Paul and the Family

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.

Tonight, as I mentioned in my previous post, we had a (very good, but likely not authentic) Chinese dish. Kelli came up with the recipe herself, by combining a few other recipes and some experimentation.

As always when we try a new dish, we were a little concerned about how the children would respond. They’re all picky eaters, and subject to quirks where they even won’t eat foods that they typically like. So we were hoping for the best. Adam is usually willing to eat foods with strong or spicy flavors, so I wasn’t too concerned about him. Sarah usually follows him in this regard, but sometimes she’ll just decide to be difficult; for instance, she’ll rarely eat any potato dish (french fries being an exception, of course). Brian is the most difficult. Until recently, he’d roundly refuse anything with any sort of unusual flavor. For a long time he wouldn’t eat pizza if it had red sauce, and even now don’t dare try to feed him Italian food! But over the past month or so he’s become much better about being willing to try (and usually liking) new foods, so I was hopeful that it’d be a success with him too.

In fact, our hopes were realized — all the kids liked the food a lot and ate really well. Things were going so well that, near the end of the meal, I commented “wow, you guys did so good, next time maybe we’ll use chopsticks.” Adam got a good laugh out of that, although we learned immediately that it was because he thought it was a silly thing to say:

• Adam: “What are chopsticks?”
• Brian: “They’re something you use to eat Mexican food!”

I guess now that our kids are a little more open-minded, we’re going to have to work on the multicultural food and eating techniques thing a bit…

Okay, yes, I know. All children are independent. So there’s not really any news in this.

But I’ll tell you anyway, because I think it’s funny.

Sarah (yes, 20 month old girl, not older brothers) has been showing all sorts of signs of independence lately. I don’t know if it’s because she’s a girl, or because she has two older siblings whom she idolizes — but it seems like she’s the most insistently independent of our children, earlier than the others as well. Here are some of our favorite examples:

Walking up and down stairs

Like most children in houses with stairs, soon after she learned to crawl Sarah started crawling up and down the stairs. However, my experience has been that most children, after learning to walk, continue crawling up and down stairs for a long time. Not Sarah. Once she had learned to walk, there was no way she was going to condescend to crawling up and down stairs. Literally within a couple of days she refused to crawl up or down stairs. For a short time — probably a couple of weeks — we had to carry her up or down. Very soon, however, she was pushing the limits — she watched Adam walk down the stairs putting his hand against the wall for balance, and she was right there doing the same thing. The first couple of times she was pretty slow, but she did it. Before long, she perfected her own technique — she walks down along the banister side and reaches up and wraps her hand around the banister, using it to support her as she walks down. Or, if Kelli or I is going down at the same time, she’ll say “hand!” — meaning “give me your hand!” — and she’ll walk down holding our hand for balance.

Talking

Sarah has definitely learned to talk faster than the boys did. She already says 3-4 word sentences — many of them complex ones.

She’s also picked up on a lot of the nuances of speech. For instance, when Sarah first started talking she called Brian “Bri!” and Adam “Ah!”. At the time, we were frequently calling our kids by a nickname where we’d say their name, followed by the letter “B” — as in “Brian B.,” “Adam B.,” or “Sarah B.” It wasn’t long after Sarah started talking that she adopted this style for Adam too — she started calling him “Ah Bee” (pronounced like “Abby”), and continues to call him that now even though he’s explicitly asked the rest of us not to call him “Adam B.” anymore. So when he’s crying she’ll say “Ah Bee had!” (“Adam B. sad”).

Eating

Long ago, Sarah refused to sit in her high chair anymore, preferring Adam’s booster chair (which he wasn’t happy about at all, of course). Luckily we have two identical booster chairs, from when Brian was younger, so we just pulled out the old one and dusted it off and started using it with Sarah. The booster chairs are sort of “travel high chairs” — they have a tray that fits on the front, although we just use Adam’s as a booster, letting him sit at the table. For a month or two Sarah was content using the tray, but sure enough once we let her try sitting on the booster with her plate on the table, there was no going back. Lately she’s even been eating her lunch sitting in my chair (with no booster, of course =). Since then, a couple of times she’s tried to insist on sitting in my chair for supper. She usually gives up when I try to sit in her booster, though (“my chair!”).

Tonight, we had some pseudo-oriental dish (don’t get me wrong, it tasted great, but I’m sure it was more American than Chinese). Sarah had meat and broccoli on one side of her plate, and rice with sauce on the other side. Her eating followed what has pretty much become her standard routine lately. She would poke and eat as much as she could, then she reached her fork over to me and said “poke!” Then I’d scoop some food onto her fork, then she’d grab it out of my hands (or, pretty soon, I’d just put it on the plate for her) and she’d take the bite of food and put it in her mouth.

Oh, and I can’t fail to mention drinking from cups. She’s long insisted that we let her drink from regular cups, rather than “sippy” cups (spill-proof cups with lids). Tonight she had a sippy cup of milk, but she wouldn’t touch it, and was quite insistent about drinking water from a regular cup, just like the boys.

Reaching high

Sarah’s dresser is an old-fashioned one that has a space on top that’s intended to be used as a changing table — it has high sides and a back, and then a low (about 1-2 inch) board on the front. We don’t use it for changing her, but we keep stuff up there like diapers and pacifiers. When she wants a pacifier, she knows to look there. The trouble is, she isn’t tall enough to see on top of the dresser, even though she can stand on her tiptoes and stretch up and reach things that are in the front half or so of the top. So she’s devised a trick that shown a lot of cleverness and strength. When she wants a pacifier, she’ll grab the rail on the front of the top of the dresser, and she’ll pull herself up so that she can see the top of the dresser, to figure out where a pacifier is. She’s not strong enough to hold herself by one hand, so then she lowers herself down to the ground and, based on where she saw what she’s looking for, she’ll stretch up and reach without looking to grab it.

Bathrooms and brushing teeth

Sarah is so absolutely insistent about bathrooms and especially brushing her teeth, it’s crazy. For a looong time we’ve had to insist that Brian keep the bathroom door closed whenever he’s finished using it, or invariably Sarah will end up in there with the water on. One time she even locked herself in — absolutely. She had gone in, closed the door, climbed up on the stepstool, and was playing in the water (in the dark, no less — she hadn’t bothered to turn on the light and the bathroom has no windows). Not only that, but she had opened the drawers to get out combs or something — and the drawers are right in front of the door, which opens in…so we couldn’t open the door more than half an inch. Finally, painstakingly, I was able to close the drawer (no way would she do it!) by shoving thin things through the crack in the door and pushing the drawer closed by friction. She wasn’t even scared — she was just upset that we made her turn the water off!

Anyway, a couple of days ago Sarah learned that she can finally open doors herself. Ah, a new world of discovery and meyhem. We now insist that Brian closes and locks the bathroom door when he’s done using the bathroom. We’ve given him a long skewer of his own to unlock the door (our doorknobs just have a little hole in the middle that you push something into to unlock the door, so we’ve kept some appropriately-sized wooden skewers on the doorframe above the locking doors for a long time now. Of course, Brian can’t reach them up there, and he was quite insistent that he’s now old enough to be trusted with a “key” to unlock the interior doors.)

For Christmas, we got Sarah her own toothbrush (plenty of times we’ve caught her in the bathroom, water on, Brian’s toothbrush in her mouth and even once with toothpaste smeared all over the counter). So yesterday when Brian was going in for his nightly “teeth and potty” routine she fairly insisted that she should be allowed to brush her teeth. So after he was done I took her in and brushed her teeth. Tonight the performance was repeated, only she got really mad when I told her that she had to put away her toothbrush when we were done.

Going out

Sarah loves to go outside. Anytime anybody says anything about “leaving” or “going” or whatever, she will immediately say “hock! hoos!” (“socks! shoes!”) and will run for the front door. And unlike the boys, who will insist that they want to go but run away when you actually try to put on shoes, socks, or coat, she will stick around and even try to do as much as she can — one of her favorite words is “hip!” (“zip!”, as in “I want to zip up my coat/pajamas”).

Dressing herself

This is probably the funniest one of all. Adam refuses to ever get dressed anyway, and he definitely won’t dress himself. Sarah, on the other hand, frequently insists on dressing herself. A couple of days ago she came out in the morning and she had dressed herself completely, perfectly.

Tonight, the kids were downstairs, and I asked them to run up and get their pajamas on quickly (they wanted to watch a movie). Brian fussed; Adam buried his head in the couch cushions. I got up and offered to get the boys’ pajamas and bring them down to them. By the time I had gotten them to tell me what pajamas they wanted, I looked up and saw Sarah halfway down the stairs. She had already taken off her pants, turned on the stairs light, went upstairs, got her own pajamas, and was headed down. I grabbed a diaper for her along with the boys’ pajamas, and came back down to the living room.

When I got there, I offered to dress Sarah first, since she had gotten her own clothes. She refused. She asked for her diaper, but then she refused to even let me change her. I didn’t quite understand what she had in mind (asking for a diaper but not letting me change her?) So I started working on Adam. Then I looked over, and she had unsnapped her “onesie” (the little body suits that snap together at the bottom, for those of you not up on the baby lingo). She was almost done undoing the fasteners on her diaper (not an unusual thing for her — if we take too long getting her up in the morning she will have almost certainly removed her pajamas and her diaper). I told her to stop and once again offered to change her — no good; she tore off into the office where Kelli was at the time.

When she came back, I just ignored her for a bit and worked with Adam. When I looked over at her again, she had opened up her diaper and spread out the sides etc. (the normal stuff we do before laying a child on the clean diaper). She then sat down in the middle of the diaper (backwards — she had the tabs on the front, alas). Then she reached down, grabbed the front (well, the back) of the diaper, pulled it up in front of her, and started reaching to the sides to try to figure out how to fasten it on herself.

Kelli convinced her to let her help put on a diaper, then Sarah came back by me, but once again she wouldn’t let me do a thing to help her put on her pajamas. She insisted on putting her feet in the legs, and kept getting mad at me whenever I even held them or pulled a bit.

The best news of all this, however, has been that we’ve finally found a motivation for Adam to learn to dress himself. When we ask him to get dressed, and he says “I can’t!” then we point out that Sarah dresses herself…and he’s suddenly more willing to try and get himself dressed, too.

Since he’s been attending school, Brian of course has been focusing on spelling small words. He’s been able to spell his name for a while now. Adam has also recently started picking up on the idea of spelling his own name. For example, a couple of days ago I was looking at our white board calendar and holding Adam at the time. Since his birthday just passed, it’s still written on the calendar, complete with a picture of a birthday cake. He asked me if that is his cake, then asked me what the words next to the cake say. “It says ‘Adam’s Birthday’,” I told him, to which he replied “That says A-D-A-M!” (spelling out his name). I confirmed that indeed it did say “A-D-A-M,” pointing out the letters of his name on the white board.

A conversation we had this morning continued on this same thread. Adam had been playing with his wooden train set and had just been pointing out that he had used some incorrect track pieces on his train set and was fixing the problem:

• Kelli: “You’re pretty smart A-D-A-M” (spelling out his name)
• Adam: (No response)
• Kelli: “Are you A-D-A-M ?”
• Adam: “No, I’m Adam” (pronouncing his name)
• Paul (me): (to Adam) “What does A-D-A-M spell?”
• Adam: “Me!”
• Paul (me): “‘A-D-A-M’ spells ‘me’?” (I literally meant the word “me,” but he obviously thought I was referring to myself—i.e. my name.)
• Adam: “No, me!”