Plotting

Jamie proclaimed to me in the car today: "When I'm an old man, I'm going to mess with people. I'll put my underwear on over my pants and whenever anybody says anything to me, I'll say ehhhhhh?".

Play ball!

Well, late February means one thing in Texas, at least for the Costello family these days: baseball!! Yes, we had opening day on Saturday, though it was rather chilly. Both the boys were playing though happily not at the same time. We had a hectic morning in any case getting both to the park having pictures taken, and then a game for the Aggies at 10.

In addition to being Jamie's first game of the season, it was my first game as head coach, so there were all kinds of butterflies. Jamie seems pleased that I am coach but in some ways it's less productive for him I think. With his coach last year he would have jumped off a bridge if he'd been told to. With me, he gets a little impatient with being coached, because it's criticism coming from me. It also puts him in a comfort zone, which is good of course, but Jamie in a comfort zone means being very silly. When he is in a new situation he seriously toes the line. But once he feels at home, he turns into quite a comedian. So there's a bit of behavior control going on in practice as well.

On the other hand, it is amazing to see how far he's come from this time last year. He is very good when the ball is hit straight at him, but less so when he needs to move to it. He struck out his first time up and was pretty disconsolate about it. He was in a bit of a slump at the end of last season and had started to feel that he wasn't good at hitting. The issue is actually a good one. For the most part of last Spring he was simply putting the bat out there and the ball would hit and the bat would actually snap backward. Now he is swinging harder and really following through, but is discovering it's harder to time this way.

So it was that he came up for his second at-bat. I used to complain that when he did get hits he would always do it on the last pitch (they get 4 in machine pitch), so I had to suffer through the whole at-bat desperately trying to will the bat to the ball. This time though he stepped up and rapped the first pitch in the air over the pitcher and out to second base where it dribbled into the outfield. From that point on there is a blank spot in my memory. Partially this is because as coach I am less focused on Jamie and was watching the kid who was at second. But I do know that the ball started flying around and the next thing I know parents are screaming and Jamie is getting waved around third and is heading for home. I braced for a play at the plate but none was coming. He slid in just in case and looked good doing it. He literally got mobbed in the dugout. Next time up he hit a good one but right to the pitcher who caught it, and the Aggies ended up dropping a heart-breaker 8-7.

Then we trekked over to Connor's game which was a very merry affair. The burgeoning competitiveness of Jamie's age group is fun, but it's also nice going back to the world of no score. It was also fun to see how far Connor has come. His concentration is so much better and he fielded a couple of balls and gamely slung the ball in the general direction of first base. But the big thrill was that for the first time ever Connor hit the ball pitched by the coach, and didn't need recourse to the tee. Off he went to first base, which looks an awfully long way away for such little legs! There was great cheering all around.

Tooth fairy

So after a pretty long interlude, Jamie lost a tooth yesterday. It had been unbelievably loose for some time, and Jamie delighted in making Sarah squirm by turning it around almost 360 degrees in his mouth. After it came out I told him to go put it under his pillow so he wouldn't forget to leave it for the tooth fairy. Connor and I came along. After he had done it, Jamie came up with some ruse to make Connor leave the room (I'm afraid the bunny is all-too easily convinced. I think it was something like 'you can play with one of my bey-blades Connor" and off he went, not inclined to look a gift horse in the mouth). With Connor gone Jamie said conspiratorially, "Dad I know since there isn't a Santa Claus that the tooth fairy isn't real. But do I still get a dollar?"

Assured that he would, Jamie was not displeased by the loss of the Tooth Fairy idea and is actually rather intrigued by the collection of his baby teeth.

Co-sleeping

This is a big topic these days. The boys are almost always angling for to be able to have some form of sleepover. The most common one is for me to sleep in a mattress in their room. This can be very cozy and I love that they want me to do this. I've gotten relatively used to the loud breathing/snoring that emanates from them all night. The only harsh thing about it is that Jamie wakes me up by jumping from his top bunk bed almost on top of me. Then he snuggles for a tantalizing moment during which time I imagine going back to sleep, before he unceremoniously gets up and not only leaves, but drags the blanket right off of me, so he can sit under it and read in the living room.

For his part Connor has been especially into sleeping with Mommy recently. A couple of nights ago he asked if he could sleep in her bed. Well, she said, where would Daddy sleep? He smiled brightly and said, "I'll show you," and escorted her out of the bedroom, into the guest room. He happily pointed and the futon and said "There!" matter-of-factly. Ouch.

The cutest thing though is that Jamie often wants to sleep with Connor. The success of this, recorded above, is very rare. Usually Connor can't settle down and stop talking so eventually we move him, which angers Jamie, who blames both us and Connor. For his part Connor doesn't much care for it. I suspect he realizes that Jamie has woobie-ized him a bit because he is impatient with the degree to which Jamie wants him to be merely present so he can go to sleep, whereas Connor wants to have some silliness. Sometimes, in moments of real frustration Jamie claims to want his own room, but the fact of the matter is he's pretty dependent on having the bunny in there with him and has admitted it a couple of times.

When we travelled to NY of course, they each wanted to sleep in a bed with us, which means in the end, not a lot of sleep for the adult. I think sleeping with Connor is worse. First of all he snores. Secondly, he has some absolute magnet to whoever he is sleeping with so you end with about 1/8 of the bed and a snoring child pressing his pointy little elbows in your rib cage.

House music

It's a little hard to explain why this one was so funny, but I'll give it a shot. There are a couple of elements to this, one being Connor's love of dinosaurs and the other his tendency to mix words up and make his own little versions of things.

So there is this beautiful pop-up dinosaur book we have, which is a big nighttime books favorite for Connor. It happened that he and Sarah read it a few times together and they began to make a series of silly games with the various pop-ups. The T-Rex, for instance, would try to bite Connor's and Jamie's noses and generally tear around roaring mightily. Then it would argue with the Archeaopteryx on the next page, taking objection to the notion that it could be related to a chicken. For the Anklyosaurus, sort of an armored tank kind of dinosaur, they started making it dance by pulling the book open and shut. The next time I read it to Connor, I was aware that they had developed some pretty elaborate scenarios and I was keeping up OK, but I wasn't prepared for what happened when we got to this page. He grabbed the book and started opening and closing it really fast so the Anklyosaurus bounced up down spastically. Then Connor started saying, with great enthusiasm "The bass is pumpin'! The crab is jumpin'!" over and over again. Jamie has learned to delight in Connor's malapropisms and improvisations so soon we were all saying it and roaring with laughter. Connor just got more enthusiastic the more we laughed. It's sort of a catch-phrase around here now.

When will we learn?

This is a cello update, but the larger theme is that at some point Sarah and I are just going to have to stop doubting Jamie's mojo. He does these things and we think we need to give him some advice only to see that he's got it totally under control. For instance, it has made us crazy for years the way Jamie is completely poker-faced around girls. We tell him to be nice otherwise they won't want to talk to him anymore. But then everyday it seems more girls say "Hi Jamie!!" as he walks down the hall. We should stay out of it clearly.

In the last cello post, I suggested that Jamie's usual wait-until-he-can-do-it-all, rather than learn incrementally, method wouldn't work for music. Au contraire mon pere. Yet again, he has proved that you can run at least at the same time that you can walk. After weeks of barely being allowed to use the bow and being the only child who hadn't satisfactorily performed any songs, suddenly he's shot forward and is about pass his third song. His teacher remarked a couple of weeks ago that he would probably pass about four in a row at once. So there you have it, the Jamie method strikes again.

I don't know if he's enjoying the playing the cello exactly, but he definitely likes knowing songs and is actually rather a quick learn. His teacher is still doggedly trying to get his posture and bow hand position correct and is learning what it can be like to work with Jamie. In the lesson yesterday he sat there with this expressionless face he gets during lessons and as she tried to push his fingers in place, get his back straight, his elbow up, etc., she finally looked up in exasperation and said, "He's pushing against everything I'm doing!" Welcome to our world. Love that little guy, but lord can he be stubborn. Got to come to it his own way.

Napoleon Costello

We have all known Connor, since the time of his birth, to be a very good-natured, sunny little fellow. We have also seen him have to contend with the force of nature that is his older brother. Generally, he goes along with what Jamie wants and finds places to insert himself where he can.

What's funny though is what happens when Jamie is not around. First of all, this is usually a big problem because inevitably he wants to be where Jamie is. He hasn't quite got the idea yet that if one of Jamie's buddies invites him over for a sleepover, Connor doesn't automatically get to go. But, finding himself back here alone with us, something changes. Suddenly he realizes he has the field to himself and two things happen. One is that he becomes very bossy, producing a series of requests and generally keeping us both and his bidding. Believe me, we try to keep it under control and at least get him to ask politely but the onslaught is really extraordinary.

The other thing that happens is that he NEVER stops talking. I mean that literally. Until the moment he falls asleep and starting again immediately when he wakes up, it is a constant stream of consciousness, as if all the stuff he's forced to keep quiet about as Jamie fills the space suddenly comes pouring out. He has this way of moving from one utterance to another, beginning with the phrase "Oh and mommy??! or "Oh and daddy??!" (sometimes he confuses us, but it doesn't really matter). This can often introduce a topic that had been dropped days ago as if we had been just talking about it, so you have to stay alert. We hear that phrase about 50 times an hour.

This has happened the last couple of days with Jamie around, however, and I think it has to do with Legos. See, he got a bunch of them for Christmas, about which he is thrilled, of course. He has now tasked us with building them, and our initial responsiveness with this seems to have sort of empowered him. Seeing us doing his bidding like that must evoke those brief periods of solitary power and so he is in full on Connor rules mode. But of course Jamie cedes no sonic ground whatsoever, so the last two days have been a real cacophony of sound here.