Sleeper Cells

This morning I struck upon a startling realization. One that will shake the concept of parenting to its very core. It is so earth shatteringly brilliant in its simplicity that some will call me a visionary and others, too frightened to accept the simple reality, will decry me a mad man. My epiphany will force parents to reevaluate everything that they thought they knew about themselves, their children, and every piece of interaction they have with those children. In short, it is a game changer. And here it is:

CHILDREN ARE TERRORISTS.

I'm not saying children are LIKE terrorists, I'm saying children ARE terrorists.

Think about it. Terrorists are people--they can be parts of a group or individuals (just like children)--who systematically work to destabilize an established system of rule through acts of unconscionable cruelty or symbolic mischief. Whether or not they actually incite "terror" is not really relevant, that is simply the byproduct of their actions, which they carry out with the intention of breaking down the system.

Terrorists have a "big picture" goal of some sort, and let's start by taking a closer look at that aspect first.

The rampaging sociopath, who might commit any of a number of unspeakable acts on the general public, is different from a terrorist because the sociopath lacks organization and a long-term goal. If a person climbs a bell tower and starts shooting, he (let's be realistic with our gender reference here, it's ALWAYS a "he") might have some sort of statement to make, but that statement is always going to be secondary to the act itself. It's the shooting from the bell tower part that this person craves, not that any message in particular gets out. There are no plans in place to FURTHER carry out unspeakable acts in the name of a cause. This is a one off deal.

Because children have a long-term goal in mind, they are not simple sociopaths venting their rage/dissatisfaction/whatever with the status quo.

Even the terrorist who works alone--like the Unabomber, for instance--has plans to carry out continued acts of cruelty in the name of a cause. Whether that cause makes any sense or not also isn't relevant. It makes sense to the terrorist, and that's all that matters.

But what, you might ask, does a terrorist WANT? WHY do they do what they do?

That is simple. They want "other," and they are willing to make personal sacrifices--perhaps even unwittingly (as the terrorist might sacrifice, say, having a successful romantic relationship in exchange for a singular dedication to a goal)--to make that "other" happen. They believe their vision of how things should be is the BEST way for things to be, and they are not willing to listen to any reasoning to the contrary, no matter how logical or convincing, that others might present. Most importantly, though, they perform their terrorist acts because they believe there is no other way that they can accomplish that goal. They view themselves as powerless in the conventional sense, as a part of the system, and they reason that their only recourse is to target the very fabric of the system in a way that will ultimately destroy it. Allowing them to rebuild it from scratch with their own designation of "order" at its heart.

"OK," you say. "I see that you are starting to create a few parallels between how terrorists think and how children could subconsciously view their own place in the family 'system.' But, come on. Children aren't blowing up refrigerators because they can't have pudding. They aren't torching the living room because they can't watch another episode of 'Bubble Guppies' (this is a new show, it just started this week, and, I swear, yesterday Gabe MIGHT have torched our living room he was so incensed that there was only one episode to watch available to him, if he'd had the means--though that attitude went away after about two minutes when he was freshly distracted by a glue stick). You're insane!"

Am I? AM I? AM I?

Now we're going to get to the meat of this thing. And I will focus solely on sleep--but there are relevant examples that can be drawn from many avenues of child behavior.

If I am insane, it's because our little terrorists have been systematically destabilizing our family system by destroying our ability to think rationally and effectively parent sanely through sleep deprivation. And I have three and a half years of research to back this up. For three and a half years, neither Libby nor I have had a good night of sleep. That isn't to say that we've never had the OPPORTUNITY for a good night of sleep. We have. Nights go by that we have no disturbances. Though, the only ones we've had since Norah came along have come when the children are nowhere near us overnight, because she has yet to learn to be a subtle terrorist. She is the kind of terrorist that blows up a pub filled with innocent people.

Gabe, however, has learned subtlety. He has learned that he doesn't need to wake us up EVERY night--thus depriving himself of his own vital sleep, which allows him to function at his full capacity for destruction throughout the day (another form of terrorism--here, though, he WANTS a mess, and by continuously making them, he forces me to eventually give up and let the mess exist throughout the day, but I digress). He has learned, perhaps subconsciously--I'm willing to accept that PERHAPS children are unwitting terrorists who do the things they do simply because that is how human beings work, and they are just working THAT system to destroy another one--that waking us up in the middle of the night, say, one day out of ten still makes us sleep uneasily those other nine days. He is like a cyber-terrorist, crashing some agency network just to prove that he CAN do such a thing--and much worse, possibly with planes falling out of the sky--if he wants to.

But WHY, you say. What could possibly be the point?

To get what they want, obviously! Not only do they get what they want when they wake up--be that a glass of water, a bottle of milk, to snuggle in someone's bed, or to simply wake up the rest of the household and get the day going two hours early (which happened with Gabe this morning)--they are also breaking down our wills and our ability to resist their constant badgering and nagging throughout the day. Because I don't have the strength to keep saying "no," with the requisite five minutes of explanation, all day to the insane requests that Gabe makes ("Can I have ice cream for breakfast?" "Can I have the big tape dispenser?" "Can I use Daddy's computer?" "Can I put stickers on the dining room table/art supply cabinet/Norah/the TV/the floor/this library book/every surface in the house?"), eventually, I will cave in and let him do something. And I can only blame my weakening resolve, which I have to trace back to the fact that I rarely sleep more than four to five hours a night (yesterday I let him have ice cream at 9:00 in the morning after he pestered me for an hour, just as an example of my failure).

And Norah gets the same thing. We've been trying to wean her off the bottle as much as possible, but she LOVES her bottle and will only drink from a sippy cup after throwing a tantrum or two. For a time, I was very good about not giving her a bottle at all during the day, but now I'm finding myself not so willing to keep fighting that fight ALL DAY, and I'll give her a bottle once in awhile just to have some peace and one less thing to deal with.

See! The terrorists are winning! They are destabilizing our family systems and eroding our wills to resist! We must declare a war on children, I mean terror, and fight them with every weapon and tool available to us!

. . . .

You know, on second thought, never mind. That sounds like a lot of work, and I just don't have it in me to deal with it right now. Just forget I said anything and go about your business.

Rockying and Meatloafing

In the past couple of days, we've made casual comments about our children in comparison to famous people/characters, and we got a picture and a movie to back them up, so I figured I would share.

The first one is pretty mild. Gabe got a hooded robe for Christmas and has been wearing it around the house after his baths. It is a little weird, because he's naked underneath, but insists on wearing it until he gets too cold to stand it, but he hasn't learned the finer points of keeping his robe closed while sitting on the floor while he plays with his legos. Translation: there's too much little boy junk being exposed around our house. But he does look a little like he's preparing for his bout against Apollo Creed, so we took a picture (junk carefully concealed beforehand).


The next reference, however, is not so kind. Future Norah, if you're reading these, please go ahead and skip ahead to the next post. Go on. Trust me. You don't want to see what I have to show here.

At some point this last week, Norah began to play a "game" where she would run around the living room and dining room yelling "Run, run, run, run!" over and over again. Obviously, this is a game that I'm encouraging because, frankly, the girl needs more exercise. We never have (or had) to worry about Gabe getting enough activity because he can't sit still for five minutes most of the time. But Norah is a different animal entirely. She is, let's say, a bit on the sedentary side. I can totally relate. Physical activity is for stevedores and professional wrestlers, I always say. But, being of the . . . we'll call it "introverted" personality type (because "lazy" is such an ugly word) myself, I know from personal experience that a future of weight battles lie ahead for her if she doesn't stay on top of her exercise regime and she doesn't force her personality to be "other."

The thing is, right now, she's built like a linebacker. And, while she doesn't have QUITE so much of that shuffling/slinging her feet forward because her own girth doesn't let her walk normally going on now as she did last summer, she's still pretty, er, stocky.

So her running is pretty hilarious, actually. She kind of bounces up and down and really doesn't look at all like running is something that comes naturally to her.

But back to the celebrity reference. While she was running around the other night--the first time she was really doing it--Libby said, "She looks like a miniature Meatloaf from the back" (the singer, not the foodstuff--as the foodstuff isn't known for moving around all that much). And she did. So I tried to recreate the moment, but she wasn't terribly cooperative (as usual). Still, the video is worth a watch. Just hum "Paradise by the Dashboard Light" while you watch it and you'll see what I mean, I'm sure.

Another Strike Against Daddy?

Over the past three and a half years, I've noticed a few things about the nature of being a stay-at-home dad--specifically, that it seems to fly in the face of nature.

Besides societal norms and expectations--which I rather butt heads with on a regular basis (Specifically, every time someone asks me "what do you do?" and I reply "I'm a stay-at-home dad" and then they give me a complicated perplexed/sympathetic/pitying/condescending looking of "knowing." And what they "know" is that I'm a loser who can't hold down a real job. I'm not saying that I have any grounds to dispute this judgment on their part, but I get a little sick of seeing it in people's faces all the time.)--I'm finding that there are some basic, natural inclinations that children have that seem to suggest that mothers, rather than fathers, are MEANT to be primary care givers.

I've mentioned some of these in the past, so I won't dwell on them again now, but I think I discovered another one recently and I have a video of Norah displaying this basic, inherent characteristic.

Obviously there is a lot going on in this video. Many of them hilarious things (and I love that she displayed her complete lack of listening skills and flair for drama queening for all the world to see), but the first part is what is relevant to what I was discussing. For much of the last week, she's been saying "Mama" all the time. At first, I thought she was just wanting Libby for something or other, even though she was gone, so I spent a great deal of time explaining "work" and being gone to her. But then it slowly started to dawn on me that she wasn't asking for Libby, she was asking for ME. And she kept doing it (and is still doing it) despite my insistence that I am "Dada." And she can say "Dada" without any trouble. If I say, "Say Dada, Norah." She'll repeat it right back to me.

So then I go through a series of "Me Tarzan" type rituals to try and get it to sink in, but she will almost immediately insist that I am, instead, Mama.

And I don't think it's a stretch to assume that she is doing this because she is naturally inclined to believe that the person who is taking care of her SHOULD be Mama. The fact that I am a male doesn't figure into her labeling process. I am home, thus I am Mama.

Just one more stereotype that I have to break. Sigh. It's so difficult being so groundbreaking all the time.

But isn't that little tantrum at the end great? I'm just getting ready to tell her that she's going to fall down, and she does. Then the crying jag (which lasted until I left the room and she didn't have an audience anymore)! Just awesome.

So there's that.

Last night, we took a few pictures of the kids that I thought I'd share, too, just for shits and giggles.

Gabe still hasn't outgrown his love of cramming himself into boxes. I still remember when he was small enough that we could put some blankets in there and let him use it like a bed. Not sure what the appeal is, but, then, I'm not the kind of person who would climb a mountain "because it was there" either.

Norah "cheesing." It's gone from being a cheesy smile to something far more creepy. I'm interested to see where it ends up.

A New Family Dynamic

Yesterday at lunch (I nearly posted this right after, but decided that two posts in about as many hours seemed a bit much), I discovered that the roles have somewhat shifted in our family. Let me go back just a bit to build up to what I mean, though.

For several months now, we've been battling our kids on a meal by meal basis to both get them to eat and to get them to eat something different. Up to this point, Gabe had been pretty good about eating just about anything that we put in front of him and eating enough of it to call it a meal. As he's gotten older, though, he's also gotten to be more difficult. He is now reluctant to try "new" things--even though he's eaten them in the past, if he hasn't eaten them in the past few days he considers them new--and he is also pretty stubborn about eating more than a bite or two at each meal, insisting that he's "all fulled up" when I know, in fact, he will be whining about being hungry in less than thirty minutes.

And then there's Norah, whose love of brown foods still hasn't changed. But her eating, while integral to this story, is not the main impetus for it.

Anyway, every meal becomes a battle of wills (that escalates to a war of ultimatums, and inevitably ends in an armistice of compromises--with much haggling for what, specifically, he has to eat to constitute a "done" state). Yesterday, we had a somewhat more tantalizing offer on the table to convince him to finish his meal, beyond the normal "if you don't eat, then you can go to bed right now" type conditions. We have ice cream in the house. And I told Gabe that, if he ate his entire plate full of food, he could have a little bowl of ice cream. Then the negotiations began.

"If I eat all my french fries, then I can have some ice cream," he suggested.

"Nope. You have to eat all your french fries AND chicken nuggets to get ice cream. OR, you can stop eating now and go take a nap. If you take a good nap, though, you can still have ice cream after that." I figured I could at least bribe SOMETHING useful out of him if I couldn't get him to eat his lunch.

"If I eat my chicken nuggets, then I can have some ice cream," he countered.

"No. Eat it all."

"Ohhhh," he whined.

Meanwhile, Norah was finishing her french fries and chicken nuggets--all too happy to devour them because they are brown. When she got done, I got her out of her highchair and let her roam around in the living room again. Gabe was still eating.

"Norah can eat my french fries, then I can have some ice cream," Gabe said.

"No. But you can go to bed now if you want." I was bored with this exchange by this point and ready to move on to the next point of contention, napping.

"If I eat everything, then I can have some ice cream," Gabe conceded.

"You have five minutes and then it's nap time. Eat quickly."

So I went about getting things around for naps for a few minutes then came back.

"My French fries are gone so I can have some ice cream," Gabe informed.

"No. Your chicken nuggets are still there. And now your five minutes is up, so get your stuff for nap time and go upstairs."

"Ohhh," he whined again, but he started gathering his blankie and things and went up. As he was going up the stairs, I grabbed Norah's bottle then noticed her doing something rather strange under the table.

And here is where the family dynamic has changed. I am not, generally speaking, a dog person. I like the idea of dogs, and I'm fond of dogs when they are outside, but I find them to be too big and cumbersome in a house--and small dogs aren't really dogs, they are just cats without dignity or self-control. However, I do envy people who have dogs and children because dogs take care of all the food that gets dropped on the floor.

But now our family has something LIKE a dog! We have a Norah-dog!

To get rid of his French fries, Gabe had slyly deposited them onto the floor under the table, and Norah was down there dutifully picking them all up and shoving them into her mouth as fast as she can--probably because she knew that I would stop her as soon as I saw her doing it. Which I did. With many sighs that went out in the direction of both of my children.

So, currently, our modern family consists of two parents, two cats, one child, and one half child-half dog. Hurray for us!

Why My Kids Won't Be Child Actors

Over the last few weeks, Norah's "vocabulary" (I use the quotes because she says very few actual words, but she's at least saying things that she THINKS are words) has really started to blossom. Just about everything we say to her, she tries to repeat. And don't even get me started on her ability to remember character names on the TV shows she likes. It's a little creepy, really. She can point at minor characters and identify them, even on shows that she's only seen a couple times (like Spongebob--she even does the "Oooooooohhhh" that starts off the theme song--though, again, she's probably only seen the show a half dozen times over the last year).

But probably the cutest thing she's started doing is having conversations on her little play phones. Again, I hate to stereotype, but when these things happen at such an early age, it's tough not to assume that certain things are just hardwired into the female psyche. Like talking on the phone. She loves it. And Gabe really only started pretending to have actual conversations on the phone sometime in the last six months or so.

There are a couple of adorable things that she does--and I tried, in vain, to capture any of them on video this morning. The first one is to say "Hello," ("hello" is one of the few words that she has nailed now) then, apparently, when the person on the other end doesn't respond, she'll say "HELLO!" like an embittered old person who isn't at all comfortable with the technology she's holding in her hand. The second one starts, again, with "Hello." After that, she'll babble nothing in particular for a few seconds as if she's having a conversation. Then she'll say "OK," as if finishing up the conversation, and put the phone down.

Both are pretty cute and I tried to coax her into doing one of them for the camera this morning.

She refused. But I did manage to get a few minutes of her just being kind of cute and then grabbing a marker and doing her favorite thing in the world--writing on the windows. At this point, we've simply given up on keeping them clean. If we know someone is coming over, we'll give them a wipe down (the Mr. Clean Magic Eraser, by the by, works WONDERS for wiping off crayon and marker from walls and windows--not so much from cloth though, sadly), but, otherwise, we just leave them be.

Anyway, there was a point to the title of this post. I've noticed over the past two years of posting on this blog that my children have a complete lack of ability to follow my basic instructions before I start filming. Gabe's lack of directability has been evident since the early days of our playroom theater, but I had held out hope for Norah. Today pretty much solidified in my mind the fact that neither of my kids is destined to be the next Cousin Oliver from "Brady Bunch." Actually, that might not be such a bad thing.

Before filming, I handed her the phone and said, "Say 'Hello' and talk on the phone," which seems like not only a pretty straightforward request but a simple enough one. She spends at least an hour of every day walking around and talking into the phone as it is, so it's not like I was asking her to do something she wouldn't normally do anyway. Yet, she barely cooperated. So long money we could make when our kids play a character like Luke Brower from "Growing Pains" (for those of you who don't waste your valuable brain space on pointless television and movie trivia, this was the homeless child character the Seavers took in towards the end of the show's run. Unlike Cousin Oliver, though, the actor who played Luke Brower went on to become Leonardo DeCaprio, the famous Prius driver.)

Sorry these videos aren't terribly interesting. But, you know me. I'd rather post something that isn't very interesting than post nothing at all.

Subtlety Thy Name Is Gabe

There are many words that people who've met Gabe only once might use to describe him. "Spitfire," might work. "Firecracker" is another. An old timey grandparent might call him a "whippersnapper" or a "rapscallion." And a polite person might refer to him as "energetic." "Subtle" is not a word that often comes up in conversations discussing Gabe's personality traits. If he's going to do something, he's going to do it up properly and everyone is going to know what he's about.

This past week, we've had a few such instances and I thought I would share.

Early this week--Sunday night through Monday night--we got about seven inches of snow. After Libby got home from work Monday night, she took Gabe out to play in it for a little while. Along with the snow, a serious cold front moved in. We had a couple days where our high was about 15 farenholtz (or about -10 centipedes or 263 Kevins for those of you in foreign climes), and it was down around that temperature by Monday night.

Note: the "farenholtz" joke is one that only about three people will get--Dr. Farenholtz was our pediatrician growing up. I loves me some inside jokes that only my brothers are going to get!

Libby bundled him up like they were chasing emperor penguins in Antarctica and took him out. Now, as you look through these pictures, keep in mind that they were outside for LESS THAN TEN MINUTES. And Libby only took pictures of the highlights. The kid covered our entire yard in that time and played with everything he could find.

The first thing he did was run into the driveway--where he tripped over his little sand pile and face planted almost immediately. He ended up giving himself some rug burn on his chin, which is only now starting to disappear.

He experimented with every piece of hardware in his sandbox before moving on.

I can't tell if he's dropping a snowball or not in this picture. It would have been better if he'd thrown it right at Libby as she clicked the picture instead of just dropping it, though.

Then he used his body to clean off the slide.

In the end, they came inside not only because it was cold and he was covered in snow but because he'd managed to lose one of his shoes. Instead of waiting to put it back on, he just kept running with only a sock on. That sock and most of his leg were covered in snow, so Libby had to come in to remove everything before he got too cold.

Tuesday, though, I think he learned a valuable lesson about keeping covered and warm while playing in the snow. He had preschool. Normally, I pick him up in a parking lot behind the school a little ways. The kids all come out and play at the nearby playground while they wait for parents to show up. Tuesday, though, they hadn't yet had a chance to clean off the sidewalk that led to the parking lot, and I hadn't thought to check that fact out when I dropped him off in the morning. In other words, to get to me, Gabe had to walk through about eight to twelve inches of drifted snow at some points. While carrying his backpack and his show and tell item (Molly Moose because it was "M" week), he tried to awkwardly push his way through the snow. I was pushing through too from the other side (of course I was wearing nothing like snow shoes or pants, so my shoes ended up filled with snow also), but before I could get to him, he face planted, again. As he writhed around trying to stand back up, he managed to pretty much coat his entire body in snow.

But there was really nothing to be done about it. I loaded him into the car and he moaned and cried about how cold he was the entire way home, but I'm pretty sure he learned a valuable lesson about snow, cold, and the effects they have on exposed body parts. I'm also relatively sure he's already forgotten that lesson, but some day it will sink in.

Then, yesterday afternoon, this happened.

Let me explain what's going on in this picture. For Christmas, the kids got a couple eye masks (the ones I mentioned in the Christmas post), but they also go these hats with animal faces on them (the lion is one of them). In addition to this, Gabe is wearing the two cloth cloth "crowns" that they got for Christmas last year, the jingle bell bracelets they got this year, and his Fidel Castro style military hat. I'm not sure where the hat came from.

Anyway, yesterday, Gabe decided that he wanted to play dress-up with the masks and stuff. However, being Gabe, he wasn't satisfied with putting just one of them on. To do it right, he had to wear ALL of them. And that is what you see there.

And here's a little video of it, too. Just for kicks.

Further Proof That Girls Will Be Girls

Now, it shouldn't be said that I have been actively trying to turn Norah into a tomboy. I have never insisted that she play with Gabe's toys and be denied anything "girly." Well, I do refuse to dress her in anything pink, but I also refused to dress Gabe in anything light blue until he was old enough for that light blue to be incorporated into designs or patterns on his clothes and it wasn't obvious that he was wearing "boy" clothing. But that is beside the point. Kind of.

I DID, however, not-so-secretly hope that she would end up being a tomboy of her own choosing. I hoped this for a number of reasons, but the most important of these was that she would willingly CHOOSE to play with Gabe's toys and wear his hand-me-down clothes, saving us a butt ton of money in the long run.

However, much to the chagrin of both me and my wallet, Norah seems to be proving that some, probably most, girls are hardwired to be girly and like girly things. Despite the fact that she has innumerable boy toys to play with, she will always gravitate towards the girly stuff. I've already covered her love of baby dolls previously, but we also recently uncovered her proclivity for tea parties.

Last night, in a bout of what can only be called brief insanity, I decided that it would be a good idea to go out and find Gabe some more Legos. They have been offering him HOURS of distraction, and anything that can keep him busy for that long is, in my books, a toy worth having more of. But all of the sets that we got him for Christmas were vehicles of some sort, and he still hasn't lost his love of building the first structure that he learned how to build: the "castle." The castle can be anything and any shape, as long as blocks are stacked on top of one another high enough that knocking them down elicits some sort of joy from him.

Sadly, all of the vehicle sets included mostly fiddly little pieces--decidedly NOT the kind of thing one would build a castle with. There were almost no traditional rectangular lego blocks. You know the ones, with the eight pegs on the top. Standard lego. In the four or five sets we'd picked him up, there was ONE of those blocks. My plan was to go out and buy a bag or box of simple, basic shaped pieces so that he could easily build "castles."

Guess what. They don't sell those. No such thing as a "basic" set of Legos anymore. All they sell are the sets that must be built into something specific. In effect, Legos have become little more than model kits that can be taken apart and put back together again. Kind of fun, but at the same time, rather limiting I think. Because, let's face it, if you have a very small, curved, thin piece that is supposed to be incorporated into the bumper of a fire engine, there aren't many other uses one could come up for something so specific. So most of those fiddly bits are useless unless they are being used to build the thing they were designed to be a part of.

Sorry. Ranting.

But, since we were out, we decided to go ahead and pick him up a few more of the vehicle sets because we found some on sale. It was a "buy 2 get 1 free" sale that covered an entire section of an aisle. So, besides the Lego sets, there were tons of other things. We picked Gabe up two sets and, for the freebie, decided to get Norah something.

Without much trouble, we settled on a tea set. We saw her spend about an hour playing with the one at my folks' house and figured it was a can't miss option. And we didn't miss. She LOVED it. When we got home, she played for the rest of the evening with the set.

Libby set the dolls up for the party, but Norah knew exactly what to do with them--and keep in mind, this is the first tea party she's had since she's been old enough to kind of remember doing things! She just KNEW what to do! Really, she's setting women back over a hundred years here, proving pretty definitively that women are naturally inclined to host parties and serve others. I'm not proud of that finding, but I am inclined to ask Libby to get me things from the fridge more often now. It's kind of her biological imperative. Hurray for nature!

And a video of her playing with the stuff. You can tell by the noise the cups make that this is a porcelain set--probably a big mistake. By this morning they had already managed to break the handle off one of the cups. Oh well. Porcelain shards aren't sharp or dangerous, right? Especially when they are coming from something that a one year old has already trained herself to put into her mouth to simulate drinking. Right?

Stories and the Octomom

Our kids are interesting, I'll give them that. Every hour or so, one or the other of them does something that makes us laugh. Over the weekend, we managed to immortalize two of these instances with our camera.

The first happened Saturday. Since Christmas, Gabe has been spending between two and four hours every day in my office playing with his legos. We have to keep them in here so Norah doesn't eat them (that being kind of her thing), but it also helps to keep them fairly well contained. He has to keep them cleaned up and mostly on his little lego table or we threaten to vacuum up all the pieces (actually, I discovered yesterday that he's pulled the hands out of most of the little lego men--these hands are beige, the same color as our carpet, and I've vacuumed recently. In other words, no more hands for most of his lego people). It's been a good lesson in responsibility for him.

Ha, ha. That's a good one. No, we have to clean them up a couple times a day or run the risk of stepping on them. And, as I've written about before, that can end poorly.

While he's in here, though, we kind of have to stick close by. It's not that he is entirely untrustworthy if left unsupervised. Nine minutes out of ten he could be left alone in here to conduct his business. But that tenth minute is the sticky wicket. As soon as his legos fail to hold his interest for even a moment, he'll turn his attention to something nearby (usually my computer) and start messing with it in a decidedly irreparable manner. Or he'll go into the kitchen and start pulling food randomly out of the fridge or the cupboards, opening it up, deciding whether he wants to eat it, then leaving it on the floor when he doesn't. Or he'll go into the bathroom, grab a cup, and start transferring water from the sink or the toilet to the bathtub. Well, that's his goal, really he transfers it from the sink or the toilet to the floor. Or any of a number of destructively messy things. Really, by three and a half I would have figured I'd be able to give the child free rein of the house. But no. Maybe by the time he's twelve.

So this means that I spend as much time here in the office supervising him as it takes to make him realize that I could come back in here ANY time and he better just do what he's supposed to or run the risk of getting caught before he's even had the chance to have enough fun to make getting in trouble worth the effort. I say "supervise," but what I mean is "sit at the computer playing Facebook games." Well, I also spend a goodly amount of time building him something with the legos so that he can destroy it in 1/100th the time it took me to build it.

Anyway, I was sitting here supervising him Saturday and he started telling me about all these lego pieces that he was carrying over to the desk. I got a couple minutes of it on video, and it should be fairly self explanatory.

The stories actually started earlier in the week as Gabe began to name the lego men that he was putting together. He's come up with several pretty good names, but the group of four that I most remember were Roger, Teddy, T. and Carlito. Where a three year old comes up with a name like Carlito is beyond me. Oh, and don't feel bad if you have no idea what he's saying. I don't either whenever he gets into fast talking mode. I especially like how, towards the end, he starts making up stories about whatever he sees on my desk because he's running out of his own ideas. They always say, "write about what you know," and, right now, he knows what's on my desk.

Then yesterday we hit Wal-Mart's clearance aisle and picked up birthday presents for everyone we know under the age of four to cover the rest of the year. They had A LOT of stuff on clearance. But every time we go into Wal-Mart with the kids, we end up picking up some cheap toy to bribe them to stay quiet and stop whining. It's an AWFUL practice, obviously, as we're only training them to expect something every time we walk into a store, but what other choice do we have? Either we ignore their shrieks and screams and fits--which WE might be able to do because we're used to ignoring them, but nobody else in the store would be able to--or we cave and keep them moderately docile long enough to get out the door at the cost of a few dollars.

Gabe always ends up with a car or, now, a small package of legos. And Norah always ends up with a baby. ALWAYS a baby. She's had no interest in anything else. And there were plenty of babies to choose from on the clearance aisle. It was like an orphanage attached to a brothel in there for selection and variety. So she got yet another baby.

When we got home, she started playing with all the babies that we have downstairs. Mind you, these are the DOWNSTAIRS babies. She has maybe another ten or so upstairs. Libby helped her line them all up and we got a picture.

I wasn't joking about that Octomom thing, was I? It's kind of creepy, actually, and something that I hope I can break her of before she gets into middle school. "Babies are trouble, Norah! Don't ever think anything different! They will drain your energy and suck your soul! You don't want eight of them! Ever! Just TWO of you have aged us a decade in the last three and a half years! With eight of them, you'll look like a meth addict or Hell's Angel in less than a year! They may LOOK cute and cuddly, but they have a nefarious ulterior motive: they want your life force!" There. Hopefully future Norah reads this and it saves me the trouble of having to have "the talk" with her before it seems even remotely possible that such things would be necessary.

And here's a picture of her in sunglasses. When she was wearing them, we thought she was cute enough to warrant a picture. Now, as I study the picture, she kind of looks like a light sensitive eggplant. Naw, I'm kidding. She's adorable. Even if these toddler sized glasses are too small already for her Easter Island sized head. (Hi, future Norah! I'm just saying these things to be funny! You were always adorable and not in the least bit giant headed or eggplant shaped! Promise!)

Breaking news!

I started posting this stuff as Gabe was playing with his legos. When he finished with them, he decided that he wanted to go upstairs and play for a little while, and Norah is always eager to join him up there.

She hasn't quite mastered going up the stairs yet, and is nowhere near figuring out how to come back down them, but she did discover something fun this morning--sliding down the stairs on her butt. I got some video.

Norah Feeds Herself

Sadly, Norah's eating habits have not significantly improved over the past few months. Try as we might, we really can't get her to eat, or even show interest in, healthy foods. The only fruit that she will eat is raisins, and those she doesn't really care that much for, picking up a couple, chewing on them lazily, then throwing the rest of them on the floor. She's gotten to the point where she won't even touch other fruit.

She is a little better with vegetables. She likes green beans and peas and will even eat lima beans. But she'll only eat the green vegetables, suspecting, I believe, that anything that isn't green must be fruit. Really, if it wasn't for the fruit yogurt I try to feed her every day, she wouldn't get any fruit at all.

Moreover, she doesn't like to be fed anything anymore, insisting that she can do it herself. This leaves us in an even bigger predicament because the only foods she wants to feed herself falls into the category of "brown"--chicken nuggets, fish sticks, tater tots, french fries . . . seeing a pattern? Fried foods are about all she'll eat.

The other day, though, we began to see a glimmer of hope. Following the theory that she will eat yogurt, I decided to mix a cup of peach yogurt in with some oatmeal (she is, at best, ambivalent about oatmeal--on the one hand it is brown, on the other, it doesn't have crust, so she approaches it warily and usually doesn't stay interested in it beyond the first few bites). When we tried to feed it to her, she closed her lips tightly and moved her face around so we couldn't get the spoon to her mouth.

Frustrated, Libby decided to put the bowl in front of her and hand her the spoon. And Norah went after the stuff. My hope is that, once she can effectively feed herself, we'll be able to provide her with a better variety of healthier foods that she will eat. As you will be able to see from the videos, though, she is nowhere NEAR being able to effectively feed herself.

And here is the aftermath (this came after a light scraping to her frontal region).

The Best (by which I mean worst) Christmas Present Ever

Along with all of the toys and clothes and what-nots the kids got this year, they also received two packages of a truly awful substance called Gelli Baff. In essence, it changes bath water into "goo." Why they say "bath water" instead of suggesting, say, using it in a small pool in the summer time is beyond me. This is not a cleaning substance.

Anyway, here's a link to the company's web site. It's an "as seen on TV" product that, I'm guessing, could not pass FDA regulations in the US due to the fact that it is some sort of slimy and unconscionable conjoining of ectoplasm and plastics that is not only unfit for human consumption but for human submersion.

Here's what it does. If added to 40 litres of water (again, a somewhat silly notion when compared to the concept of "bath," which usually contains enough water to at least cover the feet when standing in the tub), this Baff turns the water into slime. It also comes with a "deactivating" powder that is supposed to turn the water back into lightly colored water again (it doesn't, in case anyone was wondering--so who knows what kind of irreparable damage we did to our local water supply by releasing this small hazmat disaster down our bathroom drain. Sorry citizens of Newton! Hope none of you oldies die when you drink this crap!)

After Gabe saw the packages--and Libby foolishly explained what they were and what they did--he badgered us all day every day until we caved in and let him do it. We used more than the 40 litres of water the packaging instructed us to use because, well, where would the fun be in sitting in roughly nine gallons of water in a full sized bath tub? Probably we used about double that amount. And the stuff was still the consistency of watery oatmeal. Or thinnish cottage cheese. Or thin tapioca. It's really rather difficult to pin down. None of those descriptions nail it exactly. It was thick, but there were small bits of, well, a plasticy feeling stuff all through it. It stuck to everything, and the plastic bits had to be flung off like . . . ok. Imagine you blew your nose into your hand (without a kleenex). Now, you have a dripping, not-entirely-slimy-but-not-exactly-consistent glop of snot hanging from the palm of your hand. To get it off without ruining a towel (and without the benefit of running water), your only real option is to fling it towards, hopefully, a neighbor or bothersome animal. That nails the removal and the clinginess aspects of it, but still can't accurately describe the way it felt. Possibly there are no words for it--but I'm going to try anyway.

Carefully strain off all the water from a carton of cottage cheese and set aside. Now, prepare a pot of cream of celery soup--make sure it's just the soup, though, and there aren't any chunks of celery or other vegetables floating around in there. Let the soup cool to roughly room temperature (the slime was warmer, but for the FEEL of it, you couldn't have it warmer than room temperature or it would melt the cottage cheese chunks too much) and add the cottage cheese. Stir around with your hands. That's probably pretty close to what it felt like.

Gabe loved it. He played in the glop for twenty minutes or so. Then we tried the deactivator, which did very little. He needed a VERY thorough shower afterward to clean all the nastiness off him.

Great present Grammie and Grandpa! Thanks!

We got some video of him playing but I probably shouldn't post it on here since it has some little boy wang in it. He moves around so much that it's impossible to only get the non-wang parts of him in a video, I'm afraid. But here are some pictures that document the entire ordeal.

A nice, innocuous bath.

Hey, blogger! Thanks for turning my pictures around for me and continuing to turn them around even when I spin the original! You're great! So, yeah, this is the stuff.

Mixing in the slime. It came with a packet to change it to green, too, which we did later, but that's not really worth mentioning.

Gabe enjoying his "baff." It took some doing getting it out of his hair. And here's why.

Yeah. That's what it looked like. Try getting that out of hair. Or off anything. I can't imagine why this stuff isn't licensed to sell in the US.