Cauldrons and Cookies

We stopped in at a kitchen gadget store yesterday while we were killing some time on the way to the squeaker's cousin's birthday party. This store has all kinds of nifty little kitchen gadgets, and we all find it entertaining -- even the kids.

The squeaker was excited as soon as he saw the merchandise in the window. "Look mama!" he cried. "They have a cauldron!" Or a fondue pot, depending on your perspective.

Then he admired some of the cookie cutters. Noticing that they were quite different from the ones we have at home, he observed to the store clerk, "We have cookie cutters, too. Only ours are a different species."

The clerk couldn't stop giggling, but the squeaker didn't notice.

The Days Are Long...

Today is the squeaker’s last day of preschool. I’ve told him so, but I don’t think he quite understands that he won’t be seeing his teachers or the kids again, for the most part. None of the kids will be attending his elementary school in the fall, as they are all in a different school zone. A few live in a different school district altogether.

I think that’s OK, because he hasn’t really made friends. Maybe kids don’t at this age. There is one boy he likes and plays with often, but on Wednesday, he told me that the boy said he didn’t want to be his friend anymore. “I still love him, though,” he said sadly. I felt sad for him, and I wanted to go beat the kid up for him, but I showed great parental restraint and suggested that maybe the kid was just having a bad day. I’d like to invite the boy over to our house to play, but I don’t know if I should if the boys aren’t getting along right now. My instinct is that kids at this age are flighty and scattered, and that the boy probably won’t even remember whatever caused the issue between them. But we’ll see what the squeaker says about today.

I am looking forward to weeks of school-free days. It was hard to get the squeaker up for school, and he was often sluggish in the mornings. And dressing both boys and hauling them out to the car was not fun on cold winter mornings. So a break sounds lovely. In the fall, he’ll be in afternoon kindergarten, so we won’t have to deal with mornings anymore. He will board the school bus after lunch, and the pipsqueak and I will nap while the squeaker is at school. Sometimes I still have a little nagging doubt about sending him to kindergarten, but I am trying hard to take my mother’s advice about letting go of my insecurity over a decision I have already made, and that really is small in the whole scheme of things.

Many parents mourn the end of the school year because they suddenly have more complicated child-care issues. But I remember that my mother always loved the end of school because as a family, we had a lot more freedom, and we enjoyed lazy days at the pool, lots of sunshine, a beach vacation, and long summer days and evenings playing in the backyard. So many good memories.

And here’s another thing I don’t want to forget: how cute the pipsqueak is when he points to his little unscathed knee and says, “Hurt. Kiss it?” I do, and all the while I’m thinking that this is a moment I’d love to bottle up and keep forever, because someday – not too far in the future – I won’t remember that chubby little knee or the anxious expression on his little round face.

More Pix

Hugs

When the squeaker was tiny, he had a simple way of telling us he wanted to be held. He would hold out his little arms and say, “Hold you!”

The pipsqueak has a slightly different approach: “Hug! Hug!” He says it with particular emphasis when someone else (especially the squeaker) is being hugged, and he feels left out. The pipsqueak will scoot right over and squeeze into the hug.

Yesterday, I realized he has another way of asking for a little love. He’ll sometimes come up to me and say, “Baby.” I’ve taken this to me that he wants his little glo-worm, which he calls his “baby.” But the last several times he’s said it, he has not wanted the baby when I tried to hand it to him. Instead, he points urgently to himself...and says “baby, baby.” Now, sometimes I hold him and snuggle him close while asking him rhetorically “are you my baby??” and I finally realized that he’s asking me to do this when he points to himself and says “baby, baby.” The discovery was accidental; when he said “baby” to me I picked him up to carry him over to his toys to find the glo-worm, and instead of helping me look, he snuggled against my shoulder. And then I got it. I think it’s pretty cute that he’s figured this out.

Yesterday, I watched a clip on CNN.com of a baby kangaroo who is being raised by a zookeeper. The joey was wrapped in a blanket and it was being fed from a bottle. The pipsqueak was beside himself with delight; he kept saying “Kangaroo! Awww!!” And then he kissed the computer screen. So cute.


My troublemakers:

Not So Small

On Wednesday, the squeaker's preschool had parent/child day, which meant that I stayed with the squeaker for his school routine. We had snack together and watched two short films. He bounced in the bounce house while I watched. And he rode a riding toy around the parking lot outside the school.

The school's newsletter hadn't specified what kind of riding toy to bring, though it did say a helmet was required. This necessitated a trip to Wal-mart, as we didn't have a helmet for the squeaker. The thing is, he doesn't play on bikes or other riding toys.

Part of the reason is that we live in the woods on a hill in a rural area. There is no street to ride on, no sidewalk, and no neighborbood. It's just our rocky driveway, sloping right down to the street. We have a short sidewalk from the driveway to the house, but it is angled in a way that would allow a child who really picked up some speed to go careening down the driveway to the street. So there is nowhere to ride unless we pack the bikes in the car and head to a nearby empty parking lot or basketball court.

And maybe we would do that if the squeaker showed any interest at all. But he hasn't. He'd rather read a book, do a puzzle, or watch a movie. He does love to be outside running, jumping, and playing, but he has no interest in the mechanics of pedaling. In fact, he doesn't quite get how the pedals work.

So on Wednesday, when my husband was ready to put the small bike with training wheels in the car for preschool, I suggested that we take a three-wheeled big-wheel type toy instead. I had thought more of the kids would have similar toys, but in fact they all had two-wheeled bikes, and some kids could even ride them without training wheels. I was very impressed.

Still, it was fortunate that we didn't take such a bike, because the squeaker had a hard enough time with the one we brought. He really tried, but he just doesn't understand how to pedal. I thought maybe he'd feel self-conscious about it, or about having a different kind of bike, but as always, the squeaker was blissfully unaware. It helped that a few of the other kids admired his "bike." I ended up having to push him around the parking lot while he struggled to pedal.

I do think it's amazing that these things don't faze him. He doesn't seem to compare himself to the other kids at all, and he is completely unconcerned about what they do or think. His sense of self is not remotely diminished by comparison to others. And this thinking was behind my favorite moment of the day. When we first got to school, we sat in the room where there was a height chart that the teachers had made. There was a "ruler" and each child had an apple with his or her height marked on it, and most of the apples were placed on the ruler according to the child's height. When the squeaker saw me looking at it, he exclaimed, "Mama, aren't I so tall???"

Now, here is the height chart:

That's the squeaker's apple, way down there at the bottom on the left side. He's the smallest kid in the class.

When one of his classmates heard his exclamation, the boy looked at me in surprise. "But he's the smallest," the boy said, and I said, "Shhhh...." But I really didn't need to. The squeaker paid not the slightest attention.

Who cares what an apple chart says when you know that you are the Magnificent Daisy the Dragon?

Goat Tales

Yes, we now have goats. We’ve been considering the idea for some time because the squeaker is terrified of animals, and that pains his papa. Every time a friendly dog approaches the squeaker, wagging its tail and ready to play, the squeaker tenses in terror, and we have to rescue him. We can hardly blame him after the cat-biting incidents. Still, it seems unfortunate to be so afraid of animals, so we thought a pet of his own might help.

We have hermit crabs – er, one hermit crab, after the unfortunate demise of his brother – but they aren’t exactly pet-able. In fact, they aren’t good for much of anything. We considered snakes and turtles and lizards, but they don’t seem like much of an improvement over hermit crabs. Dogs and cats were out of the question because both the squeaker and his papa are too allergic, and we are not sure we’d be comfortable with an outdoor dog or cat. It was hard to watch our previous outdoor cat sit outside on the cold, cold days of winter. Ferrets are pretty stinky, and I can imagine that any we tried to keep would escape promptly in a house with two little boys and plenty of doors to the outside. Pigs didn’t seem like a good idea, and hamsters, gerbils, mice, and rats seemed too vulnerable to accidental injury.

So I’ve been checking craigslist for goats, and last week I saw an advertisement from someone with four of them. The ad emphasized that she would sell them only as pets (not dinner), and said they were friendly and comical. She described them as a “pygmy cross.” Though I still felt kind of undecided, I exchanged some e-mails with the woman selling them, and I copied my husband on the e-mails. Where I was still hesitant, he was enthusiastic, so on Saturday, under heavily clouded skies and without much of an enclosure or goat house, we headed to the farm.

Rarely have I felt my suburbanite roots as keenly as I did on that farm. The farmers – a weathered looking woman of maybe 45 or 50, and her cheery ex-cop husband – have about 25 acres on the edge of Amish country here in Pennsylvania. On that relatively small farm, they had horses, goats, chickens, cows, and lots of cats and dogs (the squeaker cowered). The goats were housed in an ancient-looking barn swarming with wood-boring bees. There were maybe four adult goats and four kids. There was also a lot of poop and many many flies. We were very frank with the farmers about our total inexperience with farm animals of any kind, and with goats in particular. They assured us goats were friendly and easy to care for. We asked a lot of questions while the squeaker wandered around the goat pen, with mama and papa periodically swooping in to move him away from the electric fence around the pen. The pipsqueak was restless in my arms. He was dying to see the animals, but I was afraid that if I set him down, he’d fall in the poop. When the farmers suggested that we go ahead and pick two of the kids (which is what I had arranged by e-mail), my husband cheerily informed them that we’d take all four.

The farmers offered to give the goats their next round of immunizations, because then we wouldn’t need to do so again for a year. She asked if we knew how to give shots, and we said no. Apparently, like many farmers, she treats her animals herself. I guess when you have a lot of livestock, you cannot afford to have a veterinarian come for every little thing. I knew this in a vague way because of my past work experience on animal drug issues, but it was still a bit of a surprise to see it in action. It just seemed so...unregulated. But we were happy with the idea of avoiding a trip to the vet, so we watched the farmers gather the goats into the barn for their shots.

Just before they were herded inside, a window pane fell out of the barn’s window and shattered on the ground in the barnyard. The woman seemed a bit distressed about it – glass shards in her goat pen. I hoped it wasn’t a bad omen (and no, I don’t really believe in that kind of thing). Then we stood and watched the farmers give the shots while the goats squealed “ME-E-E!!!!!” with unbelievable volume. The barn door had a top part and a bottom part, and while the bottom part was closed to keep the goats in, the top part was open so that we could watch. As we stood there, a strong wind from a coming storm caught the top door and nearly slammed it – my husband caught it just before it hit me, holding the baby and with my back turned. We would never have seen it coming. Yikes.

By this time, the kids – I mean MY kids – were fidgety and bored, so we put them in their car seats. Then the farmers began loading our goats in the car. We had purchased a very large dog crate, which just fit into the back of our minivan. My husband figured that there was no better time for him to learn about goats than the present, so while the farmers caught and loaded three of them, he caught the fourth, and soon they were all making a racket in the car.

I had been worried about the ride home, but all was peaceful. The goats snuggled together in their cage. I was watching the darkening sky anxiously, but when we got home, it still wasn’t raining. My husband had built a small, temporary goat pen out of metal posts and wire mesh. He has the materials for a larger pen with wooden posts and wire mesh, but he had not yet built it. So he pulled the minivan up the hill and parked near the pen. We have enough space on our 9 acres that the goat pen is only a very small part of our land. My husband unloaded two goats and was going to get the third when, to our surprise and horror, the second goat leaped out of the pen. It had been running and jumping around in the pen in a terrified kind of way, and it jumped on the wire mesh fence, which then folded enough for the goat to leap out. My husband didn’t see this happen because he was getting goat #3 out of the car. But I freaked out (the squeaker’s timidness around animals is due to both “nurture” (the cat-biting incidents) and “nature” (his mama’s genes)), and we both scrambled to catch it. First, my husband had to get the struggling and loudly protesting goat #3 into the pen, which he did. Then we stood there and looked at each other helplessly.

Luckily for us, goat #3 was very anxious to get back into the pen. I guess he or she didn’t like being separated from “the herd.” Once we realized that, we bent the fence again when the goat ran at it, and the goat leaped in. Goat #4 also briefly escaped when my husband tried to get it inside the enclosure, but we used the same technique to recapture it.

And then we stood there in a kind of stunned silence. My husband is the kind of man who is rarely at a loss. He is always busy, and he rarely seems unsure about what to do next. But this was one of those rare moments, and once the goats were all inside this pen that we knew couldn’t hold them, with no house and no food except the little bit we got from the farmers, he just stood there looking very surprised and befuddled. I think he had expected them to be much smaller (we had been given a good-sized wooden doghouse, which we thought would hold all four of them, but now it was not clear if even one of them would fit inside). He also said that he didn’t expect them to be so much like livestock, which made me laugh. Still, I understood what he meant. We are hoping they will be pets; maybe not quite like a dog, but still, a friendly pet that likes to be petted more than herded. So far, they seemed like terrified barnyard animals (which is exactly what they were).

With the coming storm, I said they needed some kind of shelter. My husband was unconvinced (“they lived in a barnyard!”) but I insisted (“they also had the shelter of a barn”). So as the wind picked up and darkness fell, my husband quickly threw together a rough little shelter, with no sides but with a broad roof. He also added some posts to prevent the wire mesh fence from folding down so easily. Then we retreated into the house wondering what we had done to our very simple lives.

The goats huddled all night, and I wondered if they were miserable. This was the first time they had been separated from their mamas, and they had only just been weaned. But they seemed OK the next day, and my husband improved their little house so that it is enclosed on three sides. It will do for now, though the plan is to build a shed before the cold fall weather sets in. We now have plenty of goat feed, and we are working on getting hay. The goats have warmed up to the squeaker especially, and they come quite close to him. They’ll even tolerate a little bit of petting.

So we shall see how they work out. I have to admit that while the goats themselves were inexpensive, we’ve already invested a lot more money than I had expected. We had to buy the dog crate, the fencing materials, and some books about goats. And we’ll have to invest in a shed of some kind. I had figured that if the goats do not work out, we could just re-sell them, but at this point, we’ve invested enough that I’d be hesitant to do that.

But I hope they work out OK. I would like the squeaker to become more comfortable around animals, and I think the experience of caring for an animal is valuable. He is excited about them, though a bit wary. So we shall see.

Newest Members of our Family

Hide!

The squeaker has a field trip today. His preschool is going to a nearby playground and candy store. I find that a little weird; it doesn’t exactly have educational value, and it’s not like we don’t do plenty of that on our own. (Well, the playground, but not the candy store.) But it does sound like fun, and I think it’s part of the end-of-the-year celebration, which continues next week with a parent/child day. I don’t get the sense that the squeaker really cares that school is ending, or that he realizes he’ll be saying goodbye to his classmates and teachers. Most of the kids will be attending a different elementary school, but I don’t think he’s had great success making friends in preschool anyway.

The pipsqueak’s hands are still itchy, and I am thinking that maybe it is indeed eczema. I am just surprised it would show up on his fingers. It seems so much like contact with something is causing it, since it is on his hands. Also, in the last day or two, he’s developed an odd rash on his forearm. It looks like sunburn, and is slightly bumpy. The rashes are driving him crazy, as they are all very itchy. I don’t know why my boys have such sensitive skin. I don’t, and my husband doesn’t. But the squeaker has outgrown the eczema that plagued him in his earliest years, so maybe the pipsqueak will, too.

The pipsqueak has started doing the silliest thing. He will find an out-of-the-way place to stand or sit, and he will retreat there very quietly. If you call his name, he will not come out – he’ll just stand there, looking amused and delighted and maybe slightly alarmed. Then he’ll pop out, giggling like mad and saying, “Hide!” I didn’t realize it was deliberate at first, because when I’m the one looking for him, he stays out of my sight and it seems that he is just occupied somewhere where I cannot see him momentarily. But then I saw the squeaker looking for him and calling his name when I happened to be standing near the pipsqueak’s hiding place. I could see his expression, and the way he stood perfectly still, listening. I am surprised that he has the discipline to play this little trick and the sense that it is funny. He is such a character.

Rain, Rain

Rain, rain, go away...I’m forgetting what a sunny day looks like. The squeaker has a field trip to a farm today, and I’m wishing he owned some rain boots. I’m sure the farm is one great big mud puddle. The warm weather is sure taking its time getting here, too. We’ve had a few scattered warm days, but it’s still so chilly most of the time.

The pipsqueak has been struggling with some kind of allergy or sensitivity. His hands are very red, especially between his finger and thumb on each hand, and he scratches his hands incessantly, both the palm and the back of the hand. There are a few raised bumps, but it is hard to tell if they are the cause of the itching or the result of the scratching. I thought maybe he was reacting to strawberries, which he loves, so we stopped giving him any. At first, his hands cleared up perfectly, and they stayed that way for several days. But now the itching is back with a vengeance. I am at a loss, and I don’t know what we can do about it. I am sure the pediatrician would recommend a food diary and the careful elimination of potentially problematic foods, so I will do that. But since I have no faith in allergy testing, that’s really my only option. I feel bad for him because his hands look so uncomfortable, and the itching really disrupts his sleep.

Other than that, the pipsqueak is so very super cute that I just want to squeeze him and kiss him all the time. However, he has learned to say no, and he says it often and very firmly. So I don’t ask. He sings songs, he spins and dances, and he surprises us every day with the words that he knows. Plus, he is a ham. When he is silly, mama and papa might chuckle, but what he really loves is when he makes big brother laugh. Big brother obliges often, even when mama and papa are ignoring the pipsqueak’s naughtiness in an effort to discourage it. Cereal bowl on the head? Carrots in the nose? Big brother loves it, and so both boys dissolve into mad giggling. And while I’m keeping a straight face so as not to encourage the behavior, I am secretly thinking that I am so happy I have two little ones, and so glad that my boys find companionship in one another, even if it does involve carrots in the nose.

We had some friends with kids over on Saturday evening, and the squeaker’s cousins visited, too. He was so happy to have playmates. The kids were older than the squeaker by a few years, and I was surprised to see that he seemed to connect with them much better than he does with kids his own age or younger kids. That made me feel affirmed in my decision to send him to kindergarten in the fall, which his preschool teacher still tells us is a mistake every time we talk to her. But he thinks kids his age are generally unsophisticated babies with no imagination. Of course, it doesn’t help that the squeaker alienated some of the kids at school by taking the toys they wanted to play with, laying on them and telling them that he was a dragon and they couldn’t have the toys because they were part of his dragon hoard. Sigh.