The Boy has a developing passion for books. It was one of his early words.
And it’s one of his favorite activities.
Promising.
the boy
Sunday Afternoon Games
Saturday Lessons in the Yard
Being a parent means learning to let your kids learn. It's an age-old adage, but some days illustrate it more clearly than others. Or perhaps some days I'm just more aware of it happening around me.
Eight o'clock. The Girl decided she wanted finally to have her yard sale. She'd made the sign long ago, and every weekend, she'd been asking when she could have the sale. This morning, she decided she could wait no longer.
No advertisements on light poles on nearby streets. No cash to make change. Just a girl out in her front yard with some random items for sale: some toys she no longer played with, some books she no longer read, E's old stroller, the bike she's decided is too heavy and we've decided is too difficult for her to ride.
In the end, she sold one thing for one dollar. K and I of course foresaw all of this, but there was no convincing her, and we realized there was really no need even to try: this was a lesson best learned through experience.
More lessons: all one needs to have a rollicking good time for most of the afternoon is an empty cardboard box large enough to fit a seven-year-old and some paints for decoration. One of the neighborhood kids seems more in tune to screens than his own imagination. I found myself wondering what he would have done if he were visiting when W and L pulled out the box and began working. Perhaps he would have found it boring. Perhaps he would have jumped in and tried. The advantage of spending all your time in front of a computer game is that you can do it alone; the advantages of playing in a cardboard box -- more significant. Some of my own students' lack of imagination is simply stunning, so I was pleased to see so much joy coming from something so simple. Pleased, but not too surprised.
Yet another lesson: building a draining system for the newly installed blueberries was surprisingly quick and surprisingly easy. For once a project took me less time than I was expecting.
The Boy learned a thing or two as well. His obsession with trains has been waning, replaced by an obsession with Bob the Builder. Every single time he sees a dump truck or any other piece of heavy equipment, he begins his mantra, based on the Bob the Builder theme song. "Bob the Builder -- can we fix it? Bob the Builder -- yes we can!" For the Boy, though, it's somewhat truncated. "Bob the Builder" becomes "Bob-beaw" while "Yes we can" has mutated to "S-N!"
So as I finished up a little mini-project -- so small it was barely worthy of being called a project except for the fact that I had to head to the lumber store this morning -- I thought I might make him a little training ground. With some effort, managed to squeeze the trigger, so to speak; with a bit more effort, he managed to hold the drill; managing both at the same time was a bit much for a twenty-three-month-old.
And after lost interest in the screws but before he lost interest in the drill, he relearned another lesson. A fall was probably inevitable, and his tears were more from the frustration of falling than anything else. I knelt down to talk to him -- the typical dad "shake it off, big man" type thing -- and I realized I was still holding the camera. Click. (Well, not so much a click with a digital camera, and with shutterless digital cameras now emerging it will soon be silent, but I can't think of a proper onomatopoeic word to describe the sound of the D300's shutter sliding open and snapping shut.)
"Why would I take a picture of my son in tears?" I thought. And tonight, going through the pictures, I learned the next lesson of the day: it's a fragment of our daily reality, the tears of a toddler. Something I'll forget as it morphs into the tantrums that will continue from now until age thirty. Or forty-one in my case.
The final lesson of the day: K and I can get so much more done when Nana and Papa spend the afternoon with us, helping out with the kids, helping out with this or that aspect of planting Asiatic jasmine or sealing a poor construction. The list of accomplishments today is impressive, but more significant, the learning.
Spring Tuesday Afternoon
Everything is finally waking up. Almost all of the raspberry canes now have leaves on them, and buds are poking out of our single blackberry cane. The irises are resurrecting themselves, and the grass has turned a dark green.
"It's about time!" is just about what all of us would say. I'm not sure I recall being so glad to see winter go in years. The winter months in South Carolina are usually so very mild that I feel we really haven't had a winter at all, but this year, there's no doubting it: we had winter. And it hung on for a while. And kept coming back even after we thought it was gone.
With the arrival of spring, though, come new chores, chief among them watering our new blueberry bushes, six here, six there.
In typical fashion, the Boy watches and then quickly imitates. It's as if he's constantly thinking, "Oh, so that's how you do it. I'll have to give that a try." He remembers details from previous days, little touches that I'm surprised an almost-two-year-old sees.
Some of it has been simply funny. A few times I gave him his bottle when he was younger, I held it as if I were a sommelier at some fine restaurant; he soon began doing his best imitation just before lifting the bottle to his mouth.
Yesterday, he watched me try to jump-start K's car. "Try" only because the battery was too dead and my small, thin cables didn't have the capacity to deliver that amount of power -- too much lost in route due to the inefficiencies inherent in current.
And so when he finds the jumper cables sitting out, he does the logical thing: he tries to attach them to his toy fire truck.
The Girl has her own concerns, though, like a budding reading obsession, that leads her to stumble and fall as she walks and reads. Or was that just the dramatic, theatrical part of her personality, pretending?
"She did that on purpose," K laughs as I snap pictures. Still, the end result is amusing, even if faked.
Later, in the hammock, she reads aloud to me. She stumbles over a few words, proper names mainly, like Ester, but by and large, I just sit and listen.
Words like "gracefully" gracefully fall from her mouth as if she's merely telling the story herself, from memory, with the inflections and drama of a professional storyteller. Well, almost.
Hammock
We got a hammock the other day. Not really sure why. L wanted it; K thought it was a fun idea. So now we have one.
Which thrills L to no end. The Boy is less sure of it, but he might warm up to it.
The Girl’s hair definitely gives it a thumbs up, to mix metaphors.
Morning Walk
Blue skies in the morning, and there’s only one thing to do: take a walk. It’s been almost two years now since I was taking daily walks with the Boy in the summer mornings. School was just out; the Boy was able to do little more than open his eyes and look straight ahead. On this lazy Sunday morning, with Polish Mass in the afternoon (the last Sunday of the month comes around with surprising suddenness), we have the time for such a trip back through time.
The difference, of course, is in the air, in the trees, in the flowerbeds. The walks two years ago with the Boy were in the summer, when the temperature could rise to the mid-80’s by late morning; today, there’s a cold breeze that reminds us it’s still March.
During the summer walks of two years ago, the shade of trees brought relief; today, the trees are still almost completely bare, and shade only makes us feel the chill more acutely.
Then, the flowerbeds were not nearly as colorful as the beds today.
Then was a beginning, with E just a little bump in the stroller; today is a beginning, with the buds opening and the Boy kicking his feet on the wheels of the stroller and doing his best to chat with me about everything he sees.
“You really want to talk, don’t you?” I ask as we turn to head home.
“Taaaak!”
Morning, Evening
Sun comes up, it's Saturday morning, and the gray sky suggests that we won't be doing much more than sitting at home -- as if gray skies mean such a thing. Just because we're rained in doesn't mean that we can't find work to do. Two kids, a house, one parent a teacher -- there's always something to do, something to fix, something to begin, something to complete.
I make the coffee and think of a song, an album I hadn't listened to in ages. Cowboy Junkies. Somehow the perfect group for this morning. Calm, somewhat monotonous, almost boring in the perfect way something could be boring.
The kids and I get ready to go out shopping -- a quick trip that serves two purposes. We get the things we need, like sundried tomatoes for the coming week's salads, and we leave K alone in the house to clean.
"I like it. It's calming, almost a meditation."
Must be a Polish thing.
We arrive home, entertain the kids, force some Polish down L's gullet -- those Polish lessons are getting harder and harder, K swears -- and eat some lunch, and then the sun comes out. Followed by me. I have ten cubic yards of dirt to compact at the end of the driveway to prepare our latest blueberry patch. And a yard to mow. And a million other things that I can't quite get to. The Girl goes to a friend's house to play, then brings him back to play some more. K brings the fed and napped Boy outside while she cleans the van we'll soon be selling -- hopefully -- and suddenly it's evening. I stand at the grill, turn the chicken, turn the corn, and watch the sun on buds in the tree tops turn golden as Nana and Papa entertain the kids and vice versa.
Eight fifteen. "What do you say I go upstairs and draw the bath?" I whisper in K's ear as she finishes up dinner dishes.
"Sounds good."
And tonight, all dive in.
All. Including our brave, curious, playful kitten.
Much to everyone's delight.
Soon enough, kids are out, and I'm making the Boy's bottle, then playing guitar for him as he drifts off to sleep. I sit on the bed, then lie on the bed, suddenly to be awakened.
"Who fell asleep first?" K laughs.
Hard to tell.
"Movie?"
"Are you kidding?"
Not really, but I know that there's not much point even starting it. She'll fall asleep within the first half hour, and by then, I might be interested enough not to want to stop.
"You're probably right," I say.
"Coming to bed?"
"No, I've got one more thing to do."
Soup, Boy, Man
We do love K’s żurek.
Tears to Mama’s Eyes
By the doors to the restrooms in E's daycare room there is a small chair, blue with yellow legs and arms. With its slightly reclined back and arched seat, it looks almost like an Adirondack chair. It would seem likely the teachers put the chair there to provide children waiting for the restroom a place to sit until one realizes that the name of the group is "Toddler 2," which means every child in the room is around two years old: not many children that age likely are using the restroom by themselves. Perhaps it's a timeout chair.
The Boy, however, made his own unique use of it last week, his first week in daycare. Because we wanted to slip him into the new routine gently, K took him to the facility in the morning then came during her lunch break to take E back to the house and Babcia, where he napped, lunched, and played until I returned. K's arrival always coincided with the preparation time for the children's nap. As the children pulled their mats into place and arranged their blankets, all with the teachers' help, E sat in the yellow and blue chair and waited for K.
This week, however, he's been going full days. Two days down, and things could be going better. What a stressful experience for a little kid, and K and I both feel a little guilty for putting him through it. We justify it to ourselves: he'll be stronger for it; he has to go through this at some point; he'll soon be enjoying it. We justify, but that doesn't do much when the teacher tells us that every day at nap time, E still trundles over to the yellow and blue chair, sits down, and waits for K.
Random Monday Thoughts
He toddled to the wood pile, on which rests the small box of sidewalk chalk, and tried to climb.
"Do you want chalk?" I asked.
"Taaaaaaaaaak!" he affirmed.
He took the chalk, bounced over to his ride-able toy firetruck, which has a small storage compartment, opened said compartment, and dropped the chalk in. He pushed it out of the carport then up half of the driveway, where he stopped and emptied his cargo onto the pavement. Taking the fat cylinder of chalk in his hand, he scratched enthusiastically at the pavement, just as L had done so many years ago.
Having multiple children is a constant reminder of the cyclical nature of almost all we do. E is now fascinated with chalk for drawing on the driveway -- large, fat chalk that leaves pink and red and blue marks on the black pavement.
"Koło!" he cried as he made yet another circle.