Progress Report

The school experience is proving interesting for all of us. It's . . . weird. Part of me can think back and remember experiencing the things that Gabe is going through, but I often can't, for the life of me, remember what I did (or what others did) to help me figure out how to do things. And I think we're getting to see some glimpses into what Gabe's (and Norah's) schooling future is going to be like.


1) Pretty much on a daily basis, Gabe is making up stuff that happens at school. Every day, on the way home from school, I ask him what he did and he will say, "Nothing." So I will press with more specific questions, like if he had P.E. or Art or what he had for lunch or who he played with at recess. And then he will tell me something. Because I've had no reason to doubt what he's saying, I've taken everything he's said at face value, but several times in the past couple weeks, I've followed up with something that had to do with his original response, and find out that he was making up what he said initially. For instance, yesterday he said that they were having recess inside because it was still cold outside. This morning, I dressed him in a lighter coat, figuring that he would be fine if they were going to be playing in the gym instead of outside. At which point he admitted that he had actually played outside yesterday and might need a big coat. Which baffles me. He said he was "teasing" me. Why? I asked and he had no answer, which he often doesn't.

I suspect that he's honing his lying skills. Which I have mixed feelings about. As I've discussed before, I'm not sure how I'm supposed to feel about my kids' lying skills. On the one hand, if they are good at it, it will VASTLY complicate my life, and I don't like having a complicated life. On the other hand, being a good liar will, well, undoubtedly help them throughout their lives. It's an ugly truth, but it is a truth. I HOPE that they will only use their skills for good--to get out of work or to con an evil super-villain into revealing his master plan so they can thwart it--but that's all I can do, really, is hope.

I suspect this because:

2) Gabe is already trying to get out of school. I'm not sure what's brought it on, but ever since the Christmas break, he's been VERY eager to not have to go to school. Which is unfortunate. Up to this point he's pretty much loved everything about school. But he even dabbled with saying he was feeling sick this morning so that he could stay home (and he dabbled with it again this afternoon, saying he had a sick stomach, so that I would go to the store and buy him a bottle of Sprite, which he decided was all that he was going to drink from now on). I get where he's coming from. I had a storied past of faking sick to get out of school. I didn't DITCH school, mind you. That would have entailed falsifying documents saying that I was excused and all sorts of complicated things--way more effort than the payoff would have been worth. I simply faked sick, which was, in itself, excused and pretty simple (thanks to Mom going along with it as she did so often). Sure, in high school it meant that, instead of ditching class and going out and doing something fun (which is what I assume the point of ditching must be) that I was, for all intents and purposes, just taking the day off to lay around in bed and read comic books, but people have different priorities, I guess.

But I had rather hoped that he wouldn't want to start taking sick days and missing school until he was at least old enough to have real homework assignments and real tests to want to get out of doing. Right now, he's just getting out of coloring and recess and eating lunch and doing some basic number and letter work. I wonder if it's related to:

3) I'm starting to get the feeling that Gabe is getting a little discouraged about some things:

3a) A little over a week ago, I picked Gabe up at the bus and then we went straight into Wichita to meet Libby at the Water Center. As soon as we turned towards Wichita instead of towards the house, Gabe got upset. Within moments, he was crying because he "wanted to go home to play." Now, this isn't entirely unusual. The last few months, every time we drive into Wichita, he's gotten pissy about it and cranky that he has to sit in the car for half an hour. I suppose it's not that surprising. He's NEVER liked being in the car. At least he doesn't cry for the entire car ride anymore like he did until he was about two years old. I think he gets car sick pretty regularly--and probably getting off the bus and immediately getting back into a car for a longish car ride can be pretty irritating. Still and all, he's always liked going into Libby's work and any complaints he's had have stopped after a few minutes. Until last week. He pouted and cried the first half of the trip and I rightly figured out that it wasn't the car ride that was upsetting him. Something else was going on.

So I pressed him for a few minutes and he finally confessed that he was having some trouble with one of the kids at school. This kid told Gabe that he couldn't play with the group that Gabe usually played with anymore. But, then, I don't know how much of Gabe's version to believe. According to him, this kid created a game that pretty much everyone on the playground played (except a bunch of kids who, when I asked Gabe if they were also playing in this group, he said no--pretty much every kid from his class whose name I know, actually). So we spent the remainder of the trip into town with me trying to figure out what was going on and trying to convince Gabe that it wasn't the end of the world. I told him that, ideally, what he needed to do was to create a game himself that was even more awesome than this other kid's game, and then all the kids in his class would want to play Gabe's game instead and this other kid would have to slither back to Gabe and ask if he could play.

But I think that suggestion fell on deaf ears. I admit that it was a bit more of a complicated scheme than kindergarten politics normally see play out, but it is clearly the best option available to him. When he didn't think this was a good idea, I went with the old stand-by of "some people are jerks, and if they don't like you, then you don't need them." Or something along those lines. Probably I didn't say "jerks" and, instead, said something like "Find people who DO want to play with you and forget about any jagoffs that think they're better than you. Because, probably they are just white trash morons anyway and they might be big stuff on the playground but they'll amount to a whole lot of nothing in the real world, clinging to their high school sports moments because that is the peak of their lives. Or they are just d-bags and they'll probably get hazed to death when they start paying to have friends in fraternities in college."

Or something like that.

Anyway, this week the kid let Gabe play with him again on the playground, so probably one of the kids blew things rather out of proportions, being only five or six years old, and now they are over it because, again, they are five or six years old. But it made me wonder if he's not having more of these kinds of problems. He certainly seems to talk about playing with different kids pretty much every day he mentions something about it (usually, getting him to actually talk about what he did at school, and tell me what he ACTUALLY did at school and not making up some story, is like pulling teeth). So I'm a little worried that he's having problems finding a niche. Which can be a good or a bad thing. Some kids who don't find a niche end up being something of a niche unto themselves and people will sort of gravitate to him. Or it could mean that he's just not blending well with the other kids, and that isn't a good thing, or good feeling at all.

So there's that to worry about. But, then, there's also schooling in general, which brings us to:

3b) A possible side effect of the Mozart Experiment. Which I'm going to put in a separate post because this one is long already.

Christmas Wrap-Up

This is where I go through all the pictures and videos we've taken over the last month or so and share them, because I'm not getting to these things quickly or efficiently enough anymore to come up with pithy and catchy themes/titles for my blog posts. But, the kids being funny has always been the point anyway, so here goes.

I'm not sure if I've posted anything else about this before, but this was something Gabe started early in December. One day, after school, he started, well, pratfalling. In the living room. He just started running a little ways then falling on the floor. When simple falling wasn't as amusing anymore, he started jumping up on the couch or bouncing off it onto the floor. And he had a name for this activity. The Funny Nationals. This is him doing some of that outside in the little bit of snow we got the week before Christmas (I figured I better get the kids out in it to play since last year we only got one snow of about this much and it was pretty much gone before we even had a chance to get out in it).

This was a game of some sort that sprang up from Norah wanting a cookie. This has been a difficult holiday season in terms of Norah's portion control--in fact, she has lost all sense of it. And she had problems in that area to begin with. We're going to have some work to do in the coming months to get her back off the snacks, which is getting more difficult now that she can reach just about anything she wants and knows how to open the packaging. She's also started hiding food. Each of the kids received the required stocking stuffers of chocolate Santas and assorted mini chocolates. Most of them ended up in a community bowl--in fact, we thought ALL of them had. But over the course of the next two days, I kept finding little Hershey Kiss wrappers around the house (the candy bowl was up on the hutch so the kids at least had to ask for something, so they weren't coming from there). After the second day, I discovered that Norah had secreted a stash of Kisses into one of her Hello Kitty toys and was periodically going upstairs to sneak a few candies out.  I have to give her props for adapting to her environment, to creating the reality she wants, but man it's tough teaching her about portion control and getting her to grasp the concept.

The second half of the video. I'm not sure what the point of the game was, again, but it was pretty funny all the same.

Norah's punching balloon skills.

The Jumpoline. Norah's big present this year. This thing was a nightmare to put together. It took four adults (well, two adults, then three adults, then I reluctantly stepped in to help for the last half hour) over two hours to put this thing together. Our goal was to put this upstairs, probably on the landing. Which we didn't remember until AFTER we'd put it all together. It doesn't fit up the stairs. Not by a long shot. And there is no way we're taking it apart again. So this might become an outside toy, which will ruin the music/noisy electronic thing on it--but that's no real loss, as you can hear on the video. To date, this was the worst Christmas assembly we've experienced.

Yes, she's on the toilet. No, this doesn't have anything to do with Christmas. But it's still pretty funny.

Norah's fashion show. Modelling some of her Christmas clothes, but mostly just being Norah.

Just a few pictures to add.

Self explanatory, really.

Libby made Gabe a set of dinosaur bone wall stickies out of thin foam. This was the first one Gabe put together, a kind of Land of the Lost Sleezstack looking thing. My budding conspiracy theorist!

Norah in her new headwrap thing. In the bathroom, of course, where all good pictures are taken.

And, finally, Gabe and Finn wearing beards. Not sure why Gabe doesn't have a shirt on. He often doesn't, for no good reason.

Christmas Programs Pt. 2

And here are some more videos.

Gabe's program. Not the first video (which was one of the better ones) because Blogger still doesn't like that video.

Gabe staying quite well-contained. Not sure how his teachers get him to do it because I sure can't.

Norah's Dance recital. 

Part 2

The whole time I was watching Norah doing her dance routine, all I could think of was this. Go on. Watch it. Dawn French is, of course, awesome. 

And that's it for the videos. I guess we must have forgotten to take the camera to her gymnastics thing. Oh well. 

Here are a few bonus pictures to go with these.

Hopefully I'll have time to add anything else Christmas related here before it becomes completely irrelevant.

Christmas Programs Pt. 1

It would appear that this year is our first full-fledged foray into the wonderful world of children's Christmas programs. For two years we've had a slow introduction with Gabe in preschool, but this year we took things to a new level. Norah had a preschool program, a dance recital, and a gymnastics program (yeah, what the hell? THREE programs for a three year old? We have nobody to blame but ourselves). Each of Norah's programs were pretty short, though--understandably, since getting a three year old to even stand still, much less actively participate in a program, is pretty difficult). Gabe had a full-on Christmas program, though. With eight songs and little speaking skits in between.

We, of course, took about 2 gigs of video. I won't share all of it here, but since I can't remember what's on each of the little ones I took (remembering that I still have to keep them under 2 minutes if I want them to have much of a chance of loading on here), so you'll just have to hope that you get lucky and get the good ones!

But first, here's a video of the kids decorating their Christmas houses. We got them each rice krispie treat houses to decorate, because rice krispie treats are delicious and gingerbread is terrible. And I had every intention of eating these houses if the kids didn't get to them (they didn't, I did). This was a "shirts optional" event, obviously, as all good house decorating events are.

Sadly, nothing super entertaining happened during this preschool program. Just sort of general pre-k mayhem and chaos.

And now Blogger is freaking out, so I'll just keep trying to post more later.

Racism and Other Fun Things

Wow, it's been a month since my last post. It's amazing how having a job, no matter how little it pays, cuts into time to document the lives of one's children. How do normal people with full time jobs find the time to write volumes about what their kids are doing? Surely the lives of those children will be ruined forever by the nearly complete lack of comprehensive documentation that they can never go back and read over or watch on youtube.

But I do feel a little guilty about the disparity in coverage. Gabe can't complain. He got PLENTY of airtime over his first five years. It would take him a month to slideshow through all his pictures, watch all his movies, and read all the blog posts about the crazy stuff he was doing. Norah, however, is getting the short end of the stick. There ARE a few factors contributing to this that are outside my control--but I have to admit to a certain level of burnout as well. I've been updating this blog for almost four years now, over 400 posts. That's a lot of goddamn words about not a whole lot of anything. And I feel guilty about that bit because I was hoping to sustain my enthusiasm at least until she made it into Kindergarten.

But the factors that are out of my control tend to exacerbate things, too. For one, working at the bookstore is cutting into my blogging time. It's always just busy and noisy enough in there for me to have difficulty focusing on writing, so I can't do it at work, despite the fact that we're usually not doing much actual business. Second, there is Norah herself. She is, of course, still cute as a button. And she's funny as hell--but she's a completely different kind of funny than Gabe. Gabe's funny easily translates to video documentation and his antics almost always lend themselves well to storytelling. His physical comedy is very easy to work with. Norah, on the other hand, is more cerebral. She says and does some funny ass shit, but it is rarely possible for me to capture it on video--and without that tool, I tend to forget what's happened too quickly to expound upon it here on the blog. Further complicating matters is her blossoming performance shyness. She's already showing signs of unwillingness to perform in front of us, and getting her to repeat something funny when she does it is pretty much impossible.

All the same, we have managed to get a few funny videos of her doing stuff recently, which I'll share in a bit since I've been too distracted to dedicate individual posts to them.

On to the main thing I wanted to talk about.

Last night, after school and before dinner, Gabe came into the kitchen while I was cooking and said something along this line: "One of the kids (he gave a name, but I'll not put that on here, just to be polite) knows a Chinese move."

"A . . . what?" I asked nervously, partly because I wasn't even sure if I heard him correctly. "He knows a Chinese what?"

"A Chinese move."

"You mean like martial arts?"

"No. Like this . . . ." And he proceeded to do something pretty racist.

I vividly remember the many racist schoolyard chants from my youth. I cringe to think of them now, but I can generally picture one friend or another performing them even to this day. Maybe it's the guilt that keeps their memories fresh in my mind. Among them is the old chestnut "Chinese, Japanese, dirty knees, look at these." The corresponding pantomime went like this: Chinese = squinted eyes pushed up at the corner, Japanese = squinted eyes pushed down, dirty knees = rub the knees and look at these = pull up your shirt to show your boobs. Classy stuff.

Well, this kid at school showed Gabe the Chinese part of that rhyme and Gabe shared it with me. Which led to a conversation about racism. A fun word to introduce to a five year old. It ended up boiling down to "It's not nice to make fun of people for how they look." My reasoning and admonishments, however, completely failed to sink in and Gabe happily showed his new "move" to Libby when she got home. She presented him with the same basic argument that I countered the move with the first time but added, "You wouldn't like it if people said 'This is Gabe!' and made a weird face, would you?" "I wouldn't mind," he said. "It's funny." And the thing is, he probably wouldn't. At least not now. It all goes back to that earlier thing about his brand of comedy. Unless things got out of hand, he probably wouldn't have his feelings hurt if someone was making fun of him a little bit. Is a knack for self-deprecation a liability for understanding political correctness?

And, speaking of being PC, I have to admit to pretty mixed feelings on all of this. As I said, I grew up with all of that nonsense HEAVILY represented in my community. We were a bunch of racists--partly because our community was 100% homogenous, but partly because our generation was one of the first to exist in the newly non-segregated world and we were all still figuring out how the new world worked. And here I am, a grown up, and I have a very strong sense of propriety when it comes to sensitivity. Do I start insisting that my child stands up to the other kids in school who come from families who aren't as sensitive--and, at that age, just refusing to participate is a kind of "standing up" to the other kids--and run the risk of making him a target for harassment himself? Sure he might be able to sway the opinions of a few of the kids to think the way he does, but the odds are probably greater that those kids will bring that story home and my kid will suddenly be the one with the "goddamn PC liberal socialist communists who are destroying our country" parents.

The dynamic of Gabe's school, it's worth noting, is going to prove very interesting through the kid's grade school lives. It's about an even mix of rural folks from around the school and hippies from the Newton area. So there is little doubt that our kids are going to at least get plenty of exposure to a broad range of personalities and world viewpoints.

Since we already gave Gabe a bit of a talking to about racism, I guess we'll see how it plays out. So far, he's not been terribly forthcoming about how well he's getting along with the other kids at school. I can see his goofiness either making him really popular or an easy target. Fortunately for him, he's one of the biggest kids in his class and his toughness is remarkable, so any bully his own age would likely have a go of it (except, of course, that we've raised him to be a gentle giant, so his size really isn't going to do him any good). We haven't had any reports from the school, either, so I guess we have to assume that he's getting on pretty well. I suppose it doesn't do much good to worry about these things until we're given an actual reason to worry, but it's pretty stupid the pitfalls and potential pitfalls we have to try to not worry about.

And, now, onto other things. Here's a funny video with Norah. If you are offended when three year olds moon you, you should probably skip to the next video.

I'm not sure what her obsession with butt stuff is these days. With her butt bombs and mooning and sticking her butt against us and farting . . . . I mean, it can't possibly have anything to do with the fact that I laugh hysterically when she does all of these things, right? This poor girl. I am cursing her with my own weirdness. I suppose she's striking a pretty good balance so far between girliness and tomboyishness. Maybe it will all work out. A pretty princess who will fart on you and laugh.

Not to be outdone, here are a couple videos of Gabe from Sunday. Our friend Sandy helped him cut some rotten pieces off our deteriorating picnic table. There was really no NEED for them to be doing this, but they did and he loved it because he got to stomp on things. My favorite part is the hat. A couple times, when he was jumping and swinging the hat around, he looked like he was doing a "tarnations" dance after a bear destroyed his gold panning equipment.

And here is the obligatory list of pictures that I found on the memory card while downloading the videos.

We always assumed it would be Gabe who climbed the door frames (which, apparently, is just a universal kid thing, like pretending things are guns even if you've never really seen a gun). Of course, after seeing Norah do it, Gabe had to take his turn, too. The fairy wings are unrelated.

Thanksgiving pictures.

Post Thanksgiving drive home. Gabe is watching Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. It was the only thing he wanted to watch for a couple of weeks. Mostly because he liked to see all the bad things happening to those kids. Hopefully he wanted to see it because of the punishment/comeuppance/justice aspects and not because he likes to see people done away with in creative ways.

Norah isn't all that taken by Wonka. This is the first time she's EVER fallen asleep while there was TV to watch.

Gabe with his slingshot.

From the stomping session.

Gabe's butt crack with his slingshot.  If he's aiming at the windows of his playhouse, there will be a reckoning in his near future.

I'm not sure who thought this was a good idea.

Oh yeah, Poppa made this for him. I guess I know where to send the bill for those windows.

Best Halloween Costumes Ever

Halloween was last week, but the kids have known what they were going to be for months now. During Gabe's Star Wars kick, he decided (with gentle coaxing by me) to be Luke Skywalker. So, also with gentle coaxing by me, Norah obviously decided to be Princess Leia. I mean, how perfect could it be? Blond haired, blue eyed boy with a natural tendency towards feathered hair and a brown eyed brunette who spends 90% of every day referring to herself as a princess! It's like Lucas wrote those parts with my kids in mind.

The pulling off of the costumes is 100% not of my doing, though. Over the past few months, Libby has been thrift store shopping for pieces, and then she spent several hours sewing and putting them together. She is an honest to god trooper about these things and deserves all the credit for how awesome they turned out.

Well, except for the combing of Gabe's hair. I did that. And I don't think I did a terribly great job of it. His hair just wouldn't part/feather the way I wanted it to and I'll be damned if I could remember how I created my glorious feathers in the 80s. I managed to get a GREAT flip on the sides, but his hair just wouldn't stay parted no matter what I did. Little disappointing, but now I guess he looks like Luke after he took off a stocking cap and then stood in a wind tunnel, which isn't a set of circumstances he was LIKELY to do, but anything is possible with Lucas at the reigns.

Speaking of hair, Gabe was a trooper on that end, too. To perfect the costume, Gabe allowed us to grow his hair out pretty much since the beginning of the year. It was long, shaggy, and miserably hot for him all through the summer when, after even a little bit of running around, his head was a matted, smoldering wad of misery.

Man he can be cheeky sometimes.

This one . . . I dunno. Lots of attitude going on here. High school could be interesting.

I know it's not really canon for Leia to be wielding a lightsaber while wearing this outfit--and I honestly have no idea what color her lightsaber was supposed to be when she did eventually get one--but lightsabers make GREAT light sources for kids walking dark streets! They are like glowsticks, but not sucky!

Was all the suffering and trouble worth it? As I didn't have to go through any of it, I give a resounding YES! The costumes were adorably awesome and the kids had a great time with them.

And speaking of Lucas at the reigns (which I was, you know, awhile back). Norah was SUPER excited that she was, technically, a Disney Princess for Halloween as well as being Princess Leia. A twofer! She's still a little fuzzy on her grasp of the twofer, but someday she'll truly appreciate it. Probably after she starts listening to classic rock stations on Tuesdays.

If only I'd thought to get out that grappling hook I made in high school! I could have let him try to reenact the swinging-over-the-big-chasm-thingy scene from Star Wars! Such a missed opportunity. 

A pretty hilarious video of Gabe trying to catch a doughnut without touching it. Not really Halloweeny, but he's wearing his costume, so that counts, right?

Norah's New Thinking Noise

A couple weeks back, we were driving somewhere or other and I looked over my shoulder and saw Norah sitting in her car seat, and I was struck with a memory. Of her strapped into her conversion seat, looking out the window or whatever, and going "Nnnggguuuuuuuhhhhh, nnnggguuuuuuuuhhh," over and over again. Or sitting on the floor in the living room with a washable marker, drawing an infinite number of little circles that really looked more like Jesus fishes, going "Nnnggguuuuuuuuuuuhhh, nnnggguuuuuuuuuuhhh" over and over. Her thinking noise. Here's a video in case you've forgotten what it sounded like:

She just sort of stopped doing that noise somewhere along the way, and we didn't really notice its absence. Which is odd, considering it was the background noise of my life for so many months. But there you have it.

But recently she's been doing something a little different. While she's working on things, she will talk and sing constantly, seemingly without breathing. I'm guessing this is a girl thing. I've gotten pretty good at selectively blocking most of it out, which irritates her when, in the middle of an hour long monologue, she asks me a question and I somehow miss it. Gabe hasn't quite gotten used to blocking it out, yet, as you'll see in the video.

Goddamn blogger.com. It doesn't like the video. It also doesn't like the other one of Norah looking at a toy catalog that is pretty funny (family probably already saw both of these anyway, I think Libby emailed them out). But here's the youtube links, just in case:

Thinking Noise
Spiderman!