Pecking and Pickups

The squeaker thinks the “bill” of a baseball cap is funny. His papa wears such hats while doing work on the house (which means he wears them perpetually); the squeaker will put the hat on his own head and use the bill to “peck” people. He’ll say, “I’m pecking you!”

Over the weekend, I gave him his lunch outside on the patio since the kitchen is in complete disarray (papa is tiling the countertop, painting the walls, and laying hardwood flooring). The sun was so bright that I went and found his new cap, which we’d purchased the day before at a Thomas the Train event.

“Here,” I told him, “this hat will keep the sun out of your eyes.”

“Yes,” said the squeaker with enthusiasm, “it does! The pecker keeps the sun out of my eyes!”

I guess I’d better teach him a new name for that part of the hat...

He also tried to pick up a young lady at Home Depot. Well, maybe he wasn’t trying, but his papa was relieved that the young lady didn’t seem to think that the little one wasn’t being prompted by his father.

The two were checking out at Home Depot when the squeaker cheerfully asked the young cashier, “What time do you close tonight?”

She told him. And then he said, “And what time do you leave?”

Luckily, she didn’t seem to find this too strange. I guess we should be relieved that he didn’t call her “baby” or “sweetheart.”

A Chuckle from O'Reilly

I try not to read Bill O’Reilly, I really, really do. When I see his column in my local paper, I concentrate on something else on the page.

This isn’t because I refuse to read conservative commentators. It’s because I like smart writers, not shallow thinkers who don’t even pretend to take a politically balanced approach to a subject.

Nonetheless, this week, I read his column because it was about atheism, and I couldn’t resist. Fortunately, I found it more amusing than infuriating.

First, he starts off with some condescending comments about atheism being “chic” and the “latest craze,” which seems to be his way of dismissing it as a less than intellectually rigorous. (These comments reminded me of a woman who once told my husband that she’d be an atheist in her younger years, but she’d gotten through that “phase.”)

He goes on to relate the details of a debate with Richard Dawkins, atheist author of The God Delusion and other books. O’Reilly boasts that he “stopped [Dawkins] in the fourth round with this right hook: ‘[The earth] had to come from somewhere, and that is the leap of faith you guys (atheists) make—that it just somehow happened.’”

Right hook indeed. I’m sure Dawkins was floored by this unexpected and unimagined question about the origins of the earth. In response, Dawkins acknowledged that scientists do not (yet) have all the answers about how the earth came to be.

That O’Reilly felt that he scored some kind of victory by getting Dawkins to acknowledge that our current state of scientific knowledge cannot explain with certainty the origins of the earth is amusing enough. (Because after all, why would such an admission refute atheism in any way? At one time, scientists were unaware of viruses and bacteria, but that didn’t mean they weren’t responsible for spreading illnesses and diseases.) But the really amusing leap that O’Reilly takes is that incomplete scientific knowledge somehow validates a supernatural explanation: “I'm throwing in with [Jesus] rather than throwing in with you guys, because you guys can't tell me how it all got here.” And he frames his perspective as clever one-upmanship of Dawkins, when in fact it defies logic or reason entirely. It's clear that O'Reilly doesn't understand the thinking behind atheism at all because he treats the absence of scientific knowledge as if it undermines atheism, when in fact it doesn't speak to the god question at all.

Anyway, I have to admit that I enjoyed the column, because one rarely gets treated to such smugness and ignorance in the very same breath.

To Hover or Not to Hover

Last week, my husband’s sister and her husband came over to our house to help my husband install French doors in place of two windows. They cut a big hole in our brick house and put the doors in. The doors look great.

But I am not really interested in writing about the doors. This is about the kids. My sister-in-law brought her two children with her, ages 8 and 3. The 3-year-old is just a few months older than the squeaker.

Anyway, I noticed that she is a mom who hovers. When the squeaker climbed onto his swing set, she was surprised I wasn’t right behind him the whole time. I guess I like to give him space to play and to allow him to develop some confidence that he can do things on his own. I generally know his capabilities and limitations, and I’m always trying to give him room to push those limits a bit.

So this week, we went to their house for the older child’s 9th birthday celebration. The squeaker, who loves to be out and about, was having a grand time playing with their toys and eating an enormous piece of cake. Then he went outside to the swing set.

Both my husband and I were standing nearby, keeping an eye on him. But we weren’t right on top of him. One second, he was standing on the platform of the swing set. The next second, he was scrabbling to hold onto something before he plunged off the edge, face first, into the hard-packed dirt a good 4 or 5 feet below the swing set. The “thump” of his body on the ground made my heart stand still.

My husband got to him first. He scooped him up, and I could see blood on the squeaker’s teeth and scrapes on his face. And of course, he was crying hard. I was looking for missing teeth or broken limbs, but I did not see any such injuries. But then his nose began to bleed pretty heavily, and it swelled up like a purple grape. A bruise emerged on the bridge of his nose.

We administered immediate first aid – sweetarts and a new toy that my sister-in-law had gotten for him. He sniffled and whimpered for a bit. We packed up his stuff and headed home.

Recently, he’s been fascinated by healing. His papa has had some...incidents lately that resulted in injury, and we’ve talked a lot about the human body’s amazing capacity to heal. So on the way home, he cheerfully told us that he thought he’d be healed by the time we got home. And he hasn’t said much about it since, except to dramatically re-enact the whole episode, with much embellishment (“and then the swing set fell on me and SQUISHED me!”).

I hope this doesn’t turn me into a hovering mom.