Paul and the Family

For a long time Adam’s been fascinated with tools — screwdrivers are his favorite, but wrenches and hammers are up on the list as well. He has some toy tools that often are “good enough,” but really nothing compares to the real thing for him. Long ago I got a set with something like 30 screwdrivers in it. For a long time there’d be two or three days a week that he’d sneak out into the garage, open the drawer of the workbench, and pull out 4-5 screwdrivers. He’d then proceed to carry them around the house, often for hours at a time, until eventually we forcefully remove them from his hands (much to his displeasure).

(Interestingly, he seems to alternate his passion for screwdrivers with a similar love of measuring spoons — he’s frequently been known to pull a chair over to the counter and climb up to the cupboard where the measuring spoons are kept, and likewise pull out three or four which he’ll carry around and even sleep with unless we forcefully extract them from his hands. But that’s all beside the point.)

Sometimes when I have a project around the house, I’ll try to occupy him by inviting him to help me. This usually consists of him holding a couple of screwdrivers or other tools and getting in my way (unintentionally) as much as possible — in such circumstances he’s not really content with just holding the tools, and wants to actually be involved in fixing whatever it is that’s being fixed. That’s the key word in his mind: “fix.” When I replaced the doorknobs on several doors, he was right there “fixing” the doors with me. When I was taking apart the door panels of a car, he “fixed” the car too. Just last week I was assembling a saw stand in the garage, and he grabbed a handful of tools and set to work “fixing” his toy lawnmower. (Mowing the lawn is another of his passions.)

But in fact, none of those are the actual event which I intended to relate when I started writing this. Just a few days ago, I was making pancakes and Adam was helping (yes, he used the measuring spoons to dump in most of the ingredients). I have a kitchen device that is basically a pancake batter pourer — it’s like a large cup with a hole in the bottom that’s blocked by a plug, and when you press down on a button it opens the plug and lets out the batter onto the griddle. However, the last time I had used it I twisted it wrong while trying to clean it, and it got a crack in the side of the “cup” part. I really like this thing, and I’ve never seen it sold on its own. (It was given to me as a gift in a set with one of those “as seen on TV” pancake cooker pans — the pan is nice, but the batter pourer is a wonderful thing, in spite of the fact that it’s really just one of the “but wait, there’s more! You’ll also get the…” additions to the set.)

So anyway, we had a couple of minutes while the griddle heated up, so I decided I’d go get some duct tape out of the garage to try and tape up the crack in the batter pourer, to try and prolong its life a bit (yes, I was really thinking of fixing it with duct tape — as much as I hesitate to admit that in a public document). As I moved toward the garage door I told Adam to just stay put for a minute, that I was going to fix the batter pourer. Notice I said that key word, “fix.” That, combined with the fact that I was heading toward the garage, was enough to trigger a light bulb in Adam’s head. He got an excited look on his face and quickly asked: “are you getting a screwdriver?”

I felt pretty bad telling him that I was only going to get some tape, and that no screwdriver would be involved in the “fixing” process.

Okay, I have to admit that Brian really really likes Star Wars. Lately he’s been on a real Star Wars kick — he dresses himself as a Jedi knight, he talks about the characters all the time, and so forth.

I remember shortly before Episode III came out, Brian was talking with a friend of ours (an adult) who had been in school with me a couple of years ago and had come back to visit. After the conversation, that friend remarked that Brian knew a lot more about Star Wars, especially about Episode III, than he did.

Admittedly, back then Brian and I had made a game of trying to guess as much as we could about the story of Episode III, based on things like the Lego sets and action figures that came out a few weeks before the movie did, so that helped a lot with Brian’s knowledge of Episode III — but in any case there’s no denying that he’s a devoted fan.

(Just to clarify, since Episode III is rated PG-13, Brian has most definitely not seen it, nor will he for a long time (but don’t tell him I said that). In fact he’s never seen any Star Wars movie all the way through. Thankfully, in the parts of the movies with fight sequences and violence, they’ve tended to chop the movie into lots of short “scenes” on the DVD, so it’s easy to skip over portions of the movie without missing more than you’d want to.)

This morning I got a confirmation that Star Wars has been a significant theme in the play around our house. Early in the morning I was watching Sarah while Kelli made a phone call (the boys were both still asleep). I accidentally sat down on a toy lightsaber — you know the kind with the “blade” that collapses into the handle. (At the time the blade was collapsed so that it was just a handle.) So I casually pulled it out from under me and set it down on the floor, wondering if 10-month-old Sarah would pay attention to it.

I didn’t need to wonder for long. Almost immediately she picked it up, held it with both hands exactly like it’s designed to be held, and started swinging it left and right, while making a sound.

I guess she’s been exposed to that sort of behavior often enough to know what what you’re supposed to do with a lightsaber.

Aren’t kids amazing, especially when they’re your own? =)

Since he was two (he’s four-and-a-half now), Brian has been building with Legos. And I’m not talking about the big chunky Duplo blocks for toddlers—I mean the real honest-to-goodness little tiny ones. To be quite frank, Brian is (already) the best Lego designer I’ve ever met, both in terms of creativity as well as quantity of output. (Even now, at age 4.5, I can safely claim that he has already built more original Lego designs than I have, by a significant margin).

Now that Adam’s turned two, he’s started “coming of age” in that respect, too. He’s always been more into the stacking, building kinds of baby toys than Brian ever was — Adam actually really likes Duplo blocks and has played with them for some time, whereas Brian hardly ever showed any interest in them. Add to that the fact that Adam has always been very aggesive about wanting to do and pushing himself to do the things that Brian does, and you can probably see where I’m headed.

So without further ado, let me proudly announce that last Sunday Adam built his first original Lego creation. Brian and I had set out to re-build one of our Lego Star Wars models (Obe-Wan Kenobi’s ship from Episode II). Of course it was taking us forever to find every piece, so Adam got bored of that quick and announced that he was going to build his own ship — and so he did!. I was so proud I could hardly contain myself — I had to run and get the camera immediately:

Brian has started to really pick up on expressions that we commonly use. Some of them got picked up from movies, and some of them from us, I’m sure. The thing is, most expressions don’t actually mean what their words literally mean, so Brian’s interpretation of these expressions can be humorous at times.

Some examples:

• “I have an MRI.” (pointing to his eye) “This is my MRI.” - Interestingly, he’s decided that only one of his eyes is his M R “eye” and he will correct you if you point to the wrong one.
• “In the mean time” - he uses this when he’s talking about a time, perhaps earlier in the day, when somebody was mad at him (i.e. the time when they were “mean”).
• “In the first place” - when he’s looking for something, or when we’ve been to more than one place, he uses this to refer to the “first place” where we looked or went. He’s also adapted it to create new expressions, like “in the next place” and “in the last place”.

Brian has a pretty amazing sense of visual perception/recognition. For a long time now he’s been able to identify stores and brands based on their logos — once while we were looking at toys in Target, he had a woman convinced that he could read because he was walking down the aisle naming the brands and contents of every Lego set on the aisle (he was three at the time).

This morning, this manifested itself once again. While eating his generic-brand frosted flakes and looking at the box (why do kids like to look at the cereal box while they eat?) he commented about some “little tails” on a particular letter. I looked at what he was pointing out, and sure enough he was right—the cereal box uses a serif font for the product name, so the letters indeed had “little tails.” I pointed out a couple more, and he started pointing out how the serifs were different shapes on different letters. At that point I figured that if he is smart enough to identify them, I might as well explain what we were looking at, so I told him about what a font is and what a serif is, and we ended up having a little chat about the topic.

Definitely not the conversation I would expect to be having with a four-year-old.

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And while I’ve got your attention, Adam’s been doing some funny stuff too. He’s really been getting into diggers and trains lately. And since he has an older brother, there are plenty of toys, books, movies, etc. around to feed his interest. One thing he’s gotten really interested in is “Bob the Builder” — it’s a claymation TV show about a man named Bob who builds/fixes just about anything from roads to soccer fields to farm buildings to pizza parlors, and the talking machines that help him work (we have a few episodes on video — we’ve never actually watched it on TV).

We have a bunch of Duplo blocks of Bob the Builder characters and vehicles (plus building materials, naturally) that we’ve found at a used toy store. Adam loves to play with them. But the funniest thing is the way he says “Bob the Builder” every time he sees one of the toys or videos or books with Bob on it. (And, I must admit, I think it’s so funny that I sometimes encourage him to say it just for fun.) Unfortunately it’s impossible to spell out, but it’s something like “Bob-da-bil-da-bil-da” — he almost always adds in the extra syllables in the middle (I think that’s called “reduplication” but I’m not positive — it’s been a while since I took phonology. Hopefully Professor Gess isn’t reading this =).

Poor Adam. Since we had Sarah so soon (17 months) after we had Adam, he was thrust into the famously unenviable role of middle child before he really had a chance to finish being a baby. Ever since he was very young he tried to emulate Brian, wanting to walk and run and play with cars and legos. He still tries to be involved with and be like Brian a lot. However, we’ve recently noticed a new side of him; well, it’s not really new, but it is sort of.

Now that Sarah is old enough that she pays attention to and plays with toys (well, she bats at them at least), and makes noises, and grabs any finger or ear that comes too close, Adam is starting to spend some of his time wanting to be like Sarah rather than wanting to be like Brian. He’ll lay down next to her and stare at her, pat her on the head or tickle her tummy (the noises he makes when doing this are quite entertaining). He also shares toys with her, and tries to talk to her with his limited vocabulary.

He’s had a renewed interest in baby toys as well — often when Sarah has one of those crinkly noise maker fuzzy textured teething kind of toys (those of you who have a baby know what toys I mean) then Adam will want one too. He’s started insisting on always having at least one and usually three blankets with him, and he’s even started carrying around a fuzzy bunny stuffed animal — something he never was interested in when he was a baby.

I’m sure some of this is a response to the fact that he was replaced by Sarah as the “baby” of the family, and he wants to get the attention that she is getting. And some of it is wanting to play with her now that she is able to respond and therefore possibly play games with him. And some of it is just inexplicable.

Lately Adam has been having trouble eating, something that is unusual for him. Of course, Brian went through a phase like this too at some point, where he always ate well and then suddenly decided not to eat anything at all — so maybe this isn’t a cause for concern. But what we would never have predicted is Adam’s sudden interest in Sarah’s diet (and specifically adopting it as his own diet).

A couple of days ago Kelli started giving Sarah baby food. As always, we started with Rice cereal. You know the stuff — it comes in a box and looks sort of like potato flakes, and you mix it with water so it looks like really wet plaster, then you put it in the baby’s mouth and he/she immediately spits it out again. Well, Kelli had Sarah in the high chair (the first time I had seen Sarah in the high chair) and was just starting to feed her some of this cereal. Since Sarah was just starting out, the consistency still was much more like milk than oatmeal or any other real cereal — but hey, you have to start somewhere, right?

Meanwhile, by Sarah’s second bite or so Adam had become interested in what was going on (this was before I started taking pictures, too, so we can’t use that as an explanation). He started saying “hum! hum!” (which is how he says “some! some!” meaning “I want some of that stuff!”). He was getting pretty frustrated, so Kelli decided to give him a spoonful so that he would know it was flavorless stuff and wouldn’t ask for any more. She gave him a bite, warning him that it tastes yucky. He ate it, laughed a bit, and five seconds later was saying “more! more!”.

A bit incredulously, Kelli mixed up a bowl of rice cereal and gave it to Adam. And would you believe, he practically inhaled the bowl he ate it so fast. His hand literally didn’t stop moving as he scooped a bite, shoved it in his mouth, and went back for another bite. “More! more!” he exclaimed, and unable to control our laugher we gave him another, bigger bowl full. All in all he ate three big bowls of rice cereal that night, and two more a couple of nights later.

I still can’t decide if he really likes the flavorless cereal more than the normal food we give him, or if he just likes being like Sarah, but in any case, he still hardly touches most food we give him, but he can’t seem to eat rice cereal fast enough.

I’ve been taking a bunch of photos of the kids, some posed and some candids, and for some reason I keep waiting to post them. (I think I’m waiting to build some fancy image browser something-or-other, but I don’t think that will come any time soon.)

So at Kelli’s urging, I have just stuck some photos up on a plain old boring web page for you to look at:

Miscellaneous photos of our kids
April to August 2005

Brian is quite fond of getting treats after meals. Usually if we give him a treat it is after supper, though we will also occasonally give him something small after lunch like a bit of candy. For a while he even asked for a treat every time he finished his breakfast, but we definitely drew the line there.

Sometimes, for whatever reason, we will give him a “big” treat after lunch instead of after supper. Inevitably he will ask for another treat after supper. Of course we tell him something like “you already had your big treat after lunch.” His standard response to this is something like this:

• Brian: Can I have some ice cream and cookies for my treat.
• Me: You already had a big treat after lunch.
• Brian: No, that was my snack, not my treat!

So yesterday night Brian was being pretty wild and we were having a hard time getting him to settle down. He was starting to get to the “hitting and throwing things” stage, so I asked him to go have a time out. Of course he never takes that idea well, so things were starting to escalate a bit.

• Me: Brian, go get on your bed for a time out.
• Brian: No, I need to go have my treat.
• Me: Go now or you will have a time out for your treat.

So, obviously that wasn’t the best calm parent response in the world. But that’s not the point of this story. The high point happened later, after I finally got Brian in on his bed for a time out. After he had been in there for several minutes and had settled down somewhat, he called to me and said something that had me laughing uncontrollably:

• Brian: I still need my treat, because my time out was just my snack and not my treat!

Lately Brian has started calling people names (mostly us and the kids, but occasionally his friends too) quite a bit. Admittedly they usually come out more funny than hurtful, but it bothers us a bit. For his particular favorite he has learned that “[some word]-head” can be used as a negative name. For instance, sometimes he’ll call us “turkey head” or “bonko head” or whatever happens to be the first thing that pops into his mind. Frequently he doesn’t even bother coming up with a new word and just says something like “stop it you heads.”

Tonight before supper Brian was having a bit of a tough time with this, and Kelli was trying to work with him to figure out what the consequence would be for name calling. Over the last couple of days we have started to notice that we, too, often call our children names. We don’t do it maliciously — it’s usually something like “honey bear” or “sweetheart” — nevertheless, Brian has noticed and started pointing out when we call our children something other than their given names. So while we were eating I made a joke about the fact that Brian had picked up name calling from us. The conversation went something like:

• Me (sarcastically): Brian, where did you learn to call people names? I’m sure I’ve never called you names like “honey bear” or “crazy kid.”
• Brian (in a grouchy tone): Stop that you name-caller!

How could I respond to a line like that? =)

Last night right after supper I took Brian and Adam out to play on their playhouse, while Kelli and I finished putting up a roof for it.

Later that night, we were trying to get Brian to bed, and as usual he tried to come up with any possible excuse to postpone going to sleep:

• Me: Brian, come on, it’s time for bed now.
• Brian: But I haven’t had a treat yet.
• Me: You got to go play outside. That was your treat.
• Brian: But it didn’t taste very good…

Excerpt from a conversation this morning:

• Brian: Can we go to McDonald’s for lunch?
• Kelli: You’ll need to get a job so you can pay for it.
• Brian: What’s a job?
• Kelli: It’s where you go to work, and they pay you money, like daddy does.
• Brian: But daddy already has money from his work.
• Me: Yes, but we already spent that money buying food for you.
• A minute passes…
• Brian: Dad, can I borrow some money to go to McDonald’s?
• Me: If you borrow money, that mean’s you have to give it back. If you spend the money at McDonald’s, how will you give it back to me?
• Brian: But you will just earn more from your work!

I have to admit, I never would have dreamed my three-year-old would be asking to borrow money from me…

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again — Brian is one clever kid.

In my family (i.e. my siblings and me) we have quite a tradition of wordplay and punnery, often quite elaborate puns involving multiple levels of multiple meaning and “had to be there”-type in jokes. Yesterday Brian proved that he is indeed one of the family.

He was playing with some legos. He really likes playing with legos, especially the mini-figures (the ones that are for ages 6+ or older) and has played with them literally for years. His favorites are the Star Wars sets. Completely off the subject, I don’t know where they get those age estimates from — we just got him a 200+ peice Star Wars spaceship lego set and he built it almost entirely by himself — I would dig out the appropriate pieces and show him which step he was on in the book, and he would put the pieces on.

Anyway, he not only likes the pre-built sets, but he also loves to take them apart and rebuild them into different spaceships or things. Yesterday, he was holding a battle droid mini-figure in one hand, and in his other hand he had a window from a spaceship set. He had attached a mini-figure’s lightsaber to the window and was making the window “chop” at the battle droid.

I was a little perplexed by this — he likes to do creative things with mini-figures, but I had never seen him use a window like a person, so I asked him about it:

• Me: Is the window fighting the battle droid?
• Brian: No dad, it’s “Mace Windu”

(In case you aren’t as big a Star Wars fan as Brian, Mace Windu (not “window”) is the Jedi Master played by Samuel L. Jackson in Star Wars episodes I - III.)

A couple of days ago I got Adam out of bed and needed to change his diaper. Lately he has been running and hiding behind furniture in his room every time we try to change him. Usually I have to find some toy or book or something that I can use to lure him out of hiding.

So I grabbed the closest thing I could reach, a toy stuffed tiger that is pretty big (over 2 feet long nose to tail). I pretended to make it walk around and growl. Sure enough, Adam got interested and came close enough that I was able to wrestle him down and change his diaper.

A funny thing happened after I finished, though.

First an aside. When Adam was about two months old, I had been driving a toy car to entertain him, making appropriate “boy noises” as Kelli calls them — rumbling engine noises and so forth. I set Adam down, and the first chance he gets he grabs a toy car and says “vrrroooom!” (Of course, it wasn’t actually “vrroom” — it was really more like “mrrmmrmmm” — but for people reading this I’m sure “varoom” looks more like a car noise.) Since then, Adam has continued to make car noises when driving toy cars etc. — Kelli has declared that it must be innate for boy children to make such noises.

Anyway, back to a couple of days ago. I had just finished changing Adam’s diaper, and he got up and grabbed the tiger. Since I had been making the tiger walk and growl, I sort of expected him to do something like that. He had different ideas, though. He started pushing the tiger sliding along the floor, at the same time making engine noises “vrrroooom!” as he drove the tiger around his bedroom.

I guess maybe animal noises aren’t innate knowledge for boys.

Well, the day has finally arrived. Our baby daughter, tentatively named Sarah Elizabeth (no middle name yet), was born at 5:15 p.m. Bloomington, IN time. Kelli and baby are both resting and doing well. Kelli was hurting a lot and having fairly regular contractions all day. She called me and I left work early and got home just after 4:00. By that time she was in a lot of pain. As she was preparing to leave her water broke, so we hurried to the hospital. They checked her and she was dilated to 9 cm — unfortunately she was too far along for an epidural, so she just had to suffer through the pain. Not fun.

The baby came fast though, and Kelli did an incredible job of pushing — much quicker and more effectively than with our other kids — I guess practice has paid off. It was nice to have the baby early enough that she was actually able to get to her room at a decent hour.

Since for some reason I can’t understand everyone always wants to know the vital statistics, here they are:

• Weight: 8 pounds 3 ounces
• Length: 20 inches

So she is kind of short and chubby, at least by our children’s standards. (By way of comparison, Adam was 8 lbs. 2 oz. and 20.5 inches; Brian was 7 lbs. 11 oz. and 21.5 inches if I remember right.)

I took Brian and Adam up to see mom and baby tonight. While we were there I took several pictures. Here are a few — the rest will be available (hopefully) soon when I finally get all my photos up on the site.

This evening Kelli was on the phone and I was chasing the kids around the upstairs. Adam was in a silly mood (he has been exceptionally silly lately) and he got running a little out of control. He ran right into the frame of our door, rebounded off the frame and bumped into the door itself, then fell forward onto the floor. Needless to say, he started to cry.

I scooped him up and took him out into the hall. To try to comfort him, I started to swing him, which he likes (and Brian has always loved too). I used to swing Brian all the time, but he’s gotten so big that it often hurts my back to swing him so I don’t swing the kids too much any more. I hoped Brian wouldn’t notice that I was swinging Adam, but soon enough I knew that he had been very aware of the whole incident.

I hadn’t been swinging Adam for more than a couple of minutes when Brian went running headlong into the door. He slowed down before he hit, but he bumped into it and “fell” onto the floor, then started to “cry.” When I asked him, he confirmed that he had indeed staged the whole thing in an attempt to try to get me to swing him, too. He saw that Adam got hurt running into the door and got a swing to console him — so Brian decided he’d try and see if the same thing worked for him too.

So I gave in a swang (swung?) Brian too. After a few swings I put him down, and naturally my back started to let me know it was feeling the burden. Then something new happened. Both Brian and Adam came up to me and stood, one grabbing each leg, both fussing and whining because they wanted to swing again. This is a new and not very exciting development, for them to both clutch my legs and beg for play time.

Finally I gave in and laid down and let them wrestle with me. Adam kept trying to put his finger in my eye or lift up my shirt and look at my belly button. In either case he would burst into giggling fits. Brian, on the other hand, kept wanting me to give him a “flip,” a little game I do where I sit him on my legs (with me laying down) and flip him over me so that he lands on his feet up by my head. But with Adam crawling all over my torso, that just wasn’t going to happen.

I think we all had a good time, though. They sure are silly and fun.