takeaways

the boy was a little peeved at having to eat sour gummy vitamins.

we're kind of laying off the screen time just now.

turns out what the boy is picking up from the "educational" shows aren't things we're wanting him to practice.

from the adult perspective, showing the engines of thomas the tank engine smashing and bashing each other or sesame street characters being stricken with a "selfishness disease" illustrate the things you don't want to do before learning a lesson about the importance of cooperating and sharing.

the boy, on the other hand, saw action and energy as locomotives rammed into each other and reinforcement of grabbing and holding onto things as something his favorite characters were doing while crying out "mine! mine!"

the lessons to cooperate and share? dialogue-driven and not so dramatic.

so you can guess which behaviors the boy began acting out in the house.

june, the boy's first celebrity crush.

this makes me appreciate the lack of conflict that drives the episodes of "blues clues," "little einsteins," "jojo's circus" and even old reruns of "mister rogers' neighborhood."

these shows seem to engage our kids with distinctive characters and storylines driven by solving puzzles rather than resolving conflicts.

(the boy's first celebrity crush, btw, appears to be june, of the "einsteins" cast. for a while there, every time she'd be featured, he'd say, "she's so pretty.")

we know we can't shield them forever from violence and selfishness, but we hope we can delay exposing them -- especially the boy -- from it until they can discern why helpful behavior is preferable to hurtful.

bad dream

so the boy gives his first report of a bad dream:

a man in a black shirt comes out of a picture and into the sesame street flying fairy school.

then he tries to change the fairies into something else.

what, exactly, the boy doesn't really say. but that's the gist of the dream.

although, now that i think about it, this sure as hell falls in line with kris' and my efforts to get the wildness out of him vis a vis the timeouts, the taking of vitamins, etc.

symbolism at such a young age.

was just telling kris i've been having dreams lately that are symbolic in a way that they haven't in a long, long, time.

after a recent few days of hand-wringing over the challenges of child-rearing, i dreamt yesterday that i found the long-lost electronic key fob for kris' car in a golf bag.

i took it to mean that, yeah, we are searching for a key to the boy's behavior.

that or i need to start playing golf again.

playlist

finally, a photo by grumpnet on Flickr.

we have moved on to the great american songbook for bedtime songs.

we started him off in the crib with "twinkle, twinkle, little star," which morphed into "baa, baa, black sheep" last spring.

he was good on that for a long time.

late last year, as he got his "thomas the tank engine" on, he would occasionally ask for it instead of, or in addition to "baa-baa."

a little before this, kris started him on "rock-a-bye, baby," i think in response to his wanting to be carried like his sister to bed. (the song includes a faux "fall" into bed, cradle and all.)

so it was a good few months of "rock-a-bye" and "baa-baa."

some time after christmas, after the baby received a toy that played "oh, susanna," i absently sang the song while changing his clothes.

apparently, the "banjo on my knee" lyric caught his fancy and he requested it not long afterward.

this week, it became part of his routine, displacing "baa-baa."

"you want 'baa-baa'?"

"i want 'banjo on my knee.'"

luckily, i know two verses of the song. kris does not.

Got stern lecture tonight for not knowing 82nd verse of 'oh Susanna.'
— stuff kris sends (@textstogrumpnet) April 18, 2013

i had to teach them to her.

we've since moved on to two verses of leadbelly's "good night, irene." (i've left out the darker portions of the song. i'll have to look up the rest.)

he is also making up songs: "i am a chair" -- "won't you sit on me?" and "i am a house" -- "won't you live in me?" and "i am a door" -- "won't you open me?"

some promise there.

Via Flickr:
knocked out after a super-late bedtime. unfortunately, he would wake up screaming in about an hour.

idle day

couldn't keep baby out of this thing.

one of those drifting days -- not a lot accomplished, but full nonetheless.

lost a good three hours when my lovely wife put the baby down for a morning nap, while she took the boy out shopping at the habitat for humanity re-store -- which he loved -- and i took a long snooze, as well.

spent the early afternoon prepping her new smartphone -- a separate entry, that -- then playing with the children outside once everyone, including the boy, were up from long naps.

topped the day off with a five guys cheeseburger picnic in the front yard. the boy was apparently so happy, he kissed my head as we ate. (he had a "little bacon cheeseburger" minus bun, with some of our giant load of french fries.)

spent the evening as the kids watched "bob the builder" activating our new phones, then wrestling over some enormous problems with its new voicemail feature.

boy helped mama add air to the beach ball this afternoon.

the kids were as good as gold today, even the boy, as he rode the ragged edge of disaster after another pre-dawn rising. he managed to keep it together even as he was loopy and fatigued.

now i'm just ready for bed.

i-day

his and hers smartphones

after resisting the urge and watching with a little envy for the past six years or so, kris and i entered the smartphone era.

the move came as our phone's capacities were being exceeded by the demands put upon them by our peers' smartphones. (and my own phone was packed to the gills with junk i could not sort through to delete.)

kris said we could make the move if we ditched our land line, which i did not do, but instead reduced to its most basic services. the savings were then plowed into data plans that our new devices would need.

as i prepared to pull the trigger tuesday, kris made me enter a pact that we would not turn them into distraction devices for our children to watch movies or play games or otherwise begin that slide into the head-bowed-into-the-palm posture that seems to afflict younger and younger people these days.

as an end-of-western-civilization doomsayer, i agreed.

they were ordered after work and arrived during lunch thursday. a pair of otterboxes came in the day after. (we were not going to risk their lovely, sculpted mechanics in the hands of our lovely, uncoordinated and temperamental children. we are now wondering if insurance is in order.)

what's in the box. plus stickers.

the 3-year-old model was available for all of 99 cents. (plus $36 "upgrade fee.") still, it's cheaper than $500.

they are wi-fi compatible, which should help save our data plan dollars, and now have their fancy "visual voicemail" boxes set up.

within minutes after setting up and handing over kris' phone and having watched her watch me tapping its delicate touchscreen keypad, she announced that she hated the thing.

an hour later, she said she loved it. (i think she liked the convenience features for grocery shopping.)

and as she grew more acquainted with it, she just wondered why we needed a computer at all, as everything she needed to do on our laptop, she could apparently do on her new phone.

(and she does have a point. it's a tv, recording and photo studio plus microcomputer in a slab of metal and glass.)

i'm just glad it's got a nice camera. (i downloaded a handful of apps the first night off our wi-fi, so i'm good.)

our phone service is now activated. (remember what they're ostensibly supposed to be used for?) now we're ready to connect to a new age.

found it

me and the boy in publisher's office, 15 july 2011.

been looking for this pic for a long time. the boy was about a week away from being a year and a half old. while he was literally a little monkey on my back then, the new, figurative monkey wears a diaper. we are working mightily on losing the diaper and keeping the monkey. a sweet, well-mannered monkey.

for the record

after a promising start back in 2011, potty training began in earnest -- again -- on thursday. very uneven.

first day, he fouled himself, the proceeded to hold it for the next 24-plus. lots of  wet underpants in the interim.

by my count, as of tonight, we have at least four poopy underpants and at least as many wet ones.

that said, he's very proficient at making no. 1 in the potty, so long as we make him go every hour.

(to make things easier, we've ditched the combo stepstool/potty for a regular potty. it's an elmo potty featuring the little monster on a "tank" that "flushes" and makes other elmo-like noises. it's at his level and we don't have to keep lifting him to get on it.)

hoping for a breakthrough on the poop front. stocked up on plenty of lysol concentrate for the laundry until then.