Traffic jam

Zack arranges his toys with the precision of a choreographer. And woe unto the adult or sibling who dares to disturbs his artistic vision.

"Look at all the things around me!" he commented when he saw this photo. (It may be hard to make out all the details in the early-morning twilight, so I'll describe them here.)

In the water, there's an aircraft carrier, a dolphin and a species that Zack has assigned the common name "wide-beaked scary shark" (Latin name is as yet unspecified). There are some goldfish, a duck, a couple of frogs and a snake -- a water snake apparently. There's also a picture book open to a page showing some additional boats.

Along the road that rings the water is the worst traffic jam 6311 Valley has probably ever witnessed. "It's bumper-to-bumper," Zack announced gleefully. Curiously, knots of similarly hued vehicles are clustered together in several places -- a line of white cars here, red cars there, and so on. The only gaps in the traffic occur where a pattern in the rug that he has dubbed "train tracks" bisect the line of traffic. At each of these points, a train is in the process of making a crossing.

Oh, and then there's a "fire chief cherrypicker truck" rescuing people from a burning house.

Bedtime routine reversal

Zack demonstrates a remarkable, almost painful, sensitivity to the needs of others - even strangers he will never meet. This morning, aware that Amie was hurrying to check on a patient who'd been admitted during the night: "Mama, I'm sorry I talked so much. I know you need to leave early to see your patient in the hospital."

***

For all his available empathy, he was more than a bit difficult last night, going out of his way to hurt Amie's feelings at the dinner table. We diagnosed the root of the problem as the lopsided bedtime routines we've allowed to persist for some time now, wherein Sam forcefully demands Amie, and so it's I who almost always ends up putting Zack down. So we decided then and there to flip the approach, though we knew Sam would protest. (Side benefit: I've been wanting for some time to read more to Sam, but bedtime is about the only time I can ever get her to sit still long enough.)

So I read Sam some stories while she complained loudly from the crib. Each time I finished a book or poem, she demanded, "Hai yao!" Whether she wanted more for the sake of the reading or simply to put off my inevitable departure, it's hard to say. She of course cried hard when I left, but it subsided quickly. Zack, meanwhile, enjoyed his bedtime with mama immensely. As he reported to me later: "Mama snuggled with me for longer than you usually do." Ouch. I guess I'd better step up my game!

Tonight, it went even more smoothly. Though Sam still howled bloody murder when it became clear that I intended to take her to bed myself rather than handing her to her mom, she only cried for half of Cat in the Hat. More remarkably, she didn't stir at all as I creeped out of the room; the night before, she'd bolted upright - from deep sleep, or so it seemed - as soon as I had the audacity to tiptoe toward the door.

***

It's now possible to have a whole conversation with her. When I got home this evening, she followed me into my bedroom as I changed out of my work clothes, and she happily (if tersely) answered a stream of my questions: Did you have a nice day? "Yeah." What did you do? "Walk." Where did you go? "Playground!" (She also went swimming, and apparently had a blast. But playgrounds come first, in the order of the universe.)

Later, perched on the a toddler-adapted ring in the toilet, she pointed between her legs. "Penis," she said matter-of-factly, indicating exactly where it would be if she had one fewer X chromosome. As yet, no pee has issued forth, from her penis or otherwise. But she does seem to enjoy sitting on the potty. And that, I suppose, is the first half of the battle.

Backseat driver

The other day, I was slow to hit the gas when the light turned green. Zack told me in no uncertain terms to get started.

 

Then he added: “When I'm a grown-up I won't need my son to tell me when to stop and when to go, riiight?”

 

 

Golden boy

Zack awoke exceedingly early this morning. In the darkness, he commented that even though everything was dark, his hand was "gray." Believe it or not, I think what he meant was that he could tell, despite the twilight, that his hand was its normal color (yes, as I recently mentioned, he considers his skin tone to be gray). I gently questioned his characterization of his skin tone. "It's gray," he affirmed. "Or maybe it's gold."

We took the kids to Eatonville, a restaurant in DC, for lunch with Sewell, who's in town for the weekend, and Sarah Hurwitz, Jackie Gran, and Alex Nguyen and his fiancé Thanh. The kids were incredibly well behaved, even though their food was slow to come and the conversation revolved around adult topics. It may have helped that the restaurant is airy and decked out with colorful murals. At one point, Zack said, "The hilltop." I looked up and realized the words were written in large lettering on a mural on the far opposite wall. He recently learned to recognize 'the' by sight, but he must have sounded out the letters of 'hilltop' silently to himself before uttering the word in a single breath. Later, he read "Flor-i-daa" off another mural. "-duh," I corrected, at which he initiated a discussion of the variable phonetic qualities of the letter 'a'; this boy is not thrown off by nuance. The city of Eatonville, I explained, is in Florida, just like the Everglades. He then pointed at a street sign out the window, and I noted that it read 'Langston Hughes Way.' Hours later, at bedtime, I pulled a book off the shelf and read from its cover: "The collected poems of...". "Langston Hughes," he finished for me.

That little trick--especially ignoring the silent 'gh'--was probably enabled by his good visual memory. Nevertheless, his ability to read words even when their spelling is not exactly phonetic sometimes astounds me. On top of that, he seems to have good retention of special rules that supersede more familiar ones--for example, his rapid near-mastery of the 'silent e', and his strengthening grasp of how to pronounce 'th', 'sh' and even 'ph'. He also makes lightning-quick connections between anything he reads and other encounters with the same words. When he read "master" from a newspaper headline recently, he added, "Like 'master of my fate'," alluding to the poem "Invictus."

After eating their fill, both kids walked around and around the Eatonville dining room, sometimes holding hands. They were very, very sweet with each other, and Sam was extremely outgoing and comfortable with our friends, even smiling and making eyes at Sarah.

***

Zack was singing "Turkey in the Straw" on an endless loop the other day. (Believe me, this is an improvement over the Christmas songs that were previously stuck in his head!) After singing one stanza--"So he fished all night, 'til the sea got sore, / And he said, By golly, I will fish no more"--god knows how many times, he suddenly paused and asked "What does sore mean?" It's rather tough, I realized, to explain a word in a manner consistent with its metaphorical usage without doing an incidental disservice to its literal definition. I tried to explain that the sea grew tired of giving up fish, the way muscles can grow tired and sore. But he was quick to point out that the sea wasn't really giving up the fish; rather, the fisherman was catching them.

***

Sam again practiced sitting on the toddler potty this afternoon. Nothing doing, in the end, but it was a good effort, and caught on video. I'll see if I can upload it. (Her wawa made of go of it, too.) She's been talking avidly of "pi gu", as the video shows, and not just her own. She even pointed out one of our fellow diner's at lunch today!

Boston, blizzard and more

Zack had been pleading for me to take him back to Boston ever since Thanksgiving, and he finally got his wish. After a few days with us in DC, Savta helped the kids and me make the trip to Lincoln last Monday, the same day Amie flew out to a stroke conference in Hawaii. (When a blizzard hit Boston later in the week, the contrasting backdrops on our video-chats couldn't have been more striking: The kids and I, while very cosy inside, looked out upon a still, white landscape, while Amie, her wind whipped by a Pacific breeze, was framed by rainbows and palm trees.)

Upon our arrival in Lincoln, Zack was immediately at home, pulling out toys he must have been dreaming of for months. As the day drew to a close, though, he put his toys temporarily aside. "Let's go outside for a walk before it gets dark," he suggested. So he, Grandad and I set off with Sam in my ergo. He got a kick out of walking behind Grandad so that his feet made no new prints in the snow. I told him about how Native American hunters and warriors walked single file. "I'm a stative American hunter," he announced a few minutes later as he once again fell in behind Grandad.

That night turned out to be the only night Sam slept in her crib the whole week. The other nights, she lay next to or on top of me in Jess's old twin bed, and one night all three of us slept in the double bed I'd assigned to Zack. Her only truly rough night, though, was the last one, when I made the mistake of calling Amie with her at bedtime -- the longing for her mother that resulted was too much for her to bear.

Zack's only tough night, by contrast, was the first one. He woke up demanding milk in the middle of the night, and I refused to go get it, telling him that I was setting a limit. Amid tears, he had yelled, "I'm going to shoot your limits!" In the morning, as I talked calmly to him about why I'd had to set a limit, he too remained calm and maintained eye contact with me throughout, even though he clearly grasped that I was asserting authority and he submitting to it. "I shooted your limits, but they're still alive," he said. An elegant, if violent, metaphor.

The kids enormously enjoyed having their run of the house and so many adults to wait on them. Frequent special breakfasts pleased both kids' palettes, and the storm and the sights of nature, especially the birds but also things like deer tracks in the snow, aroused Zack's curiosity. Sam tore around the house, exploring and manipulating objects, yet wisely avoided any potential hazards such as stairs and outlets. She showed great affinity for her aunt, practically yelling "Jess!" when she made her appearance while the kids were in the bath our first night in town.

The day after the blizzard, she sat placidly in a sled while Jess pulled her around the driveway. Zack alternated between sitting in a second sled, also mostly pulled by Jess, and climbing out to help her pull it. He also got a kick out of helping Grandad with the shoveling. This, while his sister mainly stood around in awe of the snow piled nearly as high as we head.

***

"Dad, I did not know boys have patients too." This when I told him that Grandad had a patient. He'd previously known only that his mom and Savta had gone to see patients, and had perhaps her Jess refer to her patients, too.

***

Reading out of an illustrated bird book Savta had received for her birthday, Zack read "Florida Everglades" without assistance. "F, fl, flo, or, flor, Florida! E, ev, er, ever, g, gl, Evergl, ah, ad, Everglades!"

***

Sam is showing significant interest in the potty. She sits on it frequently, typically with her clothes on. (At least once, she also sat down on the scale and grunted, as if straining to move her bowels.) On Monday, I saw her struggling mightily to remove her diaper and helped her ease it off. She put herself on the potty and strained and strained, passing gas and even a small amount of excreta. Amie and I were quite surprised! With my assistance, she also positioned her wawa on the smaller potty next to her. Zack cheered both of them on.

After a leisurely bath just before the Boston trip, Zack informed me that he wanted to get out and sit on the potty. I dried him off, drained the tub, told him some details about our upcoming trip, and -- having completely forgotten about his toileting needs -- asked him to floss his teeth. "Hey, poop!" he retorted. First things first, dad. "Stinky!" he remarked a minute or so later. "May you put something over my nose because I don't like the smell?"

Yesterday morning, Sam went around collecting and donning articles of her brother's clothing. The t-shirt he'd slept in here, a sweater Savta had knitted him there, some outgrown shoes of his from the closet. A more-than-willing recipient of hand-me-downs.

***

Uttered long ago, but just remembered by your correspondent:

Zack, commenting on the appearance of his Indian friend Arin, "He is color brown. I'm color gray."

Waiting for Savta

Right about now, I told him, Grandad is probably dropping Savta at the airport we'll be at in a few days. "And then he'll go back to Boston because he has to teach, right?" Why yes. That's ... exactly right.

"Is Savta flying on her plane now?" he asked a few minutes later. I said I thought so. "And when I wake up then I'll see her right?"

***

This morning, Zack cheerfully marched up to the school building, his hand in mine. It was a refreshingly far cry from yesterday morning, when he'd broken down into sobs as I dropped him off and attempted to leave.

"Daddy I like the lunch you made me," he said as we walked up to the door. "Even though I haven't tasted it yet."

And we're off to Massanutten

After dinner tonight with Po Po and Kun Kun, we drove here to Massanutten, a Shenandoah resort area. Zack had some trouble on the drive, demanding first that we help him get the "stuff" out of his nose (several tissues failed in this quest, and were returned to me, wadded up and unwanted). Then he wanted to take his sweatshirt off and then to put it back on and then he again complained that he couldn't get the stuff out of his nose. Long car rides are tough ...

Luckily, Sam slept through most of it and, when she did awake, allowed me to sit next to her and stroke her face with my hand, lulling her to sleep with poems. I was eventually able to hypnotize Zack to sleep by slowly counting 99 consecutive road stanchions. Amie, meanwhile, drove the two and a half straight hours without a break and got us safely to our destination. We look forward to exploring our surroundings tomorrow.

***

Tidbits from earlier:

"Daddy! Daddy! There was a monster In Sammy's room but then it disappeared! You know why?" I allowed that I did not. "Because it was in our imagination!"

As I took leave of Zack last night, I said,
'I love you, Zack. Sleep well. I look forward to making you breakfast and playing with you in the morning.'
"And then I'm off to Boston," he said matter-of-factly.