[June 22, 2008—
Star-Mangled Banner]
[For our overseas listeners, a cheat sheet can be found here.]
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[May 09, 2008—
Venus]
From K: Oliver wants to live on Venus. I told him it was hot. He said he'd wear sunscreen.
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[April 02, 2008—
Incentives]
Report from K in re: potty training:
I'm not sure why we ever worried Oliver wasn't smart enough to get this. Oliver gets it, to the extent that we are now being snowed.
So this morning, he gets up, and we run to the potty, and he makes himself go. We get a star! We get M&Ms!! We sit at the table for about five minutes getting breakfast. Oliver polishes off the last of his reward M&Ms. He then informs me it is time to go to the potty again. We run to the potty. He concentrates, squeezes, shuffles around, squeezes more and makes a small dribble come out. Hurray! We get a star! We get M&Ms! Oliver runs back to the table. He is there about five minutes. He eats his last M&M...he informs me it is time to...go to the potty again. Do you see a pattern here? I did, after about the third time, and oliver's umpteenth M&M.
I wondering if this isn't a metaphor for the housing crisis. Government tells people it is good to buy houses. They incentivize the buying of houses through oodles of cheap credit and mortgage deductions. People buy houses and buy bigger houses and buy second houses and they can't afford to pay!. And then the economy falls apart. I'm not sure how this metaphor translates in the end, back to the potty. But right now we are going through a lot of M&Ms.
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[March 27, 2008—
Jimmy Cagney]
I confess I haven't done the calculations, but I wager that if you draw a straightish line between Buxton, Ore., and London, you might land in Queens, N.Y. At least, that's the accent Oliver has decided to synthesize based on his dual linguistic inheritance.
Dog=Dawg. Bird=Boid. Jupiter=Jew-pidour.
Who knows where this comes from. He was born in New York, but on the West Side. Maybe it was the chemical waft from Newark that did it and this is really a homage to the Sopranos. Also, K and I did watch and awful lot of Law & Order when we lived in Manhattan. Poor child. Add that to the faux south where he currently lives and he's going to develop an accent unrecognizable to modern anthropology.
Perhaps it won't matter, as long as the bird doesn't chase the dog around Jupiter.
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[February 28, 2008—
Siberia]
Last night, Oliver was doing something he ought not. K tells him that if he did it again he'd be sent to Siberia.
O: Siberia is in Russia.
K: Yes, Oliver
O: Russia has communists.
K: Yes, Oliver
O: Oliver go to Siberia with the Yeltsin and the Gorbachev and the Brezhynev and the Krushchev and the Lenin and the itty bitty tiny Marx.
K: Fine, Oliver. Go to Siberia and be with Marx. But it's cold in Siberia.
O: No Siberia?
(Translation: He's been playing with recently with K's Russian president matryoshka, which look a bit like this.)
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[December 17, 2007—
Windswept]
Now I actually own land and trees and the occasional wilting peony, I've developed a fond attachment for stuff that grows. Most recently, I have found myself, on summer afternoons, fighting a intellectual tussle as to the proper amount of attention one should lavish on a lawn. Too little, and it looks like a desert. Too much, and that's just not an appropriate way for an adult to spend his time.
In the middle of our property is a gnarled and aging apple tree that's probably twice as large as it should be. I don't think it had been pruned for years until this spring when I gave it a dramatic haircut. This year, not all the apples were mutant, but rather too many came out with unsightly bulges. Remaining solid were the four trunks growing out of the base, each heading toward its own compass point.
That was until last night. The 50 mph winds knocked out the power for 12 hours, sent limbs from the uselessly soft fir trees tumbling into the road and cleaved my poor apple tree in half. Two trunks are still standing. Two are lying forlornly across the lawn, barely joined at the base to their former cousins. It looks a bit rotten in there and no doubt it's only a matter of time before the rest of it falls down.
Neither it, nor its apples, had a story to tell as far as I was aware. Adam didn't partake of its lumpy fruit, which also didn't fall on the head of any budding physicists. No arrows were shot through them. No poisoned examples were given to proto-princesses. But it was my tree, to which I had lavished at least a small amount of care, and I am annoyed.
Minor consolation: It will replenish the firewood we ran through last night trying to prevent our children turning into popsicles. (Photos TK when I find a second to run outside during daylight.)
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[November 28, 2007—
Stella Update]
From the doctor's office: Aside from being jabbed with needles, which made her justifiably annoyed, she's all good. 11 pounds, four ounces, and 22.5 inches long.
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[October 29, 2007—
Untranscendentalism]
O and I went stomping in the fallen fall leaves this weekend, concentrating on the patch of earth under a fabulous maple, or maybe it was an oak, or something else, which had turned a glorious palette of yellows and reds and browns. In an Emersonian moment, I tried to pass on what little I knew about the sinuous veins that glowed in the cold, late afternoon sunshine. He took the leaves, ripped them to shreds, and tossed the remnants over his shoulder.
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[October 18, 2007—
Enforced Hiatus]
My camera is unwell, which is why there have been no new photos recently. I've been intending to take it to the camera doctor, but keep forgetting.
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[October 02, 2007—
Oh]
Not quite sure what to make of this (search for 'stella'). Current thinking: possibly not a problem, but not necessarily.
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[September 06, 2007—
Quite Contrary]
From K:
Setting: This morning, Oliver and I had a cute conversation about opposites. Oliver: "Up is duh opposite of doooowwwn. Yight is duh opposite of daarrrrrk. Good is duh oppoiste of baaaaaad." Etc.
Fast forward to now: Oliver is in his crib for his nap, singing and screaming his head off. "Oh yord, won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz…. I LOVE strawberries…. Tirty-tree, tirty-four, tirty-five…. If you're happy and you know it stomp your FEET!!!" (loud thumping noises against the wall).
I go into the room. I say: "Oliver, this is quiet time. You don't have to go sleep if you don't want, but you need to be quiet. It's resting time. No singing. No shouting. Be quiet."
He goes quiet, looks at me. Puts his hands over his eyes, as if to prove he will now try to go to sleep. I back out and close the door. As I turn to walk back to the office I hear, shouted at my back:
"THE OPPOSITE OF QUITE IS LOOOOUUUUUUDDDDDDD."
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[August 21, 2007—
SIS-tah]
An actual conversation:
K: Do you want Stella to come and live with us.
O: Oliver lives in Hiwsbruh, Virginia.
K: Well, yes, Oliver. But do you want Stella to come and live here, in our house.
O: Stella live in North Dakota.
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[August 21, 2007—
Dummy]
Oliver, ever since he was born, has sucked on a dummy when he sleeps. Having created this dependency, neither K nor myself have been inclined to tackle the resulting problems—dummies falling out of bed; dummies going missing; dummies falling apart—because the consequences of having no dummies seemed even grimmer.
Now, Oliver has helped us, though perhaps not himself, by chewing holes in every dummy in the house. He slept fine last night. Nap time today, however, was a bit different. For one hour, he yelled, at the top of his lungs: NO MORE DUMMIES. DON'T EAT THE DUMMIES.
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[July 28, 2007—
Still Not Cut Out for Country Life]
At first, I thought the ugly red welt on my leg was a massive tick, and I did what anyone else would have done faced with a similar problem: started digging it out with a pair of tweezers. Turns out it wasn't a tick, just a welt, and it bled, a lot.
I noticed, after a while, that it was itchy, and that there were three other welts. So I did what anyone would have done, faced with a similar situation, and scratched them. They got itchier.
More bumps started appearing on my hand. I tried to ignore them. They started itching too, as if someone was jabbing my skin with a clump of blunt needles. The itch started to drive me batty. In turn, I drove everyone around me batty. It became worse, as if someone decided to jam the needles into my bone and start wiggling them around.
A few days later, by a brilliant piece of deduction, I convince myself that the cause was fleas, to be found either in my car or at my desk in the office. Neither K or O are afflicted, QED.
By this time, the welts on my leg had become larger and angrier. I am convinced I have Black Parrot Disease. I visit a local doctor, who tells me I have insect bites and that my leg is infected. We discuss the relative merits of English versus American doctoring, and why it is that British people don't like taking medicine, relative to people over here who seem to think that access to drugs is in the Constitution. He gives me antibiotics.
Neighbors come over. They know about country diseases. They take one look and say: "It's poison ivy." Makes sense. I probably rubbed against some while rooting out an entire bed's worth of weeds a couple of weekends ago. My endless scratching helped spread it around.
I borrow the neighbors' anti-poison-ivy spray, which makes everything even itchier. Not yet sure if this is a good thing. Reach inevitably conclusion that the great outdoors isn't great at all, but is, in fact, dangerous.
UPDATE, August 3: Still itching. Might kill myself.
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[May 29, 2007—
Singing]
O's repertoire now goes something like this, often in this kind of order:
Unforgettable (dat's what yooo ahhh)
Hot Cross Buns
The Alphabet (Literally, abcdefg, hijklmnop &c.)
That's Amore (yucky fella)
My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean
Days of the week set to the Munsters theme tune.
Let's Call the Whole Thing Off (toh-mah-toe)
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