Our little Stashu

We had a great Christmas vacation with lots of time with the boys. It was a bit of an adventure at times. Sarah's parents flew in a couple of days before Christmas and arrived to see Connor with a freshly shaved head. Poor little guy had gotten a case of head lice, which has apparently been rampant in the schools this year. He had so much hair that it quickly became clear that shaving was the only real option. He was apprehensive at first but actually adapted surprising quickly. The first picture is actually a few days later and the one of him sleeping is from two nights ago, but you get a sense of the look.

The only thing he really didn't like was the nickname he acquired. On Christmas Eve we had a traditional Eastern European meal of pierogies and kielbasa. Well, little Connor got a serious eating on. He always likes the meat but he started really stuffing the piergoies in as well. Somehow, sitting there munching pierogies, with his bald head and light skin and blue eyes, his Polish heritage really became visible so we started calling him "Stashu" and it stuck. It just comes off the tongue easily when you see him these days. Too easily, in fact, because you really can't say it within earshot or you will earn an angry look and an assertive "I'M NOT STASHU!!!" Fair enough. We're willing to respect this since he still lets us call him Bunny.

Cute and scary

Since I wrote about Connor's predilection for playing the role of baby animals, we have been a family of peacocks, stegasaurauses, lions and T-Rexes. These latter two are interesting. Connor has that child's fascination with meat-eating animals, perhaps in part because he is one (he would eat bacon morning, noon and night if we let him!). But there is of course terror. On a trip to school last month he started asking about whether lions eat people. Not usually, I said, trying to downplay it. But he insisted and I had to agree that sometimes, under certain unusual circumstances, lions might eat people. There was a pause while he thought about this. Then his knowledge of the continents served him well, because he asked if there were any lions in North America. No, I said happily. We agreed they were only in Africa. Wanting to nip any concerns in the bud I did mention that there were mountain lions in North America, but we agreed they didn't eat people. He then got a little concerned and wondered whether the lions eat giraffes (he likes giraffes a lot, even if he sometimes calls them zebras). I dodged this a bit by saying that giraffes were too big (no mention of baby giraffes!). He pondered all of this a bit and was quiet on the last few minutes of the trip. But then, as I got him out of the car, he said with great seriousness, "Dad, I don't EVER want to go to Africa!" I nodded, but he wanted a very direct and clear assurance that I understood.

So it's funny then to see him playing the role of the baby carnivore. He doesn't sugar-coat it either. One of the things we're supposed to do when he's being a baby animal is feed him the appropriate food. So when he's a carnivore he shows up in the kitchen, bowl in hand, with a very sweet baby animal expression on his cherubic little face, and says, in his sweet baby animal voice..."BLOOD!!! BLOOD!!" It's a bit disconcerting to be honest.

Ewww!

The boys are in the dread-of-kissing stage. It started last summer when Jamie informed me that I could hug him outside the building when I dropped him off for camp, but no kisses. This soon turned into a general prohibition and Connor has adopted it as well.

Both boys are proud of the fact that they don't get scared by movies. They have seen the Indiana Jones movies and they protested vociferously at our insistence on fast-forwarding through the face melting part in Raiders of the Lost Ark. To be fair, they have been totally unaffected by any of the rest of the movies except for: the kissing scenes. These elicit howls and they cover their eyes so as not to be tainted. Sarah and I can send them into fits of horrors by kissing now.

Baby animals

Connor is in that funny phase of four-year oldness when he is both increasingly independent and still wants to be a baby in some ways. We could NEVER, of course, call him "baby brother" or any such thing. He wants always to be with Jamie and the big kids and is desperate to keep up with them.

But at the same time he loves to be a baby animal. It's very funny the way the whole thing plays out. Lately he's been a baby stegosaurus (that's the preferred dinosaur of late) and we have to watch him hatch from his egg, narrating the whole time ("Look, I see a leg!") Sometimes, then he can't walk, because he'll explain, "My legs are brand new!" He is often the usual things like a puppy and a kitten, but has also been, all within the last month: a baby sea lion, a baby giraffe, a baby eagle, a baby peacock, a baby bird generally, a baby elephant, a baby monkey, and perhaps strangest of all, a baby vulture.

It's nice when he does this actually because he allows us to hug him (never kisses!) in our role as parent vultures, and we very rarely get to do this as humans because in this role he is such a big boy and that would cramp his style.

It's funny how much more focused on animals he is than Jamie. He has these two pillow pets, a bee and a polar bear and he sleeps every night on the polar bear. It's perhaps the cutest thing in the world to see him snuggled up on that bear with his woobie close by.

He'll be here all month

One of the things we adore about Jamie is that he is so ready to laugh. Sometimes it can be a little weird because he can be in the midst of crying, find something irresistibly funny, laugh very genuinely about it and then go right back to the tears. But most of the time he is just on the lookout for surprising and funny situations and he finds them everywhere. Many include the cat. I heard him talking about her once and it sounded like he had said "Animal" instead of "Annabelle". I said this and he instantly started laughing hilariously and has been calling her "Animal" ever since. Then, better still, just before Christmas we were in the car with Nana and Pops. Suddenly from the back, where she is sitting with Jamie, Sarah says, "Oh Leo! I forgot to tell you that Animal threw up on your jeans!" Now, Jamie is already laughing hard. "Oh," I said, "the ones I'm wearing now?!!" Jamie is now completely dying. Funniest thing he's ever heard. Still laughs about that.

Jamie has also turned into quite the little comic and perhaps likes making other people laugh even more than laughing himself. Interestingly he's quite good at it. For camp last summer they had a talent show. We were fascinated to know what Jamie might do and he told us he would tell jokes. So he tried them out on us and they were really not funny. But at the camp? He killed. Absolutely killed. Here's his closer: "Why did the chicken cross the road? To save the world!!!" Killed with it. The moral of the story is you have to know your audience, and 5-10 year-olds are a much better audience than Sarah and I.