Why Teachers Should Make Doctor Money

As the days pass, I am becoming increasingly convinced that, once he's in school, Gabe is going to be "that kid." You know the kid I'm talking about. The one who, at the school program, is dancing in place or pulling someone's hair instead of singing the song he's supposed to be singing. The one who never sits still and, several times a day, gets in trouble for disrupting class. The one that teachers have to plan their days around.

He's got all the marks of being "that kid." He's pretty smart. He's high energy and doesn't care for sitting still. And he's got a short attention span and gets bored easily. He's going to be a handful for all of the teachers he has, probably until high school.

Now, to my reasoning for the title of this post. I have to find ways to keep Gabe at least passably entertained every day. It's not an easy task--and I have to admit that I spend a great deal of my energy trying to steer him towards activities that will keep him in one place and get him used to the twelve years of school he's going to spend sitting in small desks--but I only have ONE other child in the house that I have to keep occupied at the same time. Imagine trying to juggle a classroom full of children, all with different needs, AND having to contain/entertain/contend with one or more of "those children." These people should be living sumptuous lives of luxury when they aren't working, and that's all there is too it.

Anyway, I had all these thoughts after watching Gabe at his pre-school program yesterday. It was short, about ten minutes. They prepared a few songs that they sang along with their teacher--which they'd obviously been working on for a little while at least--and it was, of course, adorable. Libby got some video of Gabe's "participation" throughout. Watch the videos and tell me that I'm wrong in my assessment of his future school life and how much his teachers should be making for dealing with him and the other kids that are like him.

Kids Say the Creepiest Things

Very brief post.

Libby got home from work a little while ago and had to pee. Gabe ran into the bathroom to pee first then was standing around waiting for Libby to go.

"Leave the room please, while I go to the bathroom," Libby said.

"I want to smell you," Gabe replied.

No further elaboration needed.

Down at Fraggle Rock

In an attempt to make Norah look more like Boo from "Monsters Inc.," Libby pulled back her first pigtails yesterday. Pigtails on little girls are, of course, an adorable staple. There is, however, one minor consideration that must first be addressed--is the hair actually long enough to pull it off.


In this case, I'm going to have to go with "no."

This picture is the one that prompted the title of this post. After getting the pigtails up, Libby decided that Norah looked like a Fraggle. This made me laugh. Maybe her name could be Buttser.

Yesterday (and today, and probably tomorrow, if I get right down to it) was Baking Day. I have not done a major Christmas baking day since the year before Gabe was born. Small children have a way to distract away from any desire to spend a few days cooking (though, I have to admit, that they are a GREAT reason to want to stay isolated in a kitchen for an entire day--seriously, I totally understand why earlier generations spent so much time cooking from scratch. I mean, besides not having fast food and prepackaged meals to buy at the store. It was the best way a mother could distance herself from her children and not be frowned upon by judgmental neighbors. I get that now. I really, really do.). But, this year, I decided it was time to revive the tradition.

And, because Gabe loves to help, I tasked Libby with the job of assisting Gabe in all of the cookie cuttering that needed to be done. Not surprisingly, since he's probably clocked about 1000 hours of Play-Doh cutting, he did a very good job of cutting out the Christmas shapes. The two of them worked on the dining room table.

None of this is particularly interesting, I know, but I needed to lead in to the picture I took.

After they finished the first few dozen cookies, Libby got tired of messing with it and moved on to other things. But she left the flour on the table, figuring she would come back to do more cookies later. In the interim, Gabe decided to play with it. About ten minutes after they were done cutting cookies, this is what I found.

The baby is obviously the creepiest part of this little tableau, with its head turned all the way around, resting in a pile of scattered "flour." It's like a scene out of "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" or "Trainspotting."

Urine Is Sterile, Right?

Last night, when I took Gabe up to bed, he crawled in and did his standard inventory of friends and sleeping accessories, finding his binky and blankie and flashlight and the old cell phone that he calls Poppa or Fireman Sam on and his half a dozen books and the dozen or so friends that he's decided he simply MUST have in bed at all times. After that, he looked at me and asked, "Can you empty the pee pee out of my potty?"

"Why?" I replied. "I just emptied it out before your nap today. Did you fill it up already?"

"No," he said, trying to sound innocent. "Can you empty my pee pee?" he repeated.

So I opened up the potty and peered in. "Oh, Gabe," I said as I inspected the inventory within.

I spied one of his binkies and a pepperoni from a Melissa and Doug play pizza set of his. And two white, porcelain balls that I couldn't immediately identify. They looked like handles from a dresser or small doorknobs or something.

"What is this stuff?" I queried. "And why are they in your potty?"

"That binky is broken," he answered by way of explanation. Clearly, when a binky has reached the end of its line, a heavy soaking of piss is what it needs before its send off to the landfill.

"What is this other stuff?" I continued. "Where did these white balls come from?"

"The curtains," he said, and I realized what they were. We installed curtain tieback bracket thingies (whatever they're called, I'm too lazy to look it up) on the walls so we could pull the curtains over and hold them there. Each of them had a little decorative ball screwed into them. He had unscrewed them, during his nap yesterday afternoon when I THOUGHT he was quietly sleeping. Then, for reasons that he was unable to elaborate on, he'd put them in his potty.

Needless to say, we had a discussion of the inappropriateness of storing household items in a potty full of pee. How he managed to nearly fill it in one nap time is another matter for consideration later on.

Sadly, when I brought the potty tray downstairs, I was a bit irate, so I didn't think to take a picture. It would have been a quite interesting tableau, perhaps even delving into the realm of art. Too bad I wasn't thinking more clearly.

I did, however, snap a picture of him this morning that was a bit amusing.

He wore this basket on his head for about fifteen minutes. When I asked him why, he said, "It's my fireman helmet." This is especially odd because the ACTUAL fireman helmet, the one from his Halloween costume, was lying on the floor in the dining room the entire time. He might have kept it on longer but he realized, after that fifteen minutes, that he wasn't wearing it so much as it was stuck on his head. A short, panicked (for him) scene followed this picture a few minutes later when he realized this fact and I had to pry it loose from his head.

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.