Seriously, when did he get old enough to build towers?
Grey: believes that anything can become a joke with a combination of three elements: “knock knock”, chicken, and Barack Obama
Thane: Somehow learned how to build with blocks and spent half an hour last night amazing me with his Mega-block-abilities
Grey: has finally found a lovey. It’s a $4 white rabbit named “Robby” that was in his Easter basket. Robby did not do well with being washed. Grey will tell you about how Robby’s a baby, but now he’s old (with his bedraggled fur). Why do children not fall in love with their high quality stuffed animals?
Thane: likes to eat corn. One kernel at a time. After carefully inspecting each kernel to verify that yes, this is a piece of corn. His fastidiousness in this regard would be more understandable if he didn’t consider grass an aperitif and leaves a delightful dinner.
Grey: has decided his favorite food in the WHOLE WIDE WORLD OMG is the spaghetti & meatballs I made for dinner on Sunday. Canned sauce (with onions & green peppers added) and IKEA meatballs. But hey, it’s nutritionally slightly superior to Mac & Cheese, so no whining.
Thane: is too busy playing to play with meeeeee! I am sad about this and want to bop noses to make him laugh.
Grey: Learned some good skills on a playdate last night, about asking for what you want, compromising, and talking people into sharing instead of sulking.
Mommy: wishes she were hanging out with her guys right now. Playing 'together'
I’d like to know who’s brilliant idea it was for my entire family to have their birthdays in a 5 week period right before Mocksgiving and Christmas. Sheesh. How did that happen?
But hey! This weekend, we held a joint birthday party for Adam and Thane! We had the iconic baby-encounters-frosting-for-the-first-time moments.
You mean I get cake? With sugar? Channeling the festive birthday spirit Let's see what this squishy stuff tastes like... OMGOMGOMGOMGOMG
Adam and I had a philosophical discussion on whether a one year old would even notice that they were having a birthday. I discovered that I have deep-seated equality anxiety. I’m a middle child. My baby brother is six years younger than me, my big sister two years older. I remember that my parents were very careful to make sure that especially my sister and I were treated the same. I recall that they asked HER forbearance when they let ME drive to high school, since she had never been allowed to. I imagined this scene where an impressionable 9 year old Thane is looking through his baby book, perhaps while 11 year old Grey reviews his. There, at Grey’s party, is the Elmo cake, the balloons, the rejoicing. A sad, blank page in Thane’s baby book, testament to second-child syndrome. Thane becomes emotionally devastated due to this evidence of my lax attention to his young self, and eventually leaves home to become a stylite monk in the Nevada desert. All because I couldn’t whip up a few streamers for his birthday.
Funny how your own issues show up, eh? I never once remember feeling like I was any less loved for being the second born. But I’m terrified that Thane might, for the slightest moment, feel that way.
Anyway, happily this fate has been avoided by this party! Now if he wants monastic life, he can at least join one of the normal orders, you know, Benedectines or Carmelites or somethin’.
While I didn’t stoop so low as to have a Halloween/Birthday party (yet… I can’t imagine that with a birthday on the 28th that won’t happen eventually), we also celebrated my husband’s natal day in the way he likes best: board games. From about 6:30 until about 12:30, they played. Since I was on boy-duty for a good portion and then somehow ended up being schooled in Mario Kart Wii, I can’t report on the games. But I can tell you there was one that sounded terrifying: it actually has a docket. And a senate. And you negotiate legislation. They apparently thought it was awesome. How Adam celebrates
I had one of those weekends that should’ve been awesome. Saturday we drove to New Hampshire, as planned, to the Fall Festival at the Shaker Museum. We did have fun, but it was about 15 degrees colder (and windy!) than it had been at home. The Festival was rather smaller than I expected. Our tour guide seemed to have a highly unsympathetic view of the Shakers, and spent most of the time on various scandals within the order instead of the cool things about it. Still, there were great points. Grey spun a piece of yarn from wool he helped card. Thane danced to a live band singing “Mountain Dew” (yet another sign that Shaker influence had, er, waned). Grey and daddy rolled down a tall hill they climbed together. Thane investigated bright autumn leaves. The wild apple cider was tart and brilliant.
Grey climbed and rolled down the hill behind us
Then to the State Park. All I can say about that is apparently “closing the weekend of Columbus Day” means closing BEFORE the weekend, not after it’s done. No poking sticks into a fire for us.
Grey didn’t vomit Sunday at church, and we were given some awesome beef barley stew. (I kept saying that I’d gotten pregnant just for the care packages. I didn’t even have to get knocked up this time!) I even found some time to sit on the couch and watch the Red Sox vs. the Angels while Adam played baseball in the backyard with our eldest. I watched the Sox come within one strike of getting to game four… twice. I watched Papelbon give up his first post-season hit, and do his first postseason blown save to end the Red Sox year. Next year, it’s entirely possible that there will be only one man left from that miracle bunch of idiots in 2004: our own Greek God of Walks. But some of the players suffered who may leave have been my favorites: Jason Varitek. David Ortiz. Tim Wakefield (who’s been playing for the Sox since I was in high school) can hardly walk. Maybe Mike Lowell? Getting swept sucked, and it’s a long way until March.
Then I made dinner, which turned out ok, and bread pudding, which turned out ok. Followed by bills, which turned out ok.
Monday, I took a vacation day. Grey’s preschool was closed. Adam was off work. I packed us into the car for the second time this weekend to Experience Autumn on a bright, brisk day. We went to Honeypot Farms in Stowe. It was a zoo. You were hemmed in at every corner, denuded of your cash and caught in a crush of crowds. I don’t know how else they could’ve managed the hordes that had descended, but it was much less bucolic reconnecting with nature and much more standing-in-line. Plus, we hadn’t brought a singe Thane-conveyance-device so we had to carry him the entire time. But. Yet. The skies were brilliant blue. We ate Empire apples picked with our own hands in the shade of the trees which had borne them. We had cider donuts crisp from the cooking. Grey saw a pig for the first time. It was not without consolation. Both Thane and Grey love apples
When we came home, I’d had dinner cooking, so I let Adam (who was feeling run down) veg while I took the boys to the park. They were FANTASTIC. Grey played wonderful imaginary games with other kids and ran around and was chased by dinosaurs and swam in the imaginary ocean. But on the way home, he refused to come. When I insisted it was time to go home, he pitched one of his most epic fits to date. I actually had to call daddy to please come rescue me and carry him home. I put him to bed without dinner because I couldn’t get him to stop swinging at me. I’m quite sure he was tired past bearing and hungry – those were my fault. But it devolved so fast, I didn’t see it coming. You always wonder, thinking back, how you could’ve used humor or something and made it work out. He was so wonderful and then he was such a stinker.
Dinner, which I prepared with great hope ahead of time, was so-so. After the boys were in bed, I celebrated by losing at Odin’s Ravens.
After that, I realized it was my father-in-law’s birthday and called my mother-in-law to let her know I was thinking of her as she suffers through missing him.
I spent the time after that holding Thane while he screamed for 1/2 hour until either the Tylenol took or the constipation eased.
I woke up this morning to a dark, cold world.
Moments of glory, joy and memory all packed around by the dismal and drear. I suppose that’s the way life goes.
OK, all day I’ve been waiting. I knew that at some point inspiration would strike and I would write a post: a brilliant post, an insightful post, a post that makes you sigh in sympathy and bookmark my blog.
And here it is, 5:11. Inspiration has not struck. (I have, however, written a nifty pdf report, so I’ll just take comfort in my clever application of style sheets.) 5:12. No inspiration yet.
Well, I’ve been saving this for a rainy day. And between sun-breaks, it’s been bucketing here. So here you go, my no-fail feel better video. I challenge you to watch this without grinning:
To me, life is set up in four year increments. High school is four years. College is (theoretically, at least) four years. I’ve made a vow to take an official, nice family portrait every four years, to watch the changes in our family march across the wall. The first portrait was our wedding. In the second, a younger, thinner, more-rested Adam and I smile back. The third portrait included Grey holding a toy car and a baby-lump of a Thane.
I'm four, mom
Well, Grey has just completed his first four-year interval of being an external person. Today, he is four years old. FOUR YEARS. I find it extraordinarily hard to believe.
Grey’s been acting four years old for a few months now. I have wonderful news for you, oh parents of three year olds. (Or, heaven forfend, two year olds!) It gets better. It gets lots better. Imagine this: you are lying in bed asleep. You hear a drawer slam. Shortly thereafter, a door slams open. A quick pad-pad-pad of feet, and a young boy, naked except for his Spiderman Undies, crawls into bed beside you. He took off his own pullup, threw it away, and put on the undies himself. “It’s morning, mama! See? The sun is up. It’s a beautiful day!” He is, of course, right. You tell him to go put on his clothes and brush his teeth. Then (this is the remarkable part) he goes and SELECTS HIS OWN CLOTHING, PUTS IT ON, AND THEN GOES TO BRUSH HIS TEETH! He returns to tell you that his teeth are all sparkly now, see? Now, granted, not every outfit he picks “matches” or “is appropriate for the weather” but it IS all on the correct direction. This fine young man heads downstairs and picks out his morning DVD. He can get it to start and put it in, but lacks the ability to turn on the tv… so far. He eats his grits and drinks his milk. When it’s time to go, he turns off the tv himself. He walks out to the car, holds the door for me, opens his car door, gets into the car and buckles his own seat belt. Then, politely and using the word please, he asks for his DS.
Grey loves games
We’re getting to a point where it’s hard to enumerate everything he CAN do. He can entertain himself. He will play quietly (if messily) in his room for up to two hours instead of napping. He is self-directed getting to the bathroom for all body functions (including, sadly, vomit). He can assemble a 50 piece puzzle. He can listen to and follow instructions. He cleans up automatically.
The other day I was in Thane’s room, putting him to bed, and Grey was bopping around. As I started to read to Thane, Grey cried out “Wait!” in obvious distress. Then Grey, without being asked, proceeded to pick up all the toys and books in Thane’s room and put them away, so he could join in story time. It took me that long to get my jaw off the floor. He picks up his own room before he goes to bed.
Grey knows how to act in case of a fire alarm. Periodically, in my culinary life, I have been known to set one or two of them off. The other day I did so, and while I was contemplating the state of my oven-floor, he calmly got up, opened the door, opened the screen door and exited to wait on the front lawn. But yet, Grey doesn’t wander. I have yet to have him leave the house when it wasn’t ok to.
Grey can tell you his nickname, his full name, his street address, his state, and his parent’s full names. He knows what to do when he’s lost in the woods. He can also tell you the full cast of Avatar.
Grey in the woods
Grey can read, kind of. If he knows a book, he uses first letters to guess what all the words are. He’ll investigate pictures for clues as to what the book says. He can read ‘from scratch’ maybe 20 or 30 words, and will sometimes surprise me. “Open” and “Stop” have both been pulled from sign with no context. He can read and write his own full name. Sadly, he read on his Gameboy, in Tetris where he’s happily been “building towers” for years the words “You Lose” and was distraught. His name is increasingly legible even if you don’t know what it is. He recently signed his own thank you cards and put the return address labels on by himself.
Grey loves to be where people are. About the only time he’ll be in another room is when he’s watching tv or is in his room for quiet time. He draws and colors at the kitchen table, puts puzzles together, adores going on walks, plays with his brother (sometimes nicely, sometimes not), helps make desserts, carries his dishes to the counter, builds block towers, and talks with the typical preschooler torrent. Well, not quite. We’ve actually never hit the “why” stage that I expected. He doesn’t usually daisy-chain questions. He seems to be a bit more literal minded. He often wants to know what’s made up and what’s real. (Question for you: would you say aliens are made up?)
Grey at aikido
He’ll make up a word and tell you it means something in Spanish. Usually what it means is “chocolate milk”.
Grey is episodically enamored with his stuffed animals. For Easter he got a cheap white rabbit. This rabbit has accompanied him often since then. He’s named “Robby” and he’s a baby. Grey uses a gentle voice and takes care of his small, increasingly bedraggled charge. Many things are babies. Grey is often a baby, but never a baby human. Sometimes he’s a baby kitty cat (pink, please). Recently he’s been a baby ghost or a baby zombie.
Since his grandfather died, Grey has been very concerned with mortality. He will often seriously inform you that Papa Flynn is dead. He worries that Robby is going to die because Robby is old. (I know I just said Robby was a baby – one does not expect consistency from a just-four-year-old imagination!) He doesn’t understand what dead means — in his pretend, people often get fixed from being dead and come back. Jesus and the resurrection do not help me lay his questions to rest on this point. Grey is very upset when he hears “dead” or “killed” on the radio. You should’ve heard me explain to him when the thing that got “killed” was the public option in the healthcare debate. Oof!
Grey at aikido
My eldest is not perfect, of course. He has this obnoxious tendency to pout when he doesn’t get his way. I remind myself that pouting is far superior to hitting or pitching a fit, but still he’s been known to stomp off and hide under the table 4 – 6 times in a one-hour playdate with a friend. He’s also latched onto this annoying way of asking for things. He’ll fake sniff and then say (in a woebegone voice) “I’m sad.” Then he’ll wait for you to ask why. If you don’t ask, he’ll say, “Do you know why I’m so sad?” Then regardless of your response, you get to the meat of it. “I’m sad because I don’t have a lollipop.” We’re working on this. He does still, rarely, pitch grand mal fits. Like all children, they’re more likely when he’s tired and hungry. But once he goes down the road of hitting/pinching/kicking, he doesn’t desist unless stopped with authority. Like, in-your-bedroom-for-the-next-fifteen-minutes or more. He’s VERY persistent.
Grey is a loving, affectionate, kind, funny, silly, fearless young man. I can only hope that he has as much fun being my kid as I have being his mom.
Last night, for the first night in what seems like forever, I had the blessed combination of some free time and some energy. I climbed the stairs to my attic fastness and plugged in my camera.
Holy Handgrenades Batman! 650 pictures! (In my defense, only about 6 – 7 weeks worth!)
It was the effort of an evening to cull the harvest down to the best fruits. The best fruits seem to involve quite a lot of Grey making weird faces and Thane reading. But here they are, for your viewing pleasure!
Setting: My domicile
Cast: Grey, Thane, my mother-in-law, Sasha (my brother’s friend)
Scene: I’m on the phone on a conference call discussing Flex best practices using the Mate framework with several colleagues in a conference room. Most of them have thick Indian accents. The speaker phone in the conference room isn’t good at a distance. My cell phone reception seems poor. My cell phone is beeping at me to let me know the battery is winding down.
Thane (in bedroom): Screams bloody murder instead of takes naps. Implies that small kobolds with skewers are hungrily gathering around his crib and that any moment the assault will begin.
Mother-in-law: Needs to print the boarding pass for her departure tomorrow and just finished painting a layer of magnetic paint. Is a saint, but periodically needs to “eat” and “use the restroom”. Is upstairs and does not hear all the tumult.
Sasha: Just dropped by to pick up some of my brother’s things. Is driving the tiniest car known to mankind. Is expected to pick up a ginormous tv, my brother’s DVDs and bedding. All my brother’s things are in indistinct, unlabeled black bags in the middle of the attic.
Grey: Is wearing pullups (and only pullups) on a very cold day. He is potty trained. I do not ask why he is wearing pullups. He has a marker stripe over his belly button. After trailing Sasha around for a bit, he brings a book to me, looking concerned about the cover.
This is the cover: Lovecraft is not really for the preschool set
Me: Trying to track arguments for naming conventions of the variables in the EventMap while reassuring Grey that the cover art is make believe, directing Sasha to the appropriate black plastic bags, ignoring Thane’s screams, and doing it all silently so as to not imply to my colleagues that my attention is anything less than rapt on the discussion at hand.
Thane: The kobolds are starting to make ladders out of Weebles and board books. Also, I may or may not be fingerpainting with poop. You won’t know unless you check!
Grey: Mommy, I’m hungry and I want to play outside. Can I show Sasha this book?
Coworkers: “So what do you think about using injectors to inject the model into the view, and then inject the variables into the model? Will that compile in the correct order?”
Sasha: (Is carrying heavy and bulky things down the stairs while patiently dodging a nearly-four-year-old and two cats.)
Brenda’s Phone: Goes dead.
I’m still sick. I am really bad at being sick. I have this vision of sickness that involves the couch, a remote, a good book and about two days of senescence. I think the last time I actually fulfilled this version of sick is when I got the flu while I was pregnant with Grey. I watched the entire first six seasons of Red Dwarf on DVD in a fevered-haze (the best way, in my opinion). But my only two nods to the snot-beast currently taking residence in my chest are that I slept through church Sunday (and by slept through I mean that I got up half an hour before the madding crowd returned home), and I skipped yoga.
It’s hard enough for me to be interesting at the best of times. But being interesting while I’m sick? Yeah. Right.
But my husband demanded that I share one of this weekend’s anecdotes, and lacking more compelling material, I shall oblige him.
Grey has a number of toys that play songs. Nearly every keyboard-type electronic device he owns has a setting where it plays songs. Please note: every one of them plays “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star”. He will sometimes quiz me on the songs and demand I sing them. Where DID my back-brain learn all the words to all these songs? He would like you to know that “Oh My Darlin’ Clementine” is very sad. How did she get lost, mama? Didn’t she have a whistle?
Anyway, “In the Hall of the Mountain King” came up in rotation, and he asked me to sing it. I know some words, “Goblins racing down the street, they will get, much to eat, when it’s time for trick-or-treat on Halloween”. They didn’t quite match with the longer version, so I expanded on the hungry goblins theme. Grey pretended to be scared – delightedly so. After our fourth or fifth time of me being a hungry goblin, he and I both became goblins and went upstairs looking for daddy-sized prey. Having found some, we gnawed on various available arms and legs.
My husband said, “Wow, this is just like the worst of my zombie dreams.” (An interesting insight to his psyche, doncha think?)
I, being sick and muzzy-mouthed, replied that we were zoblins. My husband and I laughed in delight. What a great word! Zoblins! Zoblins, or maybe Gombies
I’m not feeling very well. I didn’t end up succumbing to the strep throat my husband had. At least not yet. My sons have produced volumes of mucous. Meanwhile I and my epic immune system sailed through. I haven’t actually succumbed – yet – but I can tell I’m teetering.
I woke up last night sometime in the dark hours, my throat on aflame and my cough hacking. I didn’t figure I’d be making it to work today. I gazed bleary into the bathroom mirror and took some ibuprofen. Somehow, though, when morning came I just felt sodden again. I cuddled my young son and then talked myself into facing another day. I don’t really know how to take a sick day anymore. It’s been years since I’ve taken a sick day and just laid on the couch watching bad tv and eating soup from a can.
One of the things I hate about being kind of sick (and let me just make clear – I’m very grateful that I’m not ACTUALLY sick) is the sort of fog it creates. My neck hurts. My eyes don’t want to focus. My chest seems heavier, as though I’m breathing something heavier that Oxygen, Nitrogen and Carbon Dioxide. Perhaps Mucosium instead. The screen swims a bit as I type. My rarely razor-sharp focus takes on even blunter, more-distractable edges. I have trouble focusing. There’s this odd combination of not being entirely sure where my time is going and having the day stretch out interminably. Decisions are hard to come by.
Then when I get home, I don’t have the energy to be nearly as present as I desire to be. I’m a little foggy answering my children. I don’t really listen to what they’re telling me – a cardinal sin in my parenting lexicon. I have trouble listening to the ideas my mother-in-law overflows with, and considering their implications.
I don’t really know what I want except I suspect it involves sloth. Lots of sloth. Computer games and books and baseball on tv. Of course, that’s not what this weekend holds. I have some sloth scheduled for tonight, but tomorrow morning starts with a 9:30 personnel meeting, an 11:30 funeral to play taps, a dentist appointment for Grey and aikido for Grey. Thane is at this tough tough stage where he fusses and cries because he wants to be big and isn’t. He wants to talk and can’t. He wants to walk and is afraid. Childhood is productive frustration – sometimes more than others.
I want to be so many things: a good wife, a good mother, a good daughter-in-law, a good citizen, a good friend, a good cook, a good church member (never mind the much harder good Christian), a good employee, a good, well, me. I have trouble enough balancing all this when I’m at the top of my game. Through the fog of mild sickness I can see the goal posts, but I don’t feel like I stand a hope in the world of reaching them. I don’t even think I can try for a field goal from this distance.
Guess I better punt, do my best, and wait for my white cells to clobber the offense. Goooooo team!
I’m 31 today. 30 was almost like still being in your 20s. 31 you have to admit that no. You’re in your 30s. If I were a professional gymnast, I’d be far past my best days. If I were a baseball player, I’d be in my prime. I’m old enough to be in Congress (and I was by my last birthday), but still too young to be President. And, unlike our current incumbent, I actually WAS born in Africa.
All I can say is that if my 30s pass as quickly as my 20s did, I’d better start writing that post now. I mean, my 20s lasted for roughly as long as two classes of Geometry my sophomore year of high school.
While I’m sitting here at work being 31 instead of 30, my mother-in-law is repainting my kitchen. And mud room. And bathroom. And possibly hallway if she gets ambitious. I think the five gallon drum of paint was a mistake — she sees it as a challenge.
I’m having a good day at work, getting to do some fun stuff that’s out of the ordinary for me.
My husband sent me flowers.
I’m wearing a swooshy pretty skirt that cannot survive close proximity to children, but that’s ok because I’m at work! Drinking coffee and being all important! My coworkers managed to surprise me with the cake, even though we’ve had “surprise” birthdays every birthday for seven years now!
My Truant Pen 