Naughty, Naughty Pipsqueak

The pipsqueak told his grandma that having his diaper changed was "fucking annoying."

I suppose he is right; it probably is.

On the plus side, I hope this means that it will be easy to transition him to using the toilet. Sigh.

Shark!!

I had already told the squeaker to settle down three times this morning when he screamed "Shark!!" in his bedroom.

"Didn't I ask you to settle down??" I shouted, very irritated.

"Yes, mama," he replied. "But I had to say it like that! I was reading the title of this shark book, and it has an examation point. See? I had to say it in an excited way." He was very earnest. And he was right, too.

Don't Let the Bugs Bite!

Most nights, I say to the pipsqueak, "Good night," to which he replies, "Sleep tight."

Then I say, "Don't let the bugs bite!"

But this causes him to squirm around in the bed looking for the bugs: "Where?? Where is 'em?" I can't tell if his reaction is excitement or concern about the possibility of bugs in the bed, but I thought it might be best to drop the last bit just in case.

So for the last two nights, when he says "sleep tight," I have not said anything at all. However, after he's waited a minute for me to say my line, he's filled in for me: "Don't let the bugs eat me!"

I think perhaps he was concerned after all!

Boys in October

The weather has been so cold and rainy. I know it is fall, but I like October for its golden afternoons of sunshine and its cool edge, not its temperatures of 40 degrees and endless rain. We even had some SNOW on the ground last week, though it must have melted before we got up in the morning. Still, I HEARD about it, and that’s bad enough!

Today it will be warmer – low 70s. We have a Halloween party to attend on the 31st, so I am hoping that the cool weather will stay away. I am sure it will be an outdoor party. I was a little hesitant to give up trick-or-treating for a party, but trick-or-treating isn’t easy for us anyway since we do not live in a neighborhood. Last year, the squeaker and the pipsqueak trick-or-treated in my sister’s neighborhood with their cousins, and a lovely time was had by all. I hate to give that up this year, but I think I’d feel more attached to the tradition if it was our own neighborhood. Plus, our friends seemed very eager for us to come to their party, and they have been guests at several at our recent parties. So we shall see how it works out.

The squeaker’s papa has made him a very elaborate mummy costume, complete with an Egyptian headdress. The squeaker had said he wanted to be a mummy, and his papa thought it was a great idea. With lots of glue and gemstones (on the headdress), I’m thinking that weight of the costume might mean that the squeaker won’t be able to move as speedily as usual, which would be nice for a change. We have not done much for the pipsqueak because he doesn’t get the whole Halloween thing yet. We have plenty of ready-made costumes – giraffe, pirate, frog. However, when I asked if he’d rather be a giraffe or a pirate, he said, “Hippo.” We will see about that. He does like hippos quite a lot.

The squeaker has been going off to school each day without a problem, though sometimes he still gets anxious at the last minute. He’s bringing home a lot of little projects, and I am a little concerned that he isn’t taking them very seriously. His drawing skills are definitely not his strong point, and that’s OK with me, but he seems to be doing a lot of scribbling, and that seems a bit worrisome. I’m not actually worried about him, but rather about how he might be perceived at school. The truth is that he’s much more verbal than visual, and he doesn’t really care about this little drawing projects (drawing his family, for example – I think he drew one big orange circle with two orange circles inside it). I don’t think this matters a whit with regard to his long-term success, or anything else that really matters. However, I think it does make him look as though he might have cognitive developmental delays (which he doesn’t -- he can draw reasonably well at home), and I don’t want this to affect his relationships and success in school. My instinct is to encourage him to do better but not to take it very seriously at this point, but I am a little concerned about how disengaged he is from these assignments.

I think that there is a type of student – earnest, engaged, eager -- who does well in school because teachers respond well to that personality type. But the squeaker is none of these things. He is usually caught up in his own world, and he is not very eager to do work that doesn’t particularly appeal to him. Any earnest effort is disrupted by a lack of focus. To me, this all seems very normal in a kid his age, but the demands of kindergarten are more intense than that.

The pipsqueak has been saying many hilarious things. Though he has near-perfect grammar, his cutest sentences are the ones he doesn’t get quite right. He’ll run around the house looking for someone and saying, “Where is ‘em?” Cracks me up every time. There really isn’t anything he can’t say now; he’s become very conversational. The other day he paused in his nursing to say to me, “My baby. Pat.” It took me a minute to realize that I was being instructed to pat him and say “my baby” in a loving tone. He definitely knows what he wants in life, that kiddo.

Second Birthday

Today the pipsqueak is two years old. What a funny little thing he is. Last night, while I got him ready for his bath, he was singing, “Coke, Coke, Coke.” Skeptical that he really knew what he was saying, I asked him, “What is Coke, you silly?”

He just grinned back at me. “Coke is...?” I prompted, thinking that he might say, “Soda.”

“Tasty!” he finished instead. I guess he did know what he was talking about.

Oh, pipsqueak, my pipsqueak. How you wear your emotions on your sleeve. When everyone sang happy birthday to you over the weekend, I thought your smile couldn’t get any bigger. “I’m happy,” you say. Or sad, or mad, or scared, or funny. You are a little bundle of visible, raw emotion. And just in case I can’t tell what you are feeling, you tell me, your blue, blue eyes wide with joy or your lower lip emerging in a little baby-pout.

While big brother relishes the lyrics of a song, you cannot help but move to its beat. To you, music means dancing – vigorous, whole-body dancing. The kind of dancing that works up an appetite, and luckily you enjoy food as much as music. I think the vast majority of your first words were food-related – pizza, chocolate, cookies, cake, tea. You remind me of the joys of decadent eating, beaming in your high chair. You are even enthusiastic for broccoli and tomatoes. I think you just celebrate the pleasure of eating, the sensual experience of taste and texture. Plus, you like to rub food in your hair. Oh my.

To big brother’s sense of order, you impishly introduce chaos, knocking over his carefully built block tower or sneaking over and snatching his favorite toy from the elaborate game he has set up. And then you run, shrieking with the thrill of the chase. How is it that little siblings know how to drive the older ones nuts from the very start? But even when you are naughty, you are full of empathy. “Sorry, sorry, T,” you tell the squeaker, your big blue eyes wide and sincere. But then you do it again...and again.

It seems that I was just toting you around in that infant car seat. How can it be that you are a walking, talking little person already? How is it that you are already zooming around the house in your toy car, narrowly missing walls and furniture with a last-minute spin of the steering wheel? I cannot slip downstairs to do laundry without you running behind me, your arms out: “With you! With you!” you say.

Pipsqueak, my pipsqueak, I’ve tried to hold you close at night to breathe you in, to feel your baby warmth, to get as many “mooches” as you will give me. (“Kiss you. Kiss you. Mooch?”) You are so little – only two! – and yet I cannot believe how fast you have become the little you that is so very busy, so funny, so naughty. Love you, pipsqueak. Happy, happy birthday.

Being Gretchen

Last night, I dreamed that I was being pursued by five lionesses. I was walking through some kind of animal exhibit, with door after door, and they shadowed me from the first moment that I stepped inside. I walked faster, and they stayed behind me as I slipped through one door after another. Each time I made it through a door with their hot breath on my heels, I shivered and wondered how I made it. When I woke up, I didn’t exactly feel the terror of having had a nightmare, but I did feel anxious and curiously hurried. It took a few minutes of quiet for my mind to settle down again. It was 4:50 a.m., and since I get up at 5 a.m., I did not go back to sleep.

The pipsqueak was snoozing happily near me, his body at an angle on top of the blankets. He was a reluctant sleeper last night. First, he patted me (“I’m patting you, mama”). Then he scratched my back, just like I sometimes scratch his. When he said, “I’m scratching you, mama,” I didn’t quite catch what he said. “Patting?” I asked. “Nooooo,” he said.

“Rubbing?”

“Nooo....”

I thought for a long time before it dawned on me. “Scratching. You said scratching.”

“Yes, mama,” he said softly, as if he thought perhaps I was a little slow. “I’m scratching you.”

I also dreamed that when I looked out the window of the nursery into the darkness, I saw a little blond head. The squeaker was crouched there, just outside the window on the roof of the sunroom. He was watching some motorcycles through the darkness as they zipped around our driveway. I tried to pull him through the window and into the house, but he shrugged me off and jumped noiselessly from the roof into the yard below. I could see him, so very small and shining white in the darkness as he ran around the yard.

I’ve related my dreams in reverse order here; the lionesses were the last. In the first, I got lost inside a building – a school? – with the lawyer-priest with whom I job share, and we wandered around empty cinderblock stairwells looking for unlocked doors. I have dreamed this before (though my colleague has never been there), and I knew while I was dreaming that it would pass.

I don’t know that I think dreams really tell us anything about ourselves. In recent days I’ve been wrestling with a decision that seemed to have at its core the mantra “Know thyself”; I have been trying to decide if I should try to make a change that appeals to the secret seed of ambition and adventure in me but that may require tasks that are so at odds with my fundamental, unchangeable nature that the change might fill each day with hurdles that unrelentingly feed my sense of anxiety. I am far more Piglet than Pooh, and while I might prefer to be Pooh-like, I know I am not.


In thinking about my dilemma, I stumbled across Gretchen Rubin’s excellent “Being Gretchen” post on The Happiness Project about accepting herself, including her limitations, but knowing that there is some loss in such acceptance. I agree very much about the importance of self-acceptance, and I appreciate the sense of loss. But how do you know when to challenge the part of you that has perhaps become too comfortable, the habituated self who sidesteps change just because it is different from the familiar self you have become accustomed to? Certainly being true to oneself does not require rejecting new experiences, but does it create the risk of steering clear of experiences that challenge our habits and our engrained perspectives? Does growth sometimes require consciously stepping beyond the comfortable and familiar – or is such action irreconcilable with the philosophy of “know thyself”? Surely scale matters: changing how you spend the afternoon will have lesser consequences that making a major life change that involves shedding some of what is familiar and comfortable.

Even in framing the issue that way, though, I am not sure if that’s what is at stake. It is hard to tell if I might be overdramatizing. In any case, I made a decision yesterday to pursue this change, though I do not know the likelihood that it will come to pass. We shall see.

In the meantime, the weather has turned cool and windy, and, to the pipsqueak’s delight, the cornfields around us have been full of large and noisy farm machines. The squeaker has doggedly been going off to school each day on the school bus, though he has a litany of concerns about school: he does not have friends. He is lonely. Other kids can read better than he can. He does not like waiting for the bus that brings him home because he waits all alone; it is the last bus. I’ve shrugged off all these worries (“You’ll make friends. I’m sorry you are lonely. You will learn to read just as well as anyone else, it just takes time. I’m sorry you have to wait for the bus, but that’s the way it is.”) But the complaint that gives me pause is his feeling that he is left out of things. He says he does not feel part of the group.

I feel that I know very much what he means, as I have always stayed on the margins, too. I like to think that I stay on the edges because I prefer it there. I am an observer, not a joiner. When everyone wants to do a particular thing, that alone makes me want to do something different. Something in me makes me resist being part of the group, even if a part of me feels vaguely sad about being on the edge. I feel like I belong on the edge, though sometimes I wish I wanted to be in the middle of things.

My husband questions the genuineness of what the squeaker is expressing; he thinks perhaps he is just echoing things he has heard in movies and in books to justify his general trepidation about school. But something about the simple words he chose to describe the feeling – and the way the feeling resonated with me – makes me think that he does feel that he is not exactly part of the group in the classroom. And that leaves me wondering: do I try to teach him how to join them, how to participate? Or do I try to help him see the beauty of being an observer? Is it his essential nature as an observer that he is discovering? Or is it just that he doesn’t know how to be engaged with the other kids, a skill he will learn with some practical experience? Is it again a question about “Being Gretchen”?