Stickers

When I was mentally composing this post last night in bed, as I sometimes do when I am not going to sleep as I should be, I pieced together a neat little intro that went like this: "For the last year or so, Gabe has been really into stickers."  Stock stuff, obviously. Nothing zazzy, just jump right in with a brief intro to the topic. Then I thought about it a little longer and realized that isn't even remotely the case.

To my way of thinking, pretty much EVERYTHING has been "for the last year or so." That's just the time frame my brain automatically goes to. High school? A year or so ago. Gabe's first birthday? A year or so ago. And so on. I have a poor grasp of time, I'm afraid. But that's beside the point.

As I thought back, I remembered that I had referenced stickers several times in this blog and, specifically, how much Gabe loves them. Most notable was the time he put "polka dots" on the TV. And I don't even know how long ago that was. A year or so, I'd guess.

He likes stickers and he really always has. I fail to see the appeal. Yes, there is a certain satisfying tactile sensation. Picking at a corner, there is always a slight thrill when you actually get it to come up without tearing. Peeling the sticker back and then having endless possibilities with it. Where should it go? Should it be part of a tableau, carefully crafted with other stickers to create a real or imagined scene reenactment--awesome in its pure expression of the perfect potential for the characters (or whatever) involved? Or should it be a piece of an elaborate, baroque, and meaningful decoration, wrapping around a treasured picture or object? So many options! It's like a metaphor for life itself with all of its myriad possibilities stretching out to infinity!

But, meh.

 Last night, Gabe had his first book fair at the school. Obviously not something that we NEED to participate in, what with the whole owning a bookstore thing going on, but we did it anyway because Libby has fond memories of the ones she went to as a child. We didn't have book fairs at our school. It was too small and, really, I was about the only student there when I was going that enjoyed reading. So it would have been a pretty disappointing affair with only me sitting on the floor in the middle of a spray of books. He had a tough time deciding on what he wanted.  Well, he had a tough time deciding on what he wanted that we were willing to buy him.

He WANTED a new Star Wars sticker book. It would be, I think, his fourth or fifth. But the sticker books are kind of expensive and we can order them from the store at our cost, so it didn't make much sense buying one there. He was hugely disappointed and settled on a Lego picture/story book that I'm pretty sure he will never look at more than once.

On the way home, we had a little discussion on the subject of wasting money. We've not been great about this in the past, choosing to buy our kids WAY more than we should be and giving in WAY more than we should do whenever they whine about wanting one thing or another. Partly we want to give them all the things they want (whether that is best for them or not), but partly we just want them to shut the hell up and caving in early means less aggravation in the long run (so, you know, laziness). But we're trying to be more responsible about those things now, and this seemed like a good teaching moment.

"Gabe, you don't NEED another sticker book," I reasoned. "You have a half dozen or so big, thick sticker books. Spiderman, Superman, three Star Wars books, and a generic Lego one, as I recall. You haven't used all of the stickers in ANY of those books yet."

"But there are too many stickers in them!" was his reasoning.

"And so you want MORE stickers when you already have more than you can use?" Bam! Suck on that logic, five year old! My superior adult brain just schooled you!

"Yes," he replied simply. And there goes my logic in the toilet where it usually ends up.

"Well, no. That's not how it works. I tell you what, when you use up all the stickers in your other books, then maybe we can look at ordering you a new one."

He sighed and I thought that was the end of that.

After we put him to bed, things were pretty quiet upstairs for quite awhile. I figured they had both gone to sleep because neither had napped. But, after an hour, Gabe came down holding one of his sticker books up with an excited look in his eyes.

"Look, dad! I used up all the stickers in this one!" And he held up the book for my inspection. He carefully flipped through all the pages to show me how empty they were.

"What did you do with the stickers?" I asked, somewhat nervously. He didn't have any paper up there, just books, furniture, and walls. But he's always been pretty good about not putting his stickers on non-sticker-friendly surfaces. Ever since the polka-dot incident, anyway.

"I put them on the books."

"Which books?" I asked, again, afraid that he had just picked out some of his chapter books and started filling the pages with stickers.

"The sticker books."

"Ah, I said. Good work." And I left it at that.

A little while later, Libby talked with him a bit more about it and Gabe said, as he began to work on the second book in his stack, "This is going to take me all night!"

And it might have. We're talking thousands of stickers here. But, instead, he went into the extra bedroom and fell asleep in that bed because his bed was filled with books. I inspected them and saw what he had done with the stickers.

 

 

 

Figuring out what he did with the stickers wasn't tough to spot. In effect, he had simply pulled each sticker out of the book and randomly applied it to the back of another sticker book. Not exactly what I had in mind when I told him to "use" the stickers. I imagined them having some sort of actual, planned application. Silly me. Also, apparently Blogger thinks I'm captioning still and won't let me align left or use a real font or even hit enter to start a new paragraph. So that seems like a good place to call it a post.

Gymnastics, Sort of

It really is pretty fascinating to watch as the world opens up in front of Gabe now that he's in school. I'm getting all kinds of interesting bits and bobs from him every day on the car ride home.

The other day he said, "I heard the best name ever today, dad! One of the kids in my class has the best name!" He was genuinely excited about this kid's name. I mean, excited. About a name. It was a little weird. "What was his name?" I asked. "Carl!" It is a kind of awesome name, really, especially since nobody uses it anymore. That hard K sound just doesn't come along often in American names, and add it to a sound that a drunk pirate might make and you've got naming gold.

Today I found out that there is a kid in the other kindergarten class that is shaping up to be Gabe's nemesis. I'm not sure what the kids name is--often Gabe is entirely unclear on the names of his classmates, changing them randomly as he tells me stories about the things they did in class--but Gabe has expressed a distinct dislike for him. I'm not sure what is going on, but it sounds like a bit of mild bullying of some sort.  I gave Gabe the standard Beta Male advice: If one of the kids is hurting you or one of the other students, be sure to tell a teacher or another adult. Probably I should have said, "If the kid is hurting you, hurt him back!" but I'd really rather put off visits to the principles office at least until grade school. Especially since the school is fifteen minutes or so away. Even if it does perpetuate the Beta Male line in our family. But, anyway, this is the first person I've ever heard Gabe express dislike about. He's generally a VERY friendly kid and rarely has a bad thing to say about anyone (a trait he obviously gets from me). So this kid must be a real d-bag.

But one of the more interesting things that is developing is his physicality. He's always been a physical kid, obviously. Running around and jumping all over the place pretty much non-stop. He's got ninja moves and lightsaber/jedi moves and army moves and power ranger moves and soccer moves and pretty much every other move he can think of. It's pretty remarkable, really. The kid is one big bruise. Just today, while running around the house jumping and kicking, he slipped on the pant legs of his army costume (they are too long, as are most of his pants, since he's 90% torso) and fell on the floor in ways that surely would have broken my hips at least three times. But he just gets back up and keeps going. Unless he slides into a wall or door or something. That usually phases him for a bit. But only a bit.

Anyway, I'm not sure if it's something they've been doing in recess or if it's just another aspect of his physicality that he hasn't really played out much here at home, but he's been exploring various gymnastic moves here at home recently. He's attempting cartwheels and backwards somersaults with a bit of regularity. The cartwheels mostly amount to him putting his hands on the ground and jumping his feet up into the air a foot or so. But the backwards somersaults . . . .  Well, just watch the video.

Norah Goes Back to School

It really does suck being the second child. And it kind of sucks being the parent of a second child, too. Having one child is pretty easy. That kid isn't going to know what options are available unless exposed to them, which means the kid can't whine and complain about not being able to do those things all day every day.

Staying in our boring home with nobody but me as entertainment, for Gabe, just WAS. There weren't really any other options as far as he knew. He didn't know there were channels other than the pre-K ones we watched while he was up. He didn't know there were schools where he could be around and play with dozens of other kids his own age. Moreover, he didn't have an older sibling coming up with things to do all day to entertain him. Again, he just had boring old me, so he got pretty good at coming up with his own entertainment and thinking of things to have me set up for him to do.

But Norah knows what's going on out there in the world now thanks to Gabe's participation. In some ways, it's probably forcing her to grow up a little faster than is entirely fair. She is hearing more chapter books and watching more Ninjago or Star Wars than Gabe would have ever been exposed to at three. She sees Gabe going off for most of the day while she is stuck at home with me and then gets to hear about all the fun things he's doing all day. In other words, she THINKS she's a five year old like Gabe and is VERY unhappy that she is still only three and can't do all the same things he gets to.

She's also not great at coming up with things to do all day. She just kind of putters around, acting bored. Though, she's going to have to start getting better at that soon because we're about 90% sure that we're going to cancel cable. And when she doesn't have the TV to entertain her, she's going to have to start coming up with things on her own (and, you know, me too I suppose).

But all of this has, I think, propelled us into what is, to my ears anyway, the most annoying phase yet, the "I want!" phase. Over the last week I have had to ban the use of it in the house because it instantly turns my brain red. If she utters it, she gets to spend a few minutes up in her bed as punishment. This seems extreme to me as I type it up, but it, honestly, is the nicest thing I can think of whenever she says it. And she says it A LOT. Any time we say "no." Any time she has an inkling for anything. Any time she has a thought, really. "I want! I want!" Oy. I'm sure Gabe went through a similar stage, but I don't remember being so frustrated and irritated all of the time like I am with this phase of hers. Maybe it's the tone of voice that she uses. It's both unsympathetically, autocratically demanding and gratingly whiny all at the same time. Like Hitler after being hit in the face by a dodge ball. I feel confident that I would also be infinitely annoyed by that Hitler, too.

Anyway, because she simply MUST be out doing stuff now that she knows the outside world exists, we've got her signed up for a few extra-curricular activities besides preschool. She gets to do a fairy dance camp that lasts the whole fall, which, I expect, will keep her happy and distracted for the sum total time that she is actually at the dance camp. But preschool is the big one, and it finally started again last week. These first two weeks are just one morning, so we're not fully into the swing of things (and I really think that, once Gabe goes to full days, she'll start to lighten up some because, I swear, 90% of her bad attitude is directed and making his life miserable), but we will be soon.

She's so cute. It's so hard to believe that such a sweet looking little girl could be such a pure force of evil right now.

It just breaks my heart to see the seething malevolence boiling just below the surface here. Her eyes are a little closed here, so you can't see that her eyeballs are rolled all the way back into her head.

On the way to school. Here you can see the wheels turning. She's thinking, "I wonder how I can break Daddy's will to live when I get home from school." Answer: with extreme prejudice.

Walking the path to school. There are bible verses on the red stones in the middle of the path. They sizzle when she steps on them.

See that blank one? There was a bible verse on there. When she stepped on it, the words actually flew off, squealing like trodden mice. They swirled miserably for a few seconds then dissolved into the ether.

The stairway down to her classroom. Did I mention that her backpack is filled with thumb screws and iron maidens and stuff? It totally is.

Norah at the table, plotting how she will finally cave in my skull. Weapon of choice: rolling pin. I do appreciate the Vaudevillian feel of that kind of end. It's like she's a character in The Lockhorns comic strip.

Obviously I kid here. I feel like I need to mention that from time to time--especially since I still believe that, of my two kids, only Norah MIGHT have the gumption to actually go back and read any of this nonsense later in life. I love my daughter and would take a rolling pin for her. She's just not making it easy right now, and I, too, like to whine.

Jokulhlaup and Virvelvind

It has been a rough year for pets in our household. Back in March, our first child (well, until we had real kids and realized how much more work they are than cats--but to our young minds it seemed fair to call her our child), Tsunami, had to be put down. She'd been shitting on the floor for four or five years--and me, being the dutiful, dedicated and loyal person I am, kept cleaning it up two or three times a day (but, really, I spent four years cleaning crap out of diapers, so it's not like it was all that much different)--but then she started peeing on the floor several times a day, and we decided it was just too much. We felt pretty terrible about it, but we still had one cat left.

Well, sort of. Neither of us really . . . well . . . cared all that much about Typhoon. I mean, she was cute, and we didn't mind her company, but neither of us were particularly attached to her. We inherited her a decade or so ago from my brother Jon when he did a semester of study in Ireland and couldn't take care of her anymore. Then, like a douche, he refused to take her back. So she has been our second cat, and pretty much the red-headed step child in the family (sorry to any red-headed step-kids out there, I just don't have any other common idioms to describe Typhoon's second-class status . . . . Hey, that works, second class status. But I'm not going to take the step-child thing back, so suck it gingers!). We're not talking Harry Potter treatment here. We didn't blame her for everything and lock her in a closet or anything. And we pet her and played with her and cared for her pretty well and all of that. But there just wasn't that much attachment.

Anyway, we still technically HAD one cat left, so my statement is fundamentally true. But Typhoon, apparently, must have drawn some inner strength or other from tormenting Tsunami on a daily basis because, as soon as Tsu was gone, Phoony started to quickly decline. She was always kind of a mess. She had recurring ear mites that we could never get rid of. She always had fleas--somehow, even though our cats never go outside and we treated her all the time. She had bad teeth and had to have half of them removed a few years ago. And she was bulimic--binging and purging all the time all over the house (that was probably our fault. I always wondered if she was trying to pretty herself up so we'd love her more than that aforementioned step-child). So, probably it was a surprise that she lasted as long as she did.

The first few months weren't too bad, but over this past six weeks, she stopped grooming (which, on a longhair cat means thoroughly knotted fur) and eventually she stopped eating. She dropped to about half her healthy weight. And she started breathing really heavy. Eventually, she just looked to emaciated and sad and we couldn't put it off any longer and hope for the best. And this week we put her down.

Yet, you ask, how can you already have two new cats in your house when Typhoon has only been gone for two days?

That's a good question and links directly back to Libby's unique brand of manic-depression. She is in a cat-manic phase right now. For the last five years, while Tsu had been crapping on the floor, Libby lamented that our cats simply wouldn't die and stop making a mess of our house.  Very nearly every day she expressed a wish to never, ever, have cats again. She hated the hair all over the house. She hated the smell. She hated the mess and hassle.

And then, last week, she started shopping online for cats. And her interest was rekindled. She took the kids around to a few different humane societies to visit their cat rooms. I tried to talk her into waiting awhile, to let our house air out and for our appreciation for pets to build back up. I figured the kids were too young still to really care all that much whether we had a pet or not around. And they have the chickens, right?  They're cuddly. And we could take a break from having pets. Specifically, I could take a break from feeding the animals every day and keeping up on the litter and doing pretty much all of the other chores related to keeping pets. I have, after all, been doing it every day for the last 17 years (yeah, that's how old Tsu was).

But no.

So, when it was decided that we were going to be getting a new cat sooner rather than later (one, I hoped, as we could wait awhile and get a second one later, after the first one had some time to settle in), we decided to try getting some input on names from the kids. This was actually a pretty awesome exercise. They came up with some great names. We were over at a friend's house, and the kids were jumping on their trampoline while we asked them for name suggestions. And, just as fast as Libby could type them into her phone to remember, they were spinning out new names.  Here's the list she got down:

Log, Saggy, Boob (seriously, these were the first three words out of their mouths), Pickle (not getting much better), Googoo, Peppers (OK, moving on to something else now, thank goodness), Pee (I guess not), Poopinthepot (my third favorite), Boozle (fourth favorite, and the last ranked name I had.  Interestingly, this was a name that Berke Breathed came up with, for Bloom County, for the little illustrated bubbles that appear above a character's head to signify that they are drunk, but I doubt my kids had read that particular strip yet, so I'm not sure where this came from), Doodle, String, Conner (I loved this odd, actual name that Gabe threw out there--it was the only one he ever gave, and I'm not sure that he even knows a Conner), Gaggy, Blink, Canker, Music, Loser, Squigglympics (this is my absolute favorite in the group--I love the idea of olympics for squiggles more than just about everything), Beaver (here we go again, what are these kids watching?), Jumprun, Cuttinggrass (this was Gabe's experimental, juxtapositional phase), Fighterpod, Firepie (my second favorite name and the one that I was closest to adopting as one of the cat's names, if we hadn't decided to go back to our natural water disaster names), Shooooo, Mutter, Hotjellies, Peanut Butter, Podder, Loggers, Dog, Momma, Sister, and Brother. Obviously, by the end, they were just grasping at straws and naming whatever happened to be close at hand. It happens, eventually, to most of the great artists as they tap their creative reserves and start phoning it in. But their early career was genius!

Libby had one rule that I hoped would work in my favor--the cat would have to choose the kids. Meaning, the cat would have to cuddle up to and appear fond of our children before we would commit to it. Being small children, I liked my odds of all cats pretty much hating to be around them. But it didn't work out that way. There weren't MANY options, but there were some, and that was enough.

And, actually, the first cat that chose them was a pretty good option. It's actually kind of weird. She looks pretty much exactly like Tsunami, only calico. A touch smaller and a touch lighter, and her head is bigger than Tsu's, but they move exactly the same way and have about the exact same fur (length and feel, obviously not color). She's a fat little puff-ball, and she makes me happy. Her original name was Sparrow, but I thought that name was lame, so we worked on some others. Gabe couldn't say Sparrow properly at first and kept calling her Spiral, which I kind of liked. Norah wanted to call her Carrot, which I also kind of liked. And we experimented with Poopinthepot (would have been Pip for short), Firepie, Boozle, and Squigglympics. But none of them seemed quite right, so Libby set out for the internet and found a few natural disaster options.

Jokulhlaup. Now I just have to remember how to spell that.

We settled on Jokulhlaup (huh, spellcheck doesn't recognize it as a word, weird). It's an Icelandic word meaning an ice-flow/mud slide created when the heat from a subterranean volcano melts a glacier. Pretty specifically awesome, right? Plus it has the link to volcanoes for Gabe. But the dealbreaker was coming up with a useable nick-name. Because, let's face it, nobody but Bjork would ever going to use that full word all the time to talk to a cat. I think we're actually still a little up in the air about it. Libby likes Jokul, but it's pronounced Yokel, and I don't really think I like that much. And the kids have a bit of trouble saying it. The other option was Yokie (I didn't even bother with the J thing at the beginning because there's no need for me to be pretentious about those things anymore--I'm not going to impress anybody), and that one has stuck with the kids, so, more than likely, that's what she will end up being.

And I hoped it was going to end with that. For awhile, anyway. Maybe six months or so, then the kids could pick out another cat, maybe a kitten, that would really bond with them and be their cat.

No dice.

Libby did some more shopping online. We ran back to the humane society where they found Yokie to see if she had any cage-mates that she particularly got on with. There weren't, and none of the cats chose us--in fact, they all seemed kind of put-off by us. So things were looking hopeful. Until last night. Libby took the kids by the humane society in Wichita on their way home and I (stupidly) had forgotten to unload the pet carrier from the back of the van. And she found another cat.

And, weirdly, she's pretty much exactly like Typhoon. Skinny, lanky, frisky, almost exactly as much younger than Yokie as Typhoon was younger than Tsunami, and kind of stupid. And kind of annoying. I'm holding out hope that she'll get normal. She's only a year old, so she might age gracefully. I hope. As it is now, she's the new step-child in our house and she'll have to get fat and fluffier if she wants to win me over. Because I, apparently, am a cat bigot. I likes 'em fat and furry and I'm kind of indifferent to them if they aren't. We learn new things about ourselves every day.

Naming this one was a bit faster process, but only because our friend Liz happened upon a good one and we weren't left to the researching on our own. You know, it's actually kind of difficult to find good results with web searches of keywords "natural water disaster names" and similar veins. I was finding very little the first time I looked.

Virvelvind. Slightly easier to spell but just as foreign. Also, she looks like a ferret. But she's MUCH more playful that Yokie, so she's probably going to be the kids' favorite.

But Liz found Virvelvind. Apparently, it means cyclone in Danish. Mmmm, cyclone of danishes, though I can't find any English websites to much back that up right now. Oh, there's one, but it's just a general definition and it appears that it also might mean tornado. Well, tornadoes can happen over water, right? That's what we're going to assume, anyway. And we're calling her Vindy. Virve was too tough to say and, besides, reminded me of that band Verve Pipe, famous for that song on the commercial a decade or so ago that I can for some reason still remember.

So, we have two cats again, less than two days after the last of our old ones died. As I said, when Libby decides she's into something, she's INTO it. And now, for better or worse, we've got two new animals that are going to be living with us for the next fifteen years or so. And I get to change their litter and make sure they are fed and watered. So there's that.

Norah Works on Her Sonic Scream

Yeah, that's right. I'm making a Banshee from X-Men reference. I'm not proud of it, but there is, literally, nothing else I can think of other than the character in the terrible 90s X-Men cartoon when I watch Norah in this video.

Plus, it's a pretty hilarious reference, if you appreciate what a stupid character Banshee is.

This video, though, is awesome. Here's the set up.

Gabe has been a bit obsessed with guns lately. And shooting things. And "killing" people. Probably not the best kind of play-time activity when one lives in, and wants to blend into, a community of largely pacifistic Mennonites, but what can you do? He watches violent television, movies, and video games, of course he's going to be that way. Duh. What am I supposed to do, keep him from watching that kind of thing? Sounds hard. I don't like it.

But mostly he just likes to shoot his little sucker-dart-nerf gun at the walls (because we've carefully explained how completely we will destroy his guns if he should ever shoot something that ends up breaking). And here he shot one and it actually stuck (as anyone who has ever spent much time shooting dart and nerf-dart guns knows, actually getting one to stick to anything is a pretty big deal), but it was about eight feet up the wall and they couldn't reach it to get it down. So they decided to try some alternate methods to get it down. Gabe tried throwing other darts at it, but Norah decided to scream it down. It didn't work, but it was awesome to watch.