slightly higher pitched version of his own (nobody will likely confuse him for Michale Winslow from the Police Academy movies--but I can't really folly him for that since the extent of my voice impersonations are limited to Pat and Pat sounding stupid). This voice covers pretty much everyone who isn't Gabe.

And last night, it covered his penis while he was in the bath.

He was sitting in there and I came in to wash his hair. He's gotten pretty good at washing everything that he can see on his body, but if he can't see the dirt, then it doesn't exist still, so we have to wash his face and hair. I filled up a cup and got his hair wet a few times (because he's got such a mop of hair) then lathered him up. While I was doing that, I heard him talking in his high pitched voice, but wasn't really paying attention to what he was saying. Until the last two cups of water that I poured, then I heard what he was saying.

As Gabe: "You need an umbrella or you're going to get wet."
As Penis: "I need an umbrella or I'm going to get wet."

Then he made a "shooosh, shoosh" sound--like a piece of large machinery or something sliding into place--and he used his hands to shield his junk from the water that was running down from the top of his head.

Because I'm a helpful parent, I pointed out, "But he's still going to get wet because you're sitting in a tub full of water."

Gabe paused as if to consider this then said in his "voice," "I need an umbrella or I'm going to get wet," effectively ignoring my reason and logic and continuing with his dialogue.

"Now you're all dry," he concluded in his own voice.

And I left him to his important work for a few minutes.

One Dad, Not Enough Time

I've reached a bit of an impasse over the past couple weeks, and I feel as though I should give everyone warning. I have begun, in earnest, to compile and edit many of my earlier postings and supplement them with new stuff to tie it all together in the hopes of creating an end product that I can start to receive rejections on from agents/publishers. The problem is, I still only have the same very limited time during the day to work on it that I previously dedicated to working on submissions for this site.

That isn't to say that I plan to take a hiatus or anything from posting on here--but there is a very good chance, indeed, that I won't be able to keep up with the multiple-posts-a-week rate that I've been able to mostly maintain for the last year and a half. Probably, this isn't a BAD thing, as many of my postings have been little more than filler and probably not worth your time and eye strain. Any time the kids do something noteworthy or entertaining, I'll figure out a way to share it.

Also, as I get this thing put together (already up to almost 40,000 first draft words! Though I'm not sure what my goal is yet, probably in the 75K-80K range), I will also be looking for readers/editors. Although I doubt anyone has noticed, I have a tendency to get a bit wordy at times. And my goal is to come up with a clean, concise, easy-to-read (and hopefully easier to market) finished project than I'm likely to create on my own.

Libby is an ace at destroying my work, but she really has less time than I do to work on this sort of thing, so, while I'm counting on her to EVENTUALLY read it, I'm sort of figuring that she'll do so at about the same rate that she's read the other three books I've written (I finished the first almost two years ago--and she's managed to edit six pages of it, so her current rate of return is about one page every four months. Not a very realistic reading rate if I want to get this sent out before we retire).

If you have strong eyes and like to judge people based on their writing style, let me know and I will happily send you sections as I get them completed.

Just When I Think Potty Training Isn't Stupid Anymore, It Still Is

For the most part, we've considered Gabe's potty training to now fall into the Win category. Over the past two months he's had a couple accidents in his bed while sleeping, and there have been some minor spills and leaks on clothes, carpet, floors, and pieces of furniture, but he's mostly mastered it. He consistently tells us whenever he needs to go, and we've really not had many problems.

But, because it is such a treacherous walk through his mess of a room and down our somewhat harrowing flight of hardwood stairs to get to the bathroom for him in the middle of the night, should he wake up needing to pee (and because, when he's napping, if he has to go and comes downstairs to do it, there's zero chance of getting him back to bed), we put his little plastic training potty up in his room. Time and again, we've stressed that this is for "emergency" use only and not something for his day-to-day tinkling. This is a nice thought, but one that he's not been particularly interested in abiding by. Especially now that he's spending a few hours of every day playing upstairs on his own where Norah can't mess with him. If he needs to go, and he has the choice between coming all the way downstairs or just dropping trow in his room, he almost always chooses the upstairs option.

Which sucks, because it requires me to CAREFULLY tote the little container down the stairs without splashing it all over myself and my environment, but is still better than the alternative--and, considering him, the ONLY other alternative to going in that potty would be to simply go on the floor in some corner of his room.

Probably the worst part is that his room always smells like pee now. He doesn't seem to care, but it bugs the hell out of me. But, if I remember what boys tend to smell like, especially once they get into high school, there are almost certainly worse things that this room can and will smell like in days to come. So we'll just deal with it for now and hope that he moves beyond the need for the potty in the not-too-distant future.

Today, though, we ventured into new territory.

A little while ago, Gabe came down the stairs to ask for a drink. He wasn't wearing any pants or underwear. I sighed inwardly because I knew this meant he had peed in his potty--which I had just emptied yesterday. For some reason, even though he CAN pull up his pants after he goes, he doesn't have much interest in actually doing so, preferring, instead, to wander around the house half naked until we grab his clothes and help him get dressed again.

"Go back upstairs and put your pants on," I said. "Or your underwear. One or the other."

"Ooooh," he moaned in disappointment. I knew there was about a 90% chance that he wouldn't even try to put them on, but I figure if I keep pestering him about it, eventually he'll have to figure out how to get himself dressed. He trudged back up the stairs and I figured I would follow him in a few minutes to see how he was doing.

A short time passed during which I changed Norah's poopy pants and worked on some laundry (Norah had a pretty good bladder explosion last night and her sheets stank to high heaven, so I had to run everything from her bed). I hadn't forgotten about Gabe's pantslessness yet, but I had already assigned it to the back of my mind.

Then, as I was carrying the kids' clothes into the living room to sort and fold, Gabe came down the stairs and shouted, "I need to wash my hands!"

This isn't an unusual request in and of itself. Gabe likes to wash his hands, and he often eats his food or plays with his play-doh, paints, or markers in just such a way that allows him to spend a few minutes in front of the faucet "washing his hands." But the request almost never comes from upstairs because there isn't much up there that he can make a mess of himself with.

He came down to the foot of the stairs and repeated, "I need to wash my hands." He held up his right hand for me to inspect.

"Oooooooh god," I said to myself. I took a deep breath. "Turn around," I said slowly.

He did so. There, smeared up the small of his back, all over both of his legs, and all of his butt was a mess of poop. That was the mess on his hand, too.

"What did you do?" I asked.

"I pooped in my potty," he informed, pointing upstairs in case I had any doubt where it was located.

"Oh, Gabe," I said, trying not to sound TOO upset. "No pooping in that potty upstairs."

"It's just for emergencies," he explained, knowing that was what was coming next.

"And pooping isn't an emergency. You don't have anything to wipe with up there."

He showed me his hand.

"You don't have any TOILET PAPER up there to wipe with," I amended. "You HAVE to come downstairs if you need to poop."

So we went to the bathroom. I grabbed the wet wipes--because toilet paper wasn't going to be enough for this job--and cleaned him up. He washed his hands, and I followed him back upstairs so he could show me what happened and I could assess the situation. Obviously, I brought the wet wipes up with me, figuring there would be poopy little finger prints all over everything.

But there weren't. Not over EVERYTHING, anyway. A few on the shelf by his toilet, and a couple more on the door which I'm guessing he'd closed for privacy while he did his business then opened back up again when he came down to wash his hands. The potty itself, however, was a disaster. Poop was everywhere. What kind of scatological acrobatics he'd performed after his dump, I can only imagine in my most terrible dreams. But he had even managed to get it on the bottom AND the top of the lid. And all around the seat. And on the side of the potty.

Moreover, he had attempted to cover it all up by pulling the window curtain, which is usually stuck behind the shelf and shielded from his peeing by the toilet lid and other obstacles we've put in its way, over the entire mess. Presumably, he thought he could cover it up with the curtain and it would all go away. If only.

Fortunately, he somehow managed to NOT get any on the curtain, which is good because I didn't have curtain laundering on my list of things to do today. Then again, I also didn't have "soak a training potty in a foot of hot water in the bath tub so that I can remove piles and smears of grimy pooh" on my list of things to do today either. But, being the nature of poop, it always seems to find a way to work itself into my schedule.

And I just have to keep looking on the bright side. At least he didn't decide to wipe with his underwear then hide it somewhere in his room. I'm guessing he'll figure out how to do that in the next few months, though, and then this whole process moves into an even darker and stinkier realm. Not even a high school boy would do something like that (I keep telling myself, hoping it's true).

In Which I Teach Norah a "Useful" Skill

There isn't much of anything to report along with this video. It should be pretty self explanatory.

Norah's new skill. I figured it went along well with the dancing that she's always doing. How old does she have to be before I start carting her to auditions for "Cats" do you think? At the very least, she appears to have the Diva thing covered.

Tantrums

For some weeks now, Norah has been fine tuning her tantrum mechanisms. Tantrums aren't something we've had a great deal of experience with so far. Despite the fact that he's starting to get a little bit of a temper, Gabe has really never descended into the realm of tantrum yet. He doesn't kick and scream or throw things when he gets angry or upset. Probably that is a blessing.

But Norah seems hell-bent on evening out the score by throwing double the number of tantrums.

Typically, whenever we do something or the world presents her with something that she doesn't like, her answer is to collapse to the ground, throw her head back, and start crying. Usually, she starts crying because she never thinks to look where she's throwing herself down and she either sat down, with a pronounced exclamation point of a thud, onto a toy, or she's tossed her head down onto the hardwood floor (or another toy, a book, a piece of furniture, or the wall--really, anything is an option and she's explored most of them several times). But I'm pretty sure she'd cry even if she didn't have any actual reason to. It seems to be her go-to form of communication.

Typical woman, really.

Ha, ha! Generalizations are fun. Especially when they're true.

Anyway, she usually stops once I remove myself from the room. As Libby's folks are fond of saying, "Sometimes you just have to take your sails out of their wind." I love that saying, and I do it frequently. I'm not what you'd call very tolerant of tantrums. I value my own emotional control and get, well, uncomfortable and frustrated when presented by such blatant attempts at manipulation through emotional outbursts. Or I just sit there and laugh at them--which only tends to make them angrier, another reason it's best for me to leave.

Until now, though, I've not really been able to get one recorded. I never have the camera close to catch the collapse and subsequent head bonk--and that, really, is the best part--but usually, by the time I get the camera, she's moved on from tantruming to either flat out crying or she's given up and gotten over herself--neither of which makes very good video.

Today, though, I was able to catch some of her tantrum. Both she and Gabe were turds this afternoon for their naps. Gabe, unfortunately, has discovered that he can play up in his room, and if he stays quiet enough, I can't hear him messing around on the monitor. So he's taken to playing in his bed and not napping. This is fine, really. Ideal, actually, if it's done properly. All I REALLY want is a couple hours every day where I can eat lunch without being pestered, watch a show without having to turn the closed captioning on so I can follow the dialogue, or catch up on the blog or emails. If he can give me that that time without sleeping, I'm OK with that, especially since it might lead to him sleeping in past 6:00 in the morning.

But he doesn't usually JUST play quietly. He hasn't quite mastered it yet. He will do it for fifteen or twenty minutes, then he'll take to doing something noisy, which runs the risk of waking Norah. Today, he did just that.

So, I had two awake kids. Since Norah was already awake, she decided to have a poop, which only made her crankier, so I had to go upstairs and sort things out. I brought her down, changed her diaper and let her reset for a half hour (and told Gabe to stop screwing around because he woke up Norah and go to sleep--he eventually did). After that, I brought her up, she fussed for another twenty minutes, but went to sleep. Only to wake up again thirty minutes later crying.

Now, I have no explanation for why she still does this, but she still does as often as not. She responds to waking up like a newborn, shrieking and crying as soon as she opens her eyes. If Gabe is already awake, I usually try to let her fuss for a little while in the hopes that she'll eventually sort her own problems out (usually she doesn't), but if he's sleeping, I try to get up there as quickly as possible so I don't have two awake kids on my hands.

When I got in there, she stopped crying, and I brought her downstairs. Once downstairs, I fetched her a juice cup and handed it to her. She looked at the juice cup, back up at me, then started bawling. Wailing and bawling and, within about five seconds, falling backwards and flailing about randomly. She started kicking her feet at any toy or stuffed friend that was close. She picked a few toys up and half threw them away from her. And then she started flopping.

That's what I got on the video. Crying and flopping.

Unfortunately, stupid blogger won't let me upload it (which I fail to understand since Google is connected to youtube, and I'm not having ANY problems uploading it to youtube--stupid Google, sort out your damn blog site!), so here's a link to the video on youtube.

Shortly after I finished with the video, I left the room and, surprise surprise, she stopped crying.

Kids.

Butts Speaks

Anyone who's been keeping up with this blog knows that little Button makes big noise. All the time. Talk, talk, talk, talk, talk. Or she's making her "concentration" noise--which she still does all the time whenever she's working on something tricky. But lately, she's actually been showing some signs of picking up random words--and yesterday she reached what is, I think, a major linguistic milestone: she repeated a word that I said to her.

Up to this point, there are several words that she's picked up on her own. "Momma," "Dadda," "No," and "Thank You," among a few others. She's not 100% reliable on these words yet as it often seems like she says them at random, but she says them often enough in the right context that we've been able to determine that she knows what she's trying to say at least. But these she did on her own. No matter how many times we've repeated a word for her, she's never even made an attempt to repeat it, until yesterday.

I held up a little plush soccer ball to her yesterday and said, "Ball." She looked at it and said, "Ba," several times and even attempted to put an "l" sound on the end of it with her last few attempts. She later proudly displayed her new word to Libby that evening (which was nice for verification purposes).

Then, today, she did it again. As I was getting Gabe ready for pre-school, I put his sandals on. Because he has ridiculously wide feet and because he has a tendency to splay his toes for some reason whenever I'm putting shoes on, his pinky toe caught on the side of his sandal as I slid it on. "Owwww," he whined. "Ow," Norah repeated. Then she tried it out another half dozen times for good measure.

Once I got him off to pre-school and she was alone with one less distraction, I tried to corner her in the living room to coax some words out of her for the camera, without much luck.

As is usually the case with my children, she refused to perform the action I asked of her. She did, however, say "Thank You" when I handed her back her bottle. You have to listen for it, and you have to know what the words are before she says them to have any sort of clue what she's saying, but she says it. "Tiku" is probably closer to what she actually says.

You'll also get to see her do a little random dancing in there. She's quite taken by dancing these days. She's even worked on her repertoire a little to spice things up with variety. She's got a butt shake, a shoulder shimmy, and in the past few days she's started stomping one of her feet. Of course, she doesn't really do any of that in the video, she just threw in a few random shimmies here and there while she was doing her normal moving around.

I wish I'd been keeping a better log of Gabe's language development before I started this blog (he was something like 20 months when I started the blog), so I could tell if she's ahead or behind where he was by this point.

Not that it matters, really, I'm just very eager for her to start talking well enough to tell us what she wants. I'm hoping that will help prevent the three or four dozen tantrums she throws a day when whatever she wants to have happen doesn't and we have no idea what she wants.

The Rock Star Life

Yesterday afternoon, Finn came over to play for a little while. For the past two years--or, really, ever since the boys have been big enough to get around on their own--just about every visit one of us parents says something along the lines of "Boy, won't it be nice when we can send the boys to their rooms or somewhere else out of the way to play on their own?" The reason we say this is obvious. Kids are noisy creatures. And messy. And not very easy to carry on conversations or watch TV or do ANYTHING around, really, unless what you are doing involves keeping them entertained and out of trouble.

For the past two or three months, we've started experimenting with letting the boys go upstairs and play. It's been a relatively slow process, and one that we've had to keep fairly supervised as neither of them has quite worked out the finer aspects of sharing their toys. Generally, as soon as we'd leave them alone to go about their business, two minutes later, we'd hear screaming or crying coming down the stairs, usually to the tune of "(Insert Child's Name Here) won't share the (Insert Toy Here) with me! That's MY (Insert Toy Here)! Wahhhhhh!" So, inevitably, one of us would end up traipsing up the stairs to sort out the trouble.

In addition to this, Finn hasn't quite mastered stair climbing/descending yet. As he has no stairs to regularly climb at home, it's just not something that he's NEEDED to do up to this point, so he's pretty tentative and apprehensive of the stairs (and we haven't felt entirely comfortable that neither of the boys would decide to start playing on the stairs, which would lead the other to join, and would almost certainly end up with one or both of them tumbling back down to the dining room).

Until last night. Really, for the first time ever, we sent the boys upstairs and didn't even follow them up (previously, they'd spent short bursts up there alone, but we'd always at least followed them up to turn lights on and make sure they were situated before going down). We left the monitor in Gabe's room up so we could hear what was going on, in case we needed to intervene, but they played for nearly a half hour up there without any real incident.

What we heard coming through the monitor hardly kept our minds at ease. The noise was considerable and it was usually accompanied by ceiling shaking thumps and crashes (since his room is directly above the living room), but neither kids were screaming, so we decided to leave well enough alone. We really WANT them to be able to sort out their own problems--partly because it is a necessary step in their development as social creatures, but mostly because we don't want to HAVE to be bothered. After a while, it was time for Finn to leave, so the boys were called down, and we didn't think to go up and check the damage. Finn left and we got the kids around for bed.

Right before we took the kids up, I ran a load of laundry upstairs and peaked into Gabe's room. This is what I saw:


Needless to say, I was not pleased. We have discouraged Gabe from treating his room like The Who in a five star hotel, but, obviously, we haven't made enough of an impression on him yet. And this isn't even all of it. The parts of his room that you can't see were equally trashed--and he'd even carried up to the top bunk of his bed where, apparently, they'd spent some time throwing random toys up there (probably what at least some of the loud crashes we heard were).

He will be spending much of today upstairs cleaning his room--with many reminders and naggings from me to get it done until he's at least managed a noticeable dent in the destruction. After that, I will probably end up spending a half hour up there organizing and putting things away (because, after all, even though Gabe is the one who will get upset when he can't find something he NEEDS that is buried in a pile, it is ME who will be the one to suffer as I spend twenty minutes sifting through detritus looking for it--so I might as well safe myself the trouble later).

Still, it WAS nice sending the kids off to play by themselves. Now, for the next two years or so, we can start saying things like "God, I can't wait until they discover video games and will sit up there and play QUIETLY for an hour or two--oh, and entertain Norah, too. Won't that be grand?"

A Little Help

At Libby's urging, I've decided to start going through ALL of my previous posts and start compiling them into something that I might be able to publish. In their blog form, of course, pretty much none of them are publishable, but I'd like to try and gather at least the funniest stories/observations/whatever together and see what I have to work with.

If any of you have a little time, I'd LOVE suggestions. Favorite stories, anyone? Feel free to go back to the beginning and read through ALL of the 200+ posts on here. I'm sure it won't take you long.

Or don't. Even just mentioning the ones that first come to mind as your favorites obviously had something going for them that made them stick to your memories. That's what I'm looking for.

Please and thank you.

Love,
Pat

p.s. You can just leave a reply if you like, or send me an email if you'd rather. Either way, I'll see it.

The Word of the Day Is "Efficient"

Considering the rate that Gabe is growing, and how active he stays, I would say there is a better than average chance that he will end up being one of the biggest and brawniest kids in his class. History is pretty clear on the role these children typically play in the schoolyard: bully. To help keep this from happening, I've been spending a lot of time drilling the concept "hurting other people is bad" into Gabe's head.

And he's taking to it like a fish to land development. I think it's safe to say that, at this point at least, Gabe is not one of nature's gentle souls. Yesterday alone I had to remind him at least six times that he was bigger than Norah and that pushing her, pulling her, wrestling with her, and tripping her were not nice things to do. At one point, Norah was messing with the train tracks he was trying to set up. In his frustration, he yanked a track away and pushed her. Since she's built like a ball, she rolled, onto her back where she bonked her head on the floor. Now, it wasn't a BIG push, and bonking her head on the floor is something Norah does under her own power or inertia a dozen or more times a day, but from the way she wailed, you would have guessed that a trip to the hospital was required. She is clearly learning her place in the household as the second child: trouble maker.

After soothing her, I sat Gabe down and discussed, again, the concept of responsibility. As the big brother, it is his responsibility to take care of his little sister. Forever. Her honor and well-being are his to protect (I figure it makes sense to start on this now since he will be in a much better place to keep an eye on her in high school than we will be). And never, under any circumstances, is it OK for someone who is bigger to hurt a smaller person just because he can. He nodded and got a little weepy because he's pretty sensitive to getting in trouble. In between sobs, though, he said something that really got me thinking: "Pushing Norah makes me happy."

Er.

I wasn't sure how to process this, exactly, but I think it's safe to say that one of these two options is true. Either he was referring specifically to that instance, where Norah was being a pest and pushing her away "made him happy" because it allowed him to play with his train tracks undisturbed, or he's a budding psychopath. I'm going to go with the first option because, to date, I haven't seen much proof of willful maliciousness on his part. He doesn't kick the cats or punch other children (or us). I'm hopeful the former is really the case.

However, in the off chance that it is not, I've decided to start actively working on alternative methods to assure his place as "nerd" and not "bully" in the playground. Besides the constant reminders and moral lessons that I already dish out on a regular basis during the day, I am also going to try and teach him things that only nerds would know. Theoretically, this would make him a likely target on the playground, but, considering his size and physical abilities, I'm hoping that he WON'T be that target. At least not after the first time he has to rub some bully's face in the dirt.

Oh, wouldn't that be grand? The best of both worlds--the nerdy jock. It's every nerd's dream to be that guy--the one who can safely be smart because nobody would pick on him for it.

Sorry, just remembering how cool it was to be that guy growing up.

Anyway, to help facilitate this, I decided that I would try to teach Gabe a new big word every day (or, more likely, as often as I remember to do it). I hope to smoothly integrate it into our everyday activities--taking an opportunity that one of the kids or the environment presents us and giving him some abstract word to digest. I think it's safe to say that kids who throw out big words in grade school are going to be the ones on the receiving end of the wedgies and not the giving end. Other parents will, of course, assume that Gabe has pretentious parents at home--but they can suck it since MY kid will know what "pretentious" means by second grade and their kid will still be eating his own spit.

Actually, who am I kidding? Gabe will be eating his own spit, too.

But today I began our lessons with the words "efficient." Here's why:


After his poop, while I was helping him get his pants on, he distracted himself with this discovery. Why pick your nose with one finger when you can finish the job twice as fast with two?

"That is very efficient," I informed him.

"Fishin," he repeated.

"That means you can get something done faster AND do it with half the work!" I informed.

"Mmmmmmm," he hummed. "I sound like a bee!"

Obviously, I have my work cut out for me.

Apparently that was the point of the fingers in his nose all along. He wasn't being efficient, he was just being weird.

As for Norah, she seems to be developing nicely. She's starting to figure out some "games" that she can play with us, so I tried to coax her into showing them to the camera, with mixed results.

She has mostly figured peak-a-boo out and can do parts of patty-cake, contrary to what she displayed for the camera. Still, I figured I would get some video of her doing whatever since I'm still spending far more time on Gabe in these posts--and I'd hate for future Norah to think that her time in the spotlight was somehow being neglected (see, future Norah, you just aren't quite as entertaining as Gabe yet, but someday you'll get there!).

Buttons

Libby and Gabe went out to Fall River today to hang out with some friends and do a little naturing and boating today. This means Norah and I are alone for the day.

On the surface, it would appear that I got the easier of the two assignments. Norah and I are both on the homebody side, and most of what entertains her the most can be accomplished in one or two rooms of the house. And that part IS easier. But, at the same time, Norah is considerably higher maintenance than Gabe (even higher, as I mentioned in my preschool posts last week, when Gabe isn't here to help with entertaining her).

While pondering on my prospects for the day (sitting on the living room floor, playing peek-a-boo and turning the pages of her books for her), I put some thought into what Gabe was like when he was just a little over a year old and he and I were spending all of our days together. This made me realize the one significant difference between the personalities of the two (and, from what I've seen, I think it's safe to say that these differences can be linked back to their differing genders).

I took it a step further and narrowed it down to the notion of "buttons," because, I think, it sums up the differences between the two nicely.

From the time he could walk until, well, only about six months ago, Gabe wanted to touch and mess with EVERYTHING. There was nothing that he wouldn't dink around with (really, that is still the case, but, by this point, he's at least learned to avoid most of the things that he gets in trouble for). Most especially, he was obsessed with buttons. Any button he saw had to be pushed, and, when it didn't have any effect, it needed to be pushed again and again and again until something DID happen (usually that something was me removing him from the button or vice versa). Because of this, we had to keep everything button-oriented locked away or out of his reach. We STILL have to keep the door on the entertainment center locked so he doesn't mess around with the DVR or the X-Box.

Norah, on the other hand, is obsessed with PUSHING buttons--and I don't mean activating them, I mean pushing MY buttons. Like Gabe at this age, she is interested in exploring her environment, which means we have to keep most things locked up or out of reach, but if she's allowed to play with something, she almost instantly loses a deep interest in them. Anything she's NOT supposed to play with, though, she makes a point of paying constant, singular attention to. And if there's a particular way that she can play with these things that really sets me off, that is exactly the way that she wants to play with them the most.

There is no doubt that it is intentional emotional manipulation on her part, either. Take the monitors, for instance (the ones that let us hear into their rooms). Because we have limited places in our living room where we could plug them in and set them, they are readily accessible to Norah. On the surface, there is no reason that she should be interested in them. They make some noise when the dials and switches are adjusted, but that's it. But because they are attached to electrical cords, and Norah has a habit of pulling those cords out from behind the table and wrapping herself up in them, I've been pretty diligent about telling her "no" and taking them away from her every time she pulls them off the table and strings them out to wherever she wants to sit while she examines them.

Once she learned that she could get a reaction out of me, she became infinitely more interested in playing with them. Now, a couple times every hour, she will shuffle over to them like an obese zombie (hint, hint, Hollywood! If you're looking for a young toddler to incorporate into your next zombie flick, I've got one with the perfect shambling walk ready and waiting!), slowly reach a hand out toward them, and look directly at me to see what I'm going to do. Often she'll start chanting "no, no, no" to herself while she's doing it.

And there's nothing that I can do but EXACTLY WHAT SHE'S TRYING TO MAKE ME DO! I've tried to ignore her, figuring if she can't get a rise out of me, then she'll get bored with it and move on to something else. But she doesn't. She escalates things until I HAVE to respond. If just touching the monitors won't get a response, then she'll pick one up and start banging it on the glass table or she'll quickly swipe both of the monitors up, drag them behind the rocking chair, and start pulling all the electrical cords out on top of herself. There is nothing, short of pulling the monitors out of the room and trying to find somewhere else in the house we'd be able to hear them, that I can do to stop her. Nothing.

It's not just the monitors, either. Anything that she's gotten into "trouble" for messing with, she's made it her goal to get a hold of at every opportunity. Not because she wants to figure out how they work or what they do--as Gabe did--but because she wants to learn what I'M going to do.

Really, it's more than a little frightening to think that one of the first social skills girls learn is emotional manipulation. Not surprising, I suppose, but frightening. And kind of irritating.

Boring Goodness

Nothing special happened at daycare. Gabe had a great time, came home exhausted (we had a LITTLE fit in the car on the way home because I hadn't thought to bring him a fruit bar to eat on the way--no particular reason why I WOULD have thought to do that, but he seemed to think I was at fault). His teachers said he did well and didn't have any problems.

Norah mostly spent the morning rumbling around her two rooms, doing nothing in particular. She didn't seem to miss Gabe, but she did seem a little less than pleased to have only me as her entertainment option.

So, no good stories from that, I'm afraid. Maybe next week.

Gabe's First Day of Preschool--The Drop Off

It must be nice to be three years old. When I was in college, and then when I was teaching, I always hated it when my first meeting of a class wasn't first thing in the morning. If it was at 8:00 or 7:30, even, I would barely wake up with enough time to get ready and get to the class on time--which gave me little time to think about what was coming. Classes that started later (the worst being the night classes, obviously) always gave me plenty of time for nervousness, anxiety, worry, and all the other things that go along with being a fundamentally anti-social person who is being thrust into a social arena. I would pace and fret and gather and assess whatever I was taking to class, frittering around the house and wishing time would pass faster so that I could just get it over with (of course, once I was used to the environment of these classrooms, I invariably liked the later starting classes to the early morning ones--but for first day jitters, early classes win).

Not Gabe. Because his class time runs from 8:45-11:45 (yeah, not the 8:30-11:30 that I thought--glad I checked that before showing up too early), he was up at his normal time of 6:30 and still had two hours to kill before school. And he went about his business as usual through those entire first two hours. He ate a little breakfast, watched about thirty minutes of Curious George, then went upstairs and systematically destroyed the landing and his room. At one point, he brought me down the shattered remains of one of his plastic cars to throw in the trash (how he broke it, I have no idea, but it had to have taken some concentrated intent). Just another day.

Then, shortly before it was time to go, I brought him down to get him dressed and put on his backpack.

Dressed and ready to go.

His new backpack. Libby brought this one out last night. She'd picked it up for him to use during preschool. He was pretty excited, especially when he got to pick out a toy for his very first show and tell. He chose a little Buzz Lightyear wind up rocket ship that zips around a table-sized puzzle (the puzzle has a little groove that the ship's wheels follow). Why? Who knows. It plays the Buzz Lightyear theme song, too, and once in awhile he will pick it up just to make some noise. Otherwise, he never plays with it. But he chose it as his favorite toy. Kids are weird.

At this point the posed pictures began because, once the camera's out, he has to put on a show (I have nobody but myself and this blog to blame for that). He wanted a picture of his arm for some reason.

Then the other arm.

Then he wanted a picture of his belly. If he were a girl, it would be at this point that I would have made a mental note to NEVER condone an unchaperoned trip to Mardi Gras in New Orleans when she got older.

After this, he seemed appeased with the posed pictures, for about thirty seconds. Then, as I was gathering Norah up, he said, "Now a picture of my wiener," and he set about pulling down his pants. I stopped him. "No, honey. It's not ever appropriate to take pictures of your wiener," I explained--because, really, what else can you say to something like this? Thankfully, he left it at that--and I made a mental note to NEVER allow Gabe to have access to any digital photography equipment until he is married, and then he can take all the pictures of his wang that he wants to.

Waiting on the front porch to go to school. Libby specifically informed me that this was a necessary picture. I'm not sure why. We don't wait for a bus or anything. Not only that, we don't USE our front porch--we only come into and go out of our house from the back door. Maybe this is some tradition or other that city kids have that I haven't yet been made aware of? Do parents all up and down city blocks gather their kids on the front porch their first day of school to pose for pictures? Anyway, I got the picture.

And then there was a steep decline in pictures because I was carrying Norah around with me--and she doesn't cotton to me holding a piece of technology in my hands while SHE'S supposed to be occupying my full attention. After setting her down inside, though, I managed to get a picture of Gabe with Mr. Rob doing a fire engine puzzle.

Once we were inside, Gabe took a moment to take off his backpack and put it into the cubby hole he'd been assigned. He pulled out his show and tell toy and put it in the basket for later. And then he ran off without another look my direction. After getting the little bit of administrative stuff taken care of that we still needed to do, I tracked him down. After three attempts, I finally got his attention and told him that I was leaving and would be back later. He looked up at me briefly, as if to say, "Whatever," then went back to work.

And that was that. If something more interesting happens when I go back to pick him up, I'll update again later. If not, then I guess that means that his first day went off without a hitch!