Latest Words

The latest vocabulary:

similar: it means something is like something else.

amphibian: a frog. Is a zebra an amphibian? :-)

octagon: a stop sign.

police: they dissipate our laws.

humph: what J says when he's lost something.

Pirate Art Happening.

A was painting outside. He likes the spray bottles filled with red and blue paint (I suspect for the spraying activity more than for the application of paint). He had painted two canvasses and was ready to start on a third. By this time he had several paint brushes and the spray bottles. It was a red day, mostly because A likes red (with a little bit of yellow thrown in).

He used a small brush and drew an orange-red triangluar shape with a few other triangular shapes on top. "I made a pirate boat," he said.

"Oh, yeah," I said. "I can see the sails, and I think I see a bit where the boat is reflecting in the water."

A drew a line along the top in red. "This is the mast," he said. Then he grabbed a larger brush and began to paint in a very thick line. "I'm making the mast," he said, adding more and more paint to make a very thick, red line. "Why did their mast break?" he asked (a reference to "How I Became a Pirate" -- a story where a modern boy joins some 1800s pirates and a lightning struck mast causes them to return to the boy's house).

"Did you want to use the spray bottles?" I asked, thinking that if he used the blue bottle he could have an ocean. Instead he grabbed the red. "I'm erasing the mast," he said, spraying a wash of red paint over the entire canvass (a referece to using a MacPaint spray can to paint over shapes with their filled-in color). "Why did they have to turn back?" I tried to hand him a blue spray bottle, and followed M's advice that I just step back and let A do what he wanted.

A finished painting. I turned on the garden hose and announced that it was time to spray off all the paint (especially the red paint caked onto A's armpit -- probably where he stuffed the paint brush under his arm). There was about ten minutes of spray play.

And then A got a hold of the garden hose.

He advanced on the canvas, where the thick masted pirate ship was drying. "Why did the lightning make the mast crack?" he asked, and then started to spray the painting.

"A-- oh, never mind." I retreated to the kitchen for some chocolate. There were some more comments about storms as the water washed away the red wash previously sprayed on. The water blasted away layer after layer of paint, revealing the thick mast, then the mast itself dissolved. "Why did the mast break?"

By this time I was inside watching through the windows as chocolate and mint helped assage my artistic sensiblities. "Hey honey," I said to M, "Our son is busily channeling his inner ocean storm and washing off the painting of the pirate ship."

"Those conceptual artists," he said.

I looked out of the window again. "Now he's tearing up the canvass and. . . he's burying it." A by this time had a shovel in his hands.

"It's an art happening. It's not about the end product, it's all about the process. Are you videoing this?"

"Mmmm. No." I said and went outside to photograph the buring processes (and clean up bits of mushy paper clinging to the to the fence).

---

"But I don't like to take a bath," A said.

"Oohh," I said one of those inscrutible father smiles. "Well, when you chose to paint yourself, you also chose for me to give you a bath to take off the paint."

Quickie

Lots of longish naps this week, so I think A is going through a growth spurt.

Yesterday he helped Grandpa with various chores -- like making pizza.

In other news, A pretty much on purpose lauched a stomp rocket onto a roof where we couldn't retrieve it. So we didn't.

Guns and Flamethrowers

Sigh.  A is into pretending that things are guns "to set people on fire."  I suppose this is natural, and I recall about eight months ago when A got mad at us he had a litany that involved crushing us up and throwing us into the garbage can. 

M was reading the latest copy of The Fearful Parent.  This issue is particularly ironic, because it has an article helping parents to not be "paranoid parents" -- so yes, the magazine that is telling us to not worry about our children falling at the playground is the same one which last year warning us that our child could be one of the 100 Americans bitten by sharks every year.

M thinks either we're getting more experienced at parenting, or The Fearful Parent is getting dumber.   

Zoo and Stomp Rockets

Our friends took us to the zoo.

Later they gave stomp rockets!

Already Reading?

Well, I'm not sure, but I think A can read.

Yesterday, we were looking at a Bob the Builder book, and A completed a line of text before I had read it to him.  I don't know if he actually read the book, or if he figured out that Wendy was going to say, "We fixed the road" based on narrative clues.  To be fair, the text was, "(Wendy icon) said, "We fixed the (road icon)."  (A said, "We fixed the road.")

M thinks A is using narrative context.  Still, it surprised me when it happened.

Photo Montage

A said that he wanted to post pictures to the blog.  So I hooked up his camera to the computer and fired up the blog.

"It's M!" says A about this picture.   

Then before we could finish, he ran off to play the kazoo.

This is the needy creature.  M is convinced that the only reason she is in our lives (for seven years before A, I might add) is to teach A to be kind to old animals.

It's mostly working.

A likes trucks.  And stickers.  I think he might have been using his truck as a paper cutter.

  

Quick Report

Went to a local hippy faire last Friday.  A loved it and was inconsolable when we had to leave.  He also missed his nap, which made Saturday and Sunday pretty interesting.  

Sunday we went to a work-related open house.  A loved it, even though it was quite warm and the fun stuff was in a parking lot.   The heat may explain why I was able to coax him from a bouncey-house and inside where it was air conditioned.  

He also wanted to find M, who was volunteering.  It helped quite a lot that an automatic piano was playing Beatles tunes.  While we waited.

A day-trip to Thomas

Grandma J and Grandpa H recently funded a trip to see Thomas the Tank Engine.  A was very excited to go and spoke about the impending trip for a week.  

The trip to the city where Thomas was was a long one.  Luckily, A managed to get a bit of a nap before the crinkling of potato chip bags woke him from his slumber.

A likes his new car seat, and spoke about it about as much as seeing Thomas.

Along the way to see Thomas, we stopped for a picnic.   The setting was idyllic.  A ate a lot.

It was pleasant to get out of the car, as the trip one-way was a little under three hours.  

Originally, A wanted to wear his pirate costume on his visit to Thomas.  However, these plans were thwarted by his own tiny body.  We're not quite sure why, but about ten minutes before we pulled into the parking lot for the Thomas extraveganza, A threw up.  I think "geyser" would be the right word to describe what was happening.  The volume was incredible.  

Fortunately for the car, A's brand new car seat -- er -- acted as a bucket.  But the pirate costume was drenched.  At the parking lot, M cleaned A and I disassembled the seat so it could air out in the 85 degree weather outside of the car.

The parking attendant was extremely helpful and even radioed in someone with a garbage can.

We must have asked A about a hundred times how he was doing.  He said he was fine, so we entered the Thomas area and then stood in line to board Thomas's train.   About this time, the temperature really picked up (or else the humidity), with the result that Grandma and Grandpa kind of slowed down and A became quite flushed.  

Finally, we boarded the train.  Somehow A acquired a balloon animal, and spent a large portion of the train ride chewing on it.   The ride itself was 30 minutes, with a good view of a local river.   I hadn't expected the pre-recorded Sodor Island Children's Choir to be singing snappy songs the entire trip, but I should have.

After the ride, A and M got to speak with the engineer of the diesel locomotive which did the real work of moving the train.   Then we went up to the "front" of the train for photo opportunities with Thomas (and Grandpa). 

Grandma and Grandpa found a shady spot (and water) and A continued to find photo ops -- this time with Sir Toppham Hatt (aka "The Fat Controller").  Sir Toppham got his knees hugged by A when they were through, which elicited a heartfelt "Aw!" from all the staff.  

There was lots to do (or at least stand in front of).  A managed to get some play time with all the toy trains there (the grandparents were taking the equivalent of a nap under a concessions tent).   The day was winding down, and I began to notice that other families were hitting the "pre-dinner toddler-jags."    I was getting pretty hungry, myself.

So we gathered up and headed for the exit gate.  We decided that it was a nice experience, but that next time we'd wait for Thomas to come a little closer to home and we'd make sure to get good seats in the caboose.  

We got A's car seat back together (it didn't smell too bad after two hours in the dry, windy weather) and drove off to find food (and just in time, because a half and hour later a huge thunderstorm hit the area with lots of rain and lightning).

---

We figured A had some kind of kid's stomach flu, because I caught it the day after we got back, and M caught it a few days later.  Luckily, neither of us threw up (although I had full-body burps reminiscent of Mt. Vesuvius).

Birds

One of the computer games in our house is to fill up a page with outlines of circles, squares and other polygons so A can use the paint bucket tool to fill them with different colors.   As you can see, the paint tool changed a few times.

A wanted to print this out, but I convinced him that posting it to the blog was just as good (with the bonus that Grandparents would be able to see it).

"I think it's a picture of birds," says A.  

"What kind of birds?" I ask.

"A 'Hadicock'."

Oh no

M says that A has begun to make "poo and pee" jokes. I don't know where that is coming from. M also thinks that excrement humor doesn't usually kick in until a child is five. What I want to know is when does it stop.

I think we may be doomed.