my dilemma

A few days ago, Maddie drew the following picture, a recreation of a scene from her day at school:

Naturally, I was pleased.  Her teachers must have been encouraging the kids to shake hands as a gesture of friendship.  So I asked her which kids were befriending which other kids.

“That’s Ash punching Marissa. And that’s me punching Edmund.”

So.  My daugher illustrated her first schoolyard rumble.  OK, it’s not so much a rumble since everybody is smiling, and Maddie hits like a girl.  But still, I couldn’t help but wonder what drawings might come our way in the near future if we let this trend continue.

I hereby present my extrapolation of future illustrations:

And

Yesterday, we celebrated Maddie’s birthday at her preschool. Aaron’s a stay-at-home toddler, so going to the preschool is always a joy for the kid.  He gets to see his big sister whom he hasn’t seen in hours.

We brought pizza and cake to the preschool for everybody.  It was organized chaos, but eventually we got all the kids sitting and eating, and all the teachers got a chance to enjoy their pizza too.  Until we heard…

“Look at me!”
“Look at me, Daddy!”

So we look around, and in the sea of little bodies eating pizza at their tiny tables, there’s one arm frantically waving around.  It’s Aaron.

“I see you.  What is it Aaron?”

“I’m eating pizza!”

It wasn’t just that he was eating pizza.  It was that he was sitting with all the preschoolers at one of their tables eating pizza!  As if he had joined their ranks.  That was just the start of it.  For the rest of the celebration, Aaron milled around with the bigger preschoolers, pretending to be one of them, always calling out to us to make sure we see what a big boy he is.

Soon, he’ll be attending the same preschool too.  He’s more ready for it than we are.

aaaAAAAGGH!!

That was me, thrashing about and screaming like a little girl in the middle of the night. A foot-long rat had dropped onto the comforter over my legs. The rat was scrambling around and jumping frantically, trying to get back from whence it came. Try though it might, it kept landing on my legs. I managed to roll out from under it, with it still tangled in the comforter.

Lillian, on the other hand, just before the rat dropped, was woken up by a huge spider that appeared on her chest, and was threatening to bite her. She thrashed about, too, but didn’t scream like a schoolgirl. She jumped out of the bed on her side, and I stood across from her with the vermin between us buried in the comforter.

After a couple “What was that?” and a few “No, it was a spider” and “No, that was a rat”s, we agreed to shake out the comforter, and to deal with whatever fell out. Gingerly, we took to the task, and after we shook out the comforter, nothing fell out.

We eventually had to accept the fact that we’d both vividly dreamt the critters. Her thrashing after encountering the spider probably causing me to feel the rat.

Chalk up another perk of parenthood: Daily exhaustion to the point of communal hysteria and delirium.

Today Aaron, my almost-three-year-old son, and I went out for a walk. He had already gone bicycle riding with Mommy, so he didn’t want to do that again. With me, he wanted to take his sister’s toy stroller around the block. With a little naked dolly and pretend milk bottle inside. Okaay.

I’m man enough to go out with my son as he merrily pushes the dolly stroller around. Especially since it was early afternoon on a workday, and nobody I knew would be around. Right as we left the house, it turns out that my neighbor was home early from work and was doing some yard work. He gives my son a big ol’ smile. I resignedly give him a wave.

Aaron and I continue on, stopping every once in a while to make the dolly more comfortable or to feed him. Not two houses down, we were spotted by the mailman, making early rounds today. He gives us a hearty hello, too. I want to explain how it’s his sister’s stroller, but think better of it.

Aaron decided he wants to take a longer walk than usual. Great, I think. A couple of blocks away, we reach the top of a little paved hill. Aaron, bless his heart, stops to adjust the baby, then in one deft motion, pushes the stroller down the hill. As the stroller careens towards destruction, he cries out, “Oh, Baby!!”

He runs down the hill after the stroller crashes, and drags the stroller back to the top to re-enact the catastrophe again, crying after the speeding dolly and all. So that was the point of bringing the doll on the trip. For some reason, everything felt better.

Aaron’s sitting on the toilet going pee-pee, and he looks down on himself as he goes.  Lillian is sitting nearby watching him, and he says, “What’s that?”
 
She:  What’s what?
Aaron:  That.
 
So she walks over to him to see what he’s pointing at.
 
She:  Oh, that’s your scrotum.
Aaron:  Scrotum?
She:  Yeah, your scrotum.
Aaron:  No, that’s balls.
She (with a smile):  Yeah, you’re right, those are your balls.
Aaron (with a smile):  Yeah, they’re our balls…

You stand me, Daddy?!
You stand me?
You stand me, Daddy!

That’s what Aaron was yelling at me from the back seat as we made our way home from Disneyland.  He and Maddie were pretending to chastise each other, “you’re so bad!” “No, you’re so bad!”  When suddenly he evidently wanted me to stand up while driving the car.

I told him that I didn’t know what he was talking about.  “Sorry, kiddo.  I don’t understand you.”

You stand me, Daddy?!

He said it again with the fury and the conviction of the righteous.  Lillian laughed, and explained to me that Aaron was asking me if I understand him.  Huh, I had answered his question without realizing it.

But why the attitude?  What was that about?

When the kiddos misbehave, I try to give them one clear warning about the consequences of their behavior.  If they don’t shape up, they’ll lose a treasured privilege.  Later that day, when Aaron was getting on my nerves, I gave him the customary warning with the usually stern, “Did you understand that, Aaron?”  He didn’t reply, and I insisted on it.  I gave him one more forceful “Do you understand me, Aaron?” before I connected the dots.

Oh…  So that’s how I am.  I didn’t know the kids could create such accurate reflections of ourselves.

Aaron made an announcement too.  “I got wee wee!”  Despite what it sounds like, he’s talking about the fact that he’s got a little piggy that goes “wee wee wee” all the way home.

While the four of us were enjoying lunch, my daughter, who’s famously afraid of strange dogs, made an announcement.

“When I get bigger, I’m going to have a dog!”

That delighted us no end.  Maddie’s apparently made a conscious decision to get over her fear.  So we ask her more about it.

“When I turn six, and Daddy dies, I’m going to get a dog,” she exclaims happily and with pride.

Wh, What?

“Mommy can get a dog for me.”

So, I explain to the little dear that I don’t have to die for her to get a puppy.  And she explains to me that, well, that’s the way it’s going to go down.  She points to me, “Daddy dies.”  She points to her mother, “Mommy gets me a doggy.”  As if she knows something I don’t.

She better not.

I asked Aaron to do a robin, based on the birds outside the window.  Instead of chirping, he started listing off, “Raven, Beast Boy, Cyborg, Superman…”  I didn’t know whether to explain that Superman was not a Teen Titan, or that I was asking for the bird.

After I read a bedtime story to the kids, my wife takes Aaron to his bedroom where they go through another little bedtime routine.

They lie down on the floor next to each other, and challenge each other, in succession, to make the sound of a certain animal.  (Well, at least it used to be just animals.)  For example, Lillian would say, “Now do an elephant.”  And Aaron would trumpet, and gracefully move his arm in an arc to emulate an elephant’s trunk.  Then, he’d challenge her to do a lion, and so on.

I don’t know if Aaron’s been becoming more of a surrealist or if the challenges aren’t, well, challenging enough, but lately the requests have gotten more bizarre.  After an animal or two, they end up having to make the sounds of things like water (sound of drinking), walking (crunching), the stars (twinkling), the moon (wave fingers and say, “ooh”) or just about anything else.

My son, the Foley Artist.

Remember the nest with the egg in it from the last post?  I was wrong.  There must have been four eggs, because four hungry baby birds appeared.

And hungry doesn’t even begin to describe it.  If those little birds ever slept, I never saw it.  Mother bird and father bird both had to pull their weight to feed the mouths in that nest.  The nest was a hub of activity.  As soon as those blind ravenous little things sensed a parent was returning with a worm, their heads would pop up, jostling for position, ready to receive that succulent morsel.

It gives us some comfort for Lillian and I to think we have it pretty hard.  Woe is we.  But if we ever got a chance to sit down, we’d watch the nest, and it was a continuous series of one parent after another flying in, feeding, gathering waste, and flying off for more food.  And after a week, those parent birds were half the size they were when they started.

The chicks grew like it was nobody’s business.  Less than three weeks after we saw the first egg, the first fledgling was out of the nest, stretching his wings.  Within one day of that, all four baby birds were gone.

The nest that was a nonstop center of activity is now empty.  It’s silly to make the obvious comparison, but it was all too fast and immediate, and I can’t help but project how I’m going to feel when my kids leave.  I’m going to put in a little extra effort to love what I have now.

(More pictures of the birds can be found here.)

A couple of robins have built a nest right outside one of our windows.  We’ve got a great view of the nest, and we’ve been teaching the kids how to carefully watch the birds without alarming them.

Mother Bird: On the Job

Watching the birds has been very instructional and inspiring.  There’s already a pretty little blue egg in the nest, and the two birds take turns watching over it.  We almost never see them together.  The bird that stays with the nest is always the perfect picture of patience and diligence, never moving, and always watching out for predators or for when the other bird returns.

But, we have noticed that the two birds aren’t exactly equally adept at parenting…

The mother bird really knows what’s important to her, and doesn’t waste time.  The nest was build in just a couple of days, she laid her egg, and promptly began to take perfect care of it.  Even when she’s settled into the nest, she’s always watching out, and has her beak raised just so, as if to say, “Don’t you dare mess with my family.”  When she flies off, she’s never gone long, and when she returns, the settles back on the egg in no time flat.

The father bird isn’t around quite as much.

Father Bird: Duh…

When the mother bird flies off, he just stands there, with this dopey stance, as if to say, “What does she expect me to do with that little blue thing?”  The entire time she’s gone, the egg’s getting cold, not getting turned, and he’s just standing there, on the edge of the nest, looking around, wondering when he can fly off again, and get a few rounds of golf in with the boys.  Oops, maybe I’m projecting a little too much there.