It's Worse Than That, It's Art, Jim

I got a Play-Dough Extruder for A, which he really likes.

And the other day I sat down with A to do draw some pictures.

What I've learned from this is that I shouldn't do collaborative art projects with the child. It's not because doing art isn't a learning experience for him (it is). It's not because he doesn't have fun (he does). It's because A's process-oriented approach to learning, which is appropriate for a two-and-a-half-year-old, is exactly the sort of thing to drive a product-oriented forty-three-year-old person like me stark raving insane.

Using the extruder isn't about mass-producing Play-Dough stars for A. Or even mass-produced leaves, moons, or triangles (and then arranging them onto a tiara). No, for A, it's about mooshing different colored blobs of dough through the extruder and yanking them as they come out of the other end until the dough is a uniform grey. And being unimpressed when I pointed out that at one point the strips of dough coming out looked like the storm systems on Jupiter. And then walking away so that the dough dries out. And then announcing that he's not eating the Play-Dough while crumbs of the stuff are falling away from his mouth.

And using crayons to draw pictures? That's about discovering how many times one can snap a crayon into two pieces, and then slamming the fragments into the table. OK, I did have a little session where we took turns drawing trucks, but then he wanted me to draw the whole thing. While he ate the remaining crayons. And wadded up the paper. While denying it.

In fact, I'm beginning to think that A is developing his own version of The Negative Confession

• Oh M, who comes home from work; I am not eating crayons.
• Oh J, who is an award winning writer; I am not touching the oven.
• Oh M, who drives a big truck; I am not pulling the cat's tail.
• Oh J, who takes me to the library; I am not poopy anymore.

I guess it could have been worse. We could have been playing with the toy that allows one to play phrases from Eine kleine Nachtmusik out of sequence.

Wishing for Kleenex

The other day we were watching "Elmo's Christmas Countdown." Predictably, there's a disaster with the result that (gasp!) there won't ever be another Christmas!

When Elmo learns this, he knows just what to do. He walks to where he can see the sky. He finds a Christmas star, and makes a Christmas wish for a Christmas miracle that everything will turn out all right.

I'm such a schmuck; I almost started crying right there because a puppet was making a wish on a television show -- not, I might add, for world peace, or for the environment, or an end to hunger, or even for Christian Salvation; but for Santa Claus to show up and hand out toys.

What's worse is that just thinking about a small red furry puppet making a wish chokes me up.

Is this the kid's fault? Or am I getting dotardly?

Unfortunately, I get the same way when the Winter Warlock wishes for one last piece of magic during the wedding scene from "Santa Claus Is Coming To Town."

I guess it's the folks who make Christmas specials' fault. Except...

In "Fantasia," the Disney animators set Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony in a mythologic Mt. Olympus, complete with Pegasi and Unicorns. During the storm movement, I used to have to resist the urge to throw up when the mother pegasus rescues a baby pegasus from the storms and they win the safety of their nest. Fast forward to just a little while ago when I was watching "Fantasia" with A -- now I have to resist the urge to clutch A to my bosom and not drench him with tears.

Damn! Damn! Damn! What little pheromone spell has messed up my artistic sensibilities?!

Don't get me started on the good-bye scene from "The Wizard of Oz." Sigh; I guess I'll have to have a viewing of "Moulin Rouge." Oh. Wait...

On the Third Day . . .

We're still opening gifts. Mostly because A plays with whatever he opens for about 20 minutes, and partly because A took in the lion's share of holiday loot. It's kind of nice, and it makes singing "The Twelve Days of Christmas" less non-sensical.

One of the toys he got was a kid's camera. It takes video.

Holiday Schedule

A has been kind of -- well -- off kilter today. I'm pretty sure that the extra holiday activities we've been attending have got him a little over-stimulated and off schedule. Unfortunately, this translates into him hitting us. Time to get the healthy snacks lined up so we don't overly delay a meal.

Otherwise, he's been having a lot of fun. He likes the Christmas Tree that we have up in our living room, and he's been wishing folks "Happy Solstice." He's also got a talent for knowing what we should get people for gifts. We just ask him, "A, what should we get so-and-so as a gift." He thinks for a second and then tells us. It's very handy.

More Ow Tanenbaum!

Decorating the tree was kind of a bust. A lasted until we got the tree up. He did pretty well hanging some metal bells to the branches of the tree. The tree, on the other hand, has pretty thin branches so a lot of the ornaments are too heavy for the branch tips. But when we got the lights out, he started stepping on them. And M's Christmas Elephant collection were instantly assigned the role of Bromley Horns -- luckily M got them from A before the pachyderms could be clacked to death. One Christmas fairy didn't manage to escape without a clipped wing...

We switched to our regular night time routine and once A was asleep, I started to put on the lights. Then I woke up M, who had fallen asleep reading to A. Our tree is a little-top heavy with decorations because anything lower than three-and-a-half feet is going to be snatched off of the tree and either used as Bromley Horns, swung around like a sling-shot, or otherwise aggressed upon. We finished (more or less) decorating the tree at midnight.

This morning, M helped A put some origami dinosaurs onto some of the lower branches.

I'm thankful this isn't 1909, when they used to put real candles on trees (although, now that I think about it, A would be more likely to blow them out than anything else).

It's Time to Light the Lights

All week long A has been looking forward to moving the sun peg on our Portable Stonehenge. It's a wooden disk with thirteen holes in a line down the middle and two circles of fifty-six holes each along the disk's circumference. It's got a day peg, a sun peg, a moon peg, and a moon's north node peg. Every day we move the day peg one hole north along the thirteen holes in a row, and the moon peg two pegs counter-clockwise along the disk's circumference. When the day peg is in hole seven or thirteen, then the sun peg moves counter-clockwise one peg along the circumference. There are three arbitrary spots equidistant from each other along the circumference that when the sun peg lands in them, we move the moon's node peg clockwise.

Anyway, A has been wanting to move the sun peg for the last several days, and today was the day when he could. He knows that today is winter solstice, but I'm pretty sure he doesn't exactly know what that means.

In other news, we're going to try to set up the tree in the living room tonight; we tried to let A help us, but he got so excited that he started hitting things. I don't know how long some of the ornaments we have are going to last this year; our tree may be up for only a short while. I think M has managed to get A to fall asleep, so it's time to string the lights.

Ow Tanenbaum!

Today we went out for a Christmas Tree. M thought it would be fun to cut our own tree on Bureau of Land Management land. I thought so, too, and we all packed the BLM maps, the cocoa, the video camera, saws, animal crackers, and loppers into the Matrix and headed out.

After driving for about a half hour and then backtracking over a mountain pass, we discovered that access to the first place we saw on the BLM map was denied to us by an out-of-county logging company. It made scintillating video footage. So we drove by a local lake and up another mountain pass and stumbled into another area. By this time, A had fallen asleep. I video taped him snoring.

I think everything was going fine, even after we waved at some skeet shooters blasting bright orange disks in the middle of a mud pit. (I didn't video them on the grounds that it's generally a bad idea to take pictures of people with guns unless you've known them for longer than a half hour.) M found a place to park the car a little farther up the mountain. He got out and I stayed with the snoring infant. It did cross my mind as M's yellow-garbed figure disappeared around a bend in the road that if I was in the car with the doors closed and the windows rolled up I wouldn't be able to hear M calling for help if he needed it.

In my more paranoid moments I wondered if I would be able to use my cell phone to dial 911 and if I'd have to rewind the video to tell them what BLM lot I was on (let's see, it's around here somewhere -- no, I went back too far to Thanksgiving; hold on a moment. Uh, OK, we're at -- oh wait, that was the sign for the road that was closed...).

A woke up at this point and wondered where M was. So I told him he was looking for a tree to cut down.

M came back and suggested a road we could walk that might have a tree for us. So we unpacked and drank some cocoa, broke out the video camera, gave A a shovel, and started walking.

It was about this time that the target practice began. We never actually saw who was shooting as they were over a ridge, but we're pretty sure that they had semi-automatic weapons. And every now and again we'd hear the skeet shooters, too. We had to explain to A that he was hearing weapons like Elmer Fudd's rifle (or Sylvester's gun, he added). During a particularly startling barrage of automatic gunfire, I reflected that at least we probably didn't have to worry about mountain lions.

We walked for a little bit (A is a real trouper and dragged his shovel the entire time).

Then we found a clear-cut.

And it started to rain.

So we walked back to the car for more hot cocoa and animal crackers.

And M wasn't going to give up. By gum, he'd given the BLM $5 to cut a tree, and we were going to do it. We drove back down a little until we found a place to park the car (again). We eventually agreed on a nine foot tree and M helped A to cut it down. It turned out to be very light, and fit on top of the car easily.

On the way back down the mountain we had to stop at the mud pit because the local high school guys had blocked the road with their -- um -- vehicles so they could watch a jacked-up-truck jump mud humps and bits of blasted orange skeet bits. They were cool and unblocked the road when they saw us and we got home with the tree still tied to the car roof.

Toys

Today M and I were A-less for a few hours.

So we went to a toy store. M was showing me all the things that A played with when he and A visited a few weeks ago. I guess it really didn't sink in that A spent about 20 minutes playing with a Disney Princess Kitchen set. I imagine that that will be good childhood story material for when A is dating.

Man, the folks in the store were grumpy grumpy grumpy. I can see why folks don't like to do holiday shopping in big box stores.

Anyway, M showed me some other things that A played with, and they included things like, a realistic looking baby doll, pirate ships and some tool benches. M explained that A would really like some real tools, as pretending to fix things like our car and house with plastic toys isn't cutting it (so to speak).

Waffles from Planet Clare

Well. . . I'm not sure why, but A woke up this morning around 2 AM. He came into our bedroom and for about forty-five minutes I lay in bed thinking, "Must Get Up. Take child back to his room." Finally, M got up and they went into A's room.

About an hour later, I heard A toddle out of his bedroom and then the click of a light. M followed soon after.

"A turned on the light," said A.

"I see that," said M, who is a better man than I.

"Get the waffle iron. Make waffles," said A.

I guess he was hungry. By this time I had girded my loins with a bathrobe and fished some frozen waffles out of the freezer. I did try to reason with A that it wasn't yet 3 AM and that we should all be asleep, but M says I was using my angry voice. I thought I was using my sleepy voice.

Hear That, Elmo? You're Next!

Scene: The hallway just outside the grown-ups' bedroom.

J (talking on the phone with his mother): Just a minute, Mom; A's harrasing the cat.

M, the Cat (running toward the closed bedroom door): Mmmmrow!

A (chasing her with a gas mask given to him by his anesthesiologist ): Tympanostomy! Tympanostomy!

J (holding the phone away from his face): A, the cat does not need a tympanostomy. Take that mask away from her face. (Opens door for cat.)

(A runs into living room to find Elmo...)

Crisis of Faith

Lately I just don't know what to do about A's spiritual upbringing.

I've been sort of grumpy lately about the local pagan scene because it's been pinging my personal "superstition meter" lately. I mean, on one hand it's cute to hear A sing "Hoof and Horn," but on the other hand, I could have just as easily been singing any number of curious little pagan songs; and I find myself wondering, "Do I really want to saddle A with ideas like 'Earth Mother is calling Her children home?' A) Doesn't a phrase like that confound our parents and our deity (or dieties); and B) if we're already home, how can we be called home?" And the major approaches of paganism seem to be

• "Everything's the Goddess" (which seems about as unbalanced as saying "Everything's God"); or,
• "Girl-Goddess meets Boy-God, and Their love makes the universe go 'round" (which strikes me as terribly heteronormative); or,
• "You can do spells to get parking spaces" (which seems to view the universe as a psychic mail-order catalogue); or,
• "I had a counselling session with my deity yesterday, and S/He told me that I needed to be less codependant," (which seems more like therapy and less like religion)

I wish I could find some local folks who seem to be more aware about the theological roots of paganism and more interested in its aspects of communion. At least I don't have to deal with Original Sin. Sigh.

I really can't say "We believe such-and-such," because M and I don't share faiths, and A's too young to have formulated a religious belief system, unless one counts Thomas the Tank Engine (and Friends) or Donald Duck (and Friends). Oh well; at least he thanks the strawberry plants for strawberries; and it makes me glad that he might see plants as other and not as object -- I guess when he's a little older I'll let him be the person who moves the pegs on the Portable Stonehenge.

And I'm going to get into trouble one of these days when he sings "Inane-a" as a Goddess name after hearing me in one of my particularly sarcastic moods.

Ply it Again, Sam

The last few days, A had heard me spell my last name so many times that he's trying to spell it, too. I guess I hadn't realized that he had generalized spelling to other words until M brought it up. A tried to spell "stop" S E O H P, so I don't expect that he'll be solving crossword puzzles anytime soon.

In other language news. Earlier today he was playing with one of M's belts and started singing, "You can ring my belt" then started laughing. And then there was the new toy plyers incident:

M: What are you doing, A?
A (playing with toy plyers): Playing with my pullers.
M: No. Those aren't "pullers", they are plyers.
A (within two seconds): Huh. What do they ply?


A's had a lot of energy lately; he's been waking up earlier and earlier and has wanted to whack things with sticks (usually me). Very large wheels for him to run around in are looking better and better each day.

Here's more tree-decorating video.

Wreck the Halls