Jamie's deep question of the day

Jamie likes to hit you with deep questions with little or no warning. Today, they are off from school and some friends were coming over so I took the boys out to get bagels. As we were getting of the car, Jamie broke his usual stream of consciousness talk and said, "Dad, why did God make mosquitoes?" Now my usual approach to such a question would be to bring in the "best possible world" idea of philosophical optimism, meaning that if there is something bad in the world it is only so because it has to be there to do something good as well. I was trying to figure out how to apply this to mosquitoes, when it became clear that Jamie had already pursued this line of thought. "I mean," he went on, "is there ANYTHING good about mosquitoes?" We agreed that there was not, but that left me pretty stumped for an answer, or at least a good one.

Hide and seek

This is a big game right now with the boys of course and can be lots of fun. Connor gets really into it, though he's not quite gotten the idea of staying hidden. Generally, while you count he goes off to hide as normal, but when you finish he immediately comes running out gleefully saying "You found me!!"

Yesterday after school I took the boys to Chick-fil-A for dinner. This is sort of a Monday tradition. There is a jungle gym there so after we ate we went to play. Jamie of course wanted all of us to play hide and seek, but it's a kid-size jungle gym so it's pretty tough for me to really disguise myself. So he and Connor played, which was funny to watch. There are two benches in the corner where the seeker goes to count, and a little Connor-sized gap in between them. When Jamie started counting Connor, with a very sneaky look on his face, began settling into the gap, and so placed himself approximately 1 foot from Jamie. "Connor," I said, "go hide where Jamie can't see you." Of course, he got a wounded look on his face and said, "But I WANT to hide HERE!" Okay, sorry, I said. So Jamie finished counting, looked at Connor and said "I found you!" My how they laughed. Shows what I know.

So this took about 8 seconds because Jamie counts very fast. Then it's Jamie's turn to hide and Connor's to count. This is produces an almost opposite result. Connor is to count to twenty. So he slowly begins, "One.............................two..............................free..............." and so on until after some time he reaches "firteen.........fourteen........................sixteeen..........................eleventeen...." Here Jamie interjects from his hiding spot several feet away, "Conno. Eleventeen is not a number." "Oh," Connor says.

So now he begins again. "One.............................two..............................free..............." Eventually, it's back to "firteen.........fourteen..................sixteeen.......................... eleventeen........................eight, nine...............................twenty-free............ twenty-four..............." Realizing that having skipped twenty he was going to keep going indefinitely, I cheerfully interjected "Twenty, Connor! Go find Jamie!" I got the hurt look and he said, "NO!!! I want to do it." Then a pause, followed by: "One.............................two............. .................free..............."

The advantages of a varied diet

Jamie and Connor absolutely love feeding Annibelle. She gets wet food in the morning and at night and they are both desperate to be the ones delivering the food. Except that it kind of freaks them out. Having Annibelle meowing anxiously and winding around their feet while one of them holds the bowl seems to make them unable to put it down, which just makes Annibelle more excited. Jamie will eventually put it down, laughing all the while, but Connor will start to cry and eventually will drop the bowl and run away, which is messy. So now, when it is Connor's turn Jamie restrains Annibelle while Connor makes a break for it. He then sets the dish down and takes off before she gets there.

Jamie is always pleased by how excited she is and likes to say "Annibelle, do you think it's your birthday?" as he's delivering the Whiskas. Apparently, however, he does not wish to be treated in the same way. Breakfast is always a battle with him, but lately we've been having success with waffles, to go with the inevitable Gummi-bear vitamins. I've also been giving him raisins lately since this one fruit he'll eat pretty reliably. When we find something that workds with him we tend to try and ride it as long as we can, so we'd given this to him for a few days in a row and were pleased with the consistent success.

But on Saturday morning I produced this meal and he sighed exasperatedly and said, "Dad...I'm not Annibelle! I don't want the same thing every day."

Figures of speech, pt. 2

I forgot of course, a couple of characteristic Jamie- and Connor-isms. One of Connor's other ones is a common one I'm sure: "Amnals" for animals. It is indescribably cute to hear. Also, I wish I could describe how he says "Jamie". It's something like "Dszjamie" but the whole first syllable is very soft. And one of Jamie's signature pronunciations, which I have no idea where it comes from is to change the "a" for an "i" in words like "have" and "has". So, a question comes out, "Dada, hiv you ever seen a number bigger than one million trillion billion? I hiv. Will his too."

Gank-oo!

One of the ways in which we sense the passage of time as the boys get older is with their changing speech. They both have these wonderful idiosyncrasies of speech and to be honest we are always a little sad when they learn the "correct" pronunciations. One of our favorite Jamie-isms (now long gone) was his rendering of "button": first "boppum" and then "but-TOOM". Another one that lasted until very recently was his thinking that a knife was "an ife". We did absolutely nothing to correct him and were hoping he would go off to college still saying it this way. His speech is very good now of course, but one little quirk is that he sometimes renders "t" sounds in the middle or at the end of words as a "ck". So when he marches into our room in the morning to announce that it's time to get up, we hear: "ICK's 7!!!" And lately he's been doing well with the activity of "conneck the docks".

Part of the problem with Connor is that Jamie feels compelled to correct him all the time, so we fear the loss of his little mistakes will come too quickly. One of his best is "Hangaber" for hamburger. It really is much more pleasing to say it this way, try it. Everytime Connor says it, we hush Jamie before he can swoop in to highlight the mistake. Connor still persists in saying "th" at the beginning of words as "g" and switching an "f" for "th" in the middle or at the end of words. Thus, if he wants you to come sit and read a book he will say "May you come and sit wiff me?" And when you do: "Gank-oo!!"

Our little outlaw

As much as Jamie likes to test the limits of our rules, as far as society as a whole goes, he is a very good little citizen. Last year I took him to a Rice football game. Knowing that he would be thirsty, and knowing that all you can get are $4 lemonades there, I decided we would bring in a full sippy cup. Technically this is verboten, but nobody was going to really give us a hard time. Knowing that Jamie likes secrets and games, I figured it would be fun to hide the cup so I told him I would put it in my coat and sneak it in. He got very quiet and then said, "Dad, I really don't want to bring it in. Can we leave in the car?" I felt a little sheepish but didn't think about it much again until...

This weekend we went to the zoo. As we got back to the car, Jamie played a joke by saying "Hey, this isn't our car, why are you getting in it?" Again, thinking to get in on the funny joke I said, "You're RIGHT, Jamie. But let's get in anyway." He asked what I meant and as I opened the doors to our car said, thinking again that this was a joke he had started, "Just get in, we'll steal this car." Jamie became alarmed. "I don't like this," he said. "It makes my tummy hurt." Turns out he was talking about the car next to us. He's been bringing it up all week too. Tonight at dinner he asked my why I had done that and said that just thinking about it made his tummy hurt again. Bad Daddy. Bad Daddy.

Halloween

This is, for Jamie in particular, a glorious time of the year. First Halloween, then his birthday, then Christmas. He has said multiple times lately that he loves his birthday date because Christmas comes so soon after. Even if it is unspoken there is some suggestion in there that Connor is unlucky to have his birthday almost as far away from Christmas as possible.

But both boys clearly enjoyed Halloween, as you can see. Jamie's costume is that of a clone trooper. He had settled on this over the summer and stuck with it admirably over the intervening months. There was some concern on his part because of his awareness of the relation of clone troopers (good) and storm troopers (bad). He is deeply invested in being on the good side of the Star Wars good/evil dichotomy and this seemed something of a grey area, but he worked it out.

I would hasten to point out that the picture of Connor sleeping was actually on the way home from a Halloween party well before trick-or-treating even began. We were very excited to experience Halloween in our new neighborhood and it was a nice scene, though not nearly as crazy as Carolyn and Chris's street. We went around a couple of blocks near the house with a boy from down the street and one of Jamie's other friends. The big boys got into the act very quickly dashing from door-to-door, giving a good trick-or-treat, grabbing as much as they were allowed, then offering a perfunctory thank-you over their shoulders as they dashed off for the next score. Connor, of course, trailed along behind, monkey ears and tail bouncing along with his short, quick steps. At one point he was far enough behind that as he was going up the walk to the door, the owner, not seeing him began closing the door and it shut more or less in his face. He began sobbing of course, and the woman quickly opened the door and put things right. They all also learned that some places allowed them to take 2 or even 3 things from the bowl and would happily proclaim this. This led to a dejected Connor shuffling down the walk from a house of greater moderation saying, "I only got one!"

I think that some of Jamie's rush, aside from the sheer desire for more stuff, stemmed from the fact that he sensed that somehow the normal rules had been lifted. These would normally disallow a) knocking on random people's doors b) taking candy from said random people and c) eating more than one piece of said candy in any 24-hour period. When we got back to the house, he and his friend seemed to want to eat as much as possible before we regained our senses and the normal, draconian, rules were put back in place. This hasn't quite fully happened yet, I'm afraid.

The Reader

While we have loved St. Catherine's, I have to confess that there have been times over the past year when we have wondered whether Jamie might not benefit from a more structured environment. Our biggest concern was his reading, or lack thereof. Fortunately, we kept the faith, and suddenly in the last 2-3 weeks the penny has dropped and he is reading like a maniac. It's funny, we are often saying that Jamie's behavior as a 5, almost 6, year-old is exactly consistent with his behavior as a 6 day, 6 week-old and sure enough he has followed his usual pattern here. He did not get teeth, for instance, for ages and then got them all at once. He did not walk until he was 18 months, but then he was running a day later (Thus proving the old adage wrong. To wit, you almost can run before you can walk!).

It used to be a little hard to tell when he was reading or not because he has such an incredible memory that he could recite books that we hadn't read in months word for word. But he proved his new skill the other day on a totally unfamiliar subject. We had been talking somehow or other about Tasmanian Devils and he was asking us what they looked. We had to admit that we didn't know either. Well, the next week he comes home with a book about them. We asked how he had found it, since he wouldn't have recognized a picture and he said, with a bit of a teenage exasperation, "I READ the title, of course!" In one sense, he is clearly enjoying this new skill, and is voraciously devouring text whereever he finds. In another sense, though, he is surprisingly casual about it.

He does like to lord this ability over Connor, as with his math skills. But for his part Connor is moving forward too. He was drawing the other day and then proclaimed, "Come look! I wrote my name!" Sarah and I proceeded over ready to see only scribbles and say "Oh that's so nice sweetie," but we were a little speechless to see, in jumbled form albeit, the rather well-formed letters C-O-N-N-O-R.

Good times

Jamie continues to thrive in soccer. He scored, I think, two goals this week, but I was especially pleased that he and another boy, Christopher, actually passed the ball to each other, twice no less. In 4-5 year-old soccer this is something akin to a miracle, and I especially like that when I congratulated Jamie after the game, he mentioned the passes very proudly.

Connor, on the other hand, seems to view the soccer field as a kind of stage on which he can play out a series of pouts and tantrums. He took part in the practice section of the day on a limited basis, as usual, only holding Sarah's hand. He then refused to play in the game of course. But we tried the old "Well, you're too young to play anyway," trick on him, which actually worked. Until we had to put a scrimmage jersey on him. This was clearly unacceptable and he went to the mattresses. So we all went to watch Jamie's game. This also angered Connor, who had decided that he wanted to stand IN the goal while his friends played and wanted Mommy in there with him too (Goal is about 3 feet high). Eventually he walked off towards the bleachers by himself, so Sarah went after him. A little sweet talk and some playing on the bleachers and he was ready to come back to the reservation. As they were walking by the fields, now empty as everyone headed for snacks, Connor sighed contentedly and said, "Good times."