terror in a onesie

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From time to time I’ve mentioned Eli’s futile attempts to threaten his sister by saying things like, “If you don’t do what I want, I’m leaving!” He’s moved on from that; instead, now he tattles. He tells us every thing Liza does that’s wrong, where “wrong” is defined as “things Mom and Dad have said are bad, and also things I don’t like”.

My dad harnessed this childhood trait for his own nefarious ends. Every year we traveled from Arkansas to Alabama for Christmas. Our tradition was that, on Christmas morning, we woke up and ran into the living room, where all of our presents were displayed, unwrapped, just as Santa had brought them. This meant that dad had to pack the car with our unwrapped presents.

One year he hit upon a brilliant stratagem. He took me aside. “Stephen,” he said, “I’ve put some of Andrew’s presents in the car. I need you to make sure he doesn’t go near the car and find them.” I agreed, so he then found Andrew and said, “I’ve put some of Stephen’s presents in the car. Make sure he doesn’t go near there.” We watched each other like hawks, ready to tell dad if one of us got within twenty feet of the car.

I haven’t figured out what I’m going to use Eli’s tattling for yet. Eli doesn’t have that problem, though. He’s sure he can use it in negotiations. We’ve started asking Eli and Liza to work out their own disagreements, so tonight, when Eli yelled, “Liza hit me! And it wasn’t for any reason, either!” I asked them to figure out how to resolve the problem.

“Liza, please don’t hit me,” Eli said. “Or else I’ll tell dad again.”

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The past two weekends we’ve been busy, busy, busy. And I’ve got the photos to prove it!

Space and Rocket Center

Some friends came to visit for the day and we played at Rocket City’s biggest attraction.

Halloween

This year Eli finally got “trick or treating” and Liza thought carrying her bag of candy was almost not worth the effort. Oh wait, what am I saying? There was candy in that bag! Liza could have hauled that thing to Timbuktu for the crumbs off of a Kit Kat.

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What crafter doesn’t want to hear these words from their children? Painting though is my least favorite because it involves water. Both kids really love to paint, so it’s always a special treat at our house. These are from this past week when it rained and rained and rained.

Yes, that’s paint all over Liza’s face.

You can see the potential for mess in double portions right here.

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Liza still loves her some bugs. These days she has her pick of them, as we’ve had so much rain that beetles and cockroaches have fled indoors to escape it. More fools they, as that puts them at Liza’s mercy. Liza finds them, picks them up, and carries them around by one of their teeny legs. She’s like a giant toddler God to these bugs. When she’s done playing with them she lets them run away, so I can only imagine the religion that has sprung up around these events.

“The God lifted me high into the air, and I heard peals of laughter like thunder!”

“You failed to sacrifice a bread crumb to Her yesterday! Be glad She did not crush your pitiable carapace!”

She found one in the kitchen this morning. All the way from our bathroom I could hear her yelling, “Buggy is running! He’s hiding from me! Come out, buggy! Come out!” A few minutes later she wandered into the bathroom. The beetle she’d found waved its legs feebly, trying desperately to pull one leg out of Liza’s grasp.

“This is buggy! He says hi!” Then she said, in a voice even more high pitched than normal, “Hi, daddy! I want to watch a show!” “Buggy wants to watch a show! He likes Dora!” she added in her normal tone of voice.

“How lucky he likes the same shows you do,” I told her.

Eli, meanwhile, is obsessed with escape-the-room games. He’s grown bored of Kingdom Hearts II: The Cut-Sceneing, so I’ve turned to free online Flash games to occupy him at night. He enjoyed titles like Little Wheel, but it’s the escape-the-room games that have captured his heart. He can’t really help with them, but he loves seeing me struggle to find the hotspots that, when clicked, will show a lever that, when pulled, reveals a substitution cipher that I then must solve.

In playing these games, I’ve filled sheet after sheet of paper with codes, ciphers, and doodlings. The other night he came up to me and said, “I have a piece of paper here. It needs to have codes on it.” So off we trundled to Jay is Games to find an escape-the-room game that wouldn’t frustrate me too much. I’m afraid if I get too stressed out I’ll only be able to calm myself by stepping on all of Liza’s bugs and hearing them pop like bubble wrap.

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“We’re going to the gardens, but don’t roll around in the sand.”

“Noodles go in your mouth, but your plastic snake doesn’t.”

“No shrieking while dad’s on the phone.”

“Sure, grab some pretzels from the pantry while we sleep in.”

“If you’re going to squash your sister, do it gently.”

“Get off the couch with your peanut butter hands!”

“Don’t wake us up from our nap, just go play on the computer.”

“Don’t carry the dog ball around in your mouth.”

“Dad’s underwear doesn’t go on your head.”

“Please, just let me go to the bathroom by myself.”

The joys of parenthood are often countless.

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Eli’s been going to kindergarten for a few weeks now, and it’s about to kill me. It’s my job to take him to school, which involves me getting up earlier than I’m used to. Once upon a time I was a morning person, but then I became an adult and discovered that I could stay up stupid late reading or playing videogames, at which point my early morning leaps out of bed became a thing of the past.

Not now–at least for the “getting out of bed” part. The leaping has been replaced by me hitting snooze at least once before rolling stiffly out of bed. Each morning I calculate how many days are left before Eli can drive himself to school.

Eli loves school. Class is fun. Recess is fun. The bus ride home is fun, even if there are the two “mean girls” on there. “Why are they mean?” I asked him.

“They said I was bossy,” Eli replied. Go figure.

The whole exercise emphasizes how much he’s changed. Sometime when I wasn’t looking he became a long, lanky boy, all elbows and knees and enthusiasm. Our morning routine is set. We pile into my car, him with his backpack that’s nearly as large as he is, me with my travel mug of decaf coffee. On the way we listen to “Shut Your Eyes” or Spoon’s “song about dogs”. When we pull into the car riders’ line, he takes off his seat belt and puts his backpack on. I see him grinning at me in the rearview mirror. The teacher signals all-clear and he’s out the door, barely able to stop and give me a goodbye hug before he tucks his head down and pelts into the school. He runs forward into the future, while I drive off into history.

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Remember when Liza didn’t sleep?

This is where she fell asleep this afternoon. I was on the phone and when I went to her room to rock her and put her down for nap, this is how I found her.

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This is how Megan and I keep our kids out of trouble. See how it works?

From our weekend at the lake in Arkansas. You can imagine the kind of birthday May had with all her grandchildren in one spot.

The obligatory grandchildren on a brown couch photo. As Andrew said, “Everywhere we go, there are brown leather couches.”

See? More brown couches. This time with the optional box attachment.

I don’t know why we’ve never gotten a photo with the kids and ¡Tim! so here’s one for the record books.

This photo cracks me up. Everyone is doing exactly what they do best in this photo.

Finally, Eli’s first day of school. I can’t wait for him to get home and tell me all about it.

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I attended kindergarten in a squat nondescript 1960s-era building. Years later I had some of my 8th grade classes there when my hometown decided to add 7th grade to the junior high school and that school ended up annexing the building. In January of that year I walked into the building to hear that the Space Shuttle Challenger had disintegrated.

But the bad memories started in kindergarten. I had the misfortune of having a teacher who wasn’t quite sure what to do with young hyperactive me. I had given up naps long before I went to school, yet the teacher was determined that I’d lie down on a mat and close my eyes. I worked long and hard at that.

And yet, the teacher knew there was something wrong with me. Eventually she pulled my parents aside. “I think he may be anti-social and I think he may be slow. You should have him tested.”

My mom, of course, freaked the hell out. There was something wrong with her first-born son! My dad the university professor got one of his colleagues in psychology to run me through a battery of tests.

The result: my IQ was more than fine and I seemed socially well adapted. “He’s reading?” he asked my parents. “My guess is he’s bored out of his mind.”

At one point in the school year, when I was sitting on the toilet, another kid peed on me. Later they weren’t going to let me graduate from kindergarten because I didn’t know how to skip, so I got to spend weeks learning how.

Here’s hoping Eli’s memories are better!

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We rushed home from our weekend visiting with Stephen’s family to attend open house at Eli’s school.

I expected the school to look like the elementary school I attended: one very long hallway with second grade at the end nearest the offices and stretching to fifth grade at the far end, and Kindergarten, first grade, and sixth grade outside the building in trailers for reasons I never quite understood.

I started Kindergarten in a trailer near the cafeteria. It had dark paneling (I did start school in the 70s) and the bathroom was in a separate building. I remember this very clearly because every day at nap time, I cried so hard I had to go to the bathroom to pull myself together. I don’t know now why I cried. I enjoyed the other kids and getting to go to one of the first grade rooms for reading. It’s true I didn’t get along with my teacher but that doesn’t seem like the reason in retrospect.

I carried all of those memories with me into Eli’s classroom. His is bright with giant windows. There’s a rug at the front of the room near the white board. There are more books in his classroom than in the children’s department of the public library behind our house, maybe more than is in the whole library. There’s a pretend kitchen and a corner that looks like a shrunken mad-scientist lab. The teacher’s desk is a low table. She has three lamps at different locations; it looks as if you could curl up and spend the day reading if you needed to take a break. Like the mom in Tom Goes to Kindergarten, I’m pretty sure that I’m going to want to continue going to Kindergarten after the first day.

In those first few moments as I was taking in the place where Eli will have his first formal educational experiences, I have to admit I teared up a little. Because without even knowing I wanted it, I know just from looking around that room and meeting his teacher that he’s going to have better memories than I do. It makes the transition a little easier for me to bear.

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As Eli has gotten older, he’s learned that he can’t always get what he wants. This has led to him developing new strategies to try to get his way. He cajoles. He whines. He argues. He suggests. But best of all, he issues threats.

What’s great is that he hasn’t yet learned that his threat should be something that the other person doesn’t want to happen. Sometimes Liza will be playing with a toy Eli wants, so he’ll shout, “If you don’t give me that toy right now, I’m leaving!” Other common threats include “I’m going to stop talking!” and the ever-popular “I won’t give you this toy that you don’t care about!”

The best, though, was this morning. He and Liza were on our bed rolling around when I heard Eli say, “Liza, if you don’t, I’m not going to put my foot in your face!”

Originally published at Live Granades. Please leave any comments there.

and the less often heard sounds of cooperation:

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What I’ve been working on:

…but maybe not so much today since Liza woke up grumpy and Eli’s ability to bug the crap out of her is up to gold medal proportions this morning. I’m not sure what I’m going to do to turn the day around. If anyone has any ideas, I’m all ears!

Originally published at Live Granades. Please leave any comments there.

We ended our Fourth of July vacation as we began it: driving in the car. We were half-way between Little Rock and Memphis, an area slightly less populated than the middle of Wyoming. As we sailed past the only rest stop in miles and miles, Liza sang out, “I’m stinky!”

Misty confirmed that, yes, her diaper needed changing. “Look at my poop hands!” Liza said, displaying her mighty poop hands while I looked for the next exit. About three years later I found one and pulled off the interstate. The only place to change her was on a gravel road leading to a field.

We plopped her on the side of the road and performed our best Bo-and-Luke-Duke fast-change routine. We were partway through when I looked up at a tractor that was patiently waiting to drive into the field. We finished up and got in the car. “That’s a John Deere tractor!” Eli said as we drove away.

That wasn’t the most surreal vacation moment. The most surreal moment came during lunch on Saturday. We were following the American tradition of having sushi for the Fourth of July. Liza was tearing through a cucumber roll while Eli picked daintily at his peanut butter and jelly sandwich. The restaurant’s TVs were showing ESPN, which was carrying the Nathan’s hot dog eating contest.

Have you ever watched this thing? It’s like a train wreck involving pallets of Wonder Bread and the wienermobile. At one point I stared at contestant Joey Chesnut, whose mouth was encrusted with bits of hot dog bun as if starring in a porn movie sponsored by the Food Network, and wasn’t sure I could finish my meal.

So in conclusion: USA! USA! USA!

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We have reached a magical point in rearing Eli and Liza: occasionally they go off and play together for up to an hour. It’s like how Furbys would sometimes spontaneously talk to each other, except Eli and Liza have no off switch. The two of them will come wandering through the room, each pushing a small shopping cart or baby stroller filled with random junk, or they’ll climb up on Eli’s bed and roll around and hide under pillows and fall down yelling, “TIMBAAAAAH!”

They don’t do this consistently, of course. There’s always the problem of toys and who has what. Eli and Liza have to go through their own version of the Great Compromise in divvying up toys, which I guess means Eli is Virginia in this metaphor and Liza is Delaware, so let’s move on, shall we? Eli sees Liza with a toy and decides that he has to have that toy right now Right Now RIGHT NOW! If Liza won’t let him have it, he sniffles, shoulders slumping, as he says, “She’s never going to let me have it! I’ll never see it again!”

Sometimes Eli realizes Liza wants certain toys that he’s done playing with, so he takes them, throws them in his room, and closes the door. If he could set them on fire and scatter the ashes just to deny Liza the pleasure of playing with them, he’d do it.

Sometimes Eli can con Liza. He finds another toy and applies his best used-car salesman tactics. “Liza, do you want this robot? If you want this robot you have to give me the balloon. Give me the balloon and you can have the robot!”

His negotiation tactics still need work. One time last week he told Liza, “Can I have that toy? If you don’t give it to me, I’m leaving!” Liza looked up at Eli and said, “Nope.” Eli shuffled off slowly, looking back the whole time, so Liza gave him a “how can I miss you if you won’t ever leave?” look.

They even fight over bugs. We’ve had a minor infestation of small black beetles. Liza has paroxysms of joy when she sees one. “Hiiii, bug! Hiiii! Look! He’s running! He wants to play wif me!” She’ll pick the poor beetle up, traumatizing it for the rest of its very short life. Eli naturally demands his turn. “When do I get to play with the beetle?”

I can only imagine what’ll happen when they discover cockroaches.

Originally published at Live Granades. Please leave any comments there.

It’s been a long time since I’ve posted about any scary kids’ toys. I don’t know if that’s because Eli and Liza’s toys have gotten less scary or because I’ve grown desensitized to them. If it’s the latter, then I’ve finally found a toy to shock me out of my complacency.

Meet Ribby the frog.

Ribby doesn’t look too bad. He’s a cute purple color, with a sweet smile and –

Aaah! Make it stop!

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My mom saved a couple of boxes of my children’s books for me to give my kids. They’ve sat in the bottom of Eli’s closet since before there was an Eli. He’s looked through the books off and on a couple of times and has come up with a few gems that he likes to read. Curiously, the ones he’s picked out are some of the ones that were my favorites. In fact, I think he’s come up with three out of about my top five favorites.

Gus was a friendly ghost is one of them. It’s a kitschy 60s book with decent line drawings. Gus has a dashed outline that I’ve always itched to cut out. (I’ll have to ask Eli if he feels the same way.) My mom always groaned when I pulled Gus off the shelf. It’s amazingly long for a picture book. It takes 15-20 minutes to read and that’s why my mom hated it. It’s why I hate to see it come off the shelf as well. Often, if it’s late and we’ve had a long day I veto it because of its length.

Saturday night though, we read it and it was fabulous. When we opened it, Eli had to examine my five-year-old signature in the front of the book. Eli laughed at all the things in the story I thought was funny when I was a kid: “…on account of mice.” I cracked up the both of us reading it. We had a long discussion of what Tapioca is and why Mouse liked it so well. And when Gus gets mad at Mouse both of us were in the dumps as well.

The 20 minutes I spent reading that book was one of those times I live for as a parent. So thanks go to my mom for making me save those books all these years.

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The list is long but boils down to this: trying to acclimate to Eli’s last summer before school starts.

In an effort to keep things light this summer, I didn’t schedule any camps or lessons of any kind for the kids. Ironic, since this is the first summer Eli’s been old enough to be eligible for most activities that run in the summer. Instead I opted for just hanging out with our friends, especially the ones with pools, and getting Eli extra time with Josh before they go to separate schools in the fall.

We’ve gone and developed quite the schedule anyway. Mondays we play at church. Tuesdays are my morning off. A girl from church is coming over to keep the kids so I can run errands or grocery shop alone, which is a mother’s nirvana. Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays haven’t quite settled out yet but will be some order or combination of going to the Botanical Gardens, spending time with Josh and his family or having Hallie over so the two of us can experiment in the kitchen.

This summer is already more bittersweet than I expected it to be. Eli is so ready for school, I’ve been saying it for a year now. And yet. And yet. It seems a giant corner to turn. A street he will go down mostly without me. I thought I would have NO problem with that. I’m looking at the couple of months until school starts and I’m wondering what else we can pack in before he goes.

The big news around here is another dishwasher leak. The first one, Stephen and his dad repaired in a day and cost less than $20. This time, the part wasn’t in stock so today marks a week of me washing dishes. It’s still not going to cost very much to repair the dishwasher and Stephen can do it. The bad news of the story is the slow leak ruined the kitchen floor. I had the folks who installed the hardwoods send someone to look at it and he gave us an $800 estimate. We’re thinking about replacing the hardwood with tile since this is the third time in seven years we’ve had water damage somewhere in the kitchen.

In crafting news, I’ve been working on a cross-stitch for hire job. It’s a lovely set of lighthouses that I need to get done before October.

And making notebooks for folks. I’ve made and given away a few and made a few more. I especially like making them now that I have an actual paper guillotine instead the 1-sheet cutter I used when I first started the process.

(Yes, I know Narwhal is misspelled. They’ve sent me a new card to replace that one.)

So all in all, shaping up to be a really busy summer. I’ll make sure to take my camera to the gardens this week so I can post some new photos.

Originally published at Live Granades. Please leave any comments there.

Several years ago, Eli climbed into a dog cage, so of course we took a picture. Ten months later we got hate mail about it.

A few months ago, comic book writer Matt Fraction took a picture of his kid in a dog crate.

Because my mind works lighting fast, yesterday I thought, “I wonder how many pictures of kids in dog crates I can find.”

The answer? Lots and lots and lots and even more lots. Enough lots for thousands of pillars of salt.

One kid in a dog cage!

TWO kids in a dog cage!

THREE kids in a dog cage!

FOUR KIDS IN A CAGE!

Sometimes the kids are dangerous.

Sometimes they are cloned.

I feel like I have stumbled into a subculture I never knew existed, like finding out that people write WOPR/KITT slashfic. I think I’m going to declare this a new movement, write a book, and get on Oprah. Clearly it’s time parents stopped claiming that their kids aren’t like pets at all.

Originally published at Live Granades. Please leave any comments there.

Eli and Liza are addicted to Wow! Wow! Wubbzy!, a kid’s show on Nickelodeon — and with reason. The art direction’s fabulous and the stories are fun. One of the characters, Widget, is always making the something-or-other 3000, a habit that Eli has picked up. “Look, dad!” he says, brandishing a tinkertoy creation. “My Robot Walker 3000!”

It’s possible I’ve become addicted to it, too, because I’ve found myself thinking about it far more than I probably should. Specifically, I’ve been thinking about how the show handles gender.

Take a look at the first season’s theme.

As shown in this picture, there are three main characters: Walden, Wubbzy, and Widget. Walden reads as male, with his deeper semi-Australian voice and his ties and all. Widget is clearly female, which is awesome — she’s a tinkerer and a builder, and plays against the male engineer stereotype.

Wubbzy is more ambiguous. He’s identified in the theme song as a he, and he does like kickety-kick ball, but he’s not overtly color-coded like Walden and Widget. He mainly reads as a young kid, though everyone undoubtedly defaults to thinking of him as male.

Now here’s the theme for Season 2.

You may have noticed Daizy has been shoehorned into the theme.

Daizy likes to grow flowers. She’s often en pointe. She enjoys dressing up and sewing. Her favorite phrase is “lavender lollipops!” In one episode she finds a uni-horn whom she names Princess.

She could not be more of a stereotypical little girl if she spent every episode playing with dolls.

I couldn’t find any information about why Daizy was added to the lineup, so what follows is rampant speculation. But I imagine the creators or the network wanted to add a character that they thought young girls would identify more strongly with. Widget, despite being super-awesome, comes across as more of an adult than Wubbzy, and Wubbzy, by virtue of our society’s defaults, is male. So they added a character “for girls”.

So why is she a girl turned up to 11? Wubbzy doesn’t embody every boy stereotype; why must Daizy be a super girly girl? This strikes me as being along the same lines as Marvel’s attempts to pitch comic books to women. “Chicks like dress-up, right? And ponies? We’ve got to have a pony in there.”

Liza and Eli won’t notice any of this, not overtly. But they’ll absorb it, and it’ll got woven into their default view of the world. How excited should Liza be that Wow! Wow! Wubbzy! has created a character for her to identify with, only to barely squeeze her into the opening theme and to make her Wubbzy’s sidekick who, oh yes, happens to really like him?