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...

#

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!"

#

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.

#

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.

#

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.

#

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,