One Dad, Too Much Time

Ambient Noise

2012-01-25T12:05:00.000-08:00

This morning, as I was sitting at the computer, doing something probably very important, I looked blankly up at the wall above my computer monitor and noticed just how noisy it was in my house. That isn't to say that I hadn't heard the noise. I had. I always do. But I have gotten VERY good at ignoring it for extended periods of time.

It is, I expect, something that almost all parents do (except for the really good, and really bad, ones, probably). I know my parents did it. I would stand and repeat "Mom, Mom, Mom, MOM, MOM, MOM! MOM! MOM!" until she eventually looked over at me with a mildly put-out look in her eyes and say, "What?" To which I would reply something like "You don't even know who the Power Rangers are." (Note: I would have NEVER said this to my mother as a child. Because Power Rangers didn't exist until I was in high school or so, I think. But, amusingly enough, while I was typing out the beginning of this paragraph, Gabe, who's sitting on the floor in here, playing with Legos, was saying "Daddy, Daddy, Daddy," over and over. When I said what, he said that Power Rangers thing. But I'm sure whatever I had to tell my mom was just as useful.).

But today, when I looked up at my wall, the kids were bickering, sort of, in the dining room. I tried to get the best parts of it on video, but Gabe saw me with the camera so he stopped the shouting that he was doing in reaction to Norah. They had been doing this for probably five minutes before I took the video. It's probably also worth noting that Norah was getting this much pleasure out of tormenting Gabe after five minutes of already doing it. She's trouble.

Darth Vader and Hoochies

2012-01-17T06:19:00.000-08:00

Last week Gabe watched the last two Star Wars movies (of the THREE that exist). He was quite taken by them. Before we watched Empire, I did what I could to make sure he, like all true fans, agreed that it was the best of the three movies. Sure it's depressing as hell (I don't think I saw it for the first time until shortly before Jedi was in theaters--and I saw that one in a theater--so there wasn't any big looming question about what happened to Han in my world), but that's what makes it the best. It was the last Star Wars movie made for adults, without a burgeoning toy market to take into consideration (which can be the only explanation for the creation of the Ewoks, which were an almost likeable option compared to what Lucas did to the prequels). Jedi was Libby's favorite. She likes the Ewoks. And she told Gabe as much.

After he watched Empire, he agreed with me that it was his favorite Star Wars movie and went on to say that it was the best movie ever. He hasn't seen Schindler's List yet (I figure five is a good age to introduce the Holocaust to him), so I took that with a grain of salt. Then, two days later, he watched Jedi, and all bets were off. He loved the "little bears" as he called them. He was actually far less drawn into the movie up to the point of the Ewoks--it took him two tries to get through before he had the attention span to pull it off--but once the Ewoks and the space battle started, he was glued to the TV.

Anyway, shortly after that, this video happened.

I'm pretty sure I've mentioned before that the villain who haunted most of my childhood dreams was Darth Vader (I used to do this thing where I would hide down, under the covers, at the foot of my bed and pretend that Luke and I were hiding from Vader, who was wandering around our room, looking to slice us to bits). So I'm glad that I could share that with Gabe. He hasn't really had any problems in the dark at bed time, though, so he might need to see Empire a few more times so it sinks in.

So there was that. And then there was this.

For Christmas, Norah received a Dora the Explorer doll. It's a weird thing. She's a teenager (I think she's got a new series or something). I am failing to see who this is supposed to appeal to. She's still doing more or less preschool type things, so I think it's geared for preschoolers. However, she's a teenager (or preteen or something, I don't pay that much attention to girl things), so the doll has all sorts of accessories that she can be dressed up in--which seems less like a preschool thing. At least Norah hasn't really grasped the concept. She LOVES to change Dora's shoes, but that's about it. Well, that's not true. She likes to get Dora naked, too. She just doesn't like putting her clothes back on. Probably there is something I should say about that, but I'll pass.

Last week, though, I got tired of getting Dora dressed again just so Norah could take her clothes back off, so I told Norah as such and insisted that she dress Dora on her own. So she spent a goodly amount of time consumed in the activity. And when she was done, this is what she created:

I'm afraid the picture might not entirely do the doll justice. Dora is wearing underwear--a bra and panties. When she's naked, that's all she has on. They are pink. Now, if you look closely at the doll, you'll notice that she's wearing a shiny gold jacket that only goes slightly below her boobs--opened up, of course--and a pair of capri stretch pants, which are barely pulled up over her pubic region. If not for the bra and panties, she would be arrestable. And THIS is what my two year old daughter thinks is appropriate dress (I'm not sure how the single shoe works into it--it's probably code for something that, being old, I don't understand). These kids today!

Norah's First Day of School

2012-01-06T07:28:00.000-08:00

I've got quite a chunk of pictures and video to post on here from the Christmas break, but I just don't have the means to tackle that right now. Instead, I'll skip ahead a bit to yesterday.

Norah started preschool yesterday. The place she's going (where Gabe's been for the last year and a half) allows 2 1/2 year olds, so they kept an open spot through the fall semester so she could join this spring. This is super good as she's been a real pill every Tuesday/Thursday when I've had to drop Gabe off and she's had to spend her mornings with me. Plus, it means I'll get a couple hours to myself every week, which can only improve my sanity.

Not surprisingly, the day started off a bit shakily. While we were rushing around, trying to get everything in order--gathering all of their stuff and getting some dishes and laundry going and doing all the other things that we generally do early in the morning to make the rest of the day go by with as few snags as possible--she managed to mangle her upper lip. Nobody knows what she did, and she wasn't able to fill in any blanks in the details either.

More or less, as I was putting dishes away, she walked into the kitchen with a stunned look on her face. She had her hand up to her mouth so I couldn't immediately see what the problem was. Then she pulled her hand away and looked at it. It was full of blood, as was her shirt sleeve. And when she saw it, all hell broke loose.

She shrieked and started vigorously rubbing her face with her hands and sleeve to try and get the blood off--which, clearly, was a terrible idea, but there's no telling her what the sensible thing to do is.

After a time, Libby was able to staunch the flow of blood (Norah wanted nothing to do with me stopping it, since there were plenty of other people in the house to choose from and I am always her last choice if she's given one) by putting a band-aid on her upper lip. It was the only way she could apply any sort of pressure to stop the bleeding.

I'm afraid we really dropped the ball on the picture taking with the bandaid. She's wearing it here, but the picture just doesn't do it justice.

Eventually, Libby had to take the band-aid off, which was a bit problematic. It was stuck pretty good. Onto her upper lip and a pretty fresh flesh wound. There was screaming and more blood. But it stopped more quickly this time and Norah went about playing with the dollhouse here. Gabe came over for a bit and helped her out, but didn't stick around too long.

I asked Gabe after school how Norah did on her first day. He said she did pretty well, but I'm not sure by what standard he was grading her performance. After a bit more pestering, I learned that she pretty much spent her entire morning sitting at this dollhouse, only being pried away a couple times for group activities. Why she has such a fascination with this dollhouse, when we have one here at home that's just about as big and has even more stuff, is one of those questions for the ages. Different is always better, I guess. Also, that's my crotch in the background. You're welcome.

The Best Video Ever

2011-12-30T06:15:00.001-08:00

Last night, as we were getting ready for dinner, Libby overheard Norah in the other room. She was hanging dinosaur magnets on the fridge and every once in awhile one of them would fall on the floor. When it did she said, "Dammit." It was pretty hilarious, but we explained to her that it was a bad word with the requisite caveat that only adults could use that word (because, after all, that was how she learned it in the first place, as saying"dammit" is one of my unfortunate verbal habits when something damnable happens to me--which is just about everything).

After she was finished with the fridge, though, Libby quizzed her on what she'd said, and the result was GOLD.

Sadly, you'll just have to ignore the last thirty seconds or minute of the video as it's just Libby trying to pester something else funny out of Norah. But up to that point, GOLD.

Gabe's Christmas Program

2011-12-19T09:04:00.000-08:00

So I still haven't gotten around to loading up the video from the Santa call to youtube, but I do have some video of Gabe in his Christmas "program" at preschool. And another one of the kids jumping on the couch (which I totally didn't let them do, Libby, I suspect one of our ghosts shot the video instead of me).

And jumping on the couch.

The Kids Receive a Call from Santa

2011-12-14T09:24:00.000-08:00

Last night, the kids got a call from Santa. It went interestingly. Hopefully it's not too long for Blogger to accept.

An Uncomfortable Retirement

2011-12-05T07:11:00.000-08:00

Almost fifteen years ago, shortly after Libby and I got married, I took a part time job at Ritz Camera in the Town East Mall. The store was only opened five years, and I started working there within a month of it opening (it was opened as part of an agreement with Simon, the mall's parent company--Ritz had to open many stores in small markets to get a space in the Mall of America, as I understand it). Ritz had to sign a five year lease on the space, and as soon as it was up, they closed our store.

Now, there is some debate as to whether it was OUR fault (besides me, my friends Brian and Kris worked there for most of those five years and my brother Jon was there for much of it as well--in other words, there really wasn't anyone to blame for the store doing badly except me and my friends, but we still found plenty of other excuses for why the store didn't do so well). But that is neither here nor there. All I know is that I was able to tape the two day marathon of Twilight Zones on the SciFi channel on New Years and watch it, in its entirety, while being paid at Ritz. Does that mean we were neglecting our job and making the business fail? Who cares, it was awesome (we also caught up on something like 10 seasons of Law and Order at the time).

By the process of elimination, and in no way reflecting my aptitude for selling cameras, I rose in the ranks at the store--becoming full time, then the assistant manager, and finally becoming the store manager for about a year and a half. Then, 4 years and eleven months after the store opened, we received a pallet-load of empty boxes with no warning and no explanations for what we were supposed to do with them. A call to our district manager informed us that the store would need to be packed into those boxes and we would be closing in a month. And then I became a college English teacher because I wasn't qualified to do anything else (and still am not qualified to do anything else).

While I was the manager, I received a piece of mail notifying me that the company was starting a 401K for me with a $100 initial deposit that I could continue to put funds into if I chose. At the time, we had zero disposable income, so I passed, but the account continued to exist and for the past decade I've been receiving quarterly notifications of how the account was doing. And, to this day, it is the only retirement that I have accrued because I have never had a real full-time job with benefits of any sort since. At one point, it had risen in value to about $175! But the market crash of 2008 cost me about 30% of my retirement, and for that I will never forgive Wall Street.

A couple months ago, I received another piece of mail letting me know that, since I wasn't doing anything with my account, it was going to be closed. I could roll it over into another account or receive a check. Since, as I said, I have no other accounts, I decided just to roll the dice and hope they would send me a check instead of just embezzling the money because, let's face it, I wasn't going to go out of my way to keep track of a little over $100. But, lo and behold, two weeks ago, I received a check for $122.57.

What would I do with this windfall? Pay a bill? Buy 2/3 of a cartload of groceries? Change the oil on BOTH of our cars? The possibilities weren't endless. And I decided to say screw it and take advantage of a Black Friday weekend sale Gamestop was running and bought a Kinect for my X-Box.

And I think it will pay off. I see decades of happy return on my retirement. At least as long as it's not me playing it because, I've found out, that most of the games that require jumping and actual exercisy movement aren't tailored to my sedentary body type. One day of messing around on there ended up with me sore and achy for a week. And I might have broken a hip.

But Gabe loves it. He especially loves Fruit Ninja. The game's concept is simple. You are a ninja, and someone below and in front of you throws fruit in the air, and you cut it with your sword--presumably to use in those fruit plates they sell at grocery stores or for the fruit juice industry, because I can't see many other practical uses for that much chopped up fruit.

But any opportunity to swing his arms around like they are swords is an opportunity that Gabe won't pass up on. He's gotten pretty good at the game, too (though he's still a bit short for the Kinect to properly read him standing in front of the TV, which poses some problems from time to time).

Gabe Ninjaing. He ALWAYS makes the sound effect of slicing his sword while playing. And he tends to roam all around the room while playing, which poses further problems for the Kinect to keep up with him. But he doesn't seem to mind that it often doesn't do what it's supposed to do. He just keeps blissfully swinging his arms and jumping around. And, even better, we've found something that he wants to do badly enough that we can use it as blackmail to get him to nap. He's already opted out of playing in favor of not napping once--which makes it an imperfect draw--but it's kept him in bed at least twice now, which I'll call a success.

Norah gave it a go, too--with me doing the actual slicing behind her because she was too short for the sensor to see. In the game, little bombs occasionally fly up and if you chop them something bad happens. What you can't see on this video, because it happens shortly after, is Norah getting a complex about the bomb that I exploded to end our game. For the past few days, she has thrown fits whenever Gabe starts playing the game, insisting that she needs to be upstairs so the bombs don't hurt her. For a day after this happened, she couldn't talk about anything but the bombs exploding--"Don't make the bomb explode, Daddy!" she would insist as we were driving in the car and there were no bombs in sight. Kids are weird.

The Holidays Begin

2011-11-28T07:24:00.000-08:00

We had family in and lots of things going on this last week. It was great fun, but I think we all know how I feel about being busy. It never ceases to amaze me that we, as a society, feel it is OK to put ourselves through the wringer for a little over a 1/12th of the year. We CHOOSE to do this. On the one hand, we have a month that could go by like any other--low stress, low expense, high sleepability since it's dark so much. On the other, we have a month of running around to everywhere to eat too much food, spending outrageous amounts of money on things people will, at best, use a few times before putting it in some closet or thrift store box, and our nightmares are filled with chilling renditions of Mariah Carey's "All I Want for Christmas Is You."

Though, personally, my dreams are always haunted with the Band Aid guilt ripper "Do They Know It's Christmas," which has ruined every holiday season for me since the first time I truly understood what the song was asking in the late 80s. Well, and then I started working retail, which extra-ruined it.

But enough of my curmudgeoning! This is Christmas, dammit, and I DO know it! So I'll just share some pictures and videos of the kids from the last week.

I'm not sure if this is a "wary" or "apprehensive" or "devious" look that she's sporting here, but I like how little cousin Paige seems to be falling gently from Norah's grasp. Norah spent the next several days carrying around and "caring" for one of her baby dolls, which she named Baby Paige. Oh, and Paige wasn't really slipping from Norah's grasp. That's what we in the business like to call an "optical illusion." Kind of like an Escher, only with suspended babies.

See? She's not really slipping closer to the floor, she's just fine. Illusion! And another thing, isn't it difficult to wrap the mind around the idea that Norah used to be this size? I mean, look at her meaty little hand. It's almost the size of Paige's head. And Norah is just a little over two years older. I think it's time for us to consider the very real possibility that she's a giant. Not like a frost giant or anything (come on, be realistic)--but possibly a hill giant.

The kids barely napped through the entire week. This made bedtime a little easier to abide by, but made the hours from lunch through bedtime an adventure filled with whining and crying and hurt feelings--kind of like a Harry Potter book without all of the good characters dying for no good reason.

We had a family meal at Stroud's (where they proudly wear shirts declaring that they "choke our own chickens"--so a classy joint. Libby worked there for a few months after we got married, if that tells you anything about the kind of people they will hire). Here's Gabe and Norah with their cousins Tanner and Sydney. All the girls we wearing pink tutus. Because you can't get away with doing something like that in public for very long and you might as well make the most of it while you can.

Sydney and Norah, posing in an appropriately cute way for a picture.

Tanner and Gabe posing in one of the creepiest ways possible for a picture.

Thanksgiving dinner. The kids are sitting at a bench, not a table. A small, wobbly bench that we scooted up to them after they sat down. Just how bad this idea was occurred to us not long after we took this picture when the contents of both of their plates spilled to the floor when Norah tried to stand up. Which they didn't mind because they are picky shits and didn't want to eat much of the wonderful food put in front of them anyway.

Gabe on Nana and Poppa's Big Wheel. This Big Wheel LOOKS awesome and tough. It makes noises and stuff, too. But it is even less drivable than most Big Wheels. The front wheel refuses to stay straight and requires more strength and coordination than anyone small enough to sit in the seat possesses. But Gabe did a few good pictures sitting behind the wheel. He looks like trouble, though the only trouble it's possible to get in with this thing comes in the form of the terrible crashes that happen whenever forward movement wrenches the wheel from the driver's grasp and jackknifes at top speeds.

I like this picture because it looks as if Gabe is preparing to give another driver the bird. If I haven't taught my kids road rage by the time they are old enough to own their own cars, then I've probably failed as a parent.

"Something Else," will be rocketing up the charts just as soon as I can figure out how to capitalize on my daughter's obvious singing talents. We will also invest in some sort of legit microphone so she doesn't have to sing into (and make out with) deer whistles on the fronts of cars.

There was also supposed to be a video of the kids decorating cookies last night, but I guess it was too big for Blogger to digest. Glad they've worked out the bugs that have been a nuisance since I started this blog almost three years ago. You'll have to either check Libby's facebook page or our youtube account if you want to see it. Stupid Blogger.

Gabe and Fire

2011-11-21T19:35:00.001-08:00

I'm going to go ahead and make a prediction here. Either Gabe is going to be a firefighter, an arsonist, or he is going to be paralyzingly obsessed with fire danger/safety when he grows up. The kid has a thing for fire.

And he has since he's been able to process the things that are going on around him. He loved fire trucks first, which wasn't odd. Most boys do because they are big and red and make a lot of noise. And he's had his Truck Adventures video that I had to find on Ebay because we checked it out of the library as often as they would allow us to for six months. And then there was his Fireman Sam phase . . . .

Interesting side note. Gabe is over Fireman Sam now. But Norah LOVES him. Can't get enough of the show. Every time she gets to pick a show to watch, it's Fireman O'Sam, as she calls him, and has been for about three months now. But where Gabe liked the show because of the firetrucks and the "daring" rescues (it's a Welsh pre-K show that runs on PBS here, so it's not what you'd call intense), I'm pretty sure Norah has other reasons to fixate on it. If I wanted to be optimistic, I'd say she's going to love firefighters in a probably unhealthy way. But if I wanted to be realistic, I'd say she's mostly interested in learning the tricks of the trade from Sam's primary antagonist, Norman Price. Norman is a little delinquent who causes the majority of the problems that Sam has to deal with. I swear, if he had an adequate latchkey system or some reliable adult supervision, the fire department in their town certainly wouldn't need four people in their employ and they'd have little use for the rescue helicopter and other odds and ends that must be depleting the town coffers. And I'm pretty sure Norah is taking mental notes for when she's older.

Anyway, and he's had his volcano phase and presently, pretty much every night, he wants us to light a fire in our fire pit outside so he can watch it. All of these seem kind of normal and boy-ish to me. Fire IS awesome. There's no way around that fact. He's just given himself over to its awesomeness.

But he's also had some kind of, well, darker obsessions with fire over the years. Like when we had to leave the daycare we liked because Gabe couldn't get over the presence of the fire alarm in the room. One day while he was there they ran a fire drill, and the sound of the fire alarm sent him into panic mode. And for six months after that, every day when we dropped him off he pointed at all the fire alarms and then cried fiercely when we said goodbye to leave him alone with the big, bad, noisy thing. Until we finally had to leave because he just wasn't improving.

Then things went pretty normally for quite awhile, until a couple weeks ago when preschool had its F week and fire was discussed. Since then, Gabe has been all about fire safety. Hardly a day goes by where he doesn't ask me some what-if question. "What if a fire traps me in my room?" "What if you and mama are asleep and can't hear the fire alarm?" "Where will we live if a fire burns down our house?"

Last week, he asked Libby that last question and Libby said, "We'd probably stay in a hotel." "What's a hotel?" Gabe asked (we've only stayed in one with him once, and that was over a year ago, so he doesn't have much frame of reference). Faced with having to explain the concept of a hotel to a four year old--think about it it and tell me that is an easy concept to explain when you want a child going back to bed soon--Libby changed her mind and told Gabe we could sleep in his playhouse.

It was pretty cute, actually. He went back into the bedroom and, on their monitor (which we still keep on, not so much because we need to be able to hear them but because they say some pretty amusing stuff up there now before they go to sleep), we heard Norah say, "What her said?" Obviously Gabe had been sent on a fact finding mission and was reporting back.

He's also decided that, in the case of a fire that is burning downstairs while they are trapped upstairs, he will break out the window next to Norah's bed so they can escape. This SOUNDS like a good idea, until you think about a four and two year old plummeting from a second story window into some bushes below. So I took him around the front of the house the next day and showed him how high up his room was, then I pointed out that the window from Norah's old room went out onto the porch, which sloped down some and only had an eight foot drop or so. Still probably a leg breaker, but not AS dangerous. He was entirely unimpressed by that notion and swore that he was sticking with Norah's window instead.

Oh, yeah, this is where that whole candle starting the entire house on fire thing came from, too. I'm just putting that together now--that would have been just a day or two after the fire safety thing at school. Duh, Dad.

Finally, tonight, I just couldn't take it anymore. Most of his fears revolve around the idea that nobody will know if there is a fire. That somehow none of us will realize it's happening until everything but Gabe's room is engulfed in fire. So, when he came down tonight, again, to ask me what would happen if we slept through a fire, I hit the test button on the fire alarm on the stares. "Too noisy!" he said. "See? Nobody is going to sleep through that, and it goes off if we burn something in the oven."

This seemed to put his mind at ease, so he went back to bed. Where this exchange, which has nothing to do with fire, but which amused us greatly happened:

Norah, "It goes like this, Beep! Beep! (imitating our fire alarm)."
Gabe, "Shh! I'm trying to sleep."
Norah, "It goes like this, Beep! Beep!"
Gabe, "Shh! I'm trying to sleep!"
Norah, "It goes like this, Beep! Beep!"
Gabe, "Shut your pie hole!"

Libby had to inform him that this wasn't an appropriate thing to say--which we have to do FAR more often than can possibly be good. Though neither of us uses this particular phrase enough that Gabe should have picked it up, he does have a knack for hearing something we say once, out of nowhere, and then repeating it a few months later. But I prefer to blame it on the kids at school instead. EVERYTHING is the fault of the kids at school from here on out, I'm sure.

That last little bit didn't have anything to do with fire, but I thought it was worth sharing anyway.

Chinese Feet and Pooping Out Wubbies

2011-11-16T05:50:00.000-08:00

Again, unrelated topics, but I enjoy the image juxtaposing these random things creates.

A month or so back, Gabe demanded that he be able to wear footie PJs like Norah had. So Libby went out and bought him a couple pairs. Size 5s. And they mostly fit, at least as far as the length is concerned. But one of the pairs had a glaring deficiency--the feet were too small (and here is where the first part of my title becomes relevant as I am making an implied--well, now expressed--commentary on the manufacturing of these PJs in China and the fact that the children who doubtless tried these clothes on to size them had much smaller feet than Gabe. Yes, I know, anything that requires this much explaining isn't worth the trouble, but now it's been done and it would be even MORE trouble to go back and erase it all. Such is life).

Every time Gabe wore them, he'd wake up in the middle of the night complaining about how bad his feet hurt. So Libby would just strip him naked and put him back to bed. But now that it's gotten pretty chilly at night, that's just not an option. So she decided to "adjust" the feet so they would fit on Gabe.

Gabe is on the left. Norah refused to have a picture taken that she wasn't a part of. Libby only snipped the foot open, she didn't cut off any cloth. So, basically, the feet on this pair of PJs was that small on him. Gabe does have big feet, but come on. It's like they fitted these for Pan or some other hooved man-beast-child.

These were the first pictures that I got. My instructions were, "Gabe, come here so I can take a picture of your feet." They both ran into the room and started posing. So I'm sharing.

And here is a video of Norah pooping out her Lulu. I don't think it needs much more buildup than that.

The Weird Things That Scare Kids

2011-11-11T06:09:00.001-08:00

Up to this point, I think we've been pretty lucky on the whole "scared of things" issue. Gabe has not had too much trouble with it, and Norah hasn't really been verbal enough to truly express her fears. Gabe doesn't much care for total darkness, and Norah obviously didn't like to be alone in her room (proven by the fact that she stopped shrieking through the night as soon as she and Gabe shared a room). We've never had monsters under the bed or bogeymen in the closet or anything like that to deal with. They wake up from nightmares from time to time and we have to talk them off the ledge, but that's about it.

Or, rather, that WAS about it. Earlier in the week, Gabe had his first of what I have to assume will be many scaredy cat moments.

It was naptime. About thirty minutes after I put them down, Gabe came down the stairs and informed me that he needed to pee. Like usual. I was trying to nap on the couch, so I just turned my head and said, "Go pee, and go back to bed!" over my shoulder and tried to go back to sleep. After a bit, I heard him go back upstairs.

But the damage was already done. I had dozed off before he came down, and now that I was fully awake again, there was no going back to sleep. About fifteen minutes later, I got up. As I walked by the stairs, something caught my eye. Gabe was sitting on the top stair in the dark.

"Gabe, go back to bed. Go to sleep. No more noise, just sleep." I instructed and walked into the office. Two steps into the office and I hear bitter sobs coming from the top of the stairs. I back out of the office and look up the stairs.

"What's wrong?" I ask in the most caring voice I can muster through my annoyance at having naptime, once again, ruined.

"I-I-I'm-m-m scared," he stammered.

"Scared? Scared of what?"

"The-the-the c-c-candle!"

"What? The candle?"

"Yuh-yes!"

"A candle. You're scared of a candle?"

"Yes!"

"OK. Let me come up. You're going to have to show me."

I went upstairs and went into the extra bedroom, where he takes naps.

"Show me what is scaring you."

And he pointed at, sure enough, a candle. It was a medium sized, I don't know what you'd call them, canister candles? One of those bigger ones that are sold at candle parties that smell like something "wonderful." This one smelled like baby powder. Libby bought it when Gabe was a baby. Apparently, at the time, we weren't smelling enough baby powder as it was.

Anyway, I looked at him. He was dead serious. This candle, which was sitting on top of a small desk in the bedroom, was the cause of his worry.

"Why are you scared of this candle?"

Through his sobs, this is the message that I was able to translate, "Because the candle will start on fire and then it will burn down the entire house."

After wasting a couple minutes trying to explain to him that things don't just start on fire, and pointing out that this particular candle, even if we WANTED it to burn, couldn't because a year or so back Gabe had personally dug out both of the wicks with his tiny little fingers and spread what wax he could all over the furniture up there, I gave up and put the candle in another room.

But now I'm afraid we've opened a floodgate and the irrational fears are going to rush in and sweep us all away. As long as whatever they are afraid of keeps being amusing, though, I guess I won't take it too personally.

To Think Like a Child

2011-11-07T08:55:00.001-08:00

I wish I could think like a kid again. Years of experience and education have jaded me to the wonder and discovery of childhood. And I miss it. Having the ability to think like a child again would certainly make communicating with my children easier because, for a change, I'd be able to figure out just what the hell is going through their heads that made them believe what they just did was a good idea.

Take, for instance:

Yesterday afternoon I found this stuck to my rocking chair. It is a lime green lego. At first I thought it was just sitting in the crease there, precariously resting. Which would have been a little strange as, even then, one of the kids would have had to set it there. But when I pulled it off, I noticed it was sticky, and that stick was keeping it on the chair, not gravity and luck. Upon still closer inspection, I saw what looked like remnants of gum on the lego. But Gabe hadn't had any gum in awhile. He did, however, still have some stuff left in his Halloween basket (specifically, the stuff that neither Libby nor I have much interest in eating).

"Gabe, is this taffy on your lego?" I asked.

He kind of squished up his face a little bit, giving me my answer.

"Did you stick this lego in your mouth while you were chewing taffy and then stick the lego to the chair?" I further deduced.

"Yes," he openly, and I think proudly, admitted.

"Why?"

"I don't know." I wish that made sense to me.

Earlier still, I opened the refrigerator and found a stick from our yard nestled between two gallons of milk on the top shelf.

"Gabe, why is there a stick in the refrigerator?" I asked.

"Because I wanted a cold stick," he answered plainly enough.

"Huh," I replied back, because what else could I say?

Well, I also told him that all he had to do was leave the stick outside and it would get plenty cold as winter was rapidly approaching, but that doesn't make for a very entertaining narrative.

At least the little stuffed penguin we found in the fridge last week made sense. Penguins SHOULD be kept in the fridge. Sticks, not so much.

Learning One of the Most Important Social Skills

2011-11-01T09:50:00.001-07:00

As we grow, we learn thousands of different social skills. We learn them from keys we pick up along the way (or, in the case of my children, through constant, nagging reminders delivered at varying pitches and volume, sometimes accompanied by largely idle threats of future repercussions or denials of privileges). They vary wildly in their importance. From learning to put the toilet seat down whenever supposedly liberated women are also in the household (come on--I have to put the toilet seat UP, so how is it not equally fair for someone else to have to put it DOWN?) all the way up to knowing when not to sock someone in the nose when being annoyed. Most of us learn these skills through one method or another. But what is the most important skill?

Gauging importance is difficult and there are many different qualifications one could use to rank these skills. For instance, if living together in a large, happy society is considered the most important qualification, then perhaps politeness, empathy, or an ability to fart discretely might be the most important skill to learn. Or if the child in question is being groomed for a life of super-villaindom, then an ability to manipulate or dominate another's personality would be the most important skill. For the sake of this post, I've decided to go with what I think is the most key element of social interaction--the very survival of the human race. What are the most basic and, thus, most important skills that we need in order to survive as a species.

Clearly this list could be argued and many nuances could be debated along the way. Loyalty and dependability are important skills to learn, and without them we cannot form cohesive bonds with other people. So those seem rather important. Being able to comprehend abstract notions of justice or fairness also seem as though they would lend themselves well to forming permanent bonds and creating lasting interpersonal relations.

But let's face it. Basic survival relies on our ability to live with one another. To not be actively repulsed by the people we share space with. On a Maslow's-type scale of importance, loyalty and fairness and all of those other skills would make a showing, but I think there can be little debate that the very foundation of the scale has to be our Ability to Not Excrete on Other People. Few other skills, it seems to me, can illicit a more negative reaction in another person than a lack of this one. And, in fact, if humans had no ability to control such things and divert away our various yucks, then society as a whole would quickly devolve. Nobody would want to have anything to do with anybody ever.

But I will take this one step further. Waste excretions are a problem. Few people want to be peed or pooped on--and those that DO want such things have MANY social problems of their own and likely aren't what you'd call "built for society" anyway. They are anomalies, and they deserve to be peed and pooped on for being so weird. That will teach them. But waste excretions are more or less contained by our inability to survive without clothes. Run around naked such that you could pee or poop on someone else freely and chances are pretty good that you'll be dead from exposure or some infection before you've had the chance to loose your bowels on many unsuspecting folks--not that they'd let you get that close anyway since you're naked and probably covered in your own filth. Thus, that problem eventually takes care of itself.

Then there's puke.

An ability to puke other than on the ones we love is, I think, the most valuable skill that we learn growing up. What is better than not being puked on? Nothing, that's what. Nothing makes me want to love and nurture someone else more than the safe, comfortable feeling I get from trusting that, no matter what, they will choose to puke on something other than me. And I can't wait until my kids learn that skill.

Not that I, personally, get puked on all that much. I would rather have my children puke on EVERYTHING in my house that isn't me. I'm a bit squeamish about the vile stuff. But Libby is a real champ about it. She has, on many occasions, put herself between our belongings and one of our kid's upchuck. She probably deserves some kind of honorarium for it. Maybe someday I'll build her a small statue, or not puke on her myself the next time I'm sick, in appreciation.

All of this is a round-about way of getting to the day of Halloween activities that Norah decided to make more interesting with the zesty combination of stomach contents that she yacked around a few different venues yesterday.

I know, I know. Poor baby. It sucks to be two and to not be able to describe what is wrong because you not only don't have the words to describe it, but you also don't have the frame of reference to understand what is wrong. Sure she used to be a major puker, but she doesn't remember any of that anymore. It's been, what, five months since she used to work herself into a puking state every time she started crying in bed. She deserves sympathy. But so do her parents. Especially me, because I am writing this down and clearly play some part in it all no matter how little I was actually barfed on.

She spent most of yesterday lying pathetically curled up in my rocking chair (which, thankfully, only smells a little like ralph today), and it looked as though she was going to keep the two of us home while Gabe and Libby made the trick-or-treating rounds. But, right at the last minute, she threw a mighty tantrum that convinced me that, no matter how much she threw up on everyone and everything along the way, that would be a lesser evil than trying to keep her home while Gabe was out doing something fun.

So we all went out and she rallied beautifully. Over the course of the day she had managed to only eat one bite of breakfast with a few sips of milk--which ended up on her shirt and in a bowl while we were at the bookstore for a "spooky story time"--and drink a glass of water and a glass of Powerade. Yet, while we were making the rounds in the neighborhoods, she managed to suffer through whatever candy she could get her paws on and then ate an entire bag of popcorn before we got home.

This, of course, she bathed herself and her bed in about 1:00 this morning. Despite a thorough washing of EVERYTHING around her bed, their room still smells like a frat house minus the desperation.

The start of our day. See? Perky, bright eyed, not the least bit looking like a vomit factory. We even managed to get her in her fairy princess costume. Though she takes after me in many ways, we don't share a love of costuming yet. She is not much of a fan of dress up. Probably she thinks there are enough REAL problems in the world to be adding fits of whimsy and fantasy into the mix. Kids these days.

Less than thirty minutes later, she was weepy and moping in Libby's arms at the store. This was after she demanded we take off her costume, but before the spewing started.

Spooky story time. About some poor woman who is being set upon by haunted clothing. Then she industriously invents the scarecrow with them. I question the authenticity of this story, though, for several reasons.

After story time, we took Norah home and Libby stayed with her because any suggestion that I stay home elicited shrieks and hysteria. Gabe and I went to his preschool for their trick-or-treeting event. His school is so cool. His teacher had each of the kids stand by her easel while she drew pictures of them in their costumes.

Fast forward to about 6:00. Norah is apparently feeling better as being around people other than me and Gabe has pushed the icky feeling stomach into the back of her mind. She REFUSED to be dressed in her costume, though, so the hand-me-down Spiderman hoodie had to suffice for dress up. Gabe, in case you're not up on your terrible 5-10 aged programming, is the Red Power Ranger. Finn is Bumblebee from the never-should-have-been-made movie version of Transformers. Gabe, it should be noted, HAS accepted my love of costume. Perhaps a bit too much. He would have worn that costume every day since we bought it six weeks ago if we'd let him. Though he claims not to be the Red Ranger in it. He thinks the Red Ranger is kind of lame. He wants to be the White Ranger (there isn't one in the show he's watching--yet), but I keep trying to explain to him that being White is even more boring than being Beige and he should pick a more interesting color. Say, purple. Or go way out there with a hunter-safety orange. He'll have none of it.

Speaking of Gabe and Power Rangers, I don't think I've shared what he wants to be when he grows up. When he first discovered the Power Rangers, he declared that he wanted to be one when he grew up (which wasn't surprising since he'd already said he wanted to be a Transformer and a G.I. Joe when those shows still caught his fancy). But the first few times he wanted to watch P.R., he caught on to the obviously negative vibe I was sending out about the show. If you've ever watched any of the early incarnations of the show, you know how bad it is. And, currently, it's even worse than it used to be. And he picked up on my snark. After a week or two, he decided that he didn't want to be a P.R. anymore because I didn't like them--those were his actual words.

I felt pretty conflicted about that. On the one hand, I had dashed my young son's dream of being a P.R. with my off-handed negativity. On the other, I had dashed my young son's dream of being a P.R. with my off-handed negativity! I was molding his taste and, hopefully, encouraging him to like things that didn't suck so hard and so fast! Nonetheless, my sense of guilt outweighed my hope that my kids won't like stupid things, and I carefully explained to him that just because I didn't like something didn't mean that HE couldn't like that thing. And that if he wanted to be a P.R., I would be very proud of him and help him keep his suit clean and his big mechanical animal thing serviced.

But he had moved on already. He decided that he wanted to be an artist. Which lasted a couple weeks. Now, he's decided that being an artist might not be that exciting, so he wants to be the first Power Ranger Artist. We'll see how that works out.

Anyway, Norah and May (she's a red crayon) in the wagon. The girls were having a tough time keeping up with the treating pace the boys were setting, so they got to ride to most of the houses. I'm actually a little apprehensive about the day when the boys are big enough to go off t-or-ting on their own. If they kept their focus and really applied themselves, they could easily cover a few dozen blocks and strip the population of a trash bag full of candy. We hit about six blocks--pretty sporadically participating blocks--and they filled their candy buckets before we quit.

Power Ranger and Transformer, bromancing and working together. It's a magical world we live in.

At the last stop of the night, Gabe was asked by our friends to show us his muscles. This is the pose he chose to do it. Not shown in the picture is Norah devouring an entire bag of microwave popcorn.

And, finally, a non-Halloween picture that I thought I would add because I saw it on the memory card and figured I would never remember to talk about it if I didn't do it now. Libby's cousin Kelly is a cheerleader for the Chiefs (I know, pretty cool, right?). Her folks, Kent and Kathy, sent the kids some Chiefs gear, including this little cheerleader outfit for Norah. And this picture makes me laugh because she looks a little psychotic. Cute still, but psychotic also. Which made it worth sharing.

A Love Letter

2011-10-25T06:42:00.000-07:00

Dear Sausage from Meridian Grocery,

I love you. There, I said it. There's no reason to beat around the bush or play coy. Let's just get that out in the open and let it breath.

I must admit, I've never felt this way about a food before. Sure there have been mild lapses in judgment inspired by fetching foods. Ice cream binges. Macaroni and cheese gorgings. Pizza gluttonings. Candy corn fixations. Marshmallow Peep face-stuffings. But these were never more than flings--the basest kind of short-sighted and self-destructive whimsies or cavings to cravings.

Never before have I wanted to make a food part of me. Don't take this the wrong way, but I want you inside me. All the time. I want your hot, spicy tube. In. Side. Me. Now. Always.

Don't let anyone turn this into something disgusting. It's beautiful. You're beautiful. And perfect. You are a perfect food.

Shh. Don't talk. Just get in my belly.

Love,
Pat

My Napping Theory Is Shot to Hell

2011-10-19T06:55:00.000-07:00

You know how I said Gabe was a complete mess on the days when he doesn't take a nap--and since he's not taking naps very often anymore, he's been more of a mess than not for awhile now. Yeah, turns out it wasn't the naps that were making him normaler.

Yesterday he took a good, long nap. Almost three hours. But from the time that he woke up until he went to bed he was non-stop spaz. We went outside to work on the playhouse some, and very little actual work got done because I spent most of my time unwedging him from things.

First, he decided that he needed to climb a tree.

This tree. A redbud. Maybe. I'm never very clear on tree names because, on the whole, they all do about the same thing in my world: provide an obstacle to mow around.

I have to admit that my feelings towards tree climbing are a bit dubious. On the one hand, tree climbing is a good, wholesome, traditional "boy" thing to do with an afternoon. Norman Rockwell would have approved of the activity. It also, I suppose, trains some coordination skills and teaches kids valuable lessons about planning ahead and gravity. On the other hand, Gabe is terrible at planning ahead and gravity has never been his friend. We've so far managed to avoid breaking any of his limbs (I say "we" but his role in the prevention has been on an unwilling participation level only), but we've also managed to keep him from being higher than a couple feet off the ground. Now that he's branching out . . . ha ha . . . it's probably only a matter of time before a trip to the hospital.

Especially if he keeps going after it like he did yesterday. He tackled this tree with gusto if not exactly prowess or skill.

Really, I have nobody to blame but myself because I'm the one that pointed the ideal climbing nature of that particular tree out to him. It seemed like an innocent enough move at the time, and I was doing it to protect another, smaller tree from Gabe's wrath. The tree he originally picked out is only about four feet tall and just a couple years old. He would have destroyed it. And when I spotted him trying to "climb" it (he wasn't able to do anything more than straddle one of the small branches that was close to the ground because the tree is only about an inch thick at its base), I pointed him to the far more substantial redbud. I thought, "No worries. That first fork is a few feet off the ground, still too high for him to get into."

So he asked me to put him up in the fork of the tree to start off. "Nope," I said. "Tree climbing isn't a team sport. If you're going to do it, you'll have to do it on your own." I thought this would buy me a few more months, anyway. Or, if nothing else, keep him discouraged enough that he would find something else to do and I could work on the playhouse.

Except he found a chair. So he used the chair to get into the fork of the tree. But that was as far as he was ever able to make it. And, obviously, it was too high for him to get down from--which he couldn't do anyway because as soon as he got in there he wedged either his crotch or his shoes into the fork in such a way that he couldn't move anymore. I have to give the kids props for trying, though, and sticking with it when it didn't work. Every time he got stuck, he yelled to me to get him down, and when I put him on the ground he declared that he "needed to try it again," always with the same result. So, every five minutes or so for a half an hour I was called over to free him up, and eventually he gave up.

After the tree, he decided to feed the chickens some "salad," one of his favorite things to do right now. He walked around the yard, picking grass and throwing it through the fence to the chickens. But this time it only kept him busy for a few minutes.

I was cutting a piece of particle board for the wall and out of the corner of my eye I saw Gabe on the picnic table. He sort of seemed to be jumping up and down. Dancing maybe? Or just being weird. Who knew. Because being on top of furniture is pretty common for him, and I didn't see where he could really hurt the picnic table being up there, I instantly dismissed it and went back to my own business.

Not a minute later I heard, "Uh, Dad? Help?" in a not very loud voice--as if he knew he needed help but REALLY didn't want to face the lecture that was going to come attached.

This was another stuck-in-a-rocking-chair moment for Gabe as he was forced to remain stuck until I had time to go inside and get the camera (which I should have done anyway to get a picture of him wedged in the tree, but I figured I would have LOTS of opportunities for wedged-in-tree pictures as the years go by). Here's what I found:

For some reason, he refused to smile for the picture.

He didn't REALLY need my help, as he pulled it out this way on his own, but I'm glad he called me all the same because I wouldn't have gotten the picture of him if he hadn't. Really, he does a great job of letting us know when he's done something he knows he's not supposed to do. I guess that's the advantage of there not being huge, terrible consequences from me whenever he screws up. He knows the worst he'll get is an earful or maybe some time out, so he hasn't discovered that it's easier just to act like something didn't happen and then lie about it when I inevitably discover it. That's good, right?

And here's his explanation of what he was doing when he punched a hole through the picnic table.

Or maybe he just doesn't lie to cover things up yet because he's not very good at it. I'm reasonably sure that he was actually just stomping on this soft spot in our picnic table--which we've known for a couple years needs to be completely rebuilt, but who wants to take the time to pull apart and then put back together a picnic table when it can still SORT OF perform its function? Now, I guess, we're not going to have much choice.

And, no matter how much of a dork he is, I'm still going to keep trying to force naps on him until he's in school. It's just my way.

The Hits Just Keep on Comin'

2011-10-13T12:31:00.000-07:00

Gabe has become a completely unreliable napper now. Two, maybe three times a week, I can either browbeat or guilt him into staying in bed long enough for him to accidentally do what his body really wants him to do and fall asleep. But most of the time he just hangs out in his room, making noise, and coming out every fifteen minutes or so to pee or poop or shout down the stairs to ask if it's "waking up time" yet.

At this point, it's worth noting that I recognize it would be easier--and there would be fewer problems with him waking Norah up--if I just abandoned his nap time altogether, let him play downstairs, and dealt with the fact that the only quiet time I will get for myself will come when I have a complete meltdown and lock myself in the bathroom. But I am loathe to give up my Me Time without a bitter, knock-down-drag-out fight. I have also maintained throughout that my kids are not going to grow up expecting the world to bend to their whims. It is vitally important--to my way of thinking, at least--that children learn to keep other people happy. It is, after all, what they're going to spend the majority of their working life doing every single day. Nobody gets to whine and cry and tell the boss they have to poop to get out of doing something they don't want to do. That's just not how the world works. That doesn't mean that my kids don't eventually erode away my resolve (sometimes quicker than normal if my tolerance for whining is particularly low that day) and get what they want, but they have to work a little to get it.

So, in my effort to at least make things more difficult for Gabe as he transitions into a napless world (which just seems preposterous to me--who wouldn't LOVE to take a nap every day and have the world resigned to take care of your every need and deal with all your problems so you can sleep carefree), we're doing "quiet time." In theory, quiet time starts when I put them both up in their rooms (Gabe sleeps in the extra bed because otherwise there's no chance Norah will go to sleep either) and it lasts until Norah wakes up. Since Norah can now nap about three hours, the odds that Gabe will be able to entertain himself quietly in his room for that long without major disturbance is about the same as of having your winning lottery ticket struck by lightning. It also doesn't help that he can't tell time, so I can't tell him to stay in his room until, say, 2:00 (there is a pretty good chance that he WILL be able to tell time before he gets to kindergarten, though, because I show him the clock and try to explain how it works with some regularity hoping to get him to recognize what two hours of quiet time looks like).

But I try anyway. And when he comes down every fifteen minutes, I inform him that he needs to go back upstairs until Norah wakes up. And I repeat that mantra every fifteen minutes until I get bored with it and let him stay up.

Yes, I realize that my Me Time is already non-existent because I'm spending all of it coaxing him back to bed. Yes, I know I'm just wasting all of our time in a futile effort to establish myself as the alpha in our household. But, so far, I haven't given up the pipe dream that I'm the one in charge around here.

But that is beside the point of my post today. One sort of advantage of Gabe not napping is that his mildly sleep deprived brain comes up with some pretty amusing stuff from time to time.

Today, for instance, he was sitting at his computer . . . .

Did I mention that we found an old lap top and gave it to Gabe for the express purpose that he could play games on an online educational site called abcmouse.com? I have to admit, the notion of letting my four year old play computer games sounded like a TERRIBLE idea when I first heard it. I already feel bad enough that my kids are borderline TV junkies (OK, probably no "borderline" about Norah's relationship to TV programming). The last thing I needed was to feel even guiltier that my kid was also addicted to video games before he can even read.

But, I tell you what, we've seen some pretty astounding results from him playing this game. Put aside the basic computer skills he already has (he can work a mouse and perform any of a number of drag/click functions, he's becoming quite familiar with the setup of the keyboard, and he's starting to come to terms with the reality of having to deal with ten year old technology being completely obsolete for doing something as basic as playing a pre-K game on the internet). He's made HUGE strides in learning his alphabet and numbers. Considering just a couple months ago we couldn't even tell if he recognized half the letters of the alphabet, now he not only recognizes them, he can identify most of their sounds, can find them on the keyboard, and he's beginning to grasp basic economic concepts (he wins tickets for playing the games on there then can buy items to decorate his "house" in the game). I'm still not saying that it's the best method out there, and it's almost guaranteed that he's going to be a video game nerd when he gets older, but so far I think the positives outweigh the negatives.

Anyway, sitting at his computer. He had a little sheet of paper that he'd stuck several different stickers on. He peeled one of the stickers off and put it above his lip like a mustache, and then he started to make up and sing a song to me. I grabbed the camera and coaxed him into doing it a few more times (he had to keep using different stickers and moving them around, too, I guess to find the perfect costume). Here's what I got.

I can't understand what he's singing about half the time, but that kind of lyrical styling is perfectly acceptable in most forms of popular music, so I think I'm going to nurture this phase.

Boys Are Weird

2011-10-06T06:21:00.000-07:00

By now everyone should be aware that my kids are weird. Funny weird, not creepy weird. Well, maybe a LITTLE creepy weird:

I have no idea what prompted him to think this was a good idea, but, then, the male brain prior to about age 25 is full of bad ideas that seem good.

Oh, and at soccer practice the other day, Libby taught Norah how to do this:

It started off innocently enough. Norah had a boo boo on the finger and was showing it to everyone. She's actually got pretty good form already--she's a natural bird flipper, if you will. She doesn't have to hold down her other fingers or anything, just BAM, the finger. Fortunately, she wasn't grasping what she was doing, so I won't have to worry for a little while longer that she's giving me the finger when I tell her to clean her plate or go to bed. My only hope is that I can convince her that she can only flip off the devil and she'll sit down here flipping off the heat registers some day (for relevant context, go here). Then the circle will be complete.

Misconceptions

2011-09-29T14:53:00.001-07:00

Things are rarely as they seem, and kids only complicate that old adage. Many and varied are the times that accurately seeing what's going on in our house has taken a double or triple take. Almost always the vision in question revolves around a "mess," which can be loosely defined as "everything children do with things," and how that mess catches my eye at first and then changes the tone of everything upon closer inspection.

Case in point, a few days ago, I approached our bathtub to start a bath for the kids. While standing over the tub, I looked down and saw a black spot. Like this:

At first blush, I had no idea what this was. Because I've had small children in my house for four years now, I automatically assumed that it was poop. Someone had left a floater in the tub the night before and we had missed it. I should note, this has NEVER happened, but that's still the first assumption I make. It's a sad place to be in, where I automatically assume a new, awful occurrence with poop has happened instead of something more innocuous, but there you have it. However, there was still a slim chance that I wouldn't need to get a kleenex to clean it up, so I bent in a little to get a better look.

Huh. That's not poop. That's . . . huh.

A head. Stuck to the bottom of our tub. Peter Parker's head, to be specific. From Gabe's Spiderman sticker book. Even he had no idea why it was there. Just one of those things.

Norah also came up with my favorite misnomer to date (well, of hers, anyway--Libby and I decided that our favorite one from either kid so far is still Gabe's "resternaut"). Wal-Mart had a bunch of summer toys on clearance last week and we bought her a pair of Dora walkie-talkies for $5. She has no concept of how to use them properly, but she loves the fact that they make ceaseless noise. And she calls them her "walkie tacos."

Yeah, I don't know. That one might be better than resternaut. I mean, sending a place to eat into outer space is funny and all, but whatever circumstance that would call for a walkie taco might trump it.

I Really Need to Be Better About Updating

2011-09-23T06:39:00.000-07:00

So, on a whim, I put the card in the reader to see if I had anything on there for a random update. Turns out I've got a mess of things on there rather worth sharing. So . . . yeah, you're going to be here for awhile.

I can't believe it's already been three weeks since school started back up. And I'm just now getting around to posting pictures. Sheesh. But here's the traditional first-day-of-school-on-the-front-porch picture.

And here's a traditional first-day-of-school-on-the-little-bench-in-front-of-the-school picture.

And here's the traditional me-carrying-a-screaming-Norah-away-from-something-that-she-insists-she-should-be-doing-instead-of-what-needs-to-be-done picture. I'm getting quite a collection of these. Norah has not been pleased about not getting to go to school with Gabe. Last year, we always went in with Gabe and she got to play around for a few minutes before we left. This year, we've had to stick to just dropping Gabe off at the front door while Norah waits in the car because, if I let her out, she throws a fit when we have to go in a few minutes. All the same, she's been screaming and crying the entire way home every day after we drop Gabe off. Once we're home, she kind of likes it, though. I've explained to her that, while Gabe is at school, she can watch whatever show she wants--instead of having to take turns with Gabe--and play with all of Gabe's toys without having to ask or share. She likes not asking and not sharing. Then we've made a habit of going to school fifteen or twenty minutes before it ends so she can play in the playground there. This is a habit I'm going to quickly start regretting when it gets too cold to be outside, but that's a problem to deal with another week.

Norah's first camp-out. The last two weekends, Libby and Gabe have been spending at least one night out in the tent. The first night, they tried it with Norah, too. They went out around 8:00, but after two hours of them screwing around and not sleeping, Libby had to give up and bring them inside. The other nights they've spent out there, Gabe has to go up to bed with Norah (because she doesn't like it when he's not in the room at night) and stay in there until she falls asleep. Then he comes back down and goes outside with Libby. Probably that's a little sneaky and underhanded, but what can you do? That's kind of the place we're at with Norah right now--we have to figure out sneaky ways to convince her that what she's doing is the funnest thing possible.

Gabe with a bubble beard. Nothing particularly special about this picture, but I figured I would share anyway.

Norah making faces. It's fun to have her go through her repertoire of emotion faces--sad, happy, scared, surprised, mad, whatever. But I fear that what I'm really doing is teaching her to create emotions. And, as manipulative as she already is, I can't imagine that she won't use her ability to create emotions to her advantage. I mean, she's already doing that, but right now all she's mastered is Screaming and Crying and Say No. When she masters the subtler emotions, we're going to be in trouble.

No idea what this emotion is. I'm going to call it Nixon.

I think she's trying to wink and smile at the same time. Not sure. Actually, the other night, Libby took five or ten minutes to teach her to tilt her head to one side, say "Please," and bat her big brown eyes at us. I REALLY dread the day she masters that one because I don't think there will be many people who will be able to say no to her when she does it.

Grammy and Grandpa sent a couple new outfits for them a week ago or so, too. But more than sharing the pictures of the outfits, I wanted to comment on Gabe's faces for these pictures.

He wasn't in a bad mood or anything. He just thought this look was what he wanted to do for these pictures. And when I look at these pictures, I can't help but have a haunting premonition of all of the pictures he'll be in from adolescence until he's probably out of college where he's too indifferent or too cool or too fed up or too angsty or too whatever to smile and admit that he's having a good time. But, then, as much as he likes to see himself in pictures and on video, maybe he'll just save that attitude for special occasions, because looking at pictures of yourself being a tool isn't nearly as much fun as looking at pictures of yourself being silly.

Last night, Libby decided to get Gabe his Halloween costume. The Red Power Ranger. Ugh. He's left Transformers and G.I. Joe in the past now and focused his entire being on the Power Rangers. I couldn't be more disappointed and can only hope that this phase just lasts as long as all those before it have. Because Power Rangers have actually managed to get worse in the past twenty years. And, considering they started off as terrible and unwatchable, where they are now is beyond painful. He kept the costume on all last night (even while he was at the store for the reception that we had for the artist we'll be displaying for the next month or two) and had to put it back on first thing this morning.

Norah with her popcorn. She has a thing for popcorn. Well, let's not fool ourselves, she has a thing for food in general. But she is VERY protective of her popcorn and she can eat a lot of it. She ate this entire bowl, which was the better part of a bag. That's perfectly normal for a two year old, though, right?

Norah playing catch. It really is weird how much better she is at it than Gabe was at that age. Actually, she's about as good at it as Gabe is now. He just doesn't have the patience to throw and catch a ball. He's good with throwing it if it's going to hit something and make it explode or fall down, otherwise, meh. I can sympathize, somewhat. I have never been much for ball throwing either. Just never came up with any practical application for the skill. I mean, if I lived in a ninja infested region and I could hone a skill for catching and returning throwing stars, sure, that's useful. Or if I was being divebombed by bats all the time and I wanted to be able to catch them and throw them in someone else's hair, that makes sense. As it is, I don't often need to catch and throw things. Just not something that I need to do.

And I saved the best for last. Take a moment to soak this picture in.

McDonalds Happy Meals have Power Ranger toys this month. One of them is a little plastic gun thing that shoots these paper disks out. For reasons that could only be clear to Gabe, he poked one of them between his but cheeks and started running around like this before his bath the other night. Libby tried to get a video, but he wasn't really cooperating by that point and it has full front nudity on it, so I'll be saving that one for the special movie viewings with his high school girlfriend. This picture will be popping up at inopportune times in his future, too, I'm sure.

Gabe Has an Idea

2011-09-16T08:51:00.000-07:00

I am doing my best not to be a helicopter parent. How well I'm doing, I suppose, probably depends on what your definition is. I've heard that term used to describe parents who swoop in whenever anything dangerous presents itself, grabbing up the child and cuddling after the smallest of bumps and bruises. I've also heard the term used to describe parents who hover over their children, constantly ruling over their lives and micromanaging them.

Let me tackle the second definition first--begging the question, why didn't I make it the first definition instead of the second, which is a valid question that points to an obvious lack of clarity and forethought on my part. Suck it.

In social situations, I have to admit that I am a helicopter parent. Well, maybe not in the micromanaging sense, as such, but I certainly hover around my kids, eager to keep them out of everyone else's hair as best I can. I know that I overdo it somewhat in this sense, but, being someone who is not overly fond of other people's kids, I naturally assume that other people don't want my kids yelling at each other and jumping all over everything and everyone. I grew up in a "kids should be seen and not heard" world, and that world seems more and more perfect in its serenity and calm each additional year that I have small children. So, yeah, I helicopter around them in social situations.

But in the first sense, the swooping in to keep them out of danger sense, not so much. In addition to not really liking kids all that much, I'm also not a fan of crying (who was it that put me in charge of kids again? Sounds like I'm about the worst person in the world for the job). I don't cry. Ever. I did growing up. Then one day I guess I just stopped, and I haven't been able to start again ever since. Not that I really WANT to cry--I don't. Crying is a messy waste of time. All that wet and snot and slobber and noise and blurred vision and vulnerability? No thanks. But I rather feel like I OUGHT to cry. It's what the sensitive guys do these days, right? But, try as I might, I can squeeze sweat out of my eye holes. It makes me sad. Just not sad enough to cry.

And, to my way of thinking, the best way to reduce the amount of crying that goes on in our house is to not encourage it. Big ouchies, sure. Those should be cried over. But anything minor--and I consider anything that isn't bleeding or includes a body part pointing in the wrong direction as a major symptom to be minor--is met with a "Can you still use it? Is blood getting on the carpet? Then shake it off." Most of the time, this borderline callous approach is met with even more furious crying and an insistence that I attend to the perceived injury with haste, sympathy, and care. But, from time to time, they actually DO shake it off and go about their business.

Well, Norah sometimes does, anyway. Gabe almost always does now, unless he's really tired. I can usually tell when Gabe needs a nap or to go to bed by how much he whines when he hurts himself. When a bonk that didn't bother him the least when he did it or throughout the day all of a sudden becomes a major issue, then it's time for bed. Otherwise, he's developing into quite the indestructible little guy, and I'd like to think that my shake-it-off attitude has helped make him that way.

But he might just BE that way, because I'm sure not having a lot of luck with Norah. Maybe it's because she's a girl and girls are just . . . well . . . pussies. EVERYTHING is an ordeal with her. Or maybe it's just because she's two and wants my undivided attention all the time no matter what else is going on around us. The kitchen is on fire, ninjas are jumping in through the shattered windows, and a tornado that giant robots created is savaging the entire town. Norah catches a foot on the edge of the carpet and falls on her knee, and THAT, to her mind, is the lead story. Kids and their priorities, I swear.

Anyway, part of the whole shaking it off philosophy is to actually let them get some banging up in the process. It's tough to teach them to deal with their own minor discomforts if they never suffer any minor discomforts. So I try to take a measured approach to my interventions when they are playing. Crawling head first down the stairs? Yeah, that's not going to fly (I'm pretty sure my kids will be permanently and irrevocably terrified of stairs their entire lives with how often I tell them to "take the stairs seriously" and "never play on them or you'll fall down, break your neck, and never be able to walk again"). Messing around near my power tools? Huh uh. Testing the boundaries to see if you can sneak into the front yard and play by the road? Inside, suckers!

However, if the possible damage that could be done is relatively minor, and the chance of success is low, many times I will just give a warning/prediction and see where nature and gravity take them.

And, every once in awhile, I let something that is truly a bad idea slide, just to see where it goes.

Today was one of those days.

Well, really, it wasn't that I let it slide so much as I didn't see it happening during the brainstorming session and decided not to step in once it had reached the point of implementation. Gabe had gotten to the point where he was trying out his bright idea anyway, so I grabbed the camera and prepared for the outcome.

Which, I should mention, never came, so I guess I was justified in letting him play it out since nothing bad came of it. Not that I need to justify my bad parenting. Bad parenting is my right as an American, dammit!

As I said, I missed his preparation as I was pulling the nails out of a piece of recycled lumber to use in their playhouse. But they had been quiet for a few minutes, which invariably means that trouble is soon to follow. And, when I went to check on them, this is what I found. A rocking horse on a porch swing. I'm pretty sure Norah just wanted to stay close so she could participate in the aftermath. She hates it when Gabe hurts himself, but I think she also likes it because she gets to use it as an excuse to scream and cry in response to him screaming and crying.

Nothing bad came of it. However, I did still get to say, "Shake it off" to Norah right after I turned off the camera. And, really, how is it that we live to adulthood? Especially boys. Defies all explanation.

Soccer and More Dancing

2011-09-13T09:44:00.000-07:00

I've really got to go through the stuff on this camera and get some updates done. It's actually been a pretty busy past couple of weeks.

School has started back up for Gabe. Norah is VERY displeased about this. She is seeing zero advantage to being at home by herself. Today, we dropped Gabe off. Norah is no longer allowed to get out of the car while I do this because, the first day of class, she threw a MAJOR tantrum when it was time for her to leave. So, now, I let Gabe out and open the door and let him go in on his own. And Norah screams and cries the entire time. Today, she didn't show signs of stopping until we were about five blocks from home.

Through her sobs she said, "I want Momma home now."
To which I replied, "Momma is at work.
She'll be home tonight the same time she usually comes home."
"I want Momma!" she demanded.
"Sorry, honey. You're just stuck with me again."
"I don't want to be stuck with you!" And that pretty much sums up her attitude towards spending time with me for the past couple months.

Anyway, in addition to school, Gabe started soccer last night. Or footbol. Or footie. Or The Running Back and Forth for Two Hours Game. Or The Sport that the Rest of the World Thinks Matters. Whatever you want to call it. It was . . . interesting. Seriously, it's a good deal he's been in preschool for a year because I can't even imagine what his instruction following skills would be like if it hadn't been for that previous exposure. As it was, he was pretty much all over the place doing his own thing. And often his own thing didn't involve kicking the soccer ball. And, once in awhile, he'd end up back with the rest of the group to stand around for ten seconds before wandering off to do whatever again.

I got some videos, but because we're so far away, you can't hear much. And, of course, he rather failed to be super entertaining while the camera was running.

After awhile they started to play a game where Clark (their coach) was a crocodile (or alligator, I can't remember which, though I'm sure it's a very important detail). The kids were supposed to dribble past him while he chomped in their direction. If he caught one of them, they became a crocigator too and helped catch the kids on the next pass. Until all of them were crocigators. After the first game, many of the kids (Gabe included) lost interest in kicking the ball and, instead, tried to get caught so they could be crocs.

Honestly, how anyone can have the patience to coach kids this age is beyond me, but I'm thankful that people with that degree of patience and dedication exist. And, hopefully, Gabe will show some improvement in his listening skills when it's all said and done.

Yesterday we also received a package from Libby's folks that contained a princess/fairy/ballerina dress in it. After Norah put it on, we had her do a little dancing for us. I'm not banking on the idea that she's going to become a world class dancer some day--unless there is a world class in interpretive dance, that she might be able to achieve.

Hire My Kids to Shill Your Product

2011-09-08T06:32:00.000-07:00

The weather has been exceptionally nice the last few days. It's possible, of course, that it hasn't been THAT nice but that it just SEEMS nice because it's been such a miserable summer (we broke a record set in 1936 for the most days over 100 degrees--I think we ended up with 53 or 54, and that is a sucky summer by anyone's standards). Either way, though, we've been spending a fair bit of time outside.

I think it was the last time Libby's family came to visit, almost three years ago, when Libby and her Dad built a little foundation in our back yard that we could build a playhouse on. That foundation has been lying bare ever since as we've never had the energy or, really, ability to do construction work with the kids around. Kids have a nasty way of wanting to touch saw blades and eat nails.

Mostly the problem was Gabe because he's got his hands and face in everything. But this year he finally reached a point where we could explain to him how painfully his hands would be ripped from his body if he touched the drill while it was running, or how his eyes might explode and drain out of his head if he didn't pay attention to where the dust from the saw was flying and stay far enough away. And also that ALL of Daddy's tools are coated with a fine layer of poison that will eat his skin away and leave him a pile of stinking, sloppy bones on the ground if he lays a finger on them.

Well, maybe not THAT kind of message, but we've at least been able to convince him to work on his own projects with the scrap wood and his hammer and a few left over nails or screws instead of having to be all up in our business.

Norah, of course, isn't all that interested in what we're doing. Really, if we can convince her that she can hit a ball with the bat on her own and we don't have to play catch with her every second we're outside, we're able to go about our business without much trouble.

So back in early June, when we had a nice weekend, we got started on the playhouse. We framed out two of the walls.

And then it was a hundred degrees or more for two months.

And this week we finally got back to building! I was able to mostly finish a third wall yesterday (it's still pretty slow going with both kids out there, but at least it's going).

While we were out there, though, the chickens became a distraction to the kids and Gabe demanded that they needed to be fed. I remembered that we had a box of Cheerios in the freezer outside that I had picked up about two years ago. Libby, apparently, is off Cheerios--and the kids had never really cared for them at all (after they were past the "finger food" phase, anyway. So we've had to boxes out in the freezer for quite some time. And I decided to feed them to the chickens because they pissed me off every time I saw them going uneaten in the freezer.

So I pulled the box out and let the kids feed most of it to the chickens. After the third or fourth handful that Gabe dumped into their little trough, he decided that he wanted to try the Cheerios again. And he decided that he loved them. He refused to let me feed anymore to the chickens because he wanted to eat the rest of the box (which was still about half full).

Norah also decided to try one. She poked her tongue out of her mouth, touched the Cheerio, made a face and said "Yucky!" I tend to agree. They taste like those corn starch packing peanuts (yes, I've eaten corn starch packing peanuts--they taste like Cheerios). Plain cereal is boring and pointless. If I wanted to eat a plain piece of bread with milk on it, I could eat a plain piece of bread with milk on it. I want ZAZZ in my cereal. Or at least a mess of sugar. Norah obviously agrees.

Gabe took the box over to the picnic table and got to work on it. Norah went along because that's what she does. Even if she didn't have any interest in eating the Cheerios, she wanted her fair share because Gabe was having some. I went back to work for a bit but, when I looked over, I saw Gabe sitting on top of the picnic table, Norah sitting on the bench beside him, and they were sharing Cheerios, quite picturesquely. It looked like someone was staging a commercial in my backyard. They were laughing and Gabe was shoveling handfuls into his mouth and then dropping the next handful onto the table so Norah could play with them.

I ran in to get the camera to try and capture it. Of course the best, most cliched bit was over by the time I got back, but I went ahead and got a few videos of them afterwards. And I think people should pay my kids to sell their stuff, because they apparently have a pretty good knack for it after being in front of the camera so much for this blog.

Old Timey Fun

2011-09-05T13:00:00.000-07:00

The bookstore has an old manual typewriter in it. Over the past few months, every time he went in the store, Gabe would pound away at the keys for about as long as he'll stay focused on anything not involving guns or mud, so when Libby found one for sale at the thrift store here in town, she jumped on it. It's been a popular toy here for the past few weeks, and I got a few videos of Norah making the most of it.

Oh Yeah

2011-08-30T08:46:00.001-07:00

I forgot. THIS happened this morning, too.

This is how he came down from bed this morning. All he needs now is a tan and a few gold chains and we're set.

ADHD

2011-08-30T08:10:00.001-07:00

Hardly a week goes by that Libby and I don't discuss the possibility that Gabe is ADHD. Mostly, this is just us being overly paranoid and perhaps a bit over-zealous about staying on top of things so we can give him whatever tools he needs to cope effectively and have as happy and successful a life as possible (in other words, we're TOO good at being parents, but that is our burden).

But our paranoia isn't entirely unfounded or unreasonable. Anyone who has been around Gabe for even five minutes knows that he can't sit still and the concept of focusing seems to be about as far beyond his grasp as the reality of ice breath.

And then, every once in awhile, he'll surprise us with a feat of mental focus or stay-in-placeitude that gives us hope, or at least momentarily distracts our own short attention spans.

Yesterday, the kids received a package from Grammy and Grandpa containing a little princess crown for Norah and a squirt gun for Gabe.

Norah in her crown.

Norah was quick to put on her crown and give us a sort of dance (I got a video, but it really ended up being pretty boring--she stopped dancing as soon as I started the camera and then just kind of ran around for a bit, so I won't include it). And then we set up a little game for Gabe in the bath tub.

Libby put some shaving cream soap on the wall in the tub and Gabe, while sitting on the edge of the tub, shot the soap off with his water gun.

A pretty simple game, and considering how much time he gets to spend outside playing in mud puddles and getting properly soaked (and playing with his other numerous water guns), it didn't seem like this game should hold his interest that long.

He spent nearly two hours in the bathroom last night doing this. TWO HOURS. And one of the times I went in there to check on him, he gave me further evidence that maybe, just maybe, he can focus on things well enough to get through life. I asked him what he was doing, and he replied that the soap on the wall was lava running down the mountain and into a river. "And this is a flume," he said.

"A flume?" I asked, trying to make sure I heard him correctly.

"Yeah. A lava flume."

So, I guess he was paying attention to those volcano specials that we've been watching the past few months. And I also guess that the trick with him will be to keep him working on things he is interested in. Cause he doesn't have any focus problems when it comes to guns or volcanoes. Probably this will make him an ideal candidate for G.I. Joe, as I can't remember them having any volcano specialists on their team yet. I mean, there was Barbeque, but he had a flamethrower. They used him as an expert on all things burning, but he really couldn't be expected to know how to fix a flame thrower AND to know where it's safe to step when walking over a lava field. It's a niche thing, obviously, and we'll have to hope no other volcano experts come along in the meantime, but at least there is SOME hope.

Gum and Pirates

2011-08-25T06:29:00.000-07:00

Just scrolling back and looking at the posts I've had for the past two months, it seems rather clear that one of two things is happening. Either my kids are being less amusing, or I'm not doing such a great job of capturing their funny parts. Either way, I'm going to blame the heat.

But yesterday the kids did a couple noteworthy and amusing things.

The first I posted on Facebook, but I will repeat here for those who don't pay attention to the facebook news feed or, more likely, have blocked me because I post a lot of pointless garbage. The second happened at the dinner table and I managed to get some video of it!

Monday, we went to my nephew's birthday party. Both kids received little goody bags, and inside those bags were several pieces of gum. Gabe has not really had much experience with gum yet. He's gotten a couple small pieces from the gumball machine at his dentist (sugar free--kind of like chicklets, which aren't really gum, more like a bit of bread dough with a coat of industrial strength varnish), and he's always just chewed them like candy and swallowed them.

In general, though, I've been trying to avoid exposure to gum. It falls into the category of Low Payoff for High Risk of Mess. Other things that fall into this category include . . . well, children. The list would take too long to flesh out, so let's just sum it up by saying that it's better to keep children in a sterile environment, like the Bubble Boy, and, preferably, sedated.

But, not being able to do that, I've mostly contented myself by keeping some of the worst mess makers, like gum, out of reach. Gabe, however, has been insistent on trying, and he was able to see what was in his goody bag before I was able to secret out all the gum and dispose of it properly. So there was no escaping it.

Before giving him the gum, though, I prefaced its eating with some guidelines and warnings for Gabe. 1) He would have to eat it at the table. He couldn't get up while he was still chewing it. 2) When he was done chewing it, he would spit it directly into the trash can. Never was the chewed gum to touch anything but his mouth and the inside of the trash can. 3) He would chew the gum and then spit it out, meaning he would not swallow it. I avoided telling him that the gum would sit in his stomach for seven years, not digesting (as I had been told as a child) because I can't see how that could possibly be true. But, despite the fact that there might not be any harm in swallowing it, I still don't think it should be done. It doesn't seem proper. 4) If I ended up finding gum stuck to something, ANYTHING, other than the inside of the trash can, there would be undetermined hell to pay.

And then, just to solidify this last bit in his mind, I told him a few horror stories from my childhood--possibly true, probably not--about my brothers and I getting gum stuck in our hair. In these stories, we had peanut butter smeared into our hair, used liquid nitrogen to freeze it, and then ended up still having to remove large swathes of hair from our heads. I tried to draw him a mental picture of a hideously mangled head of hair, with mangy bald spots and ratty ends, and how the kids at school ruthlessly and endlessly teased us. How we cried and cried and gnashed our teeth and rung our hands and pulled even larger chunks of hair out of our heads in frustration.

Well, maybe I didn't go into that much detail. But I did tell him that we had to cut chunks of hair off our heads and we ended up with bald spots. To which Gabe had a wonderful response:

Me: "If you get gum stuck in your hair, we'll have to use the scissors to cut it out and you'll have big bald spots on your head."

Gabe: "Did you get a lot of gum in your hair?" he asked as he looked at the top of my head.

Now, there are clearly two ways to interpret this question. Either he was responding to the story I had just told him, where I had gotten gum in my hair and had it cut out, and he was just clarifying that, at some point in my history, I had gotten a lot of gum in my hair. OR, my kid is a snarky smart ass who was taking a jab at all the hair that's fallen out of my head (pretty much entirely since we became parents). Obviously I'm hoping for the second option.

So there's that.

In other news, at the dinner table last night, this happened:

Arrrrgh!

Making Love to the Camera and Chickens

2011-08-17T07:38:00.000-07:00

I wish my two topics were more closely (though not intimately!) related, because those two topics together makes me laugh. I imagine some scene with Gonzo posing his chickens in some boudoir setting. Sick but amusing to me.

Anyway, unrelated topics, but I had some stuff on the camera to share.

I worry about a lot of things. It's what I do. Pretty much every day I worry that I'm not having the right kind of influence on my kids. That they'll be too . . . whatever isn't ideal and whatever can be traced by to me. The list is long and undistinguished. But one of the things that I worry about every time I pull out the camera is what kind of kids I'm creating by always having the camera close at hand.

My kids both learned from an early age how to ham for the camera. It took Gabe a bit to get into it, but Norah starts to put on a show just about as soon as she sees the camera now--and she has been doing that for several months now.

I worry that I'm creating narcissists who constantly crave not only the attention of being in front of the camera but of being able to go back and see and admire themselves in the results.

Did I mention that Gabe is pretty obsessed with his Baby Gabe movies? They are pretty much the only thing he wants to watch right now. I burned one of Norah's first year and a half (yeah, poor girl, Gabe had two DVDs worth of material for his first 18 months, and Norah only got one DVD), and he watched it through once, but only because I told him that he'd be in several of the clips. He obviously didn't feel as though he was in ENOUGH of them, though. And Norah didn't really care to sit down and watch herself either. So that movie has received tepid reviews so far.

But I'm not sure how I feel about the whole thing. On the one hand, I do worry that I'm creating monsters of some sort. But I worry about that no matter what I do. Every action I take on a daily basis--to my mind, at least--is going to result in my children climbing a bell tower. And this kind of monster, at least, might be able to get an acting or performing job of some sort. Which brings me to the possible positive outcomes. I might also be creating entertainers, and though entertainers are certainly prone to troubles of their own, everyone loves them. At the very least they are sociable people who aren't afraid to engage with people they don't know, and I can't stress enough how much I hope my children are not like me in this sense.

So maybe I'm not destroying their futures by putting them in front of the camera on a regular basis. Or maybe I am. There's no telling. But at least they are producing some worthwhile pictures/videos along the way (so far, the Baby Gabe and Baby Norah videos are actually proving rather interesting to watch--they've both been pretty entertaining kids so far).

First, here's a set of pictures that I got of Gabe the other day. I was sitting here in my office and picked up the camera to check and see if I had anything new to post on here. While I was holding it, Gabe told me to take his picture. And he started creating these various poses for my benefit.

Is this gangsta?

This one is definitely gangsta. Not sure where he's getting these poses. It's not like he spends his time watching . . . I don't even know. What kind of show would have people posing for pictures like this? Is he interning with one of the half dozen photographers here in town that keep using the alleyway behind the bookstore for senior picture poses (I guess because the bricks look "fatigued" or "oppressed" or whatever the term is for when it starts to chip and look chic)? I don't know where this stuff comes from.

The poses with the phone were a little weird. He sure does like having his phones around, though. Again, something I worry about (is he TOO familiar with technology? Can one be too familiar with technology these days? Should one be too familiar with technology? Someone get me something for these ulcers that I'm getting).

Phone as hat. This, I'm guessing, is his "think piece."

And then there's Norah. Sweet, adorable, bitchy Norah. She's getting to be quite the cheeser, too. Though she hasn't started in with the interpretative posing as Gabe has.

This may be one of the most adorable pictures ever taken by anyone.

Finally, the chickens. Libby and Gabe went out and bought replacement chickens last night (remembering that our last six all got eaten by something). She made some modifications to our storage shed in the back. Permanent modifications of the cutting-a-hole-in-the-side-and-building-a-roosting-nest-inside variety. Probably not ideal, but I suppose it's better than having an entirely new chicken coop built in our backyard for the buggers.

As they came home, Gabe came up with some names for his chickens. We kept two of his original three and helped him come up with a third.

Here are the chickens and Gabe sharing their names.

In case you couldn't make out the names, the black and white one is Bucket Truck, the orange and black one is Fire Hose, and the orange and white one (the one on the far right) is Volcano. Originally, Volcano's name was Firetruck. But we thought it would be too confusing to have a Firetruck AND a Fire Hose, so we convinced him to come up with a new name.

Now we just wait for these to die as well.

The Price of Sleep Deprivation

2011-08-15T13:49:00.000-07:00

If you've ever read this blog or spent more than about five minutes around me, I'm sure you've heard about my complicated relationship with sleep. I hate doing it. It hates me doing it. Sleep and I hold each other in deep contempt. To say we "loathe" each other might be a bit strong, but I have to admit that I wouldn't mind seeing sleep die. One has to feel pretty strongly negative about something to wish death on it. And I'm pretty sure sleep has been trying to kill me for decades now, so the feelings are obviously mutual.

But, despite the fact that I have never slept well and often don't get more than a few hours in a night, I somehow manage to function. Well, mostly function. Function by the definition as it applies directly to me, which is probably about the same functionality one would expect from a hobbled helper monkey.

How do I do it? How have I been able to adapt to get to a place where I am not suffering severe effects of sleep deprivation on a daily basis? Or have I? Am I actually a complete mess and, if I was just sleeping properly, I would be some kind of hyper-functioning super human?

I've been pondering on these thoughts since last night.

Libby went out of town for a few days to stay with her sister Molly, who just had twins.

Side note: congrats, Molly, though I doubt you'll be finding yourself with the time or energy to keep up on this blog anymore! And thanks for having Libby out. I think, until this trip, Libby was secretly harboring a wish that we could adopt another baby here in the not-too-distant future (despite my numerous and often emphatic protestations). After spending a few days remembering how exhausting babies are, she has decidedly shifted into the No More Babies camp. Thanks and good luck!

Anyway, over the weekend, the kids went out to Nana and Poppa's house. While they were there, they stayed up a couple hours late both nights and didn't take naps. By my figuring, Gabe ended up about three hours short (six hours if you figure the naps, but he isn't a super reliable nap taker anymore and might go an entire week without one) and Norah ended up at least six hours short. They both sleep about 9-10 hours a night now. In other words, they went two days getting about 7 1/2 to 8 hours of sleep (well, they slept in a little, too, so not even that bad, I guess).

Yet, despite only getting down to a sleep period that is considered a fantastic night of sleep for an adult, Gabe had what can only be called a Complete and Utter Shitstorm Meltdown last night. It was a rough afternoon all the way around for both of them. They were at each other's throats. They were crying about anything and everything. They were refusing to cooperate. But by 6:00 Gabe was effectively done. He threw a tantrum about taking a bath--an activity that he loves. Everything made him cry. He worked himself up to the point where he couldn't breath properly (actually, we're going to need to talk to the doc about that, he might have some asthma or something). He was a complete wreck. Norah was a little better but that might just be because, like me, when she's tired, she just turns into a lump. She had resigned herself to just sitting in one place in the living room hours before and hadn't really ventured from that spot for most of the time we were home.

So that got me thinking. Here he is, four years old, and being only a couple hours net sleep off normal over the course of two days has turned him into a little monster. If that's the case, then what has not having a regular night of sleep for the past four years been doing to Libby and I? maybe we would be beautiful, wonderful, endlessly patient human beings if we'd only been getting ten hours of sleep every day. Maybe ALL people would be beautiful, endlessly patient human beings if we'd only get ten hours of sleep every day!

That's really my only thought for the day. Someone should try to sleep that much every night for a week or so as an experiment because, lord knows, even if the kids and my wife would let me sleep that long, I wouldn't be able to anyway. Because I'm absolutely sure that if I gave myself over to sleep for that long, it would take the opportunity to kill me.

I Get It Now

2011-08-04T08:22:00.000-07:00

Libby's family has some great stories. They could write a book. Actually, John should write the book since he plays prominently in about a third of them. But one of the first stories that I heard, and one of the stories that has stuck in my mind most clearly, is a little number about lima bean casserole and a feat of seemingly Herculean, rage-fueled strength.

As I remember it, the story goes something like this.

Karen (Libby's mom) had prepared a lima bean casserole for dinner. The family had always stuck with a family-dinner-at-the-table routine through the years, and Karen always did a great job of providing a variety of home-cooked meals, making use of whatever was available in the pantry and freezer. Usually, the meals were pretty well received. This particular meal was not. The children (I'm not sure which ones were involved or what ages they would have been--that bit of information has faded into the ether of my brain) ranted and raved and whined and moaned about the casserole, ultimately refusing to eat it.

This infuriated Karen. She snatched up the casserole dish, brought it into the kitchen, and then slammed the dish down over the center divider in their kitchen sink, breaking the casserole dish in twain. And, I'm sure, silencing her children.

The story has been told many times and is used as an example of Karen's rage at the children getting just a touch out of hand. As a young man, I shared in the good chuckle at Karen's expense, dismissing the incident as, perhaps, evidence of her mildly high-strung personality type. This response, while foolish and naive is, I'm sure, the same kind of knee-jerk response that pretty much anyone who has heard the story (but who don't have kids) would have.

As the kids have grown older, I've grown more and more dismissive of the events in the story. Having a toddler and an infant, there were a few moments where frustration took hold and I felt like checking out, but even then, things never reached anything near a boiling point. For that to happen, I think you have to be dealing with children of at least toddler age and above. But, even still, a small portion of my brain held onto the notion that "Maybe she over-reacted just a touch."

Until yesterday, when I came to fully relate and appreciate what she might have been going through. I did not break a casserole dish, but that's only because I did not have one readily available. If I had, I was in such a state that I might have tried to break it over my knee instead of having the sense to take it to the kitchen sink.

It was a very bad day.

Also, I wouldn't have had a casserole dish anyway because our stove is broken. It is just one of the things that has broken in the last month (stove, garage door, both cars, one car twice, air conditioner for the second time this year, both laptops, one laptop twice, the refrigerator and my desktop computer are both making weird noises . . . and I just can't go on any longer). I blame summer because it is a godless season where nothing good ever happens.

But the stove didn't break yesterday. Nonetheless, many other things went rather poorly.

First, two of our three big chickens were eaten by something. This isn't necessarily a bad thing. I'm not fond of chickens and, while I had grown to accept the existence of these three chickens in my life, I was hardly attached to them. But this was an ominous start to the day.

For some reason, we started the day by showing Gabe some of the videos from when he was a baby. He was enthralled. Couldn't get enough. He sat in front of my computer for almost a half hour while I ran him back a selection of the movies from his first year. Then I got bored with that. He didn't. So I told him I would try to burn him a DVD so he could watch the movies at his leisure somewhere other than in my office.

But I didn't have any DVDs. Nor did I have any idea how to make a DVD. Despite the fact that DVD burning technology has been around for something like a decade, I have never done it myself. I've had interest, but I just haven't had the gumption to actually do it. Or learn anything about doing it. But I decided that yesterday was the day that all that changed.

So we ran to Wal-Mart and I bought some blank DVDs. While we were there, I decided to be extra nice and I treated the kids to some new play-doh and some cheapish toys. It was going to be the best day ever. They'd get to watch home movies and play with new toys and then create something wonderful with their play-doh. They would love me forever and this day would stick in their minds as one of the best.

So we got home and I set to work on making the DVD while they played with their new stuff. I've never purchased a GOOD piece of DVD creation software, but I figured there would be something on the computer. DVD burners are standard now, so it made sense there would have to be something on the computer. I started out with Windows Movie Maker.

As it turns out, Windows Movie Maker DOES make movies out of clips, but it DOESN'T burn them onto DVDs unless you buy an upgrade. I didn't find this out until I burned what I thought was my movie onto what I thought was a blank DVD. Turned out it was just a Windows movie on a CD-R. Apparently, while looking at a box of DVDs, I bought a box of CD-Rs instead. So even if Windows Movie Maker did make DVDs, it wouldn't have done me any good.

So, after wasting a good hour on that, I gave up. We had lunch and I put them down for a nap, hoping to get a nap myself because I'd not had a very good night of sleep (probably I was hearing the chickens being slaughtered but didn't realize it). Neither of them slept. For two hours I fought with both of them to get them to lie down, shut up, and go to sleep. And, even though I knew they were both tired, they wouldn't do it.

So no nap and two hours of fighting small children had left me in a bit of a funk. All the same, I decided that I was going to press on and get the DVD made. So we ran out to the store, again, and this time I made sure I bought DVDs. I found another program on my computer, Roxio, that would burn DVDs. And I started the whole process over fresh with that program, inserted the blank DVD, and discovered that, for reasons I still can't understand, my computer was reading the blank DVDs as having zero available memory. No matter what I did, I could not burn anything on these DVDs.

So I decided to try it on my laptop. I had to install a newer version of Roxio, but I was able to make it work (but not until Gabe had already gone to bed--yes, I spent ALL DAY yesterday creating one 90 minute DVD).

Around 3:00 I decided to ride the stationary bike. I usually do it at 3:00 because that's when Wow Wow Wubzzy is on. I usually ride for about a half an hour, and Wubzzy is one of the few shows that they will both watch and be mildly distracted by. While I was riding, I heard this "tink, tink, tink" noise coming from what I thought was just outside the window. After it kept happening for a few minutes, I got up and looked outside to see if a bird was knocking around on something. Then I noticed that the sound was coming from under my feet. Specifically, from the heat register. And I could also hear laughter coming through it. Ugh.

I went into the living room and both kids were huddled around the heat register. For the past five minutes, they had been dropping ALL of their small toys down into it (they also removed the cover and broke both of the little flaps off it). Many were lost forever, I fear--too far into the pipe for me to reach. The rest of them were covered in dirt, food scraps they'd been dropping down there for years, and dead moths. I spent about ten minutes cleaning the stuff out during which time I sat the kids down in separate chairs and demanded that they sit quietly while I fixed and retrieved things.

When I was finished--bike ride aborted--I decided to see about setting up the laptop and burning that DVD. So I worked on that. Not five minutes after I finished cleaning out the heat register, I heard splashing coming from the other side of my office wall. The cat water.

I went around the corner and Norah was playing in the cat's water bowl. She had dumped a cup full of hard cat food in there and was splashing around, knocking soggy cat food and water all over herself and everything else. With forced calm, I stood her up, told her in no uncertain terms that we don't play with the cat water, escorted her into the living room, then went back in to clean out the water bowl. I picked it up and dumped it into the toilet (which Gabe had just peed in--and for some reason he refuses to flush these days, I guess to make up for the fact that he did nothing BUT flush it for nearly two years). Once it was all in there, I noticed that several of Norah's little toys were floating around in with the cat food. Several of her little toys that she has become VERY attached to. Several little toys that I"e spent many minutes searching for over the past few weeks. Several toys that I knew I couldn't flush down the toilet. So I stuck my hand down into the pissy cat food water and sifted through it for toys. I found a couple, but I fear I didn't find them all. So far, if I didn't, she hasn't noticed yet.

I sighed, cleaned off the toys, filled up the water bowl, and put it back. I closed my eyes and counted to ten (I didn't really because counting to myself does nothing but make me angrier because, let's face it, at that point all I'm doing is adding the waste of several seconds counting onto whatever is already frustrating me, but I did metaphorically count to ten by not punching the wall or doing something equally rash or violent). Then I sat down to try to focus on the DVD burning to at least get it started.

Two minutes later (I am not kidding here, it might have actually been less than two minutes because I had only JUST sat down), I hear splashing again. She had dumped another cup of cat food into the bowl.

I lost my mind a little and told her to go into the dining room and play. Gabe was in there playing with the play-doh at the table. While I was still dumping out the water bowl for the second time, I hear shrieking and screaming and whining, at great volume, coming from the dining room.

And then I actually did lose my mind. I won't go into details, but nobody was hurt and nothing was broken. The kids did spend twenty minutes sitting quietly in separate chairs in the living room with nothing to play with and no TV on. If you know how well my kids sit still, I think you might have a pretty good idea just what kind of impression my total lack of composure had on them. They were seriously not going to fuck with me anymore.

And they didn't for the rest of the day, which went rather well. I finished the DVD. They went to bed early and fell almost immediately to sleep because they hadn't had naps. And I got to spend a few quiet hours alone (oh yeah, did I mention that Libby worked until well after the kids are in bed last night?).

Lesson learned. Two lessons learned, actually. Lesson One: don't judge another person's loss of composure until you've been in their shoes (and, still, Karen had FIVE kids to deal with, I only have two, so I still don't have any real idea). Lesson Two: I don't care what the touchy feely parenting guides say. For being nice and keeping my cool I was rewarded with bratty children that kept pushing and pushing throughout the day. For losing my cool, I was rewarded with a few hours of peace and quiet and children who did what they were told to do. So, make of that what you will.

Oh, and the last chicken was eaten this morning, the garage door broke, my hot tub cover is falling apart, and when we went outside to play, within five minutes, the kids got into a sand throwing fight that resulted in Norah being pushed face first into the wet sandbox. So today isn't really shaping up to be any better. If they don't take naps, we might run to the store so I can buy the cheapest casserole dish I can find to shatter in my sink.

The Prissy Prissy Princess

2011-08-03T07:09:00.000-07:00

Since the beginning of the summer, Norah has really started to blossom as a princess. I'm not sure how it has happened. I am not a fan of princesses. Or pink. Or things that are prim and proper. And, honestly, I had every intention of raising a daughter who wasn't a big fan of those things either. While I'm sure there is a place in the world for princesses and pink and frilly bits, I had hoped that place was other than my house.

Don't get me wrong. If you want a princess, more power to you. I just don't.

Yet, somehow, that's what I'm getting. Part of it is everyone else's fault. People LOVE to make little girl princesses--even Libby keeps buying princessy crap for her. Time and again, people give us frilly pink clothes and Barbie dolls and other ugh. And she eats it up.

Now, I'm not saying that boy toys are somehow superior and that Norah shouldn't be allowed to play with girly things or that somehow she'll grow up to be superior if she ignored all the girly stuff and became a tomboy.

Well, really, maybe that is what I'm saying. Boy toys ARE superior. Transformers? Come on! Look at the engineering that is involved in creating a toy that can be a robot AND a vehicle. Now look at the engineering involved in creating a Barbie. Yawn. Even a straight comparison of "action figures" vs. "dolls" comes out with action figures in the lead. Look at their accessories! Trucks and airplanes and guns and bases and rockets and lord knows what all. Now look at the accessories for dolls. Chairs and food and pink cars and clothes. Yawn. She'll have the rest of her life to think about where to put the ottoman, why waste childhood on that kind of garbage? Childhood is for adventure and fantasy and imagination! And boy toys whip hell out of girl toys for that.

And, I have to admit, because of Gabe's interests and the fact that he had a two year head start on building his toy collection, Norah does spend quite a bit of time playing with boy toys and, at least, incorporating them into her little doll worlds. And she's at least passingly accepting of watching his shows--though, the older she gets the more she realizes that she would rather be watching something else and, being the vocal type, isn't afraid to whine and pester Gabe and I until she gets what she wants.

But she is decidedly squeamish about many things. Rather strangely so, actually. Nonsensically so, even. Take bugs for instance. She hates them. In fact, she just hates the IDEA of bugs so much that, without rhyme or reason, that's the place her brain goes whenever she sees something she can't readily identify if it's roughly bug sized. Say there is a piece of lint on the floor. She doesn't really have the world experience necessary to understand why lint is, so, when she sees a piece on the floor, she's not sure what she's seeing. So she shouts "BUG!" and runs as far away from it as she possibly can.

And dirt is another thing. Time and again she complains about dirt and mud and being sticky or dirty. She claims to hate it. But she is completely inconsistent about it.

I've had videos on here before of them playing in the mud, so this is hardly news. And, really, I don't have anything NEW to add this time. But we filled their pool again the other day and then ran a little more water onto what used to be our lawn (which, thanks to this heat wave and the fact that we haven't had any measurable quantities of rain since May is mostly a crusty wasteland). And Norah went to town.

Here are some videos of them playing and stuff. I'm sure there is commentary that I SHOULD add, but I can't really remember the specifics of what was going on. Such is the state of my mental capacity these days, that I can't even remember what I record just a couple days later.

So there's the video. I got a few pictures of her just playing in the mud, too, and there IS a point that I'm going to make in relation to these pictures.

Splashing in a mud puddle. Not so prissy.

Further splashings.

Ah, adorable. Actually, she wasn't making some sort of coquettish pose here. She was trying to dig some dirt out of her mouth. But that's the nice thing about still pictures. They can be whatever you want them to be.

And NOW we get to the point . . . .

See this water? Norah refused to play in it. She declared it to be "too dirty." Note that this water GOT this dirty because they were playing in mud and then washing themselves off in the pool. Still and all, even though her logic eludes me, I AM happy that she's willing to play in the mud still without any problems, even if she won't get into muddy water. So maybe I'm not losing the princess battle entirely.

Yeah, I know. That wasn't much of a point to be making, was it? Kind of a lot of build up for not much payoff.

How about a picture of Gabe with a dirty Hitler mustache and soul patch? Does that make this whole thing more worthwhile? I thought so.

Nursemaid's Elbow

2011-07-29T07:54:00.000-07:00

Here's something you probably didn't know (unless you've had a similar encounter or you're the kind of person who looks up EVERY possible ailment your child may suffer from). Until 2 1/2 or 3 years old, your child's elbow sockets are not really "set." Does this also apply to other sockets in the body? Maybe? The other sockets were not relevant to my day yesterday, so I don't know. Plus, it's not called Nursemaid's Socket, is it? But that doesn't mean there isn't a Nanny's Ankle or Au Pair's Shoulder or Eddie Murphy's Daddy Day Care Hip. Who knows with these things. The bottom line is that children are undeveloped and prone to having stupid things happen to them that they are inadequately prepared to cope with or communicate about.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

So, yesterday, Norah was playing. And then she abruptly stopped playing and started shrieking. Inconsolable shrieking. Now, I have to admit. My first instinct is to assume that she's being a drama queen. Insert Crying Wolf metaphor here and use it as an example to all children everywhere forever. Were she not such a drama queen, I would have immediately known that something serious was happening. If Gabe made noises like this, after making sure that I didn't need to stem blood loss, I would be making a beeline for my car keys because a trip to the hospital was immediately necessary.

But that's not the case with Norah. When she cries, here's how my immediate response goes:

1) rush into the room to make sure someone isn't bleeding
2) make cursory check for sharp things sticking out of weird places in her body
3) see where Gabe is in the room--if he's hiding under a blanket or behind a chair, he's responsible
4a) if Gabe is hiding, come up with some sort of admonishment/punishment that will be ignored and/or forgotten in two minutes
4b) if Gabe isn't hiding, tell Norah to stop crying/shrieking/screaming/whining, come up with some sort of admonishment/punishment that will be ignored and/or forgotten in two minutes.
5) warn Norah that if she keeps overreacting to everything that, before long, I will completely fail to take her seriously when she's making noise (I'm serious, I'm that kind of person, and I will make this kind of argument to a two year old despite the fact that I KNOW it won't make a difference--and I only do it so that, at some undisclosed point in the future, I can say "I told you so."

And that's more or less what I did this time. There was no blood. There was nothing APPARENTLY wrong with the arm that she seemed to be complaining about. Thus my assumption became that drama queening was going on. I held her for a minute, tried to convince her that she was fine, then put her back down to go back to playing.

Usually, at this point, she'll see if she can milk the sympathy for a few more minutes with some more sobs and whines or complaints, but when that doesn't develop, she goes about her business. This time, though, she went into the dining room, collapsed to the floor, and continued to cry.

Something wasn't right. So I went in and checked her over more closely. There really wasn't anything obviously wrong, but she kept favoring her left arm. I poked and prodded a bit but couldn't find anything obviously the matter. Then she demanded a Dora band-aid, so I got one out. I asked her wear it hurt, hoping that would help me figure out what was the specific problem. She looked at her arm to find someplace to put the band-aid and pointed to it. It was a spot of dried chocolate milk about midway up her forearm. Clearly NOT the problem, but I put the band-aid on there anyway.

For the next five minutes, I continued to evaluate her level of ouchiness. Was she REALLY hurt or was she just overreacting again to a relatively minor injury? There was obviously more than nothing going on, but I didn't want to take her to the ER for a bit of a muscle bruise. I am not now, nor will I ever be, one of those parents who take their kids to the hospital for every little injury.

Have I mentioned that when I was nine years old I had an accident with a metal grinder? I removed the top half of my right index finger down to the right knuckle--including part of that knuckle. I can't bend my finger all the way down anymore, and the fingernail is still a shambles. It never grew back properly. Do you know how I was treated for this injury? I held it under cold water for a half an hour, then Neosporin was applied to a piece of gauze, wrapped around the finger, then taped to a popsicle stick so that I couldn't bend the finger. I never set foot in a hospital or doctor's office to have it looked at.

I am not willing to take things to that extreme. I am too paranoid of infection and permanent damage. But I have to admit that I lean more towards the "if bones aren't sticking out, then you'll be fine" mentality (which applies, because, with my injury, my bone WAS sticking out).

This time, while her bones weren't sticking out, she did appear to be losing the use of her arm rather quickly. Within five or so, she'd stopped using it entirely. It was hanging limply to her side, and every time the arm was moved she screamed.

So I loaded her up into the car and took her to the hospital.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: fuck the American health care system. I'm sorry if this offends anyone who works in the health profession. I've got some bad news for you. Your boss is a fucking idiot. And if you truly believe that our system works and is awesome, then you are a fucking idiot too.

If a screaming two year old child is brought to the admission center, then that child needs to be admitted immediately unless there has been a zombie outbreak or some kind of calamity and every doctor and nurse in the facility is cleaning up that mess. Here is the order of priorities for immediate admission:

1) People with open wounds--with those who've received bites from zombies topping the list because they might soon bite someone else and spread the affliction.
2) People who are vomiting uncontrollably or suffering from some other devastating ailment that would spread disease or otherwise put out the rest of the people in there.
3) People who are screaming from the pain, even if there isn't an obvious ailment (with small children topping the list because they can't say where it hurts, so it's impossible to say how severe the ailment/injury might be)
4) People who are having any other problem.

This, I imagine, is probably how the priority list is SUPPOSED to work as it is. And, I have to admit that we were admitted before some other patients who had been waiting in the lobby for a longer period (including a parent of a three year old who FREQUENTLY mentioned how angry he was that he'd been waiting with a three year old for three hours already--but, and here's the important part, there was obviously nothing wrong with this three year old who was running around and being a nightmare all over the lobby the entire time I was waiting there, and this parent should have been called a fucking idiot and sent on his way).

But, all the same, I was forced to sit with a two year old on my lap for a little over an hour in a packed waiting room before we were brought back to a room. Norah cried almost the entire time because every time she shifted around, she moved the arm and it set off new pain. And she shifted around A LOT during that time for two reasons.

It was about 110 yesterday. And in the hour that we were in the lobby, I was "fortunate" enough to be sitting right next to the thermostat. While we were there, I watched as the temperature went up two degrees. It was hot in there, and Norah is built for winter. She was a sloppy, sweaty mess. For that matter, I'm built for winter, too. So I was also a sloppy, sweaty mess. On top of that, "sitting still" ranks right up there with long distance running on the list of things I am NOT good at doing. So every few minutes Norah and I were squirming around uncomfortably, and this set off a new jag of screaming and crying. After the first fifteen minutes, it was very nearly setting off jags of screaming and crying in me as well.

Then we were brought into a room where we waited for another half an hour--though at least we were both spared the admonishing looks from other patients as Norah screamed her way through more waiting.

Next came the x-rays. This took another half an hour. More screaming, especially when they had to twist her little arms around to get the best picture.

Then back to the room for more waiting. Another half hour of it. During this time, Libby arrived and was shown to our room. But, by the time she got there, Norah was better.

That's right. Better. Chipper, happy, playful, normal. Better.

After the x-rays, Norah was cuddled up on my lap in the room, periodically crying and in misery. Every little move set her off again. And then, quite inexplicably, it didn't anymore. Out of nowhere she used her previously useless hand to remove one of the stickers the x-ray technician had given her. And that was that.

(We still had almost an hour of waiting left, though, before we'd be released--fucking idiots.)

The doctor explained to us about Nursemaid's Elbow. Sometimes, I guess, the sockets on the arms of small children can be pulled out of joint. The name it's given, I assume, is from harsh, British-style nursemaids who yanked children's arms to get them to do what they are supposed to. The fact that this has not happened to us before and this ailment was completely foreign to me is surely a testament to my parenting methods. I have NOT yanked my children's arms out of socket. So, hurray for me!

And just as easily as they come out, they go back in. And, at some point, she twisted the arm just such a way that it popped back into place.

So that was that. Yet another failed attempt to make use of our medical profession, and yet another weird ass thing that can go wrong with small children. And if this happens to your child . . . well, it won't help you one single bit knowing this is a possibility because, let's face it, you're NOT going to start twisting your screaming child's arm around to try and pop the elbow back into place. But at least you won't be surprised when you feel stupid two and a half hours into your hospital visit when your child starts acting normally again. You will feel like just another fucking idiot in a system filled with them, but we'll both know that you're really not (unless you are, then screw you and stop making the world a terrible place for the rest of us).

Grace and Beauty

2011-07-26T06:42:00.000-07:00

Finally! Some videos and not just me whining about something! Hurray!

Remember that thing I mentioned in my last post, about Gabe getting stuck in the rocking chair? And do you remember the other stories of daring-do involving Gabe? How he suggested that jumping down the entire flight of stairs would be fun? Or how he used to fall off the back of the couch during his "Finny and Yon!" stage without first looking to see that he had something soft to land on? Or . . . well, you get the point. He plays pretty fast and loose with his own safety.

Norah, not so much. Trying to get video of her doing something that is funny isn't that difficult, but it's a completely different kind of funny than with Gabe. She's cute funny. Gabe is dangerous funny.

But we did finally get some video of her after she got herself caught in something. While you're watching this, keep the excitement of one of Gabe's adventures in mind and contrast it to where Norah is right now.

This is about as "exciting" as it gets with Norah. A foot caught in the cup holder of a chair. EXTREME sitting!

One of the kids' favorite shows right now is "Peppa Pig." It's actually pretty amusing. And it's been rather interesting watching the non-American English slang that the kids have been picking up from it. Norah now refers to our trash cans as trash bins. And she named one of her stuffed animals Cheeky Cat. But the phrase that Libby and I have most enjoyed comes from the school teacher (who also moonlights as the dancing teacher in the show). Peppa is taking dancing lessons and the teacher often repeats the phrase "Grace and Beauty" while the kids are practicing their dancing.

And we've transferred that over to Norah. With some regularity, actually. Because we're ironic and stuff.

Over the past couple weeks she's gotten into a bit of a dancing phase of her own, and some of the stuff she does is pretty priceless. Her best move is when she tries to do one of those ballerina poses where they grab their foot and pull it up to their heads. Not only can she not raise her foot to her head, she can't grab her foot and lift it up. Or really stand on one foot. Sadly, we haven't been able to talk her into performing that move in front of the camera yet, but we did get some videos at different points in the past week or so of her showing some of her other mad dancing skillz.

You can tell that she's TRYING to grab her foot in this one, but she never quite got around to lifting her leg as she did it. All the same, we'll keep trying to get that on video because it will be well worth having for posterity's sake.

On Being an Even Older Dad

2011-07-23T12:07:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow I turn 37. I would like to say that I have mixed feelings about this. But I don't. Actually, that's not true. I DO have mixed feelings about it--I just don't have any GOOD feelings about it mixed in there. My range of emotions on the subject range from Meh all the way down to I Can't Fucking Believe How Old I Am and How Each Year Seems to Be Spiraling Away from Me More and More Quickly.

The Meh aspects of it, I'm sure, come from the fact that 37 is one of the most pointless ages possible. To my brain's way of processing and categorizing the world, which has been nurtured by years of tireless pop culture study, 35 is the last year that people can be considered "young." If you're watching a movie or television show and there is a charismatic young person on it, that person will invariably be portrayed as 35 or under.

These people, then, are generally lumped into one of three categories: young parent (under 30 only, there are few parents between the age of 30-40, as there is no "ideal" age for their children--kids need to either be very young and cute or teenaged and sassy), not-quite-old single hipster (up to age 35), or young married person (again, under 30 only--after that the couple either has kids or CAN'T have kids, if they could have kids, they would have kids or if they didn't want kids they would not be married).

The next category of person skips to not-quite-middle aged. This category of person ranges in age from 40-45 and falls, again, into one of three categories: parent of a teenager (with the possible addition of very young children--TOO young children for any thinking adult over 40), professional single person (too busy and awesome to bother with a family, but very possibly starting to regret that decision now), and pathetic single person (too stupid/ugly/awkward/shy/misunderstood to have a successful relationship).

There is no middle ground. People are either young, nearly old, or old. And 37 is one of those years that falls into none of these categories. 37 year old actors and actresses play 30 year old characters (except in the case of the guy who plays Herrick on the BBC version of "Being Human," who is only a couple years older than me but LOOKS like he's easily in his late 40s to early 50s).

In reality, though, it is starting to feel very solidly like the not-quite-middle-aged-but-it's-GOING-to-be-middle-age-in-the-blink-of-an-eye category to me. And that's where the I Can't Fucking Believe How Old I am and How Each Year Seems to Be Spiraling Away from Me More and More Quickly feeling comes into play.

I mean, really? 37? By 37 I shouldn't even be able to remember my 10th birthday it should have been so long ago, right? My teenage years should not only feel like a lifetime ago, they should feel like someone else's lifetime because I am so far removed. College should be a fond memory of fun times had that I tsk tsk at when I consider either how much time I wasted or regret the fact that I didn't waste enough of it. BUT THEY DON'T. I vividly remember turning 10. I can still easily recall the terrible feelings of angst and longing from high school. And college seems like just yesterday (though I do somehow manage to feel, at the same time, that I wasted too much and not enough time in college). But they've been AGES ago.

And now, Gabe . . . you know, the kids who trapped himself in the rocking part of a little wooden rocking chair when he was 18 months old--who I had to cut out with a hacksaw right after taking a hilarious picture of his predicament . . . is four and only one year away from kindergarten. He likes "big kid" TV shows and plays with army guys in a way that suggests he's starting to understand what armies actually do.

Gabe related side story. He learned a valuable life lesson this morning and his reaction to it is very much in line with my last statement about him and army playing.

At some point last night, a toothy critter ate our three baby chickens. Of the first three chickens that we got, only one of them ended up being a female. It's illegal to own roosters in the city limits (with good reason, they are loud and annoying and we don't have a problem getting rid of them because they are bothering us, never mind how the neighborhood feels about them). But we didn't want to leave our one female chicken all alone, so Libby picked up three new babies, hoping we'd get at least one female out of the group again. Gabe named them Evil Doctor Porkchop, Megatron, and Spider-Man. We'd had them at least two weeks and they weren't THAT small anymore.

But some creature of the night managed to pull them ALL out of their cage THROUGH the chicken wire. Yeah, nature is gruesome and awful (and chickens are goddamn stupid as they had a boxed in shelter they could have been hiding in, yet they didn't).

When Libby explained to Gabe what had happened, his first reaction was to think that she was joking. He laughed and accused her of being silly. When she insisted that she wasn't, he got upset. He cried. And then he got MAD. Really mad (he's been starting to show signs of "grown up" anger lately, which I'm a little sad about as he's been such a sweety up to this point). He claimed he was going to "destroy" the fox that killed his chickens (we do have a fox in the "forest" behind our house, but it was probably one of the neighborhood cats that got the chickens, as there are quite a few of them that wander into our yard at all times of the day--the fox or foxes tend to keep to themselves and there is no shortage of easy to get at bunnies in the neighborhood to keep them filled up). And I'm pretty sure he would have picked up a stick and started rushing through the back forest looking for the fox if he'd had his druthers.

So there was that.

What was I talking about? Ah, who cares. It's time for my Metamucil and The Wheel comes on in a few minutes.

The Mixed Blessing of Twoness

2011-07-19T07:59:00.000-07:00

As I pointed out a couple posts ago, there are lots of subtle changes happening in our household, many of them are welcome. And there have been a few more that I failed to mention before. All of them make me happy beyond words.

Baby gates. Now unnecessary. Well, mostly. We took the ones off the stairs because Norah has had the proper level of the fear of god put into her regarding the stairs. She treads them VERY lightly, or she won't tread them at all without one of us to help her. We kept the gate into my office and into the kitchen for now, though, because I use them while I'm riding the exercise bike. If I don't, Norah likes to come in and stand right next to the bike and wander up around the pedals, where she would get whacked if I didn't stop. I also like to use them from time to time while I'm making dinner, if the kids are being particularly pesty. But I don't really NEED them anymore, which is awesome.

And last night I realized that I was once again leaving cups with drinks in them on the end tables in the living room. That was another change that happened so gradually that I didn't even notice it. Norah now leaves them alone. Mostly. I still wouldn't leave a cup with anything that would permanently stain the carpet in there for fear that she'd want to try to drink some herself, but I can leave water and that sort of thing freely cupped around our house. And that is awesome. It's been nearly four years since we've been able to drink liquids with impunity and disregard for possible consequences. It's great to be able to put our things places and have a reasonable expectation of them not being messed with.

Then, just a few minutes ago, I pulled the high chair out of the kitchen (where we've been keeping it in between uses) and put it in the garage. She hasn't used it at all for about two weeks now, and for the past month or so we've only used it for especially messy meals. Our kitchen actually looks rather bare without it in there. Again, something that has been a staple in that room for almost four years now. I'm so pleased to have it out of the way.

Two is actually kind of a great time in a kid's life. For the parents, anyway. I have no idea how it is for the kid. Probably not great. They still have no idea what's going on and have a glaring tendency to bang themselves up a lot. But it has to be nice being able to sort of communicate what they want and need, right?

But, as I suggested in the title, two is a mixed blessing. Yes, the trappings of babyhood are going away (some might view this as a bad thing, or a sad thing, but I most certainly do not). And two is also the magical time when parents start to love their children as people.

This is something that Libby and I have talked about a few times. Up to about two, parents love their children (or the ones who are willing to admit it, anyway) because they HAVE to. Sure, sure. They're cute. And they're yours. And they're little things that are entirely dependent on you for their existence. And you love them unconditionally and you sacrifice for them because of that love.

But, let's face it, if you took the cute and the dependency away, there wouldn't be all that much to love about them. They are disgusting. They ruin all of your things. They control your life. And they contribute very little to the family atmosphere. They are there, but they don't really DO anything. Take away the "ahhh, adorable" factor, and you're left with very little reason to NOT want to leave them in some kind of baby farm where they could be provided the essentials and you could come visit them once or twice a week until they were old enough to start providing the family with some redeeming qualities.

But around two, that all starts to change. They start to become little people. They develop personalities. They start to do and say funny things. They start to follow basic orders and can help get out their diapers or grab their cups or put toys away (well, in theory at least). Right around two, you start to love your kids because of who they are, not just because you have to!

Yes, I know. That sounds kind of jaded and terrible. So, I'm jaded and terrible. But anyone who has known me for any amount of time already knew that about me. If you think about it, though, and you're honest with yourself, I bet you'll have to reluctantly agree that it's true. You love your kids when they are babies, but you don't start to love love them until they start to become functioning people.

Or maybe I'm just a dick. Who knows.

Anyway, that's happening now. Norah's personality is starting to blossom. And she's got some truly wonderful traits. She's funny. She can, and I'm not exaggerating here, light up a room with her smiles and expressions. Her entire face just transmits primal joy when she smiles. Her eyes brighten, her face opens up, and her smile crosses her entire face. She likes to sing, she does hilarious "ballerina" dances, and she has a budding imagination--creating little stories with her "friends" in her dollhouse or with some of Gabe's big construction vehicles. As I type this, she's carrying on some sort of conversation with her Yo Gabba Gabba guitar (well, Gabe's Yo Gabba Gabba guitar, but she's pretty much claimed it as her own, and Gabe's obsessed with army guys right now, so he doesn't care).

But, man, can she be a little B. Wow. She's got some SERIOUS attitude going on some times. And MEAN. I don't know if it's just because she's the youngest and is trying to push her way up the pecking order or if it's just part of her personality, but . . . wow.

Just last night . . . OK. Here's the story.

Gabe was sitting on Libby's lap in the living room. And, because he's Gabe, he decided to slide down her legs face first to the floor. But instead of getting all the way down, he left his feet up in her lap and was mostly lying face down on the floor for a little bit. Norah was standing by the couch and watched him do it. As soon as he had his head down and he was mostly defenseless, she walked over to him and, I shit you not, started to stomp on the side of his head with her foot. Just picked it up and started mashing down on his head like it was snake threatening to strike. And this was the SECOND time I've seen her do that in the last week.

Clearly she got a little spank and about five minutes in time out for it. But, come on. Granted, Gabe doesn't really help matters. He's such a glutton for punishment that he usually thinks it's a great game. He actually encourages her to "squash" him from time to time. He tells her to sit down on his back and kind of jump up and down.

OK. So maybe my kids are a little effed up. But they keep me entertained. And a little annoyed. And kind of tired.

But it is awfully nice not having any babies around anymore. And I get to laugh about as often as I find myself pulling out what little hair I have left from the last four years of raising them. So there's that.

Damned if You Do, Damned if You Don't

2011-07-13T08:19:00.000-07:00

Recently--and I'm not sure WHY this is happening, maybe it's the current parenting zeitgeist or maybe I just keep stumbling upon articles addressing the topic--I've read many discussions on the subject of "proper parenting." Basically, the debate boils down to these two houses: Disciplinarian or Child's Best Friend, and everyone, it seems, is vehemently admonishing the other side for doing it all wrong. And actual parents are the ones caught in the middle, never knowing what is the right thing to do--and I'm one of them.

Although, let me be frank, I've NEVER put much stock in parenting "guides." If these people had been right through the last few generations, then we would be living in a Utopia where all of these grown-up children would be perfect social creatures who always got along and always did whatever work was necessary to make the world a fantastic place. They would be productive, empathic, dedicated, hard working, intelligent, sophisticated, polite, courteous, gracious, sportsmanlike, creative, imaginative, healthy, dextrous, compassionate, talented people.

But the world is full of douchebags. FULL. We have, almost certainly, reached our capacity. Critical mass will be achieved within a few short years and we will experience a douchebag overload. Douchebags will explode forth from this planet and spread their doucheiness out into the cosmos or into an alternate reality or something.

Now, is this the result of generations of bad parenting, or is this simply the result of having a planet that has 6 billion people on it, and the simple fact is that douchebags are loud, obnoxious, and seem to take up FAR more space and reality than they deserve because they are so hard to function around?

I think "yes." To whatever it is my point was supposed to be.

Here's how the philosophies (or the opposition's interpretation of those philosophies, anyway, since it's always easier to nail down the simplified and caricatured opposing view than it is to offer an ACTUAL interpretation of something so nuanced and complicated as a couple decades of parenting to raise a child to adulthood) break down.

Disciplinarians: These parents reign down terror upon their children. They squash all creativity and seek to bully or mentally/emotionally/physically abuse a child in order to "keep them in line." Children are taught from infancy that they will be punished for ALL outbursts of individuality and differentness. Often categorized as "old school" parenting--where a parent wasn't afraid to wallop a disobedient child, even if said child was acting out in the middle of a crowd of SRS workers, and the old adage "children should be seen, not heard" was enforced with a wooden spoon or yard stick (or a withering glare that threatened the eventuality of such punishment). According to the opposition, children who live through these conditions will inevitably lash out through bullying/laziness/slouching/premarital sex/ or whatever other undesirable traits that "the youth" are exhibiting that old people don't like that will "show them" that they can do their own thing despite the threat of punishment. Parents who do this are evil dictators and Hitler himself would shake his head and cluck his tongue at them if he saw how these parents treated their kids.

Child's Best Friend: These parents reign down unwavering love and support on their children. Discipline is achieved through positive reinforcement only. If a child does something bad, then that child is gently directed to do something else that is acceptable. This doesn't happen very often, though, because very nearly everything is acceptable--it is an "expression" of childhood, and children should be allowed to define themselves and rule over their immediate surroundings lest their creativity/intelligence/ambition/whatever be squelched. Furthermore, the child should be protected from EVERYTHING bad through any means possible. According to the opposition, children who live through these conditions will inevitably lash out through bullying/laziness/slouching/premarital sex/ or whatever other undesirable traits that "the youth" are exhibiting that old people don't like because they've never had to deal with reality of any sort and they are completely unprepared for how the world actually works. Parents who do this are hippie deadbeats who have never contributed anything worthwhile to society and the leading cause of gingivitis, rickets, irritable bowel syndrome, and the moral decay of society. They spit in the face of "the good old days" and won't be happy until society is crumbling around them.

That about sums it up.

Sort of.

But what is the RIGHT thing to do?

And there's the rub. It won't matter. No matter what you do, your child will blame everything bad in his/her life on your parenting (or, perhaps, they will love you too much to actually blame you, but their therapists almost certainly will all the same--because you let your child love you TOO much but they didn't have the respect they needed to understand that). In short, it doesn't matter what you do, you're going to do it wrong.

And that's not surprising. Parenting happens every waking minute (and many barely awake minutes) of every day, and unless you have the discipline of a Buddhist monk, you aren't going to be able to maintain whatever "ideal" you are striving towards. You are going to screw up. If you want strict discipline, you will find yourself momentarily incapable of dishing it out and your child will run rampant, doing what his/her heart desires for a little while as you put your metaphorical head between your legs and hide. If you want to love and support your child through positive reinforcement, you're going to lose your shit every once in awhile and bellow orders at your children backed with threats of the most unrealistic kinds of cartoon violence when you've finally reached your breaking point.

And all because sometimes you just can't take their abuse anymore.

Yeah. That's right. I said abuse. Children are the WORST practitioners of physical/mental/emotional abuse. And all of this debate boils down to "How do I react to my child's abuse?"

How DO I react to our child's abuse? What's the best way? What do I need to do to make my child the best person possible?

That's the age old question, and one that surely doesn't have a right answer. Because, as I said, it doesn't matter what you do, it will probably be wrong. If you lash out, your child will grow up afraid of people and negative consequences and go through life with a variety of stunting complexes. If you coddle and over-protect, then your child will grow up incapable of functioning in a world that doesn't give a damn about them or how they feel when they become adults. To my way of thinking, there has to be a happy medium somewhere. A child has to know love and caring and be able to treasure social contact and feel free to express creativity and individuality. And a child has to be able to blend into society and understand that the world does not now, nor ever will, revolve around him/her.

Really, I think it all boils down to teaching personal responsibility. Not just because personal responsibility is great. It is. It's necessary to feel fulfilled in life and to find a happy place in the world. But, more importantly, if a grown-up child feels personally responsible, then that child will likely not blame the parent for doing the wrong thing.

And THAT is the most important aspect of parenting--getting away with it. But how to make that happen is still a mystery to me, and I'm still convinced that, no matter what I do, it will be the wrong thing. As with all things, only time will tell. In the meantime, though, I'll just keep disagreeing with everything parenting advice columns tell me I SHOULD be doing, because they don't know any better than I do at this point. If they did, then nobody would be arguing about the best way to do things anymore.

The Times They Are A-Changin'

2011-07-09T07:29:00.001-07:00

So, now that I'm in a nice, quiet place where I probably won't be disturbed for awhile (work), I'll get around to doing that "kind of big news" update I was talking about earlier.

Rather quietly, our lives have changed significantly over this past month. Many of the things that I've been pissing and moaning about for the past six months or so just sort of went away. More or less. And with no fanfare. In fact, the transition was so nearly seamless that I almost failed to notice it entirely. It would have just been one of those things that stopped happening that we didn't notice wasn't happening anymore until much later when we thought to ourselves, "Remember when . . . ." and then we finally remembered when.

This happened the other day with Gabe. Someone asked him his name. He said, "I'm Gabe. I'm four!" Everyone he talks to these days finds out that he's four. It's kind of his thing right now. But that was it, and a little while later I was thinking about it and remembered that his response USED TO BE "I'm Gabe Albers from Big Boy," which we loved and thought was adorable. And it just sort of stopped happening without us noticing.

I imagine that's what will keep happening from now until all the kids do is yell and throw things at us and nothing very pleasant happens anymore.

Well, that's a very jaded notion, isn't it. My children will not be monsters when they are teenagers. They will be loving children who respect me, listen closely to my opinions, always maintain their composure, and love me more than anything else in the world. Like the kids on Family Ties or Growing Pains. Right.

Anyway, the Big Boy thing was cute and a good thing and I was sad to see it go. These things with Norah, not so much.

While Libby was in the hospital for her surgery, my folks took the kids. I think I commented on that at the time--about how wonderful it was and how exhilarating the breath of freedom was.

I've since adjusted back to the chains of parenthood again, in case anyone is wondering. I barely even think about how little I can get out and do anything that I'd like to again. Which is good, because if I thought about that regularly I'd probably go batty.

While the kids were at my folks' place, Norah went through an interesting metamorphosis. Apparently, all she needed to break her of her waking up three times in the middle of the night and needing a bottle cycle was to have the reset button pushed on her. She spent five nights at my folks, and while she was there, she never once demanded a bottle in the middle of the night when she woke up. Granted, she was sharing a big bed with Nana who just calmed and soothed her back to sleep instead of getting up and giving her a bottle (and, yes, we've tried this before, rather Libby has, with zero success).

Then, when she got home, we had pulled the side off her crib so we could transition her into a big girl bed, and that combine with her short-term habit of sleeping through the night at my folks' house apparently reset her. Now, if she wakes up in the middle of the night, she mostly just calms herself down and goes back to sleep. She's woken up a couple times and needed some soothing, and once demanded a bottle, but she seems to have mostly moved on.

And it is so wonderful. If you've never had a child who wakes up multiple times a night for two years straight you really have no idea. But even I can't complain that much because I didn't wake up EVERY night. Sometimes I slept through it because I could. Libby, however, couldn't. So maybe she'll start to get some decent sleep again. Finally.

The next big thing happened the next weekend after we put her in her big girl crib. We separated Gabe's bunk beds, girlied one of them up, and moved Norah into his room. We were a little nervous about all of it--Would they go to sleep with each other there as a distraction? Would they wake one another up all night with their noise? Would Norah pee through her diaper every night and make her real, kind of expensive mattress a stinky disaster in a week? It was all rather up in the air, but we wanted to try it anyway, figuring Norah was making big changes quickly with her sleeping and we might as well ride the wave.

And it worked swimmingly. They can't nap together because they DO keep each other up all afternoon, but they sit in there and chat and play for a few minutes at night (if they aren't so tired they fall right to sleep) then go to sleep. When one of them wakes up, for the most part, the other one sleeps through it (really, it's amazing how much Gabe can sleep through--the kid is like a stone once he's gone down and if it's not after 5:00 in the morning). In addition, now that Norah isn't needing bottles all through the night, she's not really peeing through her diapers anymore (much, just a little damp from time to time, which only makes her and her sheets stink--and she's been stinky for so long that nobody probably notices anymore).

So, in the course of a month, we've been able to start sleeping through the night (we don't, of course, because we haven't been for nearly four years and it's not easy to break a habit like that), we've got our spare room back, our child doesn't stink like a pisspot every morning, and the kids are actually starting to enjoy having each other in the room with them while they sleep (Norah gets pissed when Gabe isn't in there when she's supposed to be sleeping--but this isn't a HUGE deal because Norah gets pissed about most things most of the time these days, she's at that age).

AND she's showing signs of getting ready to potty train. I know! We might be diaper free in a few months! God that would be glorious. GLORIOUS!

This Deserves Its Own Post

2011-07-05T06:21:00.001-07:00

I know I said I was going to get to an updating type thing, and I think I've got quite a few pictures on the camera that I need to sort through and post, but something happened yesterday that deserves attention of its own.

We hosted the 4th of July party yesterday. It was, in fact, our 10th annual 4th of July party. Over the years we've hosted a variety of our holiday parties, but the 4th of July is the only one that we've had here every year.

One of our sort-of traditions (in that we don't do it EVERY year, but we've done it a few times over the past several years) is to put a fresh coat of spray paint on the giant aluminum canoe of Kris' that lives in our backyard. We have no particularly good reason to paint the thing, except that it is here, we usually have extra spray paint to get rid of, and it's good for killing about thirty minutes.

So, last night, in the lull between when the kids had fired off all of their daytime fireworks but it still wasn't dark enough yet for them to shoot off their nighttime ones, we pulled out the canoe and several people--mostly the kids--set to work on it.

And someone thought it would be a good idea to let Gabe have a go with a can of black spray paint.

He was shown how to hold the can and push the button on top to make it shoot paint in the right direction. I was trepidatious. Just two weeks ago, Gabe had his first experience with an aerosol can. He found a can of bug spray on our back porch and, convinced that he needed to put some spray on, started to use it. Instead of carefully "spritzing" himself with it, he sprayed pools of the bug deterrent into his free hand and then spread the puddle of spray around his body. In his effort to cover himself, he used up the entire can--a mostly full can. Pools of bug spray had collected all over the glass table he'd chosen to set it on. His clothes were soaked with spray. His hair was greasy with it.

Not surprisingly, I considered the experiment an unmitigated disaster and forbade him from using the bug spray by himself until he could properly figure out how to control its output. So I wasn't too hopeful about the outcome with the spray paint.

Nonetheless, I didn't want to be a helicopter parent who denied my child the chance to learn something new or have a fun experience just because I could predict a terrible outcome. It runs counter to my nature to NOT be a helicopter parent, but I'm trying. My kids deserve the chance to screw things up on their own. If they don't, they'll never learn. But, in retrospect, this might not have been the best time for me to take a step back.

To make matters worse, Libby had gone inside to give Norah a bath for bedtime, so she wasn't there to be the voice of reason. Also, a fair amount of alcohol might have been slowing my judgment, but I'm sure that didn't have anything to do with it.

Anyway, things actually didn't go TOO bad for awhile. He was hitting the canoe with most of the paint. He definitely needed to work on his application and spread of the paint--he was creating a lot of streaks and runs--and more than a little was ending up on his hands, but I figured that wasn't too much of a price to pay. The stuff on his hands would wear off eventually and he was getting to participate in an activity with the older kids.

After a few minutes, we adults grew more confident in his abilities and stopped paying close attention to him. We THOUGHT he'd more or less mastered the art of pointing the can at the canoe and pushing the button.

Then he spun around quickly with a dumbfounded look on his face, and we saw this:

Well we didn't see this EXACTLY right after it happened. I quickly ushered him to the house and told him that he needed to find Libby in the bathroom, get in the bath, and try to wash it off before it dried. This was what was left after Libby tried to get as much off as possible, which wasn't very much of it. Spray paint, it turns out, does not wash off the skin even if it is enamel. She tried to use a little finger nail polish remover, too, but it just wasn't possible to do much since so much of the paint was on his mouth and his skin is just too sensitive for that kind of thing.

At least he didn't get it in his eye, I suppose. But, all the same, I can't take him out of the house until it's faded considerably or I'm likely to have SRS called on me. And I suppose I should consider myself lucky that it wasn't the can of sky blue that he shot all over himself. Or a neon orange or something. It's bad enough that he looks like a poorly cleaned up Vaudevillian black-face performer, but at least he doesn't look like he tried to eat an emergency cone. Oh, wait, maybe I've got that backwards. Well, whatever, we're not going out in public for the next few days no matter what he looks like.

Slacker

2011-07-03T17:44:00.000-07:00

Wow, there's now way it's been over a week since I posted last. I'm pretty sure that's the longest stretch I've had of not posting on this site since I started it almost two and a half years ago. I blame Libby being home. With her home, I haven't had to retreat to my office and use "updating the blog" as an excuse to escape the children for a little while.

But I'm sure I have things I need to be posting about. Actually, quite a bit has been going on with Norah the past few weeks.

Later. Next week Libby goes back to work, so I'll get caught up a little then. Maybe.

Mud Butts and Bubble Wands

2011-06-24T16:44:00.000-07:00

First, that's a great post title, isn't it? Someone should use that for their band.

So this is that post where I put up some videos I've been sitting on for a week or two. Hurray! But wait, these are kind of funny. Promise.

About a week and a half ago, we got some rain. Our driveway, since it isn't paved, is notorious for holding mud puddles. Gabe, exhibiting surprising ingenuity (well, not surprising, really, since it was an ingenious way to get himself dirty, and he has a pretty solid history of coming up with creative ways to do that), made up a fun game.

The videos really say it all.

Maybe the videos don't QUITE say it all. Over the course of this little experiment in bidetery (hurray, I made another new word!), I pointed out to Gabe that not only was he shooting muddy water up his back all the way to his hair, he was, in fact, shooting muddy water straight up his butt. In response to this, he looked back at his butt, laughed, and then scooted back on his seat so that he could shoot MORE muddy water up his butt.

I went ahead and got some pictures, too, and included them here because it is a little easier to see his butt.

The fresh application of a new layer.

The problem with leaning back so he could shoot more mud up his butt is that he lost his balance. He fell off backwards into the frothy puddle that he'd created. Where he played for a few minutes before he got back on the bike.

Then, the other day, Gabe found a small bottle of bubbles that he'd been given, and Libby helped him come up with way to make LOTS of bubbles. She bent a badminton racket, filled up a very small baby pool with ALL of the bubble solution that we had (which was a quite a bit--about a gallon, I think), and let him go at it. The theory was that he would dip the racket, pull it out, then wave it around and make dozens of bubbles at a time. As you can see from the videos, he found a rather more wasteful way of making thousands of very small bubbles instead. She said she learned it from the Bubble Master or Bubble Guy or Mr. Bubble or some "celebrity" of some sort? I have no idea who she's talking about--but, I didn't have access to real television channels as a child so I'm deprived of anything that didn't make network TV. Also, I didn't watch many stupid things (except Bravestarr, which was pretty stupid), so I might have missed it that way, too. I guess the Bubble Guru guy is dead now? Dunno, she said it was in his honor, which is nice even if I had no idea what she was talking about.

One last thing.

Several months ago, Libby bought Gabe a Scotch Tape dispenser. It is a little plastic bracelet that dispenses single strips of tape. We installed one package of the tape, which he proceeded to put on EVERYTHING until he ran out. And then we told him we were "all out" of tape and quietly hid the thing in with his art supplies so he'd forget it even existed. Which he mostly did, until he found it again. And, because the memory of a parent is very short, I forgot what a mess he made with it the first time and refilled it for him.

Then this happened:

At least it only ended up on him and not everywhere else. Nonetheless, the dispenser was put back in the art supplies until the next time he stumbles upon it and I forget what he is able to worchen . . . (that doesn't seem to work. I was going for the present tense/infinitive form of "wrought." The closest I could get was the Middle English version of "work," which completely fails to make any sense, but I'm keeping it anyway because I spent two minutes on dictionary.com looking it up).

Staying Inside

2011-06-23T14:50:00.001-07:00

I've actually got a few pretty good videos that I need to get posted up here, but I keep forgetting to post during the day. Libby is home still from having her surgery and, with all the added distraction, I keep forgetting that I have a very important job, posting embarrassing videos of my children, to do. But I'm at work and don't have the memory card with me, so I'll just have to get it later.

What I did want to share was the miserable last couple days that Gabe has had. Miserable days that, to my way of thinking, make it clear that the outside is a place best enjoyed through a quarter inch of glass.

The thing that happened yesterday, in a round-about way, can probably be blamed on me. Libby can't mow. She won't be able to mow for at least a few more weeks. And I hate mowing. Put these things together and you get a somewhat overgrown yard (it's only been a little over a week since she mowed last, so it's not THAT bad yet--but it will get there, believe me, it will get there). Because it was a little shaggy, the clover that pretty much covers our backyard had started to bloom. Gabe, being extraordinarily helpful, volunteered to take a felled branch to our branch pile in the very back corner of our yard for Libby.

Really, he's turning out to be a very helpful little guy. Just thought I should give credit where it's due.

Anyway, he wasn't wearing shoes. On his way back from the brush pile, he let out a yelp followed by a terrible wailing scream. He'd stepped on a bee.

I've never been stung by a bee. Wasps several times, but never a bee. So I can't even really relate.

But he was miserable for about a half hour after that. Libby was able to get the stinger out and I carried him into the house where he laid on the couch for the next hour. After that hour, though, he was over it. And later that night, when he had to pee and Libby was in the bathroom, he went outside, barefoot, into the backyard grass to do it, and he never thought twice about it. He's a tough little bugger, that's for sure.

Which is good because today, apparently (again, I'm at work so I'm just going off what Libby has been texting me all day), he stepped it up a notch. Or it would seem that way to me, anyway. A friend of ours took Gabe out fishing. While out there, Gabe did a fair amount of sitting around in the grass. And guess what's in grass: chiggers. And guess where chiggers like to go when people sit in the grass: crotches. And guess what Gabe has one of: a crotch. And guess where he got a whole mess of chigger bites: his junk.

Yeah. Chigger Junk. One of the most not fun things ever.

I'm just worried about what tomorrow might bring. I don't see how his body can take much more escalation.

Another Argument Against the Likelihood of Our Survival as a Species

2011-06-18T10:47:00.000-07:00

Daily, constantly, I am amazed that we have managed to survive for so many millennia. Our children are helpless for SO long compared to other species. We can't even walk, much less run, away from danger for over a year. We can't be trusted to make decisions that reflect the concept of self preservation until we're at least in grade school--and in some people it doesn't kick in until they're in their mid-twenties.

These are problems, but not the ones that I want to discuss today. Today I want to discuss the awesomeness that is NOT having kids--specifically, the NOT having kids after spending four years, more or less non-stop, having kids.

Libby had surgery Tuesday. If you haven't heard about this and are concerned for her well-being, then feel free to ask her about it. I shan't go into it here because it has to do with "girl problems" and I don't like to think about such things. From Monday night until Saturday morning, my parents had the kids.

First, I should note that they did wonderfully over that period (well, from what my parents said, but they might have been telling me what I wanted to hear so we didn't feel bad about dumping the kids on them for so long). Possibly a little TOO well. I mean, it's one thing for them to be well-adjusted enough to not throw tantrums wanting mommy and daddy or to sleep in a bed in someone else's house or whatever. It's quite another for them to not really miss us at all. Neither one of them spent more than a few moments thinking about Libby and I. On the one hand--awesome. That makes it easier to dump them off on other people for a few days should we ever have the gumption to go somewhere without our children. On the other hand--come on! I spend my whole friggin life taking care of you brats, the least you could do is pine over my not being around for five days! A little appreciation here, people!

But, then, I guess it's a two-way street and that is the point of this post. I rather enjoyed not having the kids around for so long.

The last five days have been wonderful. WONDERFUL. I don't think there is a font that could accurately do it justice on here. I was able to go into town, to the hospital, whenever I wanted. I was able to stay for the better part of two and a half days straight. I was able to stay overnight once. I was able to get into my car, without thinking a thing about it, and GO PLACES. I was able to go to bed at my leisure and wake up when I wanted to. And then when Libby came home Thursday afternoon, we were able to do pretty much whatever we wanted. I was able to go into work Thursday and Friday night without a worry (in contrast, we've spent the last couple days talking to friends and trying to work out some way to have people in the house with the kids on Tuesday/Thursday/Saturday next week because Libby can't lift more than ten pounds until the middle of July and we have a two year old in our house--and I have to work).

In essence, it was like being childless again--like that period from the time we got married until Gabe came along. It had been so long since I'd had anything like actual freedom of movement that I had long since forgotten what it was like. I had taken for granted the extraordinary pain in the ass it is to have kids.

Which made me think, "Why don't people tell other people about this kind of thing BEFORE they have kids?" Which made me think, "Clearly, if people told other people about this kind of thing BEFORE they had kids, then normal/thoughtful people wouldn't have kids and only those people who become weirdly obsessed with having children round about the time they hit puberty would be doing the breeding, and then we'd have a world entirely populated by people born to weirdly obsessed teenagers. And what kind of a world would that be?" Almost certainly less populated, if nothing else.

Nonetheless, I'm going to tell prospective parents, outright, that it sucks. Having once again had a taste of near freedom, I'm not going to mince words with you. Your kids are like a shackle around your ankles. They are house arrest. They are a full body cast. They are the spontaneous combustion of your means of transportation and shoes. Worse. They are WHINING shackles and house arrests and full body casts and spontaneous combustions!

Now, clearly I say this because I am freshly embittered. After a few days of having the kids around again, I won't even remember what I was bitching about, or why, or what my name is, or how I got where I was, or any of the other things that usually brain cloud away when I'm around the kids for too long.

Oh, yeah. Did I mention that I was starting to think actual thoughts again about things that weren't to do with Transformers and getting my child to sleep through the night? Granted, they were mostly thoughts about composting and the possibility of introducing vermiculture--worm composting--to the composting experiment that I've been weirdly and inexplicably taken in by over the past month, so not exactly deep or relevant thoughts, but they were my own.

But all of that will be gone soon enough and I won't know any better. Because I love the little buggers. Inconvenient and brain numbing as they are, I love them. And THAT is probably the only reason that we've survived as a species.

(But seriously non-parents--and here I want you to imagine me speaking in a foreboding tone, possibly with a flashlight held under my chin--consider having children CAREFULLY. Do not take the having of children lightly. They will OWN you! You will be in the prison of child-rearing and it will not end soon! Heed my words! I shit you not!)

Ash Cleanup

2011-06-10T12:17:00.000-07:00

A friend just reminded me of a funny thing Gabe has been saying off and on for the last few weeks and I wanted to get it down before it was lost forever.

I am pretty sure I mentioned Gabe's obsession with volcanoes. That, of course, was like three weeks or a month ago, so he doesn't think or talk about them at all right now (replaced by the Transformers I've apparently also been obsessed with all week, since I keep talking about them too).

Only a week or two ago, all Gabe could talk about was volcanoes. And he invariably became very animated whenever he was talking about them. Actually, he gets very animated whenever he's talking about whatever he happens to be obsessed with at the time. When excited and animated, he tends to not worry quite so much about pronunciation and elocution--assuming, I believe, that the added hand gestures and invasion of personal space (he usually gets right in a person's face and talks at them to make sure they're paying close attention to the important things he has to say) will make up for understandability.

So, for a couple weeks, every time he stopped someone to tell them about volcanoes, of which he probably knows more than I do now, it usually went something like this: "I've got a volcano movie! My favorite part is the ass clamp!"

Whoever he was talking to would give us a perplexed look.

"Ash cleanup," we would carefully translate. "Yeah, ass clamp," Gabe would verify.

And we laughed and laughed.

That's all. Just wanted to get that one down.

Baby's First Prom

2011-06-10T06:28:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, we got a pair of packages from Grammy and Grandpa in New Zealand filled with the kids' birthday presents. Gabe received (among other things) a t-shirt and a rubber band gun that shoots ping pong balls. He wore the t-shirt all day yesterday (even deciding that, since it went down to his knees, he didn't need to wear pants under it, which I disagreed with--but, since he was wearing shorts and I couldn't see them anyway, he was probably right).

We also had a little come to Jesus about toys yesterday and the rubber band gun became involved. Since we started watching the old Transformers series, hardly an hour goes by that Gabe doesn't want me to run right out and buy him ALL of the Transformers that have ever been made. He doesn't grasp the concept of "this show was on over twenty years ago and the toys aren't made anymore (and, yes, I do have a trash can full of them in Mom and Dad's attic, but I'm not going to let you play with those until there's at least a 50% chance that you won't destroy them instantly. Jazz and Optimus Prime have survived for 25 years or so and deserve to be allowed to continue to do so).

Usually I just keep giving him what is quickly becoming an old standard: "Keep saving your allowance and eventually you can buy one of the big Transformers." The problem is, he doesn't have any concept of money value. He sees that he has a jar with almost an inch of coins in it. This is LOTS of money. He should be able to buy whatever he wants with it. Now. He makes three coins a day doing his "morning chores" (three random coins, usually pennies and nickels because, again, he doesn't understand their value and I am still hoping to use the big change jar I've been accumulating for the last seven years to buy a new X-Box when the one I have inevitably craps out), and every day those three coins should buy him a new Transformer.

That, I patiently explained, was never going to happen. I went on to tell him that he wasn't going to get every toy he wanted, and informed him that he was being kind of a spoiled brat because he hadn't even fully played with all the toys he got for his birthday. His argument: "But I need ALL of them because Bumblebee is lonely without all of his friends."

So I approached the subject of his imagination. He uses it pretty regularly, creating little scenarios for his toys to play out, but I don't think he's very good at pretending something is other than it really is. So, when he asked, "Did you have Megatron when you were growing up?" I said, "No, we didn't. We just used another toy and pretended he was Megatron" (which is true, though before long that got pretty lame so we just relied on the bad guys that we did have instead to wreak havoc).

And then the rubber band gun came into play. Because old school Megatron was a gun (the new one is an airplane, which is also lame). And he started pretending that the rubber band gun was Megatron. In my head I did a little victory dance. If all went well, suddenly all of his dozens of hot wheels cars COULD be Transformers!

But it only lasted about thirty seconds and he was asking me if I would buy him Ironhide (not the new one, which he got for his birthday, but the old one). Sigh.

Meanwhile, Norah got a princess dress for her birthday, and she also spent most of yesterday wearing her present. Also without pants.

I don't know, this just looked like the kind of picture that is taken before a prom to me. Minus the date.

Adorable. She still needs a crown, but we have the pixie wand, so she's very nearly a fairy princess already.

After I took it off her for nap time yesterday, Gabe was THIS CLOSE to putting it on himself. Man I hope he does, cause that will be an AWESOME picture.

Birthday Extravaganza

2011-06-07T06:28:00.000-07:00

There is something to be said about one's kids having their birthdays three days apart. I would highly recommend it. Really, it's the most considerate thing you could do for everyone--except maybe your kids, but who worries about them anyway? For you it means only needing to organize one party. For your guests it means only needing to endure the inevitable hardships of birthday parties for small children once instead of schlepping out on different occasions. And, really, for a number of years, your kids won't even notice the difference. At four, Gabe still had no concept that he was sharing a party with his sister. Though, in fairness, only this year has Gabe begun to understand the concept of "birthday" and "age" and both of them are directly linked to the concept of "everybody will give me multiple presents that I can open and barely register the existence of from that moment on."

The one downside to having children that get older is that they begin to request themes for their parties. This year, Gabe wanted Transformers (partly because his best friend Finn had a Transformer cake that Gabe obsessed with for the last few weeks and partly because he has an unhealthy fixation with the toys).

Actually, the Transformers thing is a little weird. He got into them--VERY into them--without ever having seen any of the cartoons. It's like his little boy mind was naturally attuned to the robot-into-vehicles concept without so much as needing to know what they were actually about. They existed and he was into them because of that. And I'm pretty OK with him being into them. Actually, it's pretty cool.

It probably comes as no surprise to anyone that most of my tastes in entertainment tend to gravitate towards the juvenile. I like science fiction and fantasy, I will choose to watch a channel showing cartoons over just about anything else (even pre-K cartoons, now, just so I don't have to watch commercials--and if I'm not really watching, as it's on for background noise or something), and part of me really likes to spend at least a little time with each of Gabe's new toys.

But even in the world of kid's entertainment, there were a few particular brands that I have maintained an especial bond with--my favorites growing up. And the two that ranked the highest in my mind were Star Wars and Transformers. Star Wars was my thing for nearly a decade, and if it hadn't been for those unforgivable prequels, it still might be. I will likely resist the urge to let Gabe get into Star Wars for as long as possible now because, when he does, he'll be inundated with all of the contemptible Clone Wars garbage and will have little exposure to the GOOD Star Wars stories. Which makes me sad.

But Transformers are another story. And, even better, they are showing the first generation shows again on The Hub. Gabe loves them and I love that he loves them because these are the same shows that I was watching in the mid-80s when I got home from grade school. And I debated whether or not they were entirely appropriate for a four year old to watch, but, then I compared them to what I was watching at that age--Bugs Bunny and Tom and Jerry and Super Friends--and realized that there is just about the same level of "shit blowing up" in Transformers as there was in those other earlier generation shows. Sure there's other things he SHOULD be watching, but if he's got to be watching stuff with explosions, it might as well be something that I want to sit down and watch along with him. So far, it's been great remembering all the old shows and trying to remember the names of the various toys and characters.

But I digress wildly.

How about I just post some pictures and shut up instead.

The preamble to the party. The problem with following themes is the cost. Little packs of plates and napkins are ridiculously expensive. And, more than likely, Gabe didn't even notice that he had Transformer plates and napkins. But I suppose this way we don't have to feel guilty about being cheap bastards later in life when they are looking back on these pictures.

Norah with Nana, Poppa, and Grandma Albers.

This was just who could cram into our living room. Our dining room was also pretty full. It's great having so many friends and family who want to celebrate the kids' big days (but I wish we had a bigger house to do it in sometimes). Gabe is opening "Stinky the Garbage Truck," a giant truck that turns into a sort of robot and talks and kind of eats garbage when you put it in his mouth. Of the things that we got him, that was probably his favorite. Though, that's not really saying much because on the list of his favorite presents it probably falls somewhere around fifth or sixth. We did a little better with Norah. The Dora the Explorer Backpack that we got her was a bit more of a hit (still, probably only third best, though).

This helmet is a 3T. When we first opened it and tried to apply it to her head, we were afraid that it was too small. It felt like I was forcing it onto her enormous head. But, as the day went on, either the swelling in her head went down, the helmet grew slightly, or I just wasn't pushing hard enough because it started to more or less fit. Still, I doubt it will fit for more than a few months.

Norah kind of got the short end of the stick on the cake. Because we special ordered Gabe a Transformer cake, and it was a pretty big cake, we didn't NEED to get another one. So we got her some princess cupcakes. Really, though, she doesn't like cake, so it's not like she cared what we got her.

Gabe's Transformer cake. The same one that Finn had at his birthday party. We got it because the day of Finn's party, Gabe was most disappointed that Finn got to keep the two toys that were on top and Gabe didn't. He talked about it daily for nearly two weeks and every chance he got he mentioned that he wanted a Transformer cake so he could have the toys off it. After he blew out his candles, we pulled the toys off, washed the frosting off them, then gave them to Gabe. He looked at them, had us identify them as Bumblebee and Optimus Prime, then put them on the floor and hasn't looked at them again since. Kids.

Gabe's big present from Nana and Poppa. Probably we should have gone with the slightly bigger model, but the store was out of them at the time and we decided just to go with what was available. It should last him a year or so, and then Norah can use it. We'll just put a pink basket or something on it. That's girly enough, right? So far, he's enjoyed playing on it, but because we don't have a paved driveway, he really doesn't have any GREAT places in our yard to practice.

Norah's new trike, also from Nana and Poppa. I THINK there is also a baby doll that she got stuffed on there somewhere with her. There is a little "trunk" on the back, and she had the baby crammed in there head first for a little while.

Their best present. Our friends Jason, Mel, and their son David arranged this for the kids. It's a tire swing of the awesomest caliber. The problem was, our yard, though full of trees, is all but devoid of good branches for hanging swings from. Eventually they found ONE candidate that had the required strength and straightness, but it was way the hell up in one of our oak trees and there were a half dozen smaller branches between it and the ground. But that didn't stop Jason. Without the benefit of a prehensile tail, he climbed up the tree and started hacking off branches with this lightsaber he conjured from his shorts (that sounds a little suspect--and it wasn't an ACTUAL lightsaber, it was called a Silky Slicer or something and was like a ginsu knife for trees, but it might as well have been a lightsaber because it was about that effective against the branches of our oak tree). Really. The guy has some stones. I'm not terribly fond of heights, but even if I was, I seriously doubt that I would climb a tree, hacking branches along the way, to hang a swing for our kids. And for that type of dedication, Jason wins Number One Friend/Neighbor for the next few months at least.

The end result. This has, by a wide margin, been the kids' favorite present. Every moment we're outside they are wanting to be pushed in it. And they're both going to have to learn some important lessons about sharing along the way, so even that is a positive.

Warning: the next picture has a naked little boy butt in it. If you're offended by cute little butts, then look away. Also, you've probably got problems.

I'm not sure if you can see these well enough on the downsized picture that Blogger puts up, but Gabe's back is COVERED in scrapes and scratches from his birthday celebration. Honestly, he looked like he was in a fairly major accident. Part of me wants to chalk this up to "Boys," but, really, I think it has to be chalked up to "Gabe."

And, finally, a picture from last night. Norah, grooming her mother. Picking out nits and eating them. Isn't nature mysterious and wonderful?

A Birthday Party and My Kids Being Weird

2011-06-03T06:06:00.000-07:00

It really has been a busy last few weeks. We've had birthday parties and Adoption Days with our friends. Libby's work was insane as every school in Wichita decided to use up a field trip day at the Water Center. And we bought a bookstore. So I suppose it's no surprise that I've been a little lacking in posts for the last few weeks.

Anyway, Gabe's BFF had his birthday party two weekends ago. They rented out an interesting place in Wichita. It's like an indoor playground with all kinds of padded play equipment and such. After giving the kids twenty minutes or so to experiment with all of the equipment, the two guys that worked there began some organized games and such. Well, "organized" might be a better way to put it.

I can't remember what they were doing here. Probably imagining self-actualization.

Then they all gathered in a "truth circle." Or something.

Honestly, I want to know what these two guys did to deserve the punishment of working in a place like this. They were both in their early 20s. Maybe it's a job they connected with as part of their degree programs in college. I'm not sure what that degree would be, though. Corrections officer? I would say Early Childhood Development might make sense, but besides getting a first-hand look at how a room full of 1-5 year olds act when confined to a smallish play area, I can't imagine there's much to be gleaned from a job like this. This job is about as close to my own personal hell as I can think of. But, then, someone must like the idea of wrangling two dozen or so other-people's kids, otherwise these places wouldn't exist. I think Norah had a bit of a crush on this guy, though. She tried to hang around him as much as possible.

Isometrics are very important.

Norah gave hanging out with the bigger kids a pass after a little while and spent some time in this tube. Cause tubes are fun, right? I find myself crawling into culverts all the time, just for kicks. So I clearly see the appeal.

I half expected to capture a trampoline disaster while I was recording here. But I didn't. Shortly after I stopped recording, though, Gabe made an interesting discovery. See that ramp in the background? I'm not sure what purpose it is meant for. Eventually some of the kids started doing "steamrollers" down it. Gabe, however, saw it as an excellent launching pad for the trampoline. I'm pretty sure, to his way of thinking, he would jump from that ledge, bounce off the trampoline, and begin to fly around the room. Or maybe he just thought he would jump from the trampoline across the room. But he wasn't quite coordinated enough even to pull off springing from the trampoline into the classic Broken Arm Pose off to the side. Instead, his legs kind of crumbled beneath him and he smacked his face pretty hard on the trampoline then bounced sadly a few times face down on the surface. To his credit, though, he stood right up and considered trying it again without so much as whining a little bit. The kid is tough, there's no denying that. Which is good considering his tendency towards self-destruction.

And then, a few days later, this happened. I am certain that this is something I should be concerned about for future reference. They both seem to have rather weird fixations right now. Gabe likes for Norah to squash him, and Norah loves to do it. I just hope it's a phase. A very weird phase. But a FUNNY weird phase. I have to say that.

Hi Chicky, My Name Is Norah

2011-06-01T17:51:00.001-07:00

We've had these things here at the house for almost a month now, and yet I have hardly said a thing about them since their arrival. I don't HATE our chickens. I don't like them, either. I am most indifferent to them. They are a part of my life and I accept that. They are like the big rug in our dining room. I know it's there. I'm fine with it there. I understand that cleaning it and taking a bit of care of it comes with the territory. But I wouldn't be sad if it just disappeared (unless we put it there to cover some hideous spots in our hardwood floor--which, considering the state of our house just might be the case).

The kids, on the other hand, are quite fond of the chickens. And guess which one of them loves the chickens the most. Well, I guess I gave that one away with the title of this post. It's Gabe! Ha, ha! Tricked you!

No, I didn't. It's Norah. She loves the little pecky things. It kind of surprises me, actually. All along I pegged Norah as my ally in this house full of outdoorsy people. I foresaw us lounging around, reading books or watching movies, sharing inside jokes about funny things we'd seen or discussed, looking down our noses at the unwashed masses (well, masses in that both Libby and Gabe have mass, each) who spent their time WILLINGLY outdoors in whatever terrible weather Kansas had to offer us that day.

But it turns out kind of not. She is a big fan of being outside. And, though it pains me to do it (quite literally since I end up with sunburns and bug bites), I encourage her to be outside as much as I can possibly tolerate it. I know, I know. I'm a martyr. And awesome.

One of her favorite things to do this past week has been to pick up a small handful of mulberries that have fallen from our tree in the backyard, carry them up to the chickens, and feed them the berries.

It was so cute that I had to get some video.

Also, during the second one--though you have to listen pretty closely to hear her say it--she introduces herself to the chickens. That's where the name of the post came from. I only know this because, after I stopped filming, she re-introduced herself another three or four times, so I was able to figure out what she was saying right before she stuck her toes through the chicken wire and got pecked.

As I posted the first of these videos, I realized that I have a few others on the memory card still that I haven't shared from the past few weeks. Apparently I've been remiss. Again. AND today was Gabe's 4th birthday, so I feel as though I need to do a four year review sometime soon, too. And, obviously, Norah's birthday is Sunday as well (and we're having their joint party Sunday, so there ought to be plenty to post about there, too). So, one of two things will happen. There will either be a mess of posts in the next week, or I will once again forget about most of it, put up some half-assed "video roundup" post sometime next week, and call it good. Which will it be? It must be sweeps week with a cliffhanger like this!

Too Big for Her Britches

2011-05-27T07:37:00.000-07:00

Over the course of the past few weeks, Norah has reached a bit of a tipping point that is causing us no end of trouble. It is a conundrum that only the parents of the world's largest toddler could possibly face. Simply put, no diaper can contain her.

We reached this point with Gabe round about last spring, too. See, diapers max out at size 6. This is not only the largest size in terms of fitting bigger children but it's the maximum capacity size for absorbency. They are designed for kids in and around the 35 pound range. Norah has exceeded this range and her big girl bladder is producing more urine than her size 6 diapers can keep up with. In other words, she is regularly peeing through her pants.

During the day, this isn't that big a deal because we can easily change her diapers to keep up. But when she's in bed, it's a REAL problem, especially considering she still needs bottles every few hours to get her back to sleep. Over a night she will drink more fluids than some adults take in throughout a day. It's kind of messed up.

Anyway, even the "super absorbent overnight" diapers can't contain her. Nightly she is soaking herself, her bed, her pillow, her blankets, her Lulu, and, based on how bad her room smells now, I think it's running off her bed and spilling onto the floor. It is disgusting and disheartening and frustrating and annoying and there doesn't seem to be a damn thing we can do about it.

If we don't give her bottles, she screams and cries until she throws up. If we get her out of bed and change her diaper, she wakes up enough that we can't get her to go back to sleep for an hour or so. We are between a rock and a sopping wet place.

We experienced something similar with Gabe when his bladder capacity reached a size where it outstripped the absorbency of his diapers--but it happened when he was very nearly at the age where we could potty train him. Which is the way it is SUPPOSED to be. That is why the diapers only go up to that size and then they make the switch to training pants (which are bigger in size but have less absorbency because kids aren't supposed to be peeing in them actively).

Norah, however, isn't to that point yet. We've got several months still, I think, before potty training becomes a real option, and even then I seriously doubt she will have the bladder control necessary to make it through the night for several more months.

So, I guess what I'm saying is, if you go upstairs to Norah's room, just pretend like you don't notice the obvious piss smell in her room, because it's not going anywhere anytime soon.

Kind of a Big Deal

2011-05-25T05:56:00.000-07:00

Over the past few weeks, something kind of major happened that I completely failed to mention on here--which is pretty remiss of me considering how I lamented and moaned about it in the past.

Since age two, we've been trying to get Gabe's binkies away from him. We tried taking them away--he wailed and acted as though he would die. A couple times, when he lost them, we tried to say, "Well, you lost your last one. I guess if you can't take care of them, then you must not want them very much." This was not true and the tantrum that followed proved this. We tried to replace the binkies he liked with ones that we knew he didn't--even stooping to use binkies OBVIOUSLY designed for babies, and telling him as much. He blithely disregarded our attempts to shame him into not using them and sucked away at the binkies. Finally, the best that we could manage was to restrict his usage. We told him that he could only use them upstairs and on long car rides. And, though he acknowledged those rules and accepted the fact that he would have to give up his binkie if caught using it in other circumstances, that didn't stop him from TRYING to use the binkie anywhere and everywhere.

Really, he showed all the signs of a serious addiction. He hid binkies around the house to enable him to sneak sucks on it whenever we weren't looking. He would stick them in his PJs when he came downstairs or wrap them in his blanket. Then, when we weren't looking, he would throw one behind the couch so he could go back there to "play" a few times a day (he covered himself up with one of the blankets back there and sucked away at his binkie for a few minutes). Sometimes he played by the rules and would sit on the stairs (which were technically "upstairs") and suck on it. And he never, ever went to sleep without it. He wouldn't and seemingly couldn't.

And it's only been in the past six months or so that he became mature enough that we could trying bargaining with him. We tried to coax him by saying that big kids who went to big kid schools didn't use binkies--he didn't see any of his friends at preschool using binkies, did he? To which he, quite logically, replied, "They can borrow mine if they want."

It was frustrating and humbling. We were consistently being bested by a three year old. And then we found a seed that actually stuck. Libby suggested that, on his fourth birthday, he would officially be a big boy and the Binkie Fairy would come to our house. This fairy would take away all of his binkies to give to other babies and small children who needed them. And then we repeated this plan ad nauseum until, finally, he started to understand the meaning.

He wasn't fond of the idea until we also informed him that the Binkie Fairy would bring him a present for each binkie that he gave up.

THAT caught his attention. Gabe has reached the age where he understands gift giving--rather, gift receiving. He wants EVERYTHING he sees, either for his birthday or for Christmas. And he's reasonably sure that he's going to get it all, too. So when he learned that the Binkie Fairy would also give him presents, it suddenly became a game of What Can I Screw This Fairy Person Out of for a Few Binkies. His list was long and loud.

And we kept talking about it and warning him that the day was coming, sort of counting down the weeks until the Binkie Fairy came. I fully expected this plan, like all of the others before it, to flop. I expected him to receive the gifts jubilantly, but then when he went to bed, realize that he didn't have a binkie to sleep with and have a major meltdown that would force me to the store to buy a few replacements for the ones the fairy had taken.

Except, quite out of the blue, Libby asked Gabe if he wanted to try to sleep without it one night as practice and he accepted. And he did it. WEEKS before his birthday and the date we'd been working towards! He didn't have a great first night, but it wasn't terrible. Then the next day he made it through a nap time. He didn't nap because of it being gone, but he didn't freak out either. A day later, we took him to the store and let him pick out something from the Binky Fairy (yeah, kind of cheated on that one, but he never asked why the Binky Fairy--who has also failed to take the old binkie away, it's still on top of our fridge where Gabe can probably see it--would need us to buy his gifts, he was just glad to be getting them).

We offered him a bike! He really doesn't have a good pedaled machine to ride at this point and the purchase of a bike of some sort is inevitable, so we kind of hoped he'd let us lump this gift in with something we'd have to buy him sooner or later anyway. We let him try out several bikes, but he was completely unimpressed by all of them. He ended up going to the lego section and picking out a rescue helicopter and fire truck.

Yes. He chose two cheap lego sets over a bike. Two lego sets that I put together and he tore apart in short order, mixing the pieces so I would never put them together again (that's my rule, I won't dig through and sort out pieces--if he wants them put back together he has to keep the pieces separated, and since he never does that, I only have to put the things together once, which is just fine by me). Weird, right? Clearly he wasn't realizing the value of what he was giving up in our eyes. We would have gladly bought him the bike if it meant he never picked up a binkie again. I might have bought him two.

So, there it is. After nearly four years, our household is binkie free! And it gives me hope that we'll eventually be able to talk Norah out of needing a bottle every time she wakes up in the middle of the night. God that will be nice.

Oooh! Oooh! We took another step in the right direction last week, too. We permanently removed one of the gates from our doorways. The one blocking off the staircase that leads upstairs. We've been leaving it open for the past couple weeks. Norah can easily go up the stairs whenever she wants now. She still won't come down them, but she'll stand at the top of the stairs and call down to me to get her. And she's done it reliably enough that we decided she didn't need a gate there anymore. Really, we leave all of our gates open most of the time (and Gabe has figured out to open them so they are mostly moot anyway), but we are keeping the ones to the kitchen and my office until we no longer need to lock the kids out of the kitchen so they aren't pulling food randomly out of every nook and cranny and spreading it out all over the house. With luck, that will happen in the next few months and never again will I have to scream under my breath as I scrape the skin off my leg or gouge my balls while going over the top of a gate. Oh the joy that will bring me.

A Funny Mental Image

2011-05-23T07:14:00.000-07:00

Last week I had a stream of consciousness conversation (not unusual, most conversations I'm involved in tend to wander hither and yon) that eventually led to a memory from my own very early childhood that creates and amusing mental image.

I could skip straight to the mental image, but where's the fun in that.

The conversation started with piledrivers--the famous wrestling move wherein the inflicter picks up the victim, spins him around so his head is between the inflicter's legs and his legs are shooting up over the inflicter's shoulders, and the inflicter drops down to his knees. Clearly, the weight of both wrestlers should smash the victim's head and destroy his spine, but, somehow, that doesn't happen. Wrestlers are just that tough, I guess, because I KNOW there isn't any sort of fakery going on.

At one point in my distant past, a friend and I came up with a Piledriver System. Based on what we knew of wrestling, it was pretty obvious that a handful of piledrivers really wasn't that harmful to a person. We'd seen them inflicted on the same person multiple times in a single match and every time he got up and kept on fighting. So we worked up how many piledrivers it would take to actually do serious damage to a person--starting around the 10th one since any before that could clearly be shaken off easily.

I can't really remember any of them from 10-18, but I do remember that 18 was Unconsciousness with irreparable spinal damage, 19 was Death, and 20 was Death and Stealing the Victim's Soul. So, for quite some time, one of our favorite threats to make was "Don't make me piledrive you 20 times." And this was a pretty effective threat because none of us thought the others very good stewards for our eternal souls.

This last story is relevant in no way to anything. I just like the idea of piledriving someone twenty times. It makes me laugh that there wouldn't really be any serious harm until the upper teens.

So, the other day, a friend was having trouble with a co-worker. I suggested piledriving this co-worker as a way to solve the problem and presented the friend with a handy template that could be used to determine if, in fact, a piledriver was deserved. Despite the fact that the piledriver can be easily shaken off for quite some time, it's still a pretty serious invasion of personal space, so it shouldn't be undertaken lightly.

Nonetheless, it was decided that, if three good reasons could be presented, then that person deserved a piledriver. Thus: "_______ deserves a piledriver because _______, ________, and ________. "

Then, a minute of introspection led me to realize that quite often in my life I resort to a kind of fill-in-the-blank approach to the world. It's difficult to explain, but that example above is pretty close to an actual mental cross-checking system that I might use in my head to justify or explain something. Tracing this back through my development, I decided that I did it because Mad Libs played such a major role in my entertainment for several years while growing up.

This trip down memory lane led me to remember the times my younger cousin and I would sit in my room filling in Mad Libs with bad words. It was our first real experimentation with bad words, and we felt giddily empowered and dangerously exposed all at the same time. We kept looking over our shoulders to make sure my mom wasn't coming into my room, and we kept the pad near my bed so we could quickly throw it under there and look like we were doing something else in case she walked in. When we were finished, we read the stories back to ourselves quietly and tittered at all the bad words we used (which, more often than not, were of the "fart" severity, but we thought we were pretty bad ass all the same). After that, we carefully hid the pad in my room somewhere my mom wouldn't find it. Every once in awhile, we'd pull it back out and laugh anew at our cleverness.

This story is also not relevant to anything, except to show the strangely circuitous way my brain works. Is this really the best use of my memory capacity? At this stage in my life, I'm lucky if I can remember someone's name or face by the third or fourth meeting, and forget about remembering an address or directions without writing them down. Last week, we ran out of ketchup, which is a pretty big deal because Gabe likes ketchup on most things. So it came up many times during the week. When I went to do the grocery shopping yesterday, I forgot my list and was just going off what I remembered being out of. Yet, despite the frequency it came up and the relative severity in terms of my child's happiness, guess what I forgot and had to make a second trip back to the store to pick up? Is it really more important that I remember my cousin and I writing "crap" a dozen times in blank spaces than daily, functional things?

This memory of me sitting in my room doing something naughty led me to another memory of me doing something that I wasn't supposed to as a child (keep in mind, this took the span of about a minute--FAR less time than you and I have wasted here so far on all this nonsense).

Around age six or seven, I learned how to flip the bird. I don't remember who I saw doing it, but it was a pretty popular gesture back on the farm, so any of a number of people probably could have been blamed. I had no real idea what it ACTUALLY meant, but I understood that it was a sign of dislike for something, and one day I decided to try it out myself.

Mom told me to do something, I don't remember what, but I do remember not wanting to do it. So I flipped her off as a response to her order.

Not surprisingly, she didn't take it very well. There was much repercussing. But before things progressed to the spanking and crying phase, I guess Mom must have realized that I really didn't have any idea what I was doing or what the bird stood for. So she calmed down and explained to me that it was an entirely inappropriate thing for me to be doing, and that it was NEVER appropriate to flip someone off.

Because my brain works the way it does, I countered by asking, "What about the devil?" Clearly, if anyone deserves to be flipped off, the devil does. He's a dick--always and forever. And flipping him the bird would be both an act of righteous indignation and a deserved reaction for his many misdeeds. Granted, I didn't make quite such a clear case, but that was basically my train of thought (well, at least that was my surface train of thought--underlying all of it was "I hope she falls for this because then I have someone that I can flip off so I can still make this cool gesture SOMETIME at least).

Faced with my flawless logic, she relented. I mean, how could she not? It's the devil! Not only did he deserve to be flipped off, he NEEDED to be flipped off. But she set a few conditions. I could ONLY flip off the devil, and I could ONLY flip off the devil somewhere that nobody, including my mother, could see it.

This cheered me greatly. I could still practice my shiny new gesture--which I then knew to be a pretty severe gesture considering the considerable restrictions put on my using it. I just needed to find a good place to practice it. So I went back to my room and considered my options.

The devil, I knew, lived in hell. Hell, I knew, was underground and very hot. I knew this because I had at least once before tried to dig to it, just to see what it was like. I figured, once I broke through the "roof" of hell, I'd be able to sit from the top of my hole and peer down on the goings-on below, passing judgment and scoffing at all the sinners as their skin was baked from their bodies and wild beasts defecated in the eye sockets they had just pulled and eaten the eyeballs from. It's no wonder hell was a kind of obsession with me for awhile. It was such a colorful place.

Strangely, I was never able to dig that far, though.

But I did know the basic rules of hell, so I had to think of the best "access point" to apply my new gesturing skills at. I had to hope that the devil would be paying attention and see me doing it--but, really, it didn't matter if he did or didn't, I just wanted to flip something off.

There was only one logical point in my room: the heat register. It made perfect sense. It blew out hot air. It went below the house. Strange noises came out of it from time to time. Clearly this was a portal to the nether world.

So I plopped down on the floor of my room. I wrapped my legs up Indian style and peered down into the heat register. I couldn't SEE hell, but it had to be there somewhere. So, with some deliberation, I folded down my fingers and held them into place with my thumb and I flipped off Satan. And I continued to flip him off for the better part of the next hour. I don't know if he ever fully recovered from such a sound, symbolic thumping from me, but I do know that I nearly perfected the act of giving the bird--and that is a skill that has served me quite well over the years.

Splashing and Lava Lamps

2011-05-17T05:59:00.000-07:00

Just a few videos to share again today.

After dinner last night, we took the kids outside to play for a bit before bed time. One of the first things Libby did while we were out there was to put some water in a bucket to give to her chickens (which, sadly, haven't died yet). After watering the birds, Norah decided that she needed to play in the water. But simply splashing in it with her hands wasn't enough. She decided that she needed to stand in the bucket and stomp around. By the time I got the camera around, she was mostly done with that, but I got some video of her doing some generally cute stuff after, too.

After getting soaked, we went inside and took a bath and got ready for bed. Then, kind of out of the blue, Libby got inspired to buy something for the kids.

Gabe has been a little obsessed with volcanoes for the past two weeks or so now. They are about all he talks about. Pretty much everything relates to volcanoes in some way, shape, or form. He might be playing with army guys and a dump truck, and those toys might be doing typical armying and dumping for a little bit, but before long they all end up doing something volcano related. Sometimes they are exploding forth from a volcano. Sometimes they are cleaning up after the volcano.

Kind of a funny story about that, actually. Two weeks ago, he said he wanted to see a volcano. He wanted me to load him up in the car and drive him to one that he could see. I explained that we lived VERY far away from the nearest active volcano, but I could show him one on the computer. So we spent about a half an hour looking at volcano videos on youtube and National Geographic's web site. And he would have continued to watch for the next hour or two if I'd felt like constantly finding new clips to watch. But I didn't, so I told him I would find him a volcano movie to watch, and I ordered a National Geographic Explorer episode about volcanoes on ebay. Fortunately, the person I bought it from was on the ball, because a dozen or so times a day (starting from five minutes after I ordered it), Gabe asked me if his movie had come in the mail yet.

It came in early last week and he has watched it at least once every day. He's even watched all of the special features on the DVD. There's a good chance that, within a couple weeks, he will have watched more hours of National Geographic in his life already than I have managed to watch myself over . . . however many years old I am. I can't remember anymore. A lot.

Last night, then, Libby was inspired to find Gabe a lava lamp for his room. Everything is volcanoes, lava and molten rock take up a goodly portion of his brain these days, we've been having to leave the light upstairs on for him because he's been scared of the dark recently--pretty much getting a lava lamp seemed like a fantastic idea. So she ran out and got two of them, one for Gabe and one for Norah's room (because what the hell, we often have to turn the light on in her room so we can see where she is to hand her a bottle and tuck her back in, so having some light in the room wasn't a bad idea).

And he loves the light. Already this morning he's gone up to his room just to stand in front of it and stare for a few minutes.

After installing the lights last night, I decided to keep a hold of the tubes they came in, just in case one of them didn't work or something. But I also figured that the kids would enjoy playing with them this morning. And they did. Though in a way that I didn't expect.

I REALLY wanted him to try to put one on each leg and walk around. Sadly, I don't think that ever occurred to him.

Gabe's First Program

2011-05-13T11:54:00.001-07:00

Tuesday night was graduation at Gabe's preschool. He's still got a year of preschool left, so the ceremony wasn't in his honor, but they did work up a little program for all of the preschoolers to participate in.

Because I wanted to post it on here, I had to break the videos into little 1 minute 30 second clips (though a couple times I wasn't paying close enough attention and wandered over--so if there are some breaks in the program, that means I couldn't get blogger to load one of my videos). So, you know, sorry that you have to watch these videos in small chunks.

While Gabe didn't manage to do anything America's Funniest Videos funny, he also didn't stay on script very well (and since I didn't want to be one of those people standing up in the middle of everything blocking the view of others, I didn't do such a hot job of video-taking, either--but there you go).

And that's that, sort of. I had a little video of their procession out, but Gabe ran around the other way to find Poppa again, so I didn't get him in it at all.

Mud Baths and Frogs

2011-05-10T13:01:00.000-07:00

Just a couple videos to share today.

Yesterday we broke the previous heat record for our state for the 9th of May by 16 degrees, topping out over 100. And it wasn't much better on Sunday. Since it was so warm, Libby got the sprinkler out and let the kids go at it for awhile. Just as he did the last time we let them play in the sprinkler, Gabe spent only as much time playing in the water as it took for a spot of ground to get muddy enough to start tearing things up. This time, instead of just stomping around, though, he decided to make his ancient ancestors proud and he made use of a simple tool.

OK, so I lied. There are a few pictures to go along with the videos, too.

I really am glad that Libby lets the kids do this kind of thing. I always put on a cranky face when it happens because I, personally, am not a fan of messes or of gaping holes in our yard, but I still appreciate the kids getting to have this kind of fun while they are young.

Then, this morning, Norah did something that caught me as amusing. I'm not sure what brought it on, but seemingly out of the blue she said, "Frog. Jump!" and then she made a ribbit noise. It was really loud and sounded something like "BRAP!" It was awfully hilarious, so I tried to talk her into doing it for the camera.

Obviously, she's picked up Gabe's bad habit of always having to see herself on the camera afterwards. I'm afraid that I'm raising a pair of narcissists. But at least a decent narcissist would put on a performance in front of the camera before insisting on seeing it instead of just assuming that, as soon as the camera is turned on, something worth seeing will materialize on it to look at. So we're going to have to work on that part if nothing else. All in all, the video wasn't successful, but I like to share my failures as well (since, if I didn't, this blog would only get updated once every few weeks at best).

Field Trips

2011-05-05T09:11:00.000-07:00

We finished the second of Gabe's field trips. They were . . . interesting (and here I use the dramatic pause followed by the euphemistically nondescript participle "interesting" in the place of "nightmarish hellscapes that I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy" because I don't want people to think that I'm being overly dramatic or hyperbolic just for the sake of colorful narrative).

Let me just begin by reiterating that I do not have the tools necessary to adequately cope with my small children out in public settings like this. If I've learned nothing else over these past four years (and, in fact, that's probably not far from an accurate evaluation of my learning curve), I have come to realize my own limitations in this particular area. I like children who follow orders--who do what they are told and are blithely capable of having a good time within the rather strict behavioral guidelines that I categorize as "acceptable."

I also know that this is an entirely unrealistic expectation of my children--or anyone else's. Kids are kids and they will do stupid kid things and almost never do what they are told. And I can accept that reality. I just don't accept my place in that reality. If children aren't doing what they are told, then I like to have a section of the house that I can gate/lock off from the rest where the kids can do their own thing and I can delude myself into thinking that they are doing precisely what I WANT them to be doing. The problem is, no such lock-offable places exist out in public.
So outings like this tend to go something like this:

Pat says, "Gabe, please stand by me and don't touch anything.

Gabe: immediately walks away and starts touching something hot, sharp, poisonous, explosive, or molting.

Pat says, "Norah, please hold my hand."

Norah says, "No!" then she pulls her hands roughly down to her side, slumps to her butt on the ground, and starts shrieking like I've just poked her in the gullet with a cattle prod.

Pat says, "Gabe, please listen to the grown ups and do what they say."

Gabe: (he never says anything anymore, instead just doing what he wants to instead of trying to rationalize or explain his actions to me in lively debate) picks his nose and wipes the booger on my pants, he then uses the distraction this offers--while I am trying to wipe the snot ball off my clothes--to find something large that he can go behind to "look at" so that I can't see him anymore. Then he will find something, anything, to pick up and put in his mouth.

Pat says, "Norah, honey . . ." and then stops because there really is no point.

Norah says, "No!" but lets me pick her up. Once she's four feet off the ground, she performs an outstandingly complex physical display wherein she simultaneously slumps limply into my arms (giving her the holdability of a greased sack of weevils) while using invisible limbs (her actual limbs are always flailing out behind her) to push away from my body with all her might. The end result is something like me wrestling a narcoleptic pig suffering a grand mal seizure. Inevitably, it is only sheer force of will that keeps her from crashing head first to the floor. But the fact that I have managed to prevent my smallest child from braining herself on the tarmac rarely distracts passers-by from the reality of the fantastic bratitude of said child and my obvious parenting deficiencies in raising such a nether-beast. I am only being judged by the attitude, not by the feat of physics defying deftness that enables me to keep my child alive and well.

And that probably sums my problems up quite adequately. I don't like being judged by people I don't know (and, frankly, who probably deserve to be on the receiving end of judgment instead of the giving end), and having small children in public is the judgment inducing equivalent of wearing a Ms. America style sash that says Dog Botherer or Real Doll Pimp on it.

Anyway. Gabe's first field trip was to our local Daylight Donuts. Gabe, as I'm sure I've pointed out several times before, has a real thing for donuts. Every day he asks for donuts. Several times, usually. So we kind of figured this trip would be like visiting his own nirvana. And he did enjoy eating the donuts--he ate his, Norah's, and half of mine. He also drank two juice cups.

Outside the donuteria.

My brilliant plan was to keep Norah locked in her definitely-too-small-for-her-now stroller. But the store isn't what you'd call spacious, and Norah pretty much hated sitting in this thing (plus, she doesn't like donuts, so there really wasn't anything to keep her interest while we were there). While she was confined thus, I was able to snap these three pictures. She demanded to be set free almost immediately after I took the next picture of Gabe, and from that point on I had to carry her or chase her around the place. So picture taking because an unaffordable luxury at that point.

Gabe, on his first juice cup, after his second donut.

This field trip actually didn't go THAT poorly. It only lasted about an hour, and Gabe was at least politely disinterested in most of what was going on around him--but NOT a running around touching and eating everything terror like I was a little afraid he would be. I had mental images of him tearing around the store, grabbing donuts off the shelves and stuffing them in his mouth like Cookie Monster. But he didn't. He was quite well behaved.

The only minor hiccup we had--which was kind of hilarious, actually--happened while the . . . what do you call the guy who makes the donuts? The Donut Master? King Donut? Whatever his name, that guy. He showed the kids how most of the different donut varieties were made, and Gabe managed to feign interest for about the first half dozen varieties. After that, he just stood quietly next to the counter where the guy was piling the cut dough. As King Donut worked on the other varieties, he looked up and said, "Oh, no. You don't want to eat that," and he reached over the counter to, you guessed it, Gabe. He had quietly scooped up one of the raw donut holes and put it into his mouth. He repentantly let the little dough ball roll out of his mouth into the guy's hand and stood there, looking sheepish for the next few minutes.

But the thing is, as his teacher pointed out to me, we're pretty sure the guy had cut three donut holes out, and only two of them could be accounted for. So Gabe probably ended up sneaking the other one while nobody was paying attention. He's getting pretty sneaky.

And that was pretty much the highlight of that trip. The morning didn't go poorly. Probably that was what provided me with the false confidence to go against my better judgment and involve Norah in the second field trip--a decision I would whole-heartedly regret on Thursday.

Thursday they took a field trip to a remote little creek. Libby was the guest teacher for the day, which excited Gabe to no end. The kids were all dressed in boots and clothes they could get wet and the plan was for Libby to guide them around this shallow creek and show them all the treasures wet, seething nature had to offer.

Neither of us had been to this little stretch of water before, so we had no idea how far it was from our parking spot or what to expect when we got there. Because, apparently, neither of us have had a two year old before, we decided to let Norah walk it.

As it turned out, the creek was about a quarter mile away from the parking lot. A hilly, mulch and rock covered trail led us there. Because there was two of us, we were able to trail Gabe while helping Norah trundle along at her measure pace. And I was also able to take a few pictures (until things went pear shaped, anyway).

So, we started at a little area with benches and the kids had a snack while the adults got their shit together.

I think Libby gets credit for this dashing ensemble. I say this because, even though she's wearing a skirt with rubber boots, she's still FAR more equipped to walk around in the muddy water than I was. For some reason, the point of the morning escaped me and I didn't find shoes I could get wet. I'm pretty daft sometimes (most of the time).

After I left with Norah, Gabe put on quite a display. Not once through Libby's presentation did Gabe pay attention to what was going on. Instead, he jumped around in the river, found ledges and an old bridge to jump off into the water, and ran around offering the other kids as much distraction as he possibly could. It was not a good day to make a case against him being ADHD. But, as this picture shows, I think the kid was tired--and Gabe doesn't handle tired with grace and aplomb. This was taken at a little campsitey area about halfway down the trail to the creek. The kids were all gathered while Libby did some introductions and talked about what they were going to do in the creek.

Libby telling the kids the facts of life, in river critter form. This was about as far away from Libby as Norah was willing to get until we got down to the creek.

Libby, naturing up the kids.

At the creek. This was about five minutes after we got there. Libby was already dredging up snake skins and other signs of nature. But, once we'd reached the water, Norah had been pretty content to stand around in it. She didn't move much. She just sort of hung around these little stepping stones, hopping up on one and dropping back into the water. Twice she decided to take a seat. Keep in mind, it was in the upper 50s or so and the water was pretty much freezing. Yet none of the kids seemed to mind. And neither of our kids got pneumonia, despite everything popular folklore likes to say about being cold and wet.

Gabe in one of the few instances when he wasn't hip to shoulder deep in water, but still not paying the least bit of attention to what was going on.

"Look, kids! We're so lucky! We've found some things in their natural element. This is a Coney Island Whitefish. I know it looks like a used condom, but it's not. And here we have . . . no, Gabe. Please stop poking that poor, bloated, er, sleeping person with that stick."

This was the last picture that I got, roughly ten seconds before my morning turned to shite. Right after this picture, Norah snagged her boot on something in the creek and fell down. She didn't hurt herself in the least--no scraped knees or banged up hands--but you sure wouldn't have guessed that from the way she completely lost her shit.

That's the story so far. Norah fell down and I went out to get her. I picked her up and she doubled her efforts to burst ear drums and disconcert rational thinking people with her wailing. On the one hand, she had fallen. And, though she hadn't hurt herself, falling down still pissed her off, and she wanted to be comforted for that. On the other hand, she didn't want ME to be the one comforting her. She wanted Libby, and she wanted to be comforted while remaining in the creek and doing whatever she wanted. But Libby was busy teaching the kids. So, since I picked Norah up out of the water, and I wasn't Libby, neither of these conditions were met, so she lost her mind.

I gave Libby a pathetically put upon look, standing there, holding a writhing, sopping wet, tantrum throwing two year old, and she said, "Take her home." I nodded quietly but thought "Oh thank god," quite loudly.

I felt bad abandoning Libby with Gabe there more or less unsupervised, but that feeling passed as soon as I took about ten steps away from the creek. By that point, I was also soaked to the core and Norah was showing no signs of slowing down. Which is a bad thing. Norah crying uncontrollably means one thing and one thing only--vomit.

And the vomit came.

There is one important difference between Libby and I when it comes to parenting. When the kids are sick, Libby doesn't hesitate to hold and comfort them through a thorough dousing with vomit. She is content to let them puke all over her and then clean herself and her clothing up later.

I am not this way.

I do not like vomit. I have not been a puker since I was a very small child and I don't have much sympathy for people who are. I have a sensitive gag reflex, so if I can keep myself from puking, most people should be able to. Plus, it's gross. Warm, chunky, slimy, clingy, and horribly smelly. I've cleaned up FAR more than my fair share of it over the past few years, and I'm fine with cleaning it up with towels or whatever. But I do not let it touch me. If one of the kids is facing me and they start to puke, as quickly as I can I turn them some other direction and let them puke on ANYTHING that isn't me. This might be a little heartless, I guess, but I see it as doing a service for my children. They need to learn that you just don't do something things all over other people. There are limits.

And here I could go into a discussion of golden showers or something else unsettling, but I won't, because this post is epically long already. So just go ahead and picture some options there and shake your head a little in disgust (or wistfulness, I guess, if that's your thing).

So I quickly rolled Norah over in my arms. I was carrying her like a forty pound log. She was spewing vomit with every step I took and screaming like a banshee that had been set on fire. And she was squirming, too, obviously. Trying to get down so she could run back to the creek and her mother.

And I walked like this for about a quarter of a mile.

I am not a small person. Anyone using words to describe me will NEVER think "slight" is an accurate modifier. I grew up lifting heavy things. I do it less frequently now because I am old and years of lifting heavy things when I was young left me with all sorts of back and joint issues, but I'm still not a slouch. I can manhandle a refrigerator with the best of them--or at least the middle of the range of them.

Yet I can't think of anything that was more physically exhausting than carrying Norah back to our car. I don't know if I've pointed this out before or not, but she's kind of a big girl. A big, sopping wet, screaming, squirming, puking girls are not very easy to carry for a quarter of a mile.

Fortunately, though, she had puked herself out by the time we reached the car, and all that was left was the uncontrollable sobbing, which lasted until we were home, undressed, and she was in the bath tub. Once back in the water--this time warm and not out in the middle of nowhere--she was happy as a clam again.

And, on the plus side, both she and Gabe took GREAT naps that afternoon. Which was good because it allowed me to lie down on the couch and decompress for awhile, too. I'm not sure what would have happened if they hadn't slept, but it probably would have involved a glass and a box of wine. Possibly the entire box.

ANorahble

2011-05-05T07:18:00.001-07:00

This time of year is stupid. Approximately 80% of everything "busy" that happens during the year happens either in April-May or December. I don't get it. Why can't people schedule things year round so people can actually appreciate what's happening? Infuriating.

Because it's been so busy and there's been such an overall feeling of exhaustion and of being overwhelmed, I've not had much gumption to post on here. Which is fine because, despite the fact that there always seems to be something going on, I really don't have that much material to work with anyway. Gabe has/had two field trips for school this week, so I'll get the few pictures I managed to get from those posted later (Norah came along, too, so chaperoning two small children during these events limited my ability to snap pictures). Otherwise, all I've got to offer are some random pictures of Norah that we've managed to get the past week and a half or so.

Norah with part of a peep. Every time Gabe asks for one (which is over now as the last of our stash disappeared this morning), Norah has to remind herself that she hates them. She puts it in her mouth for a second then spits the slobbering, mushy mess somewhere that I won't see until it's had the chance to set back up properly and become a permanent part of the environment.

I should point out this was pre-bath. We don't generally let our kids walk around with clothes on. I find it distasteful. I don't think I'm prudish about nudity, particularly, but there is a fine line between "naturist" and "hillbilly," and I would rather let my children distinguish that line on their own time when they are old enough to be embarrassed by their bodies.

These pictures are what is known in the business as "filler." In effect, I am announcing "I don't have a damn thing to post about, so here are a few pictures of my child making the same adorable faces that you've seen on this blog before."

It's the blog equivalent of a "best of" episode of a sitcom, where the characters all reminisce, in flashback form, to all the silly or amazing things they've done over the past season. These episodes invariably make me angry. Not only are they an insult to my intelligence (as I can clearly remember those things happening myself, since it's only been a month or two since I saw it the first time, and I'm not a goldfish), but they are an insult to my production ideals. Being little more than a rerunning of previous clips, they cost next to nothing to make yet they create nearly-normal ad revenue. This might seem like a practical means to turning an extra buck, but I find it loathsomely lazy.

So, here you go. Loathsomely lazy. Sort of. At least I took fresh pictures instead of just using stuff from previous posts. See, TV producing world, I'm better than you, even when I'm lazy! Hacks.

Easter and Rashes and Cross Dressing Nudity

2011-04-28T07:56:00.000-07:00

It's been a busy past couple of days, I guess. Almost two weeks, really. The four of us have had strep throat (though the doctor never did a swab of the kids because their throats weren't that red, but they both had ear infections the same time that Libby and I had strep, so I don't see how it couldn't be related), then Norah started to get a rash, then Easter weekend, then Norah's rash got really bad, and then, this morning, Gabe put on Libby's wedges (I guess that's what they're called) while not wearing any pants and strutted around in my office. And I got pictures of it all. Let's start with Easter.

We haven't yet celebrated Easter here at home. There just hasn't been any real need yet. This year Gabe finally grasped the concept of egg hunting, and he's gotten pretty good about looking for them in actual hiding places and not just sitting out on a table or somewhere else obvious. But, as in years past, we went out to Cunningham and celebrated with family (my brother Ben and his wife Skye and their still in utero baby--who will likely either be named Patrick or Patricia, I'm betting--were visiting from Kentucky as well). While there, Gabe got to participate in three egg hunts, including the traditional "throw a few dumpsters full of candy on the football field and let the kids rush out there" event that the town throws. It's not so much an egg hunt as a free-for-all, but Gabe actually managed to rake in quite a haul this year, so I consider it a success even if all it required of him was an ability to walk at a brisk rate while bending over to pick up candy from the ground.

Another tradition--the wearing of the basket like a hat (with goddamn binky in mouth). Somehow we've managed to get a picture of Gabe doing this ever year. It's a little odd, really. He's still not much for hats. Besides his fireman hat, he really won't keep one on his head for more than a few seconds. Yet, every year, he will wear his Easter basket around until he has something to put in it.

We tried to get Norah to participate in the tradition, too, but she had a little trouble grasping the concept.

He kept it on pretty much right up to the time where they started running around, grabbing candy.

Look! Someone other than Gabe and Norah in a picture! Hurray!

After the big egg hunt, they did an inside the house egg hunt, and then, later in the day, Mom refilled the plastic eggs and they were hidden in the yard so the kids could find them one more time.

And Gabe had finally had enough of waiting to eat his candy. After gathering a healthy share, he started busting into them and stuffing the candy into his mouth as fast as he could before we could stop him. I'm reasonably sure that he didn't eat anything else the entire day. Just candy.

Norah on a tractor. Not relevant, really, but it was on the memory card so I included it.

And that was Easter. While we were out there, though, we noticed that the rash Norah had was starting to spread. It started out early last week as a few spots on her left leg, and it stayed like that for a few days, not really getting any worse and not spreading. But Saturday, it started to creep up her back. By Sunday afternoon, it had spread all over her body. But Monday morning, what started as some spots on her left leg had turned into a gigantic patch of dark, dark red--almost like a terrible burn. And the spots all over her body were spreading and growing darker, too.

We took her to our doctor and were told that it was a reaction to the penicillin she was taking for the ear infection. A pretty severe reaction. The doctor decided to list her as allergic to it in her file (though it's tough to say if it was that or simply a bad reaction to its first use--which often happens, apparently, though typically not as severely as it happened to her--as she has not had an antibiotic of any sort so far).

Only a few times did she act as though it was bothering her. She cringed and whinged a few times when it was at its worst, but, for the most part, she acted like it wasn't such a big thing. Except that, once we started "Poor babying" her because of it, she started to try and milk it for all it was worth. We tried to get a little video of her talking about "A rach" and rubbing her belly like she was miserable, but she kind of stopped before we got the camera around.

Still, there is a video of her pulling up her shirt and sticking her finger in her bellybutton. That's always entertaining.

The rash on her belly. What a belly. Built like a World's Strongest Man competitor.

The rash, very nearly at its worst on her leg. This was the only spot that got fire red like this. Gabe decided that Norah was a volcano after seeing it.

The weirdest part was that it took about six days from the start of the antibiotics for the rash to get bad. And then it was at its worse the twenty-four hours after she stopped taking it. But, it's lightening up now and she seems to be through the worst of it. Sadly, she got used to not sleeping well again and has been up three or four times every night for the past two weeks. Hopefully she'll realize soon that she doesn't have to start crying and waking up the entire household and can just, instead, go back to sleep when she wakes up in the middle of the night. How I long for that day. But, considering Gabe still doesn't do it very well, we've still got a few more years of never sleeping. By that point it will probably be something like six years without much decent sleep. It's no wonder parents always look so much older than people who never have kids of an equivalent age.

And, finally, this morning. From time to time, Gabe likes to run around the house without any pants on. I don't like it. If it's just me in the house, I always make him put pants on immediately. But Libby doesn't have a problem with little boy junk flopping around all over everything, and this morning I came down to see Gabe playing with his legos, legs spread wide open, without any pants on. Then, while Libby was getting ready for work, Gabe found her new pair of shoes and started walking around with them.

Here's what that looked like:

Awesome. I told him to turn just his head towards the camera and smile for me, but he couldn't do it without turning his whole body to the camera. Still, a pretty good blackmail picture should he decide to habitually break curfew in high school. We've got lots of those. Our kids better stay in line or they'll have all sorts of stuff to embarrass the hell out of them with their peers. Forward planning, that's what it's all about!