Sundry Vignettes

On our trip down to Tahoe, we stopped at a restaurant for dinner. It was one of those restaurants where they bring you a small loaf of bread on a board with a knife. Our waitress made what I thought was an oddly exaggerated statement of how sharp the knife was. She also made a point of mentioning that the knives included in the napkin-wrapped utensil sets were sharp steak knives. Finn has been fascinated with knives and cutting lately, so of course he ended up with the bread board in front of him and spent a great deal of the dinner slashing the loaf into ribbons. He uses sharp knives quite often at home... we watch him closely and move his hands into a safer position when necessary. We got odd looks from a couple of the other diners and I was sure our waitress was going to say something several times on her way by, but she never actually did. I had no idea why everyone was behaving so bizarrely and chocked it up to being back in California. I didn't realize until we were getting back into the car that Finn had decorated every one of his fingertips with a bandaid before we left home.

It continues to be very amusing to see how Eli and Larkin play when they are together. And people say young kids don't fully understand the fine art of compromise. The big, all-consuming game they played last time they were together was the Care and Feeding of Zombie Babies. Think about it. It's a dilemma.

A couple Eli and Larkin exchanges:

L: Oh no! A dinosaur is coming! Let's defeat it.
E: There are no dinosaurs. They were all destroyed millions of years ago when a giant meteor hit the earth.
L (exasperated): I KNOW about the meteor! I'm *pretending*.

L: Let's play wedding!
E: Uh... are we allowed to do that?

I have often been annoyed by the lack of an equivalent to "starving" for being very very thirsty (parched just doesn't cut it somehow). Larkin recently noticed this lack and (after a pause in the middle of the sentence in which it was required) inserted "droughted." I like it.

We have never tried to convince the kids that Santa Claus is real. We have also never told them that he is not (although last year I did ask Larkin if she wanted a gift we were wrapping for Emile to be labeled from us or from Santa). A few days ago, totally out of the blue, Larkin told me that she wanted us to pretend that Santa Claus was real this year. I asked her what that would mean and she said they should have stockings and presents "from Santa." (If she knew about air quotes she would have used them, I swear.) I asked if there was something she wanted us to do differently than last year in that regard (since we did stockings and presents, although we never specified who they were from). She said that she just thought it would be fun to pretend that Santa actually brought the presents that we bought, and we should talk about him more. Yeesh, Finn is going to end up confused.

And finally, it has been very cold lately. Larkin still likes to wear summer dresses, but will wear pants under them and a coat on top when we go outside. On this particular day, she was wearing a sleeveless summer dress. We were leaving the Book Exchange (which contained a large number of other people happily browsing for books), when she stopped very dramatically and announced loudly: "I shall need a coat, for I am dis-armed."

Payback

Larkin has declared that the only m&ms she likes are the dark brown ones. The other ones taste funny. Those of you who know my personal history with m&ms are presumably already amused. For the rest of you, here is the stuff of Hamilton Lore:

When I was a wee bairn (5? Help me out here, parents) I claimed I could taste the difference between different colored m&ms. Jim, as the supportive parent he has always been, demanded a scientific trial so he could prove me wrong. Out came the blindfold and what he figured was a statistical sample of m&ms. The results? I got every single one right. Okay, actually I think I couldn't tell the difference between light brown and dark brown (I'm aging myself by remembering the light brown ones), but it sounds better to claim a perfect record. After simmering down from the heights of disbelief, Jim and Mary figured I could probably actually taste the different dyes used in the candy coating.

Granted, the m&ms we have now are the hippie version and it's not so hard for me to believe that whatever vegetable/fruit extracts they use in the dye are slightly more flavorific than red #357 and blue #123 or whatever it is in name brand candy these days. So far, no one has been blindfolded in the name of science (well, not recently anyway), but I think I might see if Larkin will agree to the experiment.

In the meantime, I guess Emile will have a lot of yellow, orange and red m&ms as work snacks in the trailer.

Tahoe!

We spent a week by Lake Tahoe with the San Jose Cousins to study the lives of off-season yuppies. The trip was a 6.5 hour drive (as in time actually spent on the road) and we were quite pleased to find out how easy car trips are these days. We read books, played pretend games, sang songs, ate weird food, peed by the side of the road, drew pictures and generally made very good time. Sleep cycles were thrown a bit out of whack, but that is an easy, no-questions trade for babies who don't want to be in a car seat and want to nurse all the time.

The kids were Super Excited to spend more time with baby Kiyo (and, um, her minders, of course).
They danced for her, sang for her, cuddled her, provided tummy time surfaces for her to lay on and were generally thrilled by her existence even during her rare fussy moments. Finn even doled out some pithy parenting advice while covering his ears with his hands to block out the sounds of crying baby: "Hurry up with that boob! That baby's hungry!" and a slightly panicked "Bounce her! Bounce her! She's not happy!"

Larkin made fast friends with another 4.5 year old who was staying in the same complex as us... a short, flurried exchange of cards is presumably in the works.

Elly and Janelle, bless their fuzzy little hearts, also gave Emile and I several opportunities to flee from the condo and its inherent chaos to take hikes at normal adult speeds and/or loll about in a coffee shop. They made up several brand new pretend games and spent lots of quality time in the hot tub with the kids. No value can be set on adults ready to play (almost) all the time. At this point, it's kind of a toss up whether a "vacation" is going to be absolutely draining or actually refreshing, and this turned out to be one of the latter. Woohoo!

Many thanks to Uncle Ken and Aunt Molleen for passing on the time-share opportunity.

Pirate Booty

This month, while Felix was staying with us, the kids received the following letter from one Ezekiel Haul IV:
This was the beginning of a several hour adventure during which seven clues were found hanging in trees, under a grate, off a fencepost, inside an old wood stove, underground and in a treehouse. The walk was crazy amusing... Larkin could hardly believe this was actually happening and talked nonstop (literally... we couldn't get a word in edgewise, even when she was supposedly asking us questions) about whether there was actually *real* treasure at the end of all the clues and who the pirates were and why the letter would have been sent to her and Finn and what the treasure might be if it turned out to be real and whether the next clue would lead to another clue or to the treasure and I think you get the general idea. Meanwhile, Finn was turning over every leaf and picking up every stick and declaring them all clues ("AHA! I found a CLUE!") and generally needing to be cajoled to keep up with the leading treasure hunt party. In the end, I think Finn ended up finding two of the clues and Larkin found the others. Here are a couple of the discoveries:


Finally, they found the X that marked the spot and started to dig:
When the treasure turned out to be a whole chest of booty, Larkin was initially stunned completely speechless (and that's saying a lot). Note shocked posture here:
But, really, if you dug a hole in your backyard and discovered this:
Wouldn't you be flummoxed? Finn's response was a little more sanguine. He gave a great shout of "YAY! Treasure!" and threw a handful up in the air. Larkin's summation of the experience: "Pirates might be mean, but they sure have beautiful booty!" Many hours admiring, sorting, wearing and generally fondling the treasure have since been joyfully spent.

Full photo documentation of the hunt can be seen at our Picasaweb site.

Exquisite Motor Skills

Okay, maybe they're just fine... but whatever they are Larkin has been very busy honing them lately. Not long ago, Larkin's art was all abstract... big blobs of bright color that were sometimes identified as specific items and sometimes not. Suddenly, she is drawing specific, recognizable things and coloring them in. Like this envelope decoration:

That second item in the row is a bed post. Seems a little out of place with the other Lucky Charms, but who am I to judge? And then there's this Mermaid Monster:
I was informed that this is a picture of a monster that Larkin and the other members of the Winx Club defeated in magical battle. Writing has been a favorite pastime lately, as well. It is still more art than "writing." She asks us to write something out for her and then she copies it herself. This is how it all began:

Larkin was writing a series of symbols that were more or less letterish and periodically asking us to read them to her. At this stage, numbers were included now and then so she would write things like "PL8": plate! We would do our best to explain how we were decoding her symbols, but it seemed like she was getting tired of writing nonsense syllables. Then she asked us to write her name on another sheet of paper for her to copy. Shortly after, she wanted to write a whole letter to Uncle Felix the same way. It hasn't arrived yet, so I'm not sure if it's legible or not. The letters were all pretty clear, but she didn't really see any need for traditional word spacing.

Larkin has also just had her second overnighter at a friend's house, this time with the fabulous Lowes. They have both gone off without a hitch... except for Finn's slight despondency at being without his favorite person. Oh, and Larkin's tendency to wake her hosts up at or before the crack of dawn. I mean, she's just so excited to be there!

Trouble Shooting

I'm not a big fan of guns and was kind of wondering how I would feel when the kids inevitably became fascinated with them. On the other hand (Felix, you can vouch for me here) the vast majority of games I played outside of school as a child were "war games." And look how fabulously peaceful I turned out. ;)

We recently got a couple of squirt guns after the kids found one that someone had left outside the library. I was somewhat surprised to discover that I didn't have any negative emotional reaction at all. I mean, these weren't Big Scary Guns, they were Fun Plastic Toys.

Yesterday we went to the park to meet friends and Larkin and Finn were very excited to take their new squirt guns with them. I remembered at the last minute that the family we were going to meet did not allow their children to play with guns. I told the kids what I remembered and said I thought it would probably be pretty rude to take our squirt guns to the park. Finn wanted to know why it would be rude. I asked him to imagine watching other kids play with something that looked Absolutely Fascinating only to be told that he couldn't touch it. He didn't think that sounded like fun and both kids agreed it would be friendlier to leave the squirt guns and play with them when we got home. Larkin wanted to know why some kids aren't allowed to play with guns. My best off the cuff answer went something like "Real guns are powerful and destructive things... it freaks some people out to see kids treating something as a toy that has caused so much trouble in the real world." Larkin summoned up some remarkably righteous indignation (I think this is almost verbatim): "But these aren't real guns! I don't want to play with real guns! Do people really think kids are so stupid we can't tell the difference between a weapon and a toy!?!?"

Whew, dodged that bullet. So to speak. I wasn't quite ready to go all gun control and break the news to them that children are killed every year because they were playing with their parents' guns. All things in time.

Gushy Mushiness

Neither Emile nor I have ever been accused of being the world's most emotionally demonstrative individuals, but we seem to have brought two of them into the world. I think I've mentioned before that Larkin tells us she loves us every time she forgets what she was going to say mid-sentence. Well, Finn has taken to yelling our names at the top of his lungs when he is across the house from us (if more than one of us is across the house, it's "Hey, Guys?") and when we respond, he says (much more quietly), "I love you." And he'll keep yelling at us until we say we love him, too.

We've been talking a lot about age, growing, relative size and babies recently. For a while, Larkin was mathematically fascinated by the fact that Finn would *always* be 2 years younger than her. "Wait, you mean when I'm 54 he'll be 52?!" This morphed into a conversation about how much bigger they will be when they reach that ripe old age, as well as how much smaller they were not so long ago. Initially, Larkin was seriously jonesin' to get older. Ten was apparently the perfect age. Finn, however, got a little freaked out by the whole aging notion and crawled up into my lap, wrapped his arms around me and said, "No me want to grow big. I want to stay little so we can snuggle." Sigh. Larkin apparently took his gentle admonition of her enthusiasm to heart and also got slightly paranoid about the possible pitfalls of growing older. A long conversation about the pros and cons of being children vs. being adults ensued. Reassurance was issued that I would be happy to snuggle them no matter how large they got. I'm not sure which parts of that conversation were most influential, but Larkin now tells me several times a week that she's glad she's still a kid and thanks me for helping her have such a fun childhood.

Score!

In other (less serious) relationship news, this morning Larkin informed me that she had "broken up with the pink xylitol candies." I believe my response was: "Huh?" She patiently explained to me, "That's what happens when you don't like something as much as you used to." Thanks, YouTube.

This exchange also happened spontaneously this morning, presumably also inspired from some nauseatingly cute cartoon from YouTube (I'm inclined to blame CareBears but have not actually seen enough myself to have convincing evidence):

Larkin: When you love somebody, they are always in your heart.
Me: Well, I guess you two are pretty well lodged in my heart.
Finn: Yeah, because we're so small.