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:

Plumber's Crack: It's Not Age/Gender/Profession Restricted

Not really much to say about this. Libby snapped a picture of Norah yesterday sporting some rockin' awesome plumber's crack. And, because it's cute when it's an 18 month old wearing it, I'm sharing.

Does it add insult to injury that she's also wearing pink camo? I think yes.

What Parents of Girls Probably Miss Out On

Having one child of each gender, I am in an excellent position to, time and again, enumerate the differences between the attitudes, personalities, and actions of boys and girls. That isn't to suggest that my word is law, of course. Different children will act and develop differently. There are simply too many variables to take into account, and any or all of them might or might not affect how a child grows up.

For instance, being a stay-at-home DAD, as opposed to a stay-at-home MOM, my just being here all the time might lean our kids in one direction or another in terms of gender identification and gender roles. But even beyond that, my own personality might play a role in how both Gabe and Norah view the masculine and feminine. I am decidedly NOT an alpha male. I am a subtly manipulative, passive-aggressive beta male. Also, I am very sensitive (not in the "in touch with my feminine/inner child" sense but in the "I will cry like a girl if you poke, pinch, or prod me--ESPECIALLY if you prod me" sense). Will this decrease Gabe's chance of developing into an alpha male himself, or will it simply illustrate to his way of thinking that their are alternatives in life?

Libby, on the other hand, is an obvious alpha female (with mildly crazy tendencies--but I suppose that is to be expected from an alpha female). She is the breadwinner and, ultimately--though it pains me to admit--she wears the pants in our family. But, then, she convinced me to wear a dress in our wedding, so this lower-half-clothing generalization based on our family roles doesn't surprise me one bit. Does this mean that Norah will grow up to be an alpha female or will she take her cues from me and grow up as . . . well, whatever I am.

Only time will tell, I suppose, and they are both too young to even have a clear picture of which direction they are heading. Norah, after all, is only now STARTING to show some signs of her own personality. And, while Gabe shows definite signs of leaning towards alpha male predilections, many of his personality traits might also be attributed to him simply being three years old and full of energy.

But, again, as I've pointed out before, our kids definitely show some gender preferences that are "typical" or "expected" for their respective genders. They both gravitate to the typical toys--Gabe has his things that "go" and Norah loves her baby dolls. They are developing physically and cognitively just as one would expect--Gabe developed gross motor skills at an advanced rate and Norah has displayed fine motor control skills that Gabe is only just now addressing, especially where coloring and drawing are concerned.

So, because our kids, no matter how they perceive their parents' roles in the world, are STILL showing typical patterns of boy/girl development, I think it is pretty safe to say that parents of girls will likely miss out on some of the crazy stuff that boys do--and by "miss out," I obviously don't mean to suggest that they are actually MISSING OUT on anything, they simply will not see the same things that parents of boys do.

For instance, without any apparent influence from me or the television (because I keep a pretty close eye on what the kids watch, and Gabe hasn't figured out how to work the remote control yet), Gabe has figured out how to make laser gun noises, line up and "fight" with army men, and create imaginative situations in which a man is eaten by a dinosaur. The last one came complete with his own oddly humorous sound effects. And that was exactly what he was doing this morning. When I got the camera out--as is usually the case--he stopped what he was doing and I had to prompt him to do it again, so his storytelling lost some of its original zeal. But I think you should still get the point.

The Student Becomes the Teacher

Over the weekend, Gabe managed to do something that his predecessors failed to do, and I thought it was worth mentioning on here.

When Libby's entire family moved hither and yon, we inherited much of their furniture, including several pieces of bedroom furniture that had somehow managed to survive five children. Please keep in mind that one of these children was James, whom everyone compares Gabe to in terms of energy and raw destructive power.

Among these pieces of furniture was an armoire. Like many armoires, this one consisted of a large cabinet and a series of drawers (actually, that's probably the description of ALL armoires, not just "many," since, without those parts, it would be something else). Libby recalled often using the cabinet, as a child, as a hiding place whenever they played hide and seek--so this was a piece of furniture that saw some action. And I know it existed through much of the kids' childhoods because, inside the door, there is a giant E.T. sticker still plastered to it.

Saturday night, Gabe broke the door off that armoire. He managed to do what five children could not accomplish in two decades. And he's just three years old.

The door. Well, ex-door. Now it is a piece of flat lumber with a door nob in it. And an E.T. sticker on the back.

Now, I wanted everyone to be clear here. He didn't just break the hinges off or pull them from their moorings. Nor did he simply detach the piece of wood that made up the frame of the door on that side from the top and bottom frame pieces. He actually splintered the hinge side frame board, making it all but impossible to fix. Undoubtedly, I will still TRY to fix it, because otherwise we have an armoire without a door, which is a bit unsightly. But I'm not optimistic about my chances.

How we found out that it was broken was actually a pretty amusing story, and is evidence that Gabe still needs to work on his lying skills if he ever expects to actually get away with anything.

See, we didn't hear anything. There was no loud crash or bang. There was no sound of splintering wood that filtered down from the bedroom. What he was doing, exactly, we have no idea, and he wouldn't fill us in on any of the details. This is how it went down.

Libby and I were sitting downstairs. We hear a few slowly descending steps from the staircase as Gabe made very deliberate progress down the stairs. But we didn't think anything of this. He will often play with his cars on the top stairs, so we often hear him coming down just one or two stairs and then pausing for long periods of time. This time, apparently, he was coming down slowly because he was reluctant to share with us the breaking news.

Then he said, "Daddy, I didn't break the door."

At first I didn't realize this was a cover-up lie and not just some random statement. He often will say things out of the blue that don't seem to make sense--possibly just to remind us that he HASN'T done some destructive act that he COULD have done, or, possibly, we just haven't found all the things he's broken yet.

"That's good, bub," I said. "We don't need any broken doors."

A few moments of silence followed during which we didn't hear him come down anymore stairs or go back up them. Apparently, whatever was on his mind was still unresolved. "Daddy," he eventually said. "You don't get mad because I didn't break the door."

And then I knew something was up. He wouldn't have brought it up a second time if it wasn't relevant. So I went upstairs and I found the door standing up along the wall and the splintered remains still attached and ajar on the armoire.

I sighed, as I often do, and asked, "How did you not break this door?"

"I DIDN'T break the door," he insisted. And I grilled him for another minute or two but couldn't get anymore information out of him than that. I have to assume that he climbed inside the cabinet and started hanging on the door or something. Though, how he managed to break it like that without crashing to the ground--which we would have clearly heard downstairs--is beyond me. Maybe, the fact that we never heard a crash is proof that, in fact, he DIDN'T break the door. Maybe he just opened it and it spontaneous splintered. Maybe the hinge-side frame board had finally had enough of the rest of the door and broke off ties, and Gabe had just been there to catch the door as it came down.

I don't know, but we still have to be moderately impressed with the fact that he has exceeded the previous generation in terms of his destructive capabilities. Because, honestly, there isn't much else that we can be impressed about with this whole affair, and sometimes you just have to cling to what you've got.