Alex's Latest Thing

Alex's latest thing, other than SCOLDING HIS BROTHERS IN ALL CAPS when they infringe on his Legos (and, since he shares his room with a 2-yr-old and keeps Legos in that room to play with in the morning when he wakes ups and his hollering at Tim wakes ME up, this is a frequent and very wrath-inducing occurrence) is to complain as if the world is ending in earshot of someone who might be able to give him the answers or items he seeks, instead of, say, asking politely.

For example, "I'll bet we'll NEVER have dinner ever again!" subs for "Mom, could you please tell me when we'll be eating dinner?" And I'm sure you can all guess how much patience I have for such a combination of complaint and melodrama.

So tonight when he wandered into the kitchen and muttered, "I wonder WHEN dinner will be!" I coached him along.

"Well, you'll have to keep wondering since you can't seem to find anyone to ask politely about dinner time."

He gave a huge sigh and said, "Mom, could you please tell me when dinner is?"

I looked at the timer. "In twenty-eight minutes."

A pause, another sigh. "Mom, could you please tell me how long 28 minutes is?"

I admit, I was stumped.

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(I eventually told him, "Long enough for you to have an apple while you're waiting." Hey, dinner was Spaghetti Pie, so I knew he'd eat it, plus he loves apples and apples are fruit and healthier than the spag pie he was waiting on, and there is probably no other non-Lego item that could keep him occupied for even a fraction of 28 minutes...)

Interfaith Playdates, 2009 (or 5770, if you like)

Across the street we have a cute Bot-aged little guy who USED TO COME OVER AND SPEAK IN ALL CAPS AS HIS WAY OF MAKING SURE HE WAS HEARD AND HEEDED AT ALL TIMES. Sometime between now and Jake sitting at the Blue and Gold Cub Scout dinner at the same table with the kid and worrying that three feet was not outside the spitting-bread-while-TALKING-IN-ALL-CAPS range of this child, he has matured in all respects and is even known to speak in quieter tones -- when I can hear him over Bot, who has TAKEN TO TALKING IN CAPS WHEN HIS FRIENDS ARE OVER.

Anyway, back when we first met him, he and Liam has a lengthy discussion in the back of the van one day about the differences between Jews and Christians. I can't remember the details, but I remember they were adorably serious to the point of hilarity. The kid clearly is well aware that he is Jewish and that Christians and Jews are different, and is eager to point out and mention these differences at every opportunity.

So yesterday, after sending the boys outside....Well, I sent them outside under some duress. You see, joining these Friday playdates recently are Chris and Gabe, our beloved buddies from our old house on Gregory. Since Nikki picks them up from school, she can also pick up Truman so I don't have to drive up the to the school and retrieve him from the After School program after Garrett's bus comes in. One Friday, Nikki went to pick up Tru as she'd been doing for three Fridays and Truman insisted that his dad was picking him up and he was not coming to my house that day. I called to inform the dad of this, since After School only goes to a certain point in the afternoon and I didn't want him to miss the closing time and get charged for late pick-up because he thought Tru was with me. The dad informed me that no doubt his son simply wanted to play on the computer in the computer lab, but he had plenty enough time on the computer in general and he should have more time with his friends playing and running and using his imagination, and that he would inform his son that if Nikki or I ever came to pick him up, he should go with us.

So when they showed up at my house with Chris and Truman extolling the virtues of Club Penguin, some children's online thing I've heard about because Truman lent his Club Penguin Handbook to Bot and Bot kept leaving it all over the house and I kept carefully putting it aside because it was not one of our books and I knew the kid would want it back when I was least expecting it, I put off letting them go on the computer by telling them that they should go outside now while it was not yet dark to see the two plastic playhouses we recently acquired (Kayleigh made friends with a lady in line at Bed Bath and Beyond who had one fourteen-yr-old and was getting rid of the little-kid toys in her yard, so she gave me her number and we went and got a little plastic log cabin from her. While Jake was heroically taking the thing apart, a friend of hers called and asked what she was doing, so she told her about this guy with eight kids taking her log cabin apart and the friend said, "Hey, we have a cute little house like that in our yard the kids don't play with anymore, do you think he wants another one?" I'm set to open a daycare in our yard if my own kids didn't already put me over the required child/adult ratios...)

"So, we have to go outside?"

"Yeah, you can go outside! One of the houses has a doorbell! And I'll bring your snack out there--hurry up, before it gets dark, you only have a little while before it gets dark!"

Out they went. When they came in and stated solemnly, "Um, Sue?

It's getting dark, so...."

I knew they were looking to get on the computer, but I put on a clueless look. "It is? OK, here!" and handed them a flashlight.

The conversation didn't go they way they expected, but hey, they had a flashlight, so back out they went. When they finally came in for good, I let them go on the computer, but after half an hour I called in to Bot that they only had five minutes. Chris came out and said, "Wow, and Bot hasn't even had a chance yet!"

Turns out Truman had "helped" Bot get a few items for his penguin, and play a few games, and such, and so when I explained that if your hand is on the mouse, it's your turn, so if it's not your turn, your hand must be off the mouse, and so on. Then I got a long litany of "And then I.....And then I....And then I....." concluding with "And now the screen is just sitting here and won't DO anything!"

"Oh, well, gee, I'm sure Liam could help you but he and Nick are playing Xbox and Nick has to leave soon for his hockey game, so I hate to interrupt them. Go do something else until the older boys are free." No way I was going to let on that *I* could possibly be of any help.

Then lots of complaining and whining started about who did what wrong to mess up whose turn (and yes, Truman, in his painful withdrawal from the computer, began to complain that he never even GOT his BOOK back), so I walked by, handed them the book, and pointedly and loudly commented, "WOW, if this is what it's like when you guys get on the computer, maybe we should avoid the computer from now on, or even things with any screen at all..." Suddenly people got a lot more cheerful-sounding.

So while I was making a lame Friday night dinner with Garrett--hot dogs wrapped in crescent roll dough--I heard some more imaginative play, and was happy. But then I began to hear lots of references to "Jewish people" and "Christians" coming from the living room, so I finally got to a stopping point and went around the corner to listen in.

Truman was sitting in the chair with a Santa hat, and Bot was just hopping off "Santa's" lap. "OK, now pretend you're Jewish!" Truman ordered.

Bot hammed it up with a melodramatic, "I'm Jewish, but I want presents, too, Santa!"

"Santa" then directed, "Then I tell you that I'm Jewish, too, and you kick me in the balls."

Needless to say, this is when I began to SPEAK IN ALL CAPS FOR A WHILE.

The Sheet and The Horn

No, this is not a new way to wake Jake. In fact, these days Jake is much earlier and quicker out of bed than I am, but then, that's only if you don't count the multiple night feedings of Miss Kayliegh, who is so darn cute and good that we kind of overlook the fact that she isn't all that into solid foods--though we got pumpkin pie into her over Thanksgiving and I might just have to start making it regularly if it's all she'll eat--and that she wants to cuddle in a nice warm bed at night firmly attached to her milk supply and getting in 2/3 of her nourishment while she's too half-asleep to get distracted as happens during the daytime. Plus, let's face it, Jake's making up for about five years of travel days and a decade or so of sleeping in every morning because it never occurred to either of us that Jake could get a child up and out the door to school by himself unless I was in the hospital having a baby and my folks were around to help. Now, of course, his job consists of getting up, waking Cory and Liam, crawling back into bed while they get themselves dressed and fed, then getting up to walk down the street to wait with Cory at the corner for a couple minutes and coming back and crawling back into bed. It was not so simple when Liam was 5, 6, 7...

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Once upon a time, when Liam and Garrett were tiny little people, Jake was reading about language development. Nothing, of course, of any real practical value to raising a toddler and infant, but interesting anyway. One of the bits of trivia was that when a child was still too young to pronounce words correctly, he still knew how the word SHOULD sound. And so, if a child was pointing at a fish and said, "Tish!" and you repeated, "You see a tish?" the child would get mad or say no, because they knew they weren't looking at a "tish" but at a "fish." Over the years, we have seen this displayed in toddler after toddler--the challenge is to figure out what they're saying, so you keep making educated guesses based on context and the sounds coming from the child until the child stops his frustrated, "NO!" and finally says, "Yeah!" For example, trying, "You want to prune the hedges?"

"NO!"

"I think he means the music, Mom," a helpful brother suggests.

"Oh! You want to hear Michael Hedges?"

"YEAH!"

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The thing is, Timmy doesn't do the "NO!" part. I think in his mind he assumes that we also don't know how to pronounce things properly, and so just like we accept his mispronunciations, he accepts ours. Problem is, this does absolutely nothing to further our understanding of what the heck he's talking about.

"Mom, Mom, we tach de ooving umna timmas tee dif marlee bounds fends im payoom."

"You took the Christmas tree to the playroom?"

"Yeah!"

"Oh, great!" Hmmm, we have no Christmas tree yet, so what is going on in that playroom? Well, what's going on is simply that they are going to watch the movie about the Christmas tree with Charlie Brown's friends, in the playroom. And he needs me to figure out the correct input for the DVD player so the thing starts. But I have no clue my help is needed, because I think Tim bought a Christmas tree and put it on the playroom and he's perfectly happy with this. Five minutes later, the movie is not working and he's distraught.

"Is it the Christmas tree?"

"YEAH!"

If the kid would just stop answering in the affirmative every time we're not denying him chocolate chips (he knows how to howl NO then, trust me) life would be much simpler.

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So this morning, there's Timmy, holding a play sword--oh no! A weapon toy! It occurred to me recently, as I was instructing my kids on the rules regarding Nerf guns, including "Never point one of them at anyone's face, even if you think it's not loaded" that practicing such caution and respect for the Nerf was not a bad thing to practice. But some of my enlightened friends are strictly anti-gun, anti-play-weapon of any sort, under the idea that that this would teach them to be violent and any contact with guns would predispose them to using guns in the future and desensitize them to the serious harm they could do with a weapon. My assertion that kids tend to use sticks or whatever's around to play-fight anyway, so why not let them play while teaching ground rules, fall on stubborn "violent games are evil, we must shelter them" ears. (Let's leave aside that their kids hit, bite and punch each other as much, if not more so, than mine do--yeah, the violence is all in the toys!) And yet these same folks think early sex education is important because after all, they're going to have sex one way or another, right? Might as well teach them all they need to know to do it safely. (The question is, have I just shot down their attitudes toward weapon toys or my own attitude toward early sex ed?)

However, one of the biggest "No guns" people commented to me when her then-5-yr-old came over and Liam made him and Bot long "guns" made out of Legos and then took them outside to play with them: "At first he came home and said he wanted to build guns and play war outside, and I was thinking, 'Oh, no, the Freivalds have brought guns into the house!'" Like we were known for guns before that? "But then my husband realized that this game pretty much involved Child making a gun by himself for an hour or two, then sitting his dad down in a chair in the backyard while Child pretended to shoot him from behind trees. So my husband took a book out to his designated chair and decided this was the best game ever!" It appears we're not such a bad influence when we further other people's benign neglect of their children and leisure reading time. They're welcome, but don't thank us. Thank guns.

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Anyway, Timmy had a sword, and he held it up and announced, "I de sheet and da HORN!" There was NO mistaking the "h" sound in the "horn," it was clearly pronounced.

"You have a sheet and a horn?"

"Yeah!" And he gave me a fierce look and held up the sword like we were facing off to do battle.

"A horn, Timmy?"

"Yeah, da SHEET and the HORN!" Brandishing his weapon again.

"You sure about that?"

He looked a little uncertain, and lowered his sword. "Sheet and horn, Mom."

OK, let's look at context. Nothing like a sheet around. Let's work with horn. He's holding a sword, there's the "or" sound in both, but he was very clearly saying "horn."

I pointed to it. "Is this your horn, Timmy?"

"Oh, yeah." He looked at the sword. "Horn."

"It's a sword."

"Oh, yeah, thord." No indication that he found anything wrong with the fact that five seconds ago that thing was a "horn." Maybe he was just mildly impressed I'd learned to pronounce it.

"So, you have a sheet and sword?"

"Yeah, SHEET and THORD!"

Ah! "SHIELD and sword? Is that what you're talking about?"

He gives me a DUH! look and says, "Yeah, sheed and thord. I hab da SHEED and da THORD!" Revert to fierce face, sword out, looking as intimidating as one can be at two feet tall in bare feet and a penguin shirt. Someone want to tell me how the child can manage a "th" and "sh" and not a basic "s" sound? Linguistically, Tim is just confusing.

Let's leave aside the fact that he had no shield, and that toys, most especially swinging-around things like swords in the hands of toddlers, are not allowed in the kitchen where hot things, sharp things, and the remnants of Mom's sanity live. The kid is too darn cute and way too willing to accept our mistakes in interpretation to help me figure out a lot faster that he's pretending to be a knight. A knight that says, "sheet," no less.

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OK, now Alex is asking of we're taking to day off from school (and he looks so truly shocked when I say no!), I suppose I should go pretend to teach them something,