Butts Speaks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Rock Star Life

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

A Little Help

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

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

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

Please and thank you.

Love,
Pat

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

The Word of the Day Is "Efficient"

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

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

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

Er.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

"That is very efficient," I informed him.

"Fishin," he repeated.

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

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

Obviously, I have my work cut out for me.

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

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

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

Buttons

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Boring Goodness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dressed and ready to go.

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

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

Then the other arm.

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

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

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

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

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

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