Is This Goth?

Over the past few months, Gabe has somewhat gotten out of the habit of joining Libby in the bathroom for "makeover" in the morning. Once upon a time, he would stand at the gate into my office and call out to Libby, about every minute, if she was ready for him to come in and join her. Every morning. For the hour that it takes Libby to get ready.

Maybe he got bored with the waiting or maybe he's just got better things to do now, but he has decided that makeovers are just a sometimes obsession now. Today was one of those days.

I'm not sure if anyone else has noticed this about Gabe, but he lacks a certain . . . subtlety. Everything he does, he does full bore, all or nothing, balls to the wall, or any of the other dozen or so cliches that I could throw out here.

What does "balls to the wall" mean, anyway? In what circumstance would one's balls be against a wall and how would that in any way encourage overt action? I guess, if I found myself in that awkward position, I might work as quickly and efficiently as possible to NOT have my balls against the wall, but, really, that would only require one step away from the wall-hardly something I would consider an overly active option. Our language is weird.

Anyway, when Gabe puts makeup on, he makes sure its noticeable. Here's his application from this morning.

Our first picture. He wasn't looking at the camera, so we tried another one.

But then I took this picture, which is hardly better. He looks like a bare knuckle boxer. I went with the "goth" angle in the title, even though I haven't said anything else about it (because I don't in any way, shape, or form relate to goth, so I'm really not interested in discussing it in any depth), because I didn't think it was appropriate to relate his makeup application to a pair of black eyes, which is what it really looks like. Maybe he's got a future in special effects (or cosmetology).

I had also hoped to get an adorable video of Norah doing her new thing. I'm sure she picked it up from me because I have a nasty habit of doing it myself. Sometimes now, when I ask her a question, she'll cock her cute little head to one side and say "Huh?" Then she'll walk around for a bit with her head tilted and keep saying it. Really, it's one of the cutest things ever, and I'd really love to get it on video. Sadly, that didn't work out. Instead, you get a video of Norah sitting at the table doing moderately cute things.

Semantic Satiation

Semantic Satiation is an interesting phenomenon that I learned about way back in college in a linguistics class I took.

The premise is simple, even if the words used to name it aren't. If you say a word enough times, generally in quick succession, they will start to lose their meaning for the person saying it and (and usually for the person hearing it, too) until, eventually, it is nothing more than a repeated sound (and, before too long, it will become difficult to even say that sound coherently). We used to do it with the word "cup"--and, every once in awhile, just to remind myself what it's like, I will sit in one place and say that word over and over again for a few minutes. It might SEEM crazy . . . . Well, probably it is. We also used the word "fish" once to the same effect, but I imagine just about any word would work. Longer words work more quickly as the added syllables quickly becoming confused and nonsense ensues.

This all is relevant to something besides me being able to whip out an esoteric terminology that I learned over a decade ago.

I think my children are suffering from semantic satiation. It started off simple enough. I was saying the word "no" so often that it began to lose meaning to them. When a soft tone no longer elicited the response I wanted, volume increased. Eventually, that didn't make any difference either (actually, Norah seems to do things BECAUSE I tell her "no" now). That's not TOO surprising as I have to tell them both "no" about an infinity number of times a day. It practically is a constant, repeated stream of the word.

But, lately, it seems as though ALL words I say have been repeated so many times that they are losing their meaning to my children. "Eat your dinner." "Don't throw food on the floor." "Don't color on the windows." "Stop pushing each other." "Don't wipe your hands on the furniture." You name it, and I've chastised for it. It's a never ending stream of redirecting and admonishing comments coming from me.

Before, they would occasionally try to appease me by moving to another part of the room and doing something else they weren't supposed to be doing, but, now, it seems as though they just sit there quietly long enough for me to shift my attention and then they go right back to doing what they were doing.

Well, not Norah. As I said before, she seems to derive great pleasure out of being contrary and doing exactly what I just told her not to. She'll smile at me and slowly move her hand back to whatever she was doing. If she's coloring on the window (which, I swear to god, I've stopped her doing AT LEAST a hundred times now) and tell her "no," she just smiles at me and lets her hand make a few reactive streaks with the crayon across the window. So I take the crayon away and she bawls and shrieks and throws herself onto the ground for ten minutes.

It's all very frustrating, but it has led to some interesting moments with Gabe, who has heard me say the same things over and over enough that they are ingrained into his brain. Just last night he said, "Oh my god," when he saw the candy that he got from the Christmas parade. His context was confused, as it usually comes out something like "Oh my god, Gabe, WHAT ARE YOU DOING?" when I say it, but there's no denying where he got the phrase from.

But there is something good that's come from it. My mom used to say "I should just make a recording and play it back for you boys." And now I understand what she meant. I SHOULD make a recording and just play it back for them. Maybe then I wouldn't run as much risk of the words losing meaning to me as well.

Rockin' the Belly Shirt

It's been awhile since I've taken any embarrassing pictures of Norah. Oh, wait, she's been about the only one I've taken embarrassing pictures of for the past week. Oh well. I have another.


On the one hand, I'm a little disappointed at her lack of shame. But, on the other, I suppose I should be proud that she's happy with who she is and isn't afraid to let the world know.

This, by the way, is a 3T shirt she's wearing. It's not that the shirt is too small, really. It goes down well below her waist when pulled down. The problem is that girls' clothing is all too tight. She doesn't have this problem when she's sporting one of Gabe's 3T hand-me-downs, it's just with the stuff that we buy for her. What does this say about society? Are we training our girls by the age of two or three to expect to wear form fitting clothes instead of loose, comfortable clothing that doesn't ride up over your formidable gut when you move around? I'm not sure it's right or proper.

But it is pretty amusing to take pictures of.

At least she had her finger MOSTLY out of her belly button. It's one of her favorite places to explore right now. That and her nose.

Oh, and please note that I didn't make this a post about wet t-shirt contests, which I could very easily have done considering how drenched she's made herself in the HOUR that she's had that shirt on. I feel as thought I took the high road on this one.

The Gangsta Life Ain't Easy

Ah, they grow up so fast. Just the other day I was posting about Norah's fat rolls, and by tonight I expect she'll be rolling a forty full of homies onto her grill. Or whatever it is the younguns say these days.

"But why?" you ask. "And HOW? She's only eighteen months old for god's sake!"

Good questions. I'm a little dumbfounded myself, but it is what it is. I can't deny the proof before me--and you won't be able to either once I've gotten around to presenting it. The only explanation that I can come up with is that kids really do grow up faster these days than ever before. MUCH faster. I guess I should have suspected something was going on when ALL of her shirts started gradually creeping up to show her "midriff" (I use the quotes because it's more like a midrough right now--ZING!), but I naively blamed that on her stomach being too big to fit into clothes that weren't a full size bigger than what she should be wearing. Foolish, foolish me.

But today she took things to a new level, all by herself. Right before my very eyes, she did this to her head.

Worse still, I'm pretty sure these are gang colors. I'm not sure WHICH gang--possibly one made up of train conductors or hobos--but one of them.

But, as my title suggests, thugging ain't easy. Or should that be chugging? Bugging? No, "buggin" is something else. And what's a "krunk"? Wasn't he a superhero on "Dexter's Laboratory"? Slang I'm not "down" with is stupid.

Anyway, she's paying the price for her crazy ways. Look at this!

Clearly she's doing whatever it is kids do with goofballs. Or however they get high listening to Devo's "Whip It." And she's doing it in our home! Insulting.

I mean, look at this last one!


She's lost control of her lips and face! She's drooling all over herself! And, trust me, she hasn't been to a dentist yet, so she can't claim that she's numb from Novocaine or something. There is something else going on. Something sinister and youth related!

But, seriously, she's teething again--or still--AND she has a head cold so she's mouth breathing and drooling like she hasn't done for six months or so. These pictures were about as close as I've been able to get her to smiling for most of the morning.

At this point I should make some sort of witty ACCURATE use of current slang terms to show that everything above was just me being silly, but I am honestly that out of touch with slang from the past five years that I'm pretty sure I'd misuse it. So I'll just end by using one bit of slang that will NEVER go out of style: Word.

Norah's Rolls

Just snapped a quick picture that I thought I should share--especially as it is relevant to my last post about how big Norah is.

I took a picture of her rolls of back fat.

When she first started growing them out, the first image that came to my mind was of the character Zoidberg from "Futurama." Here's what his look like:


And here's my baby:


Some day, she's going to hate me for these pictures. But today is not that day. Also, she usually has a matching set on the other side, but she kept twisting around in Libby's arms so I couldn't get a good picture. Still, you get the idea.

So Maybe My Baby IS More Advanced Than Yours After All

This afternoon, Libby took Gabe outside for about an hour. Norah won't keep a hat on, and it was a bit too chilly and windy for her without one, and I don't much care for "outside," so we stayed in. Without Gabe around for her to push and kick, though, Norah quickly became bored with only me to entertain her. Fortunately, instead of just tossing tantrums and herself around the room, she remembered her favorite activity--drawing.

Actually, prior to putting her in her booster seat at the table, she DID have a tantrum and threw herself around the room. It was pretty hilarious. I was putting Gabe's Play-Doh away in the dining room and she came in to her booster seat and started grunting. She's regressed pretty noticeably on her language skills over the past two weeks--reverting to sub-human grunts and moans to get what she wants instead of saying the simple words like "up" and "hat" that she'd been using so well for the past month or two.

"Up?" I asked her, trying to encourage her to use her words. "Mmmmmmooooooooohhhhhhh" she groaned, and she lifted her arms up for me to lift her.

So I walked into the living room, pretending not to understand what she wanted. "Waaahhhh!" she wailed in frustration as she looked directly at me. Then she spun around in place, hit her hand down hard on her little music table, noticed that she wasn't THAT close to where I was sitting, so I might not see what she was up to, and came into the living room. Once there, she walked over to the window, pushed herself off it, spun around a couple times, kicked at a pillow on the floor, fell down, hit the pillow, stood back up, and came over to me with blood in her eyes.

I picked her up and said, "Can you show me what you want?" I set her back down and she walked over to the booster seat and said, "Up." Problem solved.

If only it was this easy to teach ALL women just to show you what they want instead of having to interpret crazed signals and supposedly communicative dances.

Huh. That was a pretty good summation/punch line there. Too bad this isn't the end of the post.

She stayed up in her booster seat for pretty much the entire hour that Gabe and Libby were outside. Because she was staying content--making her little groaning "thinking" noise the entire time--I didn't really check on what she was doing except to pick her washable markers up when she dropped them on the floor.

When Libby and Gabe came back in, I finally stopped to look at what she was doing. And I was mightily impressed.

Norah Art.

Now, I'm not sure I can say that this is genius level drawing for an eighteen month old. I don't have MUCH of a frame of reference to draw from. Gabe has never had the patience to do much more than scribble on paper. He's always been perfectly happy just to see the colors appear with no particular shape or form. And then he moves on to something else after five or ten minutes. To give an idea of where he's at, just to see what he would do when I showed him what Norah had been doing, I asked him to draw a circle of his own on the page. His is the blue "poorly torn in half pizza" shape in the bottom left corner (he then added the other squiggles on the page that aren't green--Norah was going through her green phase today and only used that marker).

So there we are--a three year old that can't really draw a circle and an eighteen month old that created, without even knowing what she was drawing, nearly complete circles. The evidence is pretty clear that she's a prodigy to my way of thinking.

However, besides being a budding artist, we also had Norah's eighteen month checkup this week and we discovered that she is advanced beyond her age physically as well--especially in the weight department. Here's a hint. We've decided to only buy her 3T clothes for the time being because she can't keep even 2Ts from riding up her belly and we can't pull the pants up around her thighs. Yeah. She's 95th percentile on height, around 90th in head size, and off the chart on weight. We're not sure how she could be "off the chart," exactly. The chart, presumably, includes ALL children--at least that is the way that I figured something like "percentile" works, basing it on percentages which go up to 100%, at which point everyone is included. So, either their system is broken and stupid, or Norah is the heaviest baby in the history of recorded medicine. Since I've seen fatter babies in Weekly World News at the rate of about every time I've picked up an issue, I'm leaning towards a broken system.

Still, the evidence clearly points to her being a big, beefy baby. Really, I think the combination of artist and linebacker is one that she'll be able to bank on in the future. After all, whose art are you going to appreciate more, the frail, waifish, strap of a girl who is meekly pointing you in the direction of her art, or the burly, hulking brute of a woman who is shoving your face into the canvas? Well, who knows which you would prefer, art being very subjective and all, but you're SURE going to tell the lady who's shoving your face into her art that you like her style best of all. And probably you will buy the painting to make sure she doesn't follow you to your car and break your throat.

And here you can repeat that closing punchline I included in the middle of the post, even though it no longer accurately sums anything up. I just hate to waste it is all, and I'm too lazy to come up with another one.

Gallagher 2: The Resmashening

Back in July, I posted an observation on the possible career choices that Gabe might have available to him based on his then current aptitudes and preferences. Usually, parents have a funny way of projecting typically optimistic predictions onto their children's futures based on their block stacking abilities or some such indicator--I, being the curmudgeon that I am, tried to "keep it real" a bit more and declared that, in all likelihood, Gabe was best suited to be a stunt man or daredevil.

And nothing about his personality has changed that would lead me to think otherwise. However, based on what I saw yesterday, I'm not willing to add one more possible career path that Gabe might follow: Gallagher.

Yes, yes. I know that Gallagher is a person and not a career path. But considering what Gabe was doing, there is really only one thing this skill would qualify him to do--be the next generation's Gallagher.

As I'm sure all of you remember, Gallagher was a prop comic who was popular in the 80s and early 90s. He was famous for the bit that he ended all of his routines with, a faux sales pitch for his wonderful "new" product, the Sledge-o-Matic. He would then bring out a big wooden mallet and proceed to smash everything, covering the first few rows in the crowd with smooshy bits of this and that--most famously, watermelons.

Not surprisingly, Gallagher was my favorite comedian when I was about 12 years old. What wasn't to love? He smashed things! Equally unsurprising is how poorly his routines held up to scrutiny as I grew older. In college, someone gave me a video of one of his stand-ups. I watched it and was not nearly as amused as I was eight or so years earlier.

Anyway, Gallagher more or less disappeared into the ether of irrelevant comics about two decades ago. He still occasionally makes the rounds, appearing at low-end venues (I think he came to our area a couple years back, appearing at a local comedy "shack" where has-beens and probably-never-will-bes come to mildly amuse smallish audiences), but, for the most part, his career is over.

Leaving the field wide open for his comedic successor to step in! I look forward to investing in tarps and large sheets of polyurethane (Holy crap! To make sure I was spelling that right, I did a search for "polyurethane sheets" and the first company that came up is called Gallaghercorp. I didn't see him anywhere on the site, but I hope that he is somehow involved. That would make me feel better about him disappearing into obscurity--knowing that he was still making a living somehow).

Here's the video of Gabe Gallaghering: