106-1

That would be Jamie's record in Candyland. He likes to play with the two of us at night after Connor has gone to Bedfordshire and before he goes. By some strange coincidence Jamie always wins and Sarah and I are reduced to being the Washington Generals of Candyland to Jamie's Globetrotters. There is something so guileless and good-natured about his cheating that we don't really argue too much or for too long. Plus, we all know that a game of Candy land can really stretch on and by that stage we're usually pretty ready to put a wrap on the day.

But I did win once. Once.

JUIFF??!!

As Sarah said recently, our two boys would sell their souls for a sippy-cup of watered-down grape juice. Jamie has long been a juice drinker and will still proclaim imperiously in the morning "Where's my juice?!"

Connor, however, is even more obsessed than his brother. In the first place, of course, he primarily wants Jamie's juice. Once he's got a hold of it, he will absolutely go to the mattresses if you try and take it from him and give him his own. Not good enough. But the desire for juice, which, when he has a pacifier in his mouth comes out "JUIFF?!!" (both a question and a command), has become something of an obstacle to all of our ability to sleep. It is often the first word out of his mouth when he wakes up at whatever hour of the night or morning he wakes up, be it 2:00, 4:00 or 5:30. This morning he got me up a little after six, so we came downstairs and I got him some juice. He plowed through two sippy cups worth and then clambered onto my chest and went back to sleep for an hour.

Oh, the places we won't go!

Jamie is becoming more and more imaginatively adventurous. Yesterday after his "nap" he told me he'd been down there whispering to himself, telling himself a story. It was probably about him and his friend Shawnie and their endless pursuit of the bad guys. Jamie is fully invested in the old good guy/bad guy dichotomy. I picked the boys up from school Friday afternoon and got Jamie first, then we went in to get Connor, who was watching some manner of video. Nothing was remarked about it at the time but when we got to the car, with the piles of stuff that comes home on Fridays, Jamie starting asking what they had been watching. I don't know I said. But who were those guys in the show, he said. Really, Jamie, I don't know. But it boiled down to him needing to know: "Are they good guys or bad guys?" He wanted me to get them both out of their car seats and go back and watch so we could find out.

He is also very much in a Dr. Seuss phase right now, and it's wonderful see how this fuels his imagination. The undefinable quality of many of the creatures also fascinates him.

All of this has been leading to an increase in nightmares I think. He's woken up crying a few times in the last week. Last night this happened and I went down and he told me his dream had been about lava. He's a little obsessed with volcanoes and is clearly both attracted and scared by them. I told him it was fine, though, and that as we've talked about, there are no volcanoes in Houston so no lava. "Dad," he said, "let's not go to Hawaii. It's scary there."

Language is power!

Guest contribution from Mommy:

Connor's saying so many words now; he easily knows 100 words. Plus he says 2 word sentences... like, "Hi Jay-Jay!" and "More choo-choo?" and "My wheee!" which means "My slide." He also knows some colors, which I find rather surprising. He can say yellow, blue, and red, and has an imperfect notion of what they refer to. He likes to color, and will sit with the box of crayons in front of him and demand "RED!" When we give him the red crayon, it sometimes pleases him, and sometimes he throws it across the room in anger, demanding again, "RED!" until we give him a blue crayon. He's turning into quite a tyrant. However, he also busted out the word "kiss" yesterday, offering one to me, and then providing it with a big "mwaah!" I think you can guess what my favorite new word is.

Pop culture questions

There was a day when the only song Jamie would listen to was "Jackson" by Johnny Cash and June Carter. Things have expanded a bit now and he has his own little playlist on the iPod. Mostly the stuff you'd expect, Beach Boys, Beatles, and some other hits of the 60s. Interestingly, they both seem to like the Ramones. At the first chords of "Blitzkrieg Pop" Connor begins thrashing around in his carseat.

Jamie likes to know what the songs are about and we find we appreciate the Beach Boys for the relative thematic directness that makes it easy to explain. In other cases he asks some interesting questions, such as: "Why Sloopy has to hang on?" The easy answer, that she comes from the wrong side of town, only prompts more questions.

Does it get any better?

We went over to one of my colleagues house for a barbecue on Sunday night. They have two kids, one of whom is a remarkable, preternaturally intelligent, thoughtful girl who just turned 10. Jamie absolutely adores her, and always has. She drew a picture of the two of them once and he carried it around and slept next to it for weeks. He gets a little shy around her, however. We had prepped him because she is a big Obama supporter (she went to the rally in Houston and is planning on attending the caucus tonight - we think she should be a superdelegate). We had him all ready to say "We want Obama to be president" (which we do of course) and even gave him some of the reasons why. But he clammed up when she asked him. All he managed was to ask me to tell her that he is good at baseball (which he is in fact).

Later, they sat next to each other at dinner and Jamie ate hamburger more efficiently than I've ever seen him eat of any food at one sitting. Then chocolate milk was offered and she came to pour the syrup into his cup. "Tell me when to stop," she told Jamie. He, however, clearly had no intention of doing any such thing, ever. The girl of his dreams, pouring as much chocolate syrup as he wanted? No way he was going to cut that short!

Roar!

Connor's vocabulary continues to develop rapidly. He is working on animal noises in earnest right now. He started with a core group of "woooof" (dog) "mow" (cat) and "roar!" (big cat). Lately he has expanded to "moooo" and some kind of primal oinkish grunting for pig. Bird is the only one he doesn't replicate: he now says "bur-taaahhh!" with real relish.

He can then deploy these noises as a means of classifying the animals that he sees in the books he is enjoying more and more. So we turn the pages from one animal to the other and he makes a noise. What's funny is seeing an animal he's not sure of. He'll pause, considering, and then apply the label with confidence. It never seems to occur that he might need a new category. His default sound seems to be the roar. Some of the things he's roared at lately: a seal, a moose, the big caterpillar in The Very Hungry Caterpillar and a giraffe.