Hard!

The squeaker has been using an odd expression: “Hard!”

He’ll say it when he’s frustrated about something. He’ll ball up his little fists and punch his bean bag chair (an enormous fuzzy pillow we call the Potato). And then he’ll sputter, “Hard!”

I was puzzled by the expression, so I asked him what he meant. “You say it, mama. I’m just saying it because you say it.”

“I say it?”

“Yes,” he insisted. “When you tell me I can’t do something and then I fuss, you say, ‘Hard!’”

It took a while before it dawned on me: he means “tough” – such as when he whines and cries because he’s been told he can’t have a cookie, and he says it’s unfair, and I respond, “Well, that’s tough!”

Tough, hard, same difference, right? It made me laugh.

The pipsqueak has discovered the great book Pat the Bunny. Very deliberately, he’ll open the book to the first page and rub the fuzzy bunny with his little hand. Then he’ll carefully turn the page. He does each activity in the book – he peers into the little mirror, rubs the father’s scratchy face, looks through Judy’s Book, slips his finger into the ring, and plays peek-a-boo. But he doesn’t smell the flowers. For whatever reason, he doesn’t get that one.

He’s been doing a lot of standing, though he doesn’t usually stand for long. He’s also taken some steps, though most of them are steps he takes quickly as he topples over, so it looks more like slow-motion falling than deliberate walking. A few times, he’s taken some skilled steps, and then he looks astonished.

He has also mastered pointing and grunting. This means that while you carry him around the kitchen, he is frantically pointing at whatever goodies he sees and squeaking to get your attention. He’ll even lean forward to try to look you in the eye to get your attention, so that his apparently urgent need for M & Ms or cookies can be met. I thought the squeaker had a sweet tooth, but he’s got nothing on the pipsqueak. The pipsqueak is obsessed with all things sweet, especially candy and froot loops. We are going to have to be careful about indulging him, especially since he responds so joyfully to sweet things. It makes it hard to resist giving him anything he wants, and that’s a recipe for disaster if we’re not careful!

More On Bones

The squeaker’s preschool has show & tell now and then. This is new to him, but he thinks he has lots of cool stuff, so he likes the idea.

Other kids apparently brought in items such as Dora the Explorer gear, Star Wars movies, and little pink fuzzy stuffed bunnies.

My kid took a rib bone he found in the backyard, presumably long after most of the animal it belonged to had decomposed.

The bone was quite clean and had little teeth markings on it from where some scavenger had gnawed on it. The squeaker loves this bone because he thinks bones in general are pretty interesting, and because he likes the story behind it; he speculates about what kind of animal the bone came from (“Probably a deer, mama”), how the animal died (“Maybe it was eaten by a wolf!”) and what animal gnawed the bones (“Do you think it could have been a hyena, mama?”).

Before he took the bone in to school, he spent a lot of time thinking about exactly what he wanted to say about it. He told me he thought he’d start by explaining what bones do, and then he’d show them the bone he found and tell the "story" behind it. I was surprised that he thought about “framing” his find in this way. But he has a passion for stories, and that’s how he thinks of things. The idea of a narrative is so embedded in him that he thinks of everything as having some kind of introduction, build up, and then a conclusion. It’s very odd to see someone so small think this way. It makes me wonder if someday he might be a writer or filmmaker or some other kind of storyteller. Or is that too much of a leap? I don’t know.

I’m just intrigued by this need to frame everything into a story that seems so intrinsic to his thinking. I’m always amused by parents who make a big deal out of everything their kid does (“Oh, look, Junior has scribbled....he’s going to be an artist one day!!”), so I’m trying not to do the same thing with my quirky little kid, and yet it is a very curious thing about him.

No More Curls

The pipsqueak got a hair cut!!

Mama is sad. :(

Happy First Birthday, My Pipsqueak!

It seems like just yesterday that we were tearing down the highway and then running red lights to get to the hospital, LOL, with the squeaker anxiously telling me to BE QUIET.

You made us wait...and wait...and wait...but when you decided it was time, you made a quick entrance into the world. I remember kissing your dark wavy hair in the first moment that I got to hold you close. And I remember how perfectly you nursed in the delivery room. It was like magic.

You are my happy, bubbly boy. I love your soft dark curls, long lashes, and big blue eyes. I love the way you say Ma Ma Ma. I even love that you adore your papa, scrambling out of my arms to get to him. You are his little southpaw, after all. I love that you think everything is so funny, especially your big brother. You are my little beam of sunshine.

And you were so tired after your first birthday bash....

Look at the Bones!!

The squeaker wants my bones.

Kind of creepy, isn’t it? He’s into collecting bones these days. He’ll roam around our woods scanning the ground. He’s found a handful of little animal bones and a turtle shell, which he keeps very lovingly in a box. He’ll take them out and speculate about what kind of animal the bones are from, and he’ll muse about which bone each one is – a leg bone, or rib, or whatever.

He also suffers from periodic anxiety about when I will die. He’ll ask who will take care of him, he’ll offer to take care of his brother, and he’ll wonder where I’ll be when I die. I’ve tried to explain that I hope I’ll be an old old woman when I die, and that he and his brother will be grown up with families of their own.

Though he’s sad about the fact that he’ll have no mama someday, it’s also occurred to him that the silver lining to losing mama might be acquiring her (my) bones. At first I thought this was very creepy and macabre. It actually disturbed me a bit, and my first impulse was to discourage it (“Of course you can’t collect human bones! How bizarre!”) But then I had the thought that perhaps it’s not so very different from the kinds of death rituals that we do find culturally acceptable – displaying a dead body, packing those bodies lovingly in an expensive box, and then burying them beneath a stone marker. And then there are those who keep the ashes of someone they love in a box or other container – not so very different from keeping their bones as part of a collection.

So I’m thinking that the desire to keep my bones is really about love and hanging onto a bit of me (as well as greatly enhancing his collection), and that the larger context – death, loss, grief – is so unfathomable to him that he could hardly be expected to share the cultural hang-ups and expectations that an older child or adult would have.

Last night, on the way home from a preschool fundraiser (where one of his teachers wisely told us that he is 4 going on 34), he reminded me that he wants my bones, especially my skull (shiver!). He said, “I don’t have any skulls, mama, and this would be the easiest way for me to get one.” Easy for you to say, I thought. I did remind him that I kind of need it right now.