terror in a onesie

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

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!

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

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.

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

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?

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

You turned two this week, roughly five weeks and a day after you turned one. It probably went by so quickly because you’re always in motion. I only thought you were fast when you were one. These days we can track whether you’re coming or going by the Doppler shift of your voice.

You have so many different ways of moving now. Your stiff-legged gait has turned into a flat-out run, your limbs moving as if they all want to go in different directions. You jump around, reaching heights of one or two inches. You sway back and forth as if auditioning for one of Jodie Foster’s old roles. You dance — oh, how you dance. One time I showed you how you could stand on my feet and we could dance together. Now you’ll come over and stare up at me, arms lifted. “Dance?” you’ll ask.

That’s all part and parcel of my assigned role of jungle gym. You love riding on my shoulders, even if occasionally you lean over and lick the top of my head. If I sit on the floor, that’s your cue to push me over and climb on top of me, hopping up and down enthusiastically. If I sit in my chair, that’s a different matter. That means it’s time to read.

Not all of your motion is so delightful. You’ve decided that tantrums are often the order of the day. I don’t know why, since they don’t work. You stomp and huff and shriek, staring at your feet like the singer of a bad indie band, and your mom and I just shrug. Tantrums are slightly more effective than The Secret for getting you what you want.

Thankfully you can now tell us what you’re thinking, and your speech is full of marvelous toddlerisms. Your brother taught me that you’ll be speaking plainly before I know it, so I’m treasuring the moments when you smile sweetly and say, “AAAAAAHHHHH! CAAAAAAAKE!” Feel free to substitute “milkshake” for “cake” in that last sentence, given that all of your meals would be cake and milkshakes if we’d let them. Eli may be addicted to carbohydrates, but you’ve learned the pleasures of simple syrup and Dutch-processed cocoa powder.

We’re past your worst sleep issues, thank goodness. There was a time when I would have happily picked someone off the street and given them you, a gunny sack, and directions to the nearest river if it meant we could have five hours of uninterrupted sleep. These days you go to bed willingly and happily. The first time I was rocking you after read you a story and you said, “I go inna bed,” and pointed at your crib, I double-checked to make sure you were still Liza. You even pick who gets the privelege of taking you to bed. “I want daddy put you a bed,” you say with a toddler’s loose grasp of subject and object. Colds still greatly affect your sleep schedule, as do the sixty-seven new teeth you’ve cut. We’ve got lots of experience dealing with you when you’re tired and cranky. Maybe you have some shark in you and are developing several rows of teeth.

You’ve already well-versed at focusing on what interests you. You draw and draw, scribbling crayon or pencil across pages and onto your little Ikea table, which already looks like it lost a war against markers. You pick up books and stare intently at them, attempting to ferret out the story that you know is in there somewhere. You love stealing Eli’s little cars and driving them around the house making quiet “beep! beep!” noises.

The funniest is how you play dress-up. I don’t know if this is really something girls instinctively do or not, but you’re a big fan of dragging everything out of your drawers and putting them on. It doesn’t even have to be your clothes. One morning I turned around and you’d taken a pair of shorts I’d worn yesterday and draped them around your neck.

You’re a big fan of animals, even if some of them do scare you a bit. You’re fascinated by dogs, so long as they don’t move or bark or breathe. If we ask you what a butterfly says, you’ll obligingly flap your hands and say, “Lop lop lop.” It’s especially great to hear you greet insects. “Beeee!” you’ll say excitedly. “Beeeee! Hiiiii beeee!” Last week you found a dead spider in our bathroom. “Hiiiiiii, spidah!” you said, waving at him. “Hiii! Hiiii spidah!” Then you picked him up. “I carry him. I carry him. Hi, spidah.” Mom told you to throw him away, but on your way to the trash can you decided to toss him in the toilet instead. “He swimming,” you told us. “He swimming now.”

Your relationship with Eli is coming along nicely. As an older brother myself, I knew what Eli would do, and he’s fulfilled my predictions nicely: he wants you to pay attention to him except when he doesn’t, and he wants whatever toys you have. You love Eli unconditionally. When he’s not around you wander the house calling him. That doesn’t stop you from not wanting him to take your toys. I now know the exact pitch of your shriek that means, “Hey, Eli, give me that back!” Your first words may have been “mommy” and “daddy”, but not long after you were saying “Eli’s”. I didn’t realize how quickly you’d learn about possessive nouns.

Right now you’re an odd mix of bravery and caution. Socially you’re cautious around new people, but physically you’re extremely brave. Two months ago you were jumping on Eli’s bed and fell face-first into the headboard. Your nose and cheeks swelled up while blood trickled down your face. You cried so long and so hard that I was afraid you’d be unable to breathe. This happpened, of course, right before bedtime, so I called our pediatrician’s answering service to find out if he thought you’d broken your nose. While I waited for him to call back, you calmed down. Then you tried to climb on one of Eli’s big bouncy balls and jump up and down on it.

That mix of caution and bravery, of motion and sound, is part of what makes you you. I am so excited and privileged to get to know you and see what kind of person you become. I love to play with you, taking part in the pretend play you’ve started doing. When you fall off the slide and come running to me, I pick you up and comfort you. But I know that won’t last long, and indeed you quickly demand to be put down so you can run back to the slide, tears still streaming from your eyes.

Tonight Pop was pushing you in your swing. Higher and higher you went, shrieking and laughing. “SWING ME! SWING ME!” you told him, and as I watched, I wondered just how high you would go.

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

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

I like fish!

I! Like! Fish!

This, in fact, is one of the songs Liza sings every once in a while.

The whole thing is from the TV show Yo Gabba Gabba. It’s astoundingly awesome, but it’s also clearly the kind of kids’ show that college students in 2025 will stream so they can giggle at it while they get high.

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

Hey, look, we got our friend Matthew Amster-Burton’s new book, “Hungry Monkey”!

Matthew’s a food writer whose daughter, Iris, is about three months older than Eli. His book combines helpful guidance, recipes, and awesomely funny writing while avoiding that strident, chiding tone so common to books that have anything to do with parenting. I’ve seen the book filed under “child care”, but calling “Hungry Monkey” a parenting book is like calling “Travels with Charley” a travel guide. “Hungry Monkey” is more a collection of entertaining essays about the travails of trying to feed a young kid. Here’s Matthew on why he didn’t feed Iris baby cereal when she started eating solid foods.

Some people deplore baby cereal, saying it gives kids an appetite for bland carbohydrates. These people presumably hang out with the mom who thinks she can keep her son away from pictures of breasts. We had a much better reason for rejecting baby cereal: everyone else starts with baby cereal, and we didn’t want to be like everyone else. I swear this sounded like a good reason at the time.

Unlike books such as “Super Baby Food”, “Hungry Monkey” is light on the kind of advice that should be accompanied by a wagging finger. Matthew’s thesis is simple: there is no such thing as baby food. It’s fine to let them try what you’re eating, and you don’t have to be crazy anxious about feeding your kid.

Matthew changed how we fed Eli and Liza. We started Eli on bland cereal, then began working our way through numbered Gerber baby food as if they were a counting book. In contrast, Liza’s eaten what we eat since she could grab it from our plates and shove it in her mouth. At nine months she was scarfing down spicy potatoes and tofu. Her face turned red and she coughed until we thought she’d pass out, but she kept eating it and demanding more. And she’s lived to be two so far!

I was especially pleased with how Matthew includes science with his advice. Where the science is lacking, Matthew falls back on the fact that your taste buds are smart; listen to them.

For me, the book’s real strength is that it recognizes how frustrating and hard feeding kids can be without giving in to parental despair, even if your kid eats frozen pizzas without waiting for you to cook them.

Feeding a young child is stressful and unpredictable, you do whatever it takes to make it work, and the job is never done. But you could say the same thing about snowboarding or touring with the Rolling Stones. “Stressful and unpredictable” doesn’t preclude fun.

And this book is fun. It’s got great recipes and funny stories. Don’t take my word for it, though. Matthew has the first three chapters up on his book’s website. Read those, then go buy the book. You’ll have a great time with it.

And I’m not just saying that because I’m in the acknowledgments.

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

A week or so ago we went to a bluegrass music festival here in town. We ended up leaving early because the kids were crazed but the pictures I snatched before we left look like we are having an awesome time.

The best photo of Will and Luke I’ve taken by like 1000%.

Thursday I had Emily for a few hours because of swine flu school closings. The girls had a blast.

Friday we were making up anything we could to fill up a few hours.

Did I mention that by Saturday we’d run out of things to do inside the house?

Yes, Eli’s toes are painted blue. He wanted to and hey, at least I used a boy color.

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

See? I do still remember how to post! We’ve had the stomach bug and now we’ve progressed on to the head cold bug. But never fear there are still cute photos of the kids to fill in the gaps between my actual posts.

This is what Liza does in the morning.

This is how Liza watches TV.

Eli’s Easter Haul.

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

Wubbzy lives in a tree.

He likes to play.

Play.

PLAY.

He’s got a bendy tail.

And he LIKES IT THAT WAY.

For context watch this video. Watch it twice and you will never get the song out of your head.

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

When Eli was Liza’s age (around 2) he was decidedly uninterested in coloring. He did not want to play with paper or crayons or markers or paint. You can well imagine how sad this made me. But I dealt with it, thinking he would learn to be creative in other ways.

I got the book The Creative Family: How to Encourage Imagination and Nurture Family Connections for Christmas. And while it has some fabulous projects, I’ve still been a bit stymied on how to encourage Eli and Liza’s creativity.

This week I think I’ve finally figured it out.

My side of the office looks like the craft tornado hit it. I’ve been on a new tear of making Artist Trading Cards so there is paper, stamps and stacks of materials on the floor and I have tools all over my desk: watercolor pencils, glitter glue, paper cutter and drying cards. Several times this week Eli has asked to work on a ‘project’. (Wonder where he’s heard that word?)

So what I’ve figured out is: what encourages them to be creative is to see me be creative on a daily basis. If I’m working they want to get in there and make something as well.

Check out Eli’s feet in this photo!

This afternoon Eli wanted to make a picture for his best buddy Josh. He got in the office (behind the baby gate–Liza is never allowed in the office unsupervised) where all the gear is spread out and started working:

Liza and I sat in the hall so she could draw with markers:

Sitting in the hall with Liza telling me what color each marker was, I had the moment where I wondered why all of our days can’t be like this.

While I was writing this post, Liza pulled a flower pot off of the piano and made a giant mess. So the moment has completely passed and we are back to normal around here.

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

Liza has discovered dress up:

and dancing on Daddy’s feet:

and strawberry bread:

and the fact that big brother is the best thing since the strawberry bread.

Eli has discovered if he helps cook he gets first dibs on licking cake batter:

and sometimes close is too close to his little sister:

and that it’s true if you leave your food out, bugs will come and eat it:

and his favorite storybook characters live at the Children’s Garden at the Huntsville Botanical Garden.

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

“So I press Tivo Man and that brings up the menu. Then I do ‘Now Playing’ and press select. Then I find ‘Wow Wow Wubzy’. Then I press select. Then I pick a show and press play.”

It occurs to me that Eli will never know a time when you couldn’t choose what TV show you wanted to watch when, or when you couldn’t pause and rewind TV. He also is used to the idea that you can listen to whatever songs you want anywhere in the house, or even if you’re riding in the car. And for him, phones aren’t things that are fixed in place.

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

by Eli

Once upon a time, there was a green-headed robot. He was lonely and very sad. But…he had no friends. But then one day, he met a purple-headed robot, Joe.

“How do you do, Joe?” said Sparky. (Mom, the purple-headed one is Sparky.)

“Good!” said Joe.

“Good!” said Sparky.

“But we don’t have any more friends!”

“You’re right!” said Sparky.

“We better go to the enchanted grove to get one.”

“Let’s go!” They said. And off they went.

When they got there, they found two other robots. The yellow-headed robot was Speedy. The blue-headed robot was Eddie. So they became best friends. Really best friends.

The End

Thanks to Kat for the cool make-your-own robots. (Boy do you know this kid or what?)

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

Ever wonder what we do around here on Saturday morning? I know, how have you gotten on this long without having this knowledge?

Here’s the answer to your burning question: Donuts.

I’ve always meant to fry some biscuits to make donuts and haven’t ever done it. (Is there anything more Southern than this? Maybe frying pickles, that’s the best I can think of.) This morning I got brave and tried it. The results: powdered sugar everywhere. The kids like to dunk their own.

Liza especially loved licking the outer coating of sugar off of the donuts. She was unsure how to proceed after she got all of the sugar off though.

She finally figured it out and ate her fair share.

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

After the success of outsourcing last year’s birthday party to JumpZone!, we decided to do something similar this year. We let you choose where we’d have the party, which is how we ended up at Chuck E. Cheese’s. You’ve been a fan of the pizza rat for a while, even if his restaurant makes your parents’ heads hurt, so we said yes. You were so excited, and you had so many tokens to spend!

Ten minutes later you’d spent all of your tokens and were miserable.

This has been the Year When You Learned to Read. You’d been showing signs of reading for a while, but we weren’t sure whether you were really reading or just reciting from memory. On our Christmas trip back to Arkansas, you and I got into Pop Don’s car to go to the grocery store. You saw the Calvin sticker on the back of his truck and said, “Look, dad! That says ‘Fords suck!’” And thanks to you reading, your mom and I can now sleep late. You happily go to the kitchen, grab the giant tub of pretzels, take it back to your room, and read quietly to yourself while scattering pretzel crumbs everywhere. This is what we call “advanced parenting”.

I don’t know if it’s due to your reading, but your story-telling tendencies have really increased. One morning you came into our bathroom while I was getting ready for work. You opened a drawer and found a three-pack of floss. “Look!” you said. “This floss is green, and this one is a different kind of green, but this one is white.” You hauled them all out and onto the counter. “The flosses are going on a trip. Look, here they go, they’re going up Scope Mountain.”

Your creativity extends to re-writing the rules to board games. You got May to play one boardgame with you. She sceptically asked, “Is this really how you play the game?” after you explained how the pieces all had to hop over each other and then you spun the spinner and then you got to take all of the game tiles. “Oh, yes,” you said.

Most every night, after Liza has gone to bed, we play videogames. I say “we play,” when what I mean is that “I play videogames, and you tell me what to do.” Sometimes you even let mom play. Your love of story above all else has helped decide what we play. You loved Psychonauts, but had no interest in Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz despite its much higher monkey-to-gameplay ratio. We’re working our way through Kingdom Hearts now, so all of your questions are about the Heartless and why that skeleton guy is so tall.

Even though you’re now five, you still need naps, even if we can’t convince you of that. Whenever you are tired or hungry — or both! — then you grown twenty extra arms and can’t be still. If we could keep you from sleeping or eating for two days, I’m convinced you’d develop superpowers and go on to have a dramatic and fulfilling life until finally merging with the Speed Force.

This year we took you to the theatre for the first time. We saw Wall-E, which you loved because ROBOTS. Even before the movie you were fascinated with robots. You have robot t-shirts. Mom made you robot thaumatrope invitations for your birthday party and robot buttons as gifts for everyone who came. Every morning, as I leave for work, you tell me, “Be careful! Don’t run into any robots!”

I’ve been fascinated watching you become a more independent person. You play on your own more, and there are times that you shoo your mom and me away. You’re learning how to deal with your emotions. Temper tantrums have become a regular fixture, as have demands and threats. It’s all we can do to keep from laughing, though, when you tell us, “If you don’t do what I want, then I’m not going to play with you now!” That threat is emptier than Pellucidar, coming from a boy who has trouble breathing if people aren’t watching him do it. You’ve also started talking back to us. “Whatever,” you say, channeling your thirteen-year-old self.

Say, did you know you have a sister? Liza now walks and talks and forces you to interact with her. She idolizes you, you know. And there are times when you are lovingly, achingly sweet towards her. Two minutes later you’re picking her up and dragging her around like a sack of wet cats. “She won’t get out of my room!” you yell over her shrieks.

I’ve been hard on you a lot this year. I’ve been tired and sick, and too often I’ve taken it out on you. I think that’s what happens to parents. When I’ve been really strict, I look at you, see an echo of how you looked when you were one, and realize that you’ll be gone before I know it.

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

These days, Liza says a lot of words. You can only understand a handful of them, of course, and then only if she points to the object she’s referring to, but she’s gone beyond what she could say in June!

Er, except she still likes talking about butterflies.

But there are a lot of other animals she likes to talk about! Like birds.

And ducks.

And elephants.

And frogs.

And monkeys. (Gosh, she knows what a lot of animals say.)

And pterodactyls!

And dinosaurs! (Generic ones, I guess.)

Of course, she’s interested in things other than animals. For example, she talks about food a lot. She’s fond of blueberries.

While she likes bananas in general, when they’re baked into bread, she’s in love.

Nothing, though, beats cake. Just tonight we were reading a book and she became very excited when she saw a cake on one page.

She’s started singing songs, and when she gets started, it can be hard to get her to stop. Here’s the first part of her singing “Deep and Wide”.

Liza likes “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star”, but she tends to get distracted by making twinkly star hand motions.

A number of her songs come from Yo Gabba Gabba, like this one.

One of her favorite songs from the show is I Like Fish. The lyrics are: “I like fish. I! Like! Fish! I like fish! I! LIKE! FISH!” You can imagine what we think of the song.

When I was recording Liza, she was fascinated by the microphone.

Liza’s fond of splashing in the tub. Of course, she has to narrate what she’s doing.

Back in the summer, she liked asking, “What’s that?” She doesn’t do that any more. Now she asks, “What’s this?”

I love how she says “yes” and “no”.

And now the sound that kills me every time she makes it.