Month: July 2008

The latest thing that Mandy does to crack me up is identifying the location of whatever she’s talking about. Or trying to talk about. It may not sounds like much, but when she says something like “Ka-loon!” and you respond with a dim-witted “Huh?” she’ll straighten up, stab a finger at whatever she’s thinking of and say, as loudly as she possibly can, “Right DERE!” It’s also weird that some things just seem to elicit exclamations from her every time she sees them. Is there a cat or cat facsimile anywhere in sight? “MEOW MEOW! Right DERE!” She also does the same thing with “LLAMA!” which makes me particularly proud.

On the Sam front, I’ve noticed in my studies of her something interesting about the way she reacts to fear. Some things make her shriek like the little girl she is and cower in fear. Any kind of flying insect, for example. The other week while we were out at The Farm we sent her up to the cabin by herself when she said she had to go to the bathroom as soon as we had walked all the way down to the beach and strapped her into four or five different kinds of flotation devices (we take flotation very seriously). A moment later, I could hear Sam screaming over the considerable distance up to the cabin, so I trotted up there. A wasp had gotten into the house with her, and she was gibbering and crying from the other side of the room while she shook her fist at it. I scored major Daddy points by simply opening the door and letting it buzz out.

Sam’s reactions to imaginary terrors differs quite a bit, though. The Little Mermaid’s nemesis, Ursula the Sea Witch, has always scared Sam. The other day she was watching that movie and I walked in from the other room to see Sam striking some kind of bizarre kung-fu stance in front of the TV. She had her feet spaced wide apart, knees bent, left hand cocked back behind her head with fingers splayed, and her right hand held out to the offending Sea Witch in a tightly balled fist. “You’d better stay away from Ursula,” she shouted. “I’m too powerful for you! I’ll KILL YOU!” She also did something similar when a commercial for some scary (to her) movie came on the TV once, ordering the pixilated monster to depart immediately.

So, anything that has an exoskeleton and the power of flight? Complete and paralyzing terror. But cartoon witch or CGI hobgoblin? Sam is gonna kick its ass, with style. Come to think of it, that’s probably pretty adaptive.

So, want to know Sam’s newest thing? She’s discovered the wonderful world of insults. Sometimes these are coherent verbal barbs, like “You’re a stupid head,” sometimes they straddle the line between sense and nonsense, like “You’re a baby head,” and sometimes they’re just gibberish, like “You’re a goo-gaa-gab-gab.” But there’s never any mistaking the tone, and whichever of her little friends at school taught her her to do this I’d like to find out so I can strangle him or her. Probably while shouting “WHO’S THE GA-GA HEAD NOW, HUH? WHO’S THE GA-GA HEAD NOW?”

And far be it from Sam to keep such lovely little habits to herself. The other day Geralyn had just given Sam a time out for calling her “stupid” when she heard Mandy marching around in the other room chanting “Stupid, stupid, Mommy stupid.” Of course, Sam took umbrage at this, and began shouting that Mandy was staying “stupid” and that she should get a time out. I can only assume that Geralyn was clenching great fistfuls of her hair as she tried to explain that it was because Sammy had taught her to do it.

Upon coming home that evening I suggested that given this factoid, Sammy should reap what she sews and take a time out every time Mandy says something objectionable. This seemed at first like a great idea based in basic economic theory, but the more I thought about it the more it seemed there might be unintended consequences. To whit, if Mandy is half as clever at gaming systems as her big sister seems to be, this rule would give the younger child an inordinate amount of power if she ever caught on. And while this might be appropriate payback for all the liberties Sam has taken with Mandy (not to mention bones broken), I thought it might be wise not to uproot what sisterly bond has developed so far.

Also, you may be seeing pictures of Sam and Mandy in a little inflatable pool. I want to point out that Geralyn blew that whole thing up by herself, using only her two –and eventually one– very own lungs. So the kids are literally bouncing around on the essence of Mommy.

Once again, I feel it is my duty to report how quickly Mandy is coming along. She’s really quick to pick up new words, and she seems to understand everything I say unless I purposely obfuscate my message. By, say for example, using the world “obfuscate.” Surprisingly, Mandy has even reportedly started using possessive pronouns, like in “my cup, your cup.” Or are those possessive adjectives? Eh, whatever. Colors we’re still working on, though, as she currently reports that everything in the world is just different shades of pink.

Sam’s doing great as well, especially if you take “great” to mean “learning to game every reward system we put in place.” I hate to keep moving the goal posts on the kid, but it seems like every time we offer her a reward for doing something (like getting herself ready for bed), she takes it to mean that she gets something EVERY TIME she does something good. Or even half-assed. Still, baby steps.

On the plus side, Sam and Mandy have really taken a liking to each other now that Mandy has developed some more social and motor skills. The other night Sam read to Mandy (and by “read” I mean “flipped the pages and made stories up,” but still) for over half an hour. Mandy would trot over to her book bin and pull a volume out, take it to Sam, sit on her lap, and sit quietly and listen to Sam tell her all about it. Very cute. And very nice for Daddy, who got to sit in the other room with his laptop.

First off, I would like to share with you a brilliant innovation in the field of parenting that Geralyn and I have come up with. Feeding time in our house has always consisted of troublesome chewing and clumsy sitting in chairs. Earlier this week we hit upon a solution to these annoyances in the form of just feeding our children nutrient rich paste from a tube on the go:

So far the only food we’ve been able to find in tube form has been cake icing, but judging by the reactions from Sam and Mandy, the program has been a huge success.

This last week also marked the 4th of July, on which we Americans display our penchant for blowing stuff up by blowing stuff up. We let Sam and Mandy stay up way late so that they could partake in the fireworks fun, but I think I may have taken my safety warnings a little too far when I told Sam that if she got too close to the fireworks they would not only kill her, but her mommy as well. As a result, Sam would shriek in fear and run for the hills if I so much as offered her a sparkler. Mandy, on the other hand, made every attempt to grab the sparkling fire.

Sam also got to experience her her first bonfire after the fireworks were spent, an event she had looked forward to for its marshmallow roasting potential. Of course, once the conflagration got going, Sam wouldn’t go within 20 feet of it. This was generally fine by me, as keeping my children out of raging fires is pretty close to the top of my parental to-do list. It’s like one of my core parenting philosophies, right up there with keeping the hyenas away. The downside, of course, was that I was the one who had to get his eyebrows scorched so that Sam could have a toasted marshmallow treat, take one bite, then declare that she didn’t like it.

After letting Sam stay up late on the 4th, something about her relationship with sleep has become apparent. First, she always gets up at the same time –around 7 am– no matter how late she’s stayed up. I think we could keep her up until 6 in the morning and she’d sleep an hour before getting up at 7. This means that she’s tired most of the next day, and a tired Sam is not necessarily a cranky Sam. But it is a spastic Sam. Seriously, when she misses out on sleep she just turns into this gibbering, spaztoid that runs around yelling stuff and never sitting still. It’s weird, because on the days after she does sleep well, she’s calm, polite, and mellow. It’s weird.

A lot of the literature I’ve read says that the speech of second children is slower to develop, mainly because their older siblings speak up for them, thus robbing them of the necessity to actually tell you to bring them their freaking cup, NOW. Oddly, this doesn’t seem to be the case with Mandy, as I’m pretty sure she’s actually a bit ahead of where Sam was at her age. This is probably because Sam rarely tells us what Mandy is trying to say, instead opting to tell us what Sam wants Mandy to be saying. So Sam will loudly proclaim that “Mandy says we should all go outside and play on the playground,” when Mandy has actually walked into the kitchen and stood expectantly at the base of her high chair while chanting “Eat! Eat!” The net result is that Mandy has actually had to work twice as hard to make sure she’s getting around Sam and through to us.

Whatever the case may be, it seems to be working. I heard Mandy use her first three word sentence this week (“Mommy, baby powder”), and I also heard her turn a verb into a gerund (“Elmo sleeping”), though I guess this could have been a simple case of repeating what she had heard. In addition to discovering these great gifts of language, though, Mandy has also discovered how to throw fits despite her normally sanguine disposition. If you take something away from her, she’s now likely to start squawking and flapping her arms like a chicken desperate for flight. This usually persists for a couple of seconds before she flops to the ground and yells into the carpet. Sam then informs us that Mandy is saying she wants us to all go watch an episode or two of Curious George.

You may have noticed some more carnival shots. We indeed went to another such event, this one much bigger and more replete with grifters who would take your five dollar bill in exchange for a chance to play a game and win a cheap plastic toy that cost some destitute, Chinese robot half a penny to stamp out. The kids enjoyed it, but it’s further testament to Sam’s tomboyishness that when she was invited to choose between a cheap plastic necklace and a cheap plastic dagger, she immediately picked the latter and spent much the balance of the day pretending –enthusiastically– to shiv her daddy in the kidneys.

Sam has had other adventures lately, too. Sadly, the little neighbor girl that Sam gets along with so well is moving away, and this was pretty much their last week to pal around. On Wednesday night Ger was out visiting her mother and I had put both kids to bed. After doing some stuff in my own bedroom, I came out into the hall to see that Sam’s door was open. This is not uncommon, as she often invents excuses to get out of bed and have us tell her to go back; it’s practically routine now. So I went downstairs looking for her, only to find that the screen door to the back yard was open, and that Sam had sneaked out to the back yard to play with the neighbor girl, who apparently keeps late hours herself.

I chastised Sam and ordered her back inside and up to her room. She complained loudly, but went. After closing her door I paused to press my ear against it and listen. Following a short pause I heard Sam loudly whispering (those of you with kids will know that such a thing is possible) to her friend. I opened the door and crept into the room to see Sam standing behind her bedroom window’s curtains and communing with her friend in the back yard like some all girls school production of Romeo and Juliet. Still unnoticed, I slipped over to the foot of her bed and sat there while I listened to her supposedly clandestine conversation.

“Natalie,” she said, “My daddy will give me a time out if I come out there again!”

Here there was a pause as her friend made some reply I couldn’t hear.

“Okay!” Sam chirped. “I’ll go very quietly down to the screen door and talk to you through there!”

Their secret pact made, Sam turned around to head downstairs again but she only took a couple of steps before spotting me. She let out a surprised gasp.

“Going somewhere, Sam?” I growled.

And that’s when she played her trump card. She started crying and blubbering “Please?” Now normally I’m more than capable of laying down the law and enduring any amount of wetworks, but it occurred to me that this was literally the last time she was going to get to play with her friend before she moved. I remember getting really upset as a kid when a few of my best friends moved away, and I furthermore remember a few times when my parents bent the rules to make me happy. So I let her go after extracting a promise to put on shoes and come in without argument when I called her.

They played for a half hour or so, chased fireflies for a while after that, and when I finally called Sam in she gave her friend a last hug and came in without complaint. She’s a good kid.