Paul and the Family

Just a few things I want to remember:

Sarah really wanted to write the name tags on the presents from her. She knows how to write her own name but not many other letters. So I wrote the names for her to copy — but the results were quite interesting. (She writes really big, and often started writing in the middle of the space so her words would wrap up, down, and other directions. She also wrote a couple of letters backwards. Some letters, like “A,” she knows the uppercase letter so when she was writing them (in “Brian” and “Adam” even though I had written them lowercase she wrote them uppercase. I thought it was interesting that she recognized the lowercase letter but didn’t want to write it).

Several days ago Adam wrote a letter to Santa. (I think that’s the first time any of our children have done that.) It was interesting because Adam is the most skeptical about believing in the existence of Santa. Adam likes to write a lot anyway, and he often repeats himself in his writing. This is reflected in the text of his letter:

Dear Santa I like Christmas
I want you to Bring
a lava Gormiti Castle.
I like the Gormiti lava castle.
I like Christmas.
Can you Pleaes Bring the Gormiti castle.
merry Christmas Santa.

Yesterday he also wrote me two very cute Christmas cards. One is more of a letter—it’s all text—talking about how he loves his dad, and loves it when his dad buys pizza for dinner. The other one says Merry Christmas and has a drawing of a snowman. He writes cute little notes like this fairly often, and it’s always a great treat to get one from him.

Since Adam is in first grade, he’s well on his way to learning to write. The teachers say that rather than trying to correct their spelling, it’s best at this age to just let kids write as much as they can without pausing to correct mistakes.

I get a real kick out of the spellings that come out as a result. Today Adam was writing some things on his list of toys he wants/Christmas list.

(Yes, they’re already writing a Christmas list. I actually started them on the idea of making toy lists so that they have a goal to work toward and hopefully save their allowance rather than just spending their money immediately every time they get any. But it also helps us get an early start on buying presents as we see things on sale. So the lists serve a dual purpose. But that’s all beside the point.)

So, Adam thought of a couple of things he wants, and he decided he was going to write them on his list rather than having me do it. Here’s what he wrote (I wish I could show you his handwriting — it certainly adds to the effect):

• Chrel mawtin kasl (“Troll mountain castle”)
• mullinein falcin (“Millennium Falcon”)

In case you’re wondering, these are both Lego sets. They’re both way out of the budget, and realistically he knows it. But I try not to squash their dreams too much since they have more fun looking at catalogs and dreaming about what they want than what they have when they actually get the toy.

Conversation I just had with Sarah (she had been talking about swimming, and how she only likes to swim wearing goggles):

• Sarah: I like goggles.
• Me: I like Sarah!
• Sarah (hugging me): I like you! Better than nothing!

Last night our kids got some candy at our Stake Halloween party/”Trunk or Treat” activity. This morning Adam was sitting on the stairs with his candy bucket, pulling out pieces and putting them onto the stairs.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Sorting my candy,” he replied.

I looked closer and, sure enough, he was sorting his candy

If you look closely at the picture, you can probably figure out his organizational system

Personally, when I sort candy, I tend to sort it by kind — I group gum in a pile, suckers in a pile, chocolate in a pile, a pile of stuff I don’t want to keep, etc.

Adam’s organizational scheme is a little different, but extremely logical. This fits perfectly with his personality — he’s always been a logical, ordered, sorting and organizing kind of person.

In case you haven’t figured it out by now, he sorted his candy by color (either the color of the wrapper or the color of the candy if the wrapper is transparent). He had a brown pile, an orange pile, a red pile, a rainbow pile (for multi-colored candy like smarties), etc.

Sarah decided to join in the fun, and organize her candy too:

Just overheard:

• Kelli (to Brian): “You need to eat more healthy foods. Do you know what that means?”
• Kelli (continuing): “That means foods like fruits and vegetables…”
• Brian (interjecting): “I eat fruit snacks…”

Sarah has a toy “Disney princess” camera. When you press the shutter button, it says one of several idyllic Disney princess phrases like “You look so wonderful!”, “You’re as pretty as a princess!”, and so forth.

She was just using the camera to take a picture of Adam. As luck would have it, the camera chose to say to Adam:

You’re as pretty as a princess!

Adam apparently didn’t approve, because he replied in a growly voice:

I’m not pretty! I’m cool.

Sarah’s always been a good talker. Practically as soon as she started talking, she was using complete sentences, and soon afterward she began amazing us with her mastery of idioms and expressions. Now, based on two things she said yesterday, it seems that she’s started to take language a step further:

• Kelli asked Sarah if she wanted to watch a movie. Sarah said, “Yes, I want ‘Charlie hash browns’.” We had to ask her to repeat it before we figured out that she wanted the Charlie Brown Christmas movie.
• After supper, Sarah came running up to us saying “I found Mickey Mouse!” I followed her into her bedroom, where she started reaching under her dresser to try to pull out some toys that had gotten pushed underneath. After a bit of adventure (in which my hand got stuck under the dresser and Kelli had to come rescue me) we got all the toys out from under the dresser, including a toy ring, a toy cell phone, and more. Sarah seemed to be looking around for something else, and we told her that we’d gotten everything out from under the dresser. “There wasn’t any Mickey Mouse,” I said. Pointing to the “bathtub” part from the game “Mouse Trap,” I said “That was the thing that I saw when I first looked under the dresser—that was the thing you were pointing at.” “Oh yeah! That’s it!” she said, grabbing the tub and walking out. Kelli and I just looked at each other, puzzled for a moment, before Kelli finally figured it out. “Mickey Mouse—Mouse Trap.” I just shook my head at that one.

This morning I overheard a humorous interchange between Brian and Adam. Adam and Brian had already moved their Christmas presents into their bedroom and they were playing in there. I was in the living room, separating recycling from trash as part of cleaning up the remains of Christmas morning. I overheard the following:

• Brian (from his room): “Adam, I’m going to tell on you!”
• (At that point I anticipated that Brian would be coming to me, and I started anticipating the complaint that was surely coming. However, since nobody was screaming, I knew it probably wasn’t too serious.)
• Brian (comes into the living room): “Da-ad, Adam ate a Hershey’s Kiss.”
• Paul: “Was it yours?” (I already knew it wasn’t, or Brian would have been upset rather than calm.)
• Brian: “No.”
• Paul: “Okay, well, it’s probably fine. Just don’t eat a lot — maybe just have one.”
• Brian: “Okay.” (returns to his room)
• Brian (from his room): “Adam, you can come out — it’s okay to eat one…”

Here are two conversations with Sarah from today that I thought were worth sharing:

Conversation 1

• Kelli (to Sarah): Aunt Terra is flying to California tomorrow!
• (brief pause while Sarah thinks about what she just heard)
• Sarah (with a confused look on her face): She doesn’t have wings!

Conversation 2

• Sarah: I just ate something yummy
• Paul: Really? What did you eat?
• Sarah (after thinking for a couple of seconds): The thing that I ate!

Tonight we had some jello (well, a jello salad with fruit in it) along with our supper. Sarah did hersomewhat common routine of leaving the table, playing for a couple of minutes, then coming back and asking for more food. In this case, the food she asked for was the jello salad. After giving her two or three helpings, I told her that the helping I was giving her would be her last, and not to ask for more. Sure enough, when she finished that helping she immediately asked for more:

• Sarah: Can I have some more jello?
• Paul: Remember I told you that you couldn’t have any more after the last bowl?
• Sarah: (pointing to the 9x13 dish, still half full of jello) There’s still more jello!
• Paul: We’re going to save that for later. We’ll have some more tomorrow.
• Sarah: I’ll have jello for breakfast tomorrow.

As a side note, Sarah really loves to say “jello”. For that matter, she really likes to say any word that starts with the “dj” sound (the sound made by the “j” in words like “jello” as well as most other words that start with “j” and some words that start with “g” as well. The linguist in me can’t help but chuckle because she likes to pronounce that sound as a fricative rather than a stop, so she ends up pronouncing it like “zhello” rather than “djello”. I actually suspect that’s part of the reason why she likes those words so much — I’m guessing that she enjoys that sound.

Interestingly, when I was in Argentina and I was teaching English pronunciation to some native Spanish speakers, they did exactly the same thing. For them, of course, it was because the “dj” sound isn’t used in Spanish so they never really learned to hear and pronounce that sound distinctly from the “zh” sound, which is used as the pronunciation for the character that’s written as “ll” (double-“l”). (At least, that’s how it’s pronounced in parts of Argentina, most notably among “porteños” — people from the area around Buenos Aires).

Sarah, in spite of occasional outbursts, is a real sweetheart. Tonight Kelli didn’t feel well so she laid down on the sofa. She started feeling cold so she asked Sarah to go get her (Kelli’s) blanket. (She was laying with her head on my lap or I would have gone to fetch it for her, but instead I decided to wait and see what happened win Sarah.)

Sarah headed off on her errand, and Kelli noted that all the lights were out in the bedrooms and hall, so she didn’t think Sarah would be able to complete her task (Sarah is a little afraid of the dark, like most children, and she’s not tall enough to reach the light switches in our house.

After a short delay Sarah came back down the hall towards the family room. When Kelli saw her, she asked, “was it too dark to get my blanket?” Just then I noticed that Sarah was dragging a large blanket behind her—one that’s usually on her (Sarah’s) bed. “It was too dark, so I got this blankie. It’s very soft,” she said. It was too dark to get mom’s blanket, so instead Sarah had gotten her own (making sure to get the onethat would be long enough to cover mommy). She brought it over and laid it over Kelli. She’s so sweet!

Today is Adam’s birthday. (Well, technically his birthday is tomorrow but we were celebrating it today because today’s the day that Kelli’s parents could come down.) Sarah had picked out a stuffed animal (a leopard) to give to Adam. It’s a fairly large stuffed animal—about two feet from nose to tail (well, large by normal stuffed animal standards—naturally it would be dwarfed by the giant ones you can win at a fair). She kept calling it a tiger—probably because 1) she’s more familiar with tigers than leopards and especially 2) because Adam already has a stuffed animal tiger that’s pretty much exactly the same size as the new leopard.

The real problem with her calling it a tiger was that she was doing so before Adam had opened his presents. You’d think this would spoil the surprise, but fortunately, even when she told him it was a tiger right before he opened it his response was “maybe…”

Then he started opening it. Interestingly, he happened to be opening it from the tail end. He had it about half open so you could see the tail, hind legs, and part of the torso. It was pretty obvious that it was a leopard—the spots were plainly visible. Sarah was watching the process excitedly (after all, the present was from her) and this interchange happened:

• Sarah: “see, it is a tiger”
• Adam: “No, it’s a hippopotamus!”

We really can’t imagine where that one came from, or whether he somehow actually thought it was a hippopotamus. Once he got it all the way open, he said “it is a leopard,” so we couldn’t be completely sure whether he was joking about it being a hippopotamus, or not.

Later on, while he was eating his cake, out of the blue Adam announced:

• My name is “Sweet Potato”

I really can’t imagine where he comes up with this stuff.

Kelli and I were just looking at different places around the bay area, trying to figure out where we’re going to live when we move there (in less than two weeks — yikes!)

Sarah woke up from her nap and came in to visit, so Kelli asked her:

• Kelli: “Sarah, where should we live? In Lafayette, or Sunnyvale, or Novato?”
• Sarah: “In Yesvato”

This is a very common verbal interchange between Kelli or I and Adam:

• (Adam does something that bothers someone, for example he takes a toy from Sarah)
• Parent (to Adam): “Tell [so-and-so] you’re sorry”
• Adam (to so-and-so): “You’re sorry”

Here’s a new one I overheard this morning:

• Adam: “I want to play Mousetrap”
• Kelli: “First you need to show me that you can behave”
• Adam: “I am being have” (He pronounced it “have” rhyming with “Dave”)

Tonight, Kelli and I were going through the usual routine of trying to clean up the kids toys, clothes and such as much as possible before bedtime. We try to keep this up as a way to keep the house manageable — sort of like the dishes, if you skip one day the next day really is painful. (There’s also the practical matter that if one of the kids starts crying in the night and we have to go in to them, we don’t want to be tripping over toys in the dark.)

So anyway, tonight Kelli and I were cleaning up toys. I was in Adam’s room, picking up a few things. He was in there too, and I noticed that he was digging some toys out of his “special things” box that is kept under his bed. I didn’t really pay attention to the fact that Sarah was in the room too, although it turned out to be significant:

• Me (to Adam): “Adam, don’t take out toys! Can’t you see that everyone else is putting toys away?”
• Sarah: “I no putting away toys!”

Ah, yes. She completely undermined my whole psychological strategy (not that I was conscious of what I was trying to do until she made it obvious).

To think that, for some reason, parents are generally anxious for their kids to learn to talk.