Fine Young Fauves

It was a dark and stormy night… last night Isaac and I sat in a parking lot with torrential rain pounding on the van, waiting for the professor to take us out into the woods to look for salamanders. It was the Bath Salamander Walk . Imagine our good fortune, that an important amphibian study is going on right here in our town!

This biology professor has been running the study for ten or eleven years. There's a three foot wall of aluminum flashing around an entire pond out there in the dark woods. And all around the edge of the flashing there are five gallon buckets set into the ground. At this time of year, the night of the first warm rain, the salamanders rise up out of the ground in the forest floor for a 300 yard radius, and proceed to to the pond to breed. The flashing fence stops them, and they walk along it to find a way in. Then they fall into a bucket, which is too deep to get out of. Then the professor picks them up, takes them to his lab, weighs, measures and photographs them. He snips their toes in specific patterns, so that he's able to identify each as an individual (work is under way to do the same thing by spot patterns– surely less invasive!). Some get radio transmitters, and all get released into the pond at the spot where they were found. In this fashion he's tracked 9,000 specific salamanders, some for as long as ten years. 

So he very kindly brings people out to see what's up during the peak migration times, such as now. Last night, Isaac and I were in a group of about 15 hearty souls tramping around in our wellies. As we walked over (a parade of flashlights on a dark and wet road) he said that it was "the best night he'd seen in six or seven years." This led to high expectations, of buckets teaming with salamanders and salamanders everywhere under foot. However… no. The salamanders were barely making an appearance. Although the rain miraculously stopped and the sky turned black and star-filled, turns out it was too cold for them. The pond still had ice on it, and although the air was warm and the ground muddy, there was still a layer of frozen soil underfoot, keeping the salamanders tucked away. Still, it wasn't a total bust. WE found a few. Isaac got some props for correctly identifying the first one we looked at. "That's a male," he said. The professor was impressed. "So, do you have a job?" he asked Isaac. "What are you doing during the week? I could use some help."

We also found a few spring peepers and some red-backed salamanders, one of which was so tiny it could just perch on Isaac's fingertip. But wading through deep muck, brambles, branches occasionally lashing our faces and puddles threatening to swamp our boots, you could want a better salamander population. Last night was not THE night we were looking for. One unhappy mom said, "Yep… this is my last salamander walk ever!" But Isaac loved it nonetheless, and it ain't over yet… we'll go out again in a few days when the weather is right and then maybe we'll get lucky.  

The following is not for the faint of heart, the timid, or those with delicate sensibilities. In fact, it's only for the extra stalwart. Let's put it this way: are you comfortable with a little mouse blood? If yes, proceed.

First a point of information: cats are not born knowing how to catch and eat mice. I know this may come as a shock to you. (Also I have living proof that not all dogs know how to swim.) Mother cats teach their kittens about it in a very orderly and methodical way. When the kittens are ready to eat solid food, the mother brings them a delicious fully-dead mouse. They can eat that at their leisure. Then, the mother cat brings a half-dead mouse for the kittens to play with, torture, and then eat. Finally when they've gotten the idea, the mother cat brings them a fully live mouse and sets it loose among them. You get the point. The kittens do too, and soon they are skilled enough to hunt on their own.

Now in the case of Bagheera, one of his key tasks in our house is catching mice. But in speaking with his foster mother (as she tearfully filled my arms with toys and his favorite foods), I learned that he missed the whole mouse-lesson business from his mother. They were separated early and he lived only with his human mother throughout his formative weeks. So… naturally I wanted to make sure he got some basic facts set into his head early on.

We have a tin cat live trap, and although I'm a chair-jumper by nature I've gotten very comfortable with dealing with live mice, when contained in secure tin boxes. Also I have quite a steady supply of mice. So I caught one and put the trap (which has a clear top) near Bagheera's cage until he noticed the mouse. The mouse, bless his heart, didn't want to be noticed so this took half a day. But finally when Bagheera was aware of the furry morsel inside the trap, I brought the whole entourage into the kitchen. My idea was to open the trap and let the cat chase the mouse. If he caught and ate it, bonus. If it got away, well, so be it. I can always catch it again, and that way the cat would see which way it went (under the stove, dishwasher, etc.). So naturally I stood on a chair and opened the trap with a broom. Bagheera leapt into action and began to chase the mouse all around the room, and I ran away as fast as I could, shaking like a leaf from the ordeal. I sat in the other room for five minutes or so, overcoming a severe attack of the willies. 

Then I crept, not to the kitchen (eew) but to the top of the stairs where I could see how the mouse class was proceeding from a safe distance. What I saw was that the mouse had gotten away and Bagheera was in a state trying to find him. In effect, though, this was a success, because a cat on patrol in the kitchen is exactly what I want.

So, lesson two the next day… I caught a mouse again that morning, possibly the self-same mouse as the day before. I brought it to Bagheera and opened the trap. However the mouse had no interest in playing tag this time and wedged himself into the little space under the little see-saw that lets him in but not out. Okay, so Bagheera dutifully went to work trying to extract him with his paw. No luck. The tail was sticking out, so he took the tail between his teeth and gave it a series of firm yanks. No luck. I began to wonder whether in fact the mouse had died in there of fright or his injuries. I closed the trap and vigorously banged it against the floor to dislodge the mouse. No luck. So I left it for a while, figuring something would have to give eventually. But no, I came back some hours later and found that Bagheera had sampled the tail. Indeed, the tail was sitting there in a sticky smear of blood. But the mouse had not moved. I decided then that it really must be dead. Isaac came bounding by and said cheerfully, "It must be in agony!" and skipped away. I said, "Well, I hope not. I really think it's dead."

I tried the tipping and banging trick some more and then became convinced that it was dead and its obese little body had gotten wedged in there somehow. Not wanting to throw away the whole trap (this didn't occur to me but I sort of wish it had), I decided I needed to get the mouse out. I could throw it away or give it to Bagheera or whatever, but having a dead mouse in the live mouse trap makes no sense. But damned if I could. I wasn't at all willing to touch it, so I went and found a needle nosed pliers and some rubber gloves and set about firmly pulling its tail. The mouse emerged so that its rump was showing and I thought that I could dump it out from there. But… people… when I let go of the pliers it scurried back in! 

That is to say, it was holding on by its fingernails while sitting there and having its tail eaten and various parties trying to pull it out.

So once I realized it was alive and cognizant I took it outside to let it go. Still, of course, I couldn't dislodge it. After a while I just left the trap to its own devices. I returned very tentatively three days later and found it empty, only a brown smear remaining where the tail had been nibbled.

Okay. So that was all pretty horrible. Maybe that's enough mouse training for Bagheera. He did learn two critical facts: 1) there are mice in the kitchen; 2) they are delicious. I hope that will be enough to set the ball rolling.

Overall, he's doing wonderfully in integrating into the household. Lena spent the first few days sitting beside his crate round the clock and watching he every move. She growled at him occasionally, and whined at me as if to say, "It's not like I'm asking to eat the whole cat, but can't I at least eat the ears?" Now he's out and about and sometimes she bothers him, but mostly he lives his life and she lives hers. Meanwhile, he's actively trying to bring Zane Grey out of her shell. I heard the sweetest little "brrrt, brrrrt" chirping noise in the other room the other day. It was persistent so I came in to see what it was. And there I found Zane Grey, sitting on the top of the stairs, and Bagheera on the bottom step, speaking to her soothingly and trying to coax her down. It's slow work, but he's making progress with her. After initially hissing and running from him, she's getting comfortable sitting ten feet away from him and watching his doings. Who knows, maybe he'll even teach her how to catch mice.

There's a new sheriff in town, and he's a bad ass killing machine. Meet Bagheera, King of the Cats.  Here he is working out with a faux rodent to get ready for the real thing. How'd you like to be on the business end of these fangs??

Here he is, surveying the terrain for signs of trouble. 

Okay, off duty he likes a snuggle.

Here's Zane Grey… we seem to have made arrangements that are working. She hides in the basement most of the time, uses her cat box perfectly down there, and gets petted during my frequent laundry runs.  We did finally install an upstairs cat box, which she has familiarized herself with, and with may in fact solve the problem in which she gets herself "trapped" up there and is unable to run the Lena/noisy children gauntlet to get to her cat box downstairs. Also her pea/pee brain can't fathom the use of the cat door I installed for her, but oh well. I think she's as fluffy inside her skull as outside. 

Still crazy after all these years…  

Ironically the very day I brought the cat home, Sunday, was the day a strange new rodent bolted from under the dresser in the sunroom (beside which ZG is sitting in that photo) and scurried under the couch nearby. This alarmed me and I screamed, and my baby was at risk– sitting on the floor– of getting attacked by a rabid rat or whatever in the HELL it was. We were in the process of leaving the house at that moment so I just scrambled to safety. En route I consulted with my mother on the phone and she reassured me that in all likelihood it was a chipmunk. When I got home, with new cat in tow, I set a trap for the whatever it was. (I have a wide spectrum of rodent-trapping devices, fortunately!) Before too long, the chipmunk (indeed it was) began running like a mad freak all over the entire house and finally ran into the tv room. I set the trap there and within moments he was in it. He dropped his tail to distract me. None the less I took him outside to the woods and let him go. Where was Lena during all this?

"What Chipmunks?"

All weekend, too, Elias was sick and Ben and Isaac were out of town. Elias had a persistent fever of 102. When treated with Motrin, he was very normal-seeming, such that on Saturday, when they were having a Valentine's Day special at the local Humane Society, I went and searched through 175 cats for the perfect one. Indeed, my criteria were hard to meet. I needed a young (6-12 month) neutered boy cat. I needed him to be frisky enough to be a good hunter, and yet gentle and friendly enough to be no threat to the children. I needed him to come from a stable home– lord knows I need no more mentally-ill cats! And lastly I needed him to be beautiful, touchable and loveable. After a long dalliance with a much more striking lynx point siamese, I decided that this was the right cat for us. I put him on hold, thought it over some more, and got him on Sunday. The lady who had fostered him from tiny kittenhood cried when I took him. But of course she needed him to find a home– that was the point. He'd been sitting in a cage there for two months, waiting for us to come along. She said, "People just walk by black cats like they don't even see them… and he's such a special cat!" This tugged on my heart strings a bit, and made me feel shallow for liking the Lynx point with the white eyeliner and electric blue eyes. But now that I've had him home for a few days, I know I made the right choice. He's wonderful!! The kids are thrilled, and even Ben is happy with him. 

About his name. He came with the name Rocker. Apparently not in the rock-on metal sense, but his medical records indicate he was injured by a rocking chair in his early kittenhood. For me, though, I just couldn't live with a cat named Rocker. I at first dubbed him Valentino, since he's a Latin lover and I got him on Valentine's Day. But when I told Isaac this he replied, "But he should have a boy's name, since he's a boy." Then I went with Poe. He's black as a raven and romantic, but with a sinister edge. Elias began calling him Po-po, which sounded pretty adorable.  But this meant nothing to Isaac, who hasn't read much Poe yet. Isaac wanted to name him Bagheera, after the black panther in the Jungle Book. After years of struggle naming Mr. Cat, I was willing to close the deal. Last night, when Isaac and Ben got back from New York, Isaac and I shook on it. Bagheera it is.  Then Isaac said that we should has as his FULL name, "Bagheera, King of the Cats." I think it's quite fitting.

Meanwhile, we're still getting him settled into the house (he started out in the upstairs bathroom at first for a couple days, now he's in a crate in the living room, getting to know Lena and Zane Grey and the kids). And suddenly we have herds of chipmunks running all over the place!! One jumped out at me yesterday morning just as I was embroiled in a prescription mess, trying to get Elias his medicine. (Elias has a double ear infection and a rattly chest, but seems to be recovering well.) Lena, snoozer in chief, woke up long enough to chase the chipmunk over hill and dale, but as far as I know it's still in here somewhere. 

I can only be grateful that soon, maybe even by the end of the week, we'll have new law enforcement on the case.  

UPDATE: this post was interrupted by screams, as the chipmunk just rounded the corner trying to come in here. I put the trap out in his path. Bagheera saw him and started throwing himself against the bars of his crate. Even Zane Grey seems on the alert. Breaking news!! More as it develops.  

Yesterday on the way home from school, Isaac pointed out to me that there was a Jacob's ladder. It was out of my line of sight and took me a few minutes to see it, while not crashing the minivan. But when I did see it, pouring down through a hole in the heavy clouds, I thought it was beautiful. Also, poignant. Jacob's ladders always remind me of Jacob, our first born baby who died seven years ago after 38 minutes of life ex utero.

I've told Isaac about Jacob already. In fact, I wanted to make sure that he heard about it from us, seeing as he has older cousins who know about it. A fear of mine was that through some weird conversational twists, one of his cousins would mention it to Isaac and it would be much weirder and disturbing to learn of it that way.  

So when I saw the Jacob's ladder yesterday, I said, "That's beautiful. Do you remember about the baby that we had before you were born, who didn't survive?"

Isaac: Yes.

Me: Well, Jacob's ladders always remind me of him because his name was Jacob.

Isaac: Why did he die?

Me: Well, he was too small to live when he came out of my body.

Isaac: You should've kept him inside you longer. Why did you make him come out?

Me: I tried not to! I tried everything. And a lot doctors tried too. No one could stop it from happening.

Isaac: So, you had one failure.

Me: [I did feel it was a failure at the time, and for a long time afterwards, so this was a particularly wounding word choice. But I defended the actions of my bicornuate uterus and abrupting placenta.] Well, it wasn't a FAILURE. It was more like a disease, or a broken arm.

Isaac: But WHY? Why did it have to happen like that?

Me: [I've asked the same question many times.] Well, do you know what a blood clot is? Like a scab? There was a huge one of those inside there with the baby. And it was very dangerous, because I was bleeding a lot inside there. That's called internal bleeding and it's a bad thing.

Isaac: Why?

Me: because you know your blood is supposed to go around your body and bring oxygen to your fingertips and things like that, and if it's all going someplace else…

Isaac: why didn't you just put him in an incubator? [Isaac himself was in an incubator.]

Me: they did have an incubator there, but it was no use. He couldn't breathe even with all the help in the world.

Isaac: you should've gone closer to it! You should've worked faster. You didn't get him there fast enough.

Me: There were so many doctors there, Isaac, you wouldn't believe it. There must have been twenty doctors there to help him and to help me, and still they could not save him. They saved me, which was good, but they couldn't save him.

Isaac: [finally done talking about this, thank god]: I think he's an angel up in heaven looking down on us.

Me: me, too. [sort of]

Isaac: I think he's like cupid!

Me: but you know the danger when you have a naked baby flying around up in the sky?

Isaac: what?

Me: He might pee on your head!… no diapers!

Isaac: [delighted by this idea] what if he shoots an arrow into your heart and then pees on your head!

Me: then you'd be like, "I'm in love– hey, someone peed on my head!"

Both: [giggling.]  

Thus a very difficult conversation ended on a light note, as we drove through the countryside with Jacob's ladders striking the earth all around us.

Here comes TaeKwonDo/Cello Mom. … Isaac just earned his blue tip belt (one below green) in TaeKwonDo last week, on the very same day he got his beautiful new cello! Young Yoyo Ma had his first lesson later that day. I worried that he would be exhausted and unable to focus, but no. He did wonderfully. He listened, he sat still, he asked questions. (He was especially intrigued to find out how they make cellos in the first place, to the extent that I've arranged to take him to a cello making place to see it in person!) And turns out his cello teacher also loves Godzilla movies (so much so that she said at one point she had planned a PhD dissertation topic– the history of Godzilla movies as compared with the Japanese economy) and so they got off to a great start.

All week we've been home a lot due to snow storms and sore throats in constant alternation. While house bound, we've had time for many a cello concert. One thing that's nice about the cello is that even a complete beginner can saw away at it, and it still sounds pretty nice. It's not shrill like a violin… speaking of violins.. Elias now wants one. We walked into a little children's string concert the other week and Elias marched right up to a violin and said, "Mommy, I play violin!" clear as you please. I know that he said it in the present tense just because "I would like to play" is beyond his level of English, but it sounded like a "Little Buddha" type statement. ("These are my glasses," says the little American boy, picking up the glasses of the late Dalai Lama.) It startled the teacher, who said, "How old is he?" I told her he's two, and she said, "Hm. How 'bout viola?" This is the same lady who when I got in touch with her looking for piano lessons for Isaac she said, "Oh, lots of kids play piano. How 'bout the cello?" 

In any case, later this afternoon I have to take the cello in for a minor repair (tonight is our second lesson), and I have to bring Elias, and I know for a fact that at the cello place they have the TINIEST violins in the whole world! They are like doll violins and almost unbearably adorable. I'll show one to Elias and see what he says.

Elias's quest to kill himself has not abated. Just last night I was in the kitchen with him and in some fraction of a second (I was standing right there), he opened a drawer, pulled out a blender wand thing (sort of a blade on a stick, when you look at it right), PLUGGED IT IN, and was fumbling with the on-button such that he could chop off all his fingers. Now, I was three feet away, and dove for it. But still. And was Monday when he was working on a project in the bathroom, ten feet from where I was in the kitchen. THe project was washing sea shells, and it was a project I fully condoned. Then there was the sounds of breaking glass. I rushed in and found that he had dropped a large rock into the round glass vase that had been holding the sea shells. He was kneeling on the counter amid bits of broken glass, while trying to fit his little hand into the jagged opening in the broken vase. 

I ask you!

This reminds me of how at thanksgiving in Minneapolis we were visiting my aunt and uncle and fully six adults, on the task, could not keep Elias out of trouble. Everyone was milling around in the kitchen, when I saw that Elias was taking all sorts of precious objects off a low glass shelf. I ran over and began taking them from him, but he was grabbing them as fast as I could get them from him and my hands were almost instantly getting full. "Help!" I cried, and several people came to my aid. All the delicate things were put up on a high glass shelf in the other room. But there was still some tidying up to do where Elias had been making the mess in the first place. So while several of us were putting things right in the kitchen there was a thirty-second period during which unattended Elias began to climb the tall glass shelf! HE wanted the things that had been taken from him. He was up a few rungs, clinging to the stereo with his fingernails, when my aunt discovered him. So we went to deal with that. Then to my astonishment, my uncle began dumping out a large bottle of coins on to the floor, for Elias to play with. Within about three seconds, Elias had spread the coins all over the kitchen floor in a single layer that was very slow and difficult to pick back up. Teams of us were working with a dustpan and a funnel… I asked my uncle what he was thinking… and he explained that he thought Elias would sit there putting them back in the bottle, which is what the granddaughters always do. They simply don't throw them all over the place! They don't walk in the pile and spread it all around. I said, "I thought you had this place pre-toddlered, due to all the grandchildren…" and they said, "We don't have THAT KIND of grandchildren!" (In print it looks like that could be a mean statement, but they said it very warmly and we all laughed.)

That is, the girls! The girls apparently don't run everyone ragged in this particular constant, determined, dangerous, stressful manner. I think Elias did about ten more such things before the night was out, and everyone was exhausted. (Isaac for his part mostly stayed out of trouble, except for having a horrible tantrum! And throwing a box of oil pastels up in the air such that it actually hit the ceiling!) 

Now.. … why am I tired all the time? And why can't i ever, ever get the laundry caught up? Oh, yeah. I remember.  

More words of Elias:

Dy-lo-lo: dinosaur

Mini-mina: banana

Hall of fame statement, as Elias bids adieu to the contents of a flushing toilet: "Bye-bye poop! See you soon! Have fun!"  

Here are some photos of the monsters that attacked my baby. Sure, maybe it was self-defense. But still. Imagine a small child, armed only with a mop, trying to do battle with these:

One of the chunks missing here landed on his nose: 

 We call this one "Gigantor."

Hello, can you say "ice dam"? Yes, we are losing a lot of heat through our roof and have the bills and bokadoos to prove it. However, we can't deal with this insulation problem until… who knows! 

In the meantime, it's gonna be fun when this all starts to melt.  

Anyone remember "the Shuttered Room"? This terrifying 1960s horror movie in which the young bride finally figures out what is going on in the locked, shuttered room upstairs? I saw it, unfortunately, when I was just a girl and it scared me to death. What I remember was that in the shuttered room (spoiler alert) there's a crazy old chained up lady dressed in rags with long matted hair!

Now I have a similar situation in my own life: Zane Gray.

To thank me for taking her in and feeding her and giving her warmth and lots of petting and a nice bath and delicious cream and chicken livers and a new cat door to the basement and veterinary care and a new cat toy, she PEED on Elias's bed. Three times! Then she peed in my closet for good measure.

So now she's locked up again in the basement. She's warm and has food a litter box down there. I can't let her into normal society because I think that part of her brain got digested during her starvation-based sojourn in the woods. What this means is that I now have a crazy lady in the basement, with disheveled fur and no tail, who I have to feed and tend to, yet who has no usefulness to me in terms of normal cat things like being pretty and being petted. And the thing I keep thinking is, "Is she really only seven? That means she could live another 13 years!"

I'm especially miffed because I was all primed up to get one or two nice NORMAL cats who could come up into the house and live productive decent lives catching mice, being petted, being lap cats, and entertaining the children. But the presence of Miss Crazy makes this all impossible.

It's true that when I go down and visit her, I'll give her a little petting time, and she purrs, and she's, well, SORT OF cute, if you look at her right, and I do feel bad for her. She only weighs four pounds and is a furry skeleton and this is a pathetic sight. When she first got home, before the peeing incidents, she sat on my lap for a least a half hour straight, purring loudly and even, bizarrely SMILING. I was touched by that, but when I found all the peed-on bedding I wanted to throw her back out into the snow.

Anyone want a fun and heart-warming charity project?

Ironically soon after I posted yesterday's bokadoo entry, Isaac was attacked by a large one and for a short time I thought he might need medical attention. It was largely my fault. One the way home from school, Isaac revealed two facts: he got in trouble for acting out at lunch time, and apparently due to scheduling issues he had no playing time (no outside nor gym) all day. It was quite a nice afternoon and so I lobbied for putting on our gear and playing in the snow, but Isaac would have none of it. However, he's been quite interested in knocking down our many gutter icicles, which are in a double row like sharks teeth, using inappropriate tools such as a shovel or an ax.

However as I was carrying things in from the car I realized (as I was walking past the icicles) that our new string mop would make a fairly harmless weapon against icicles, and perhaps this was a project that would allow Isaac to get some of his, well, ENERGY out before settling into the house. Surely he couldn't break a window or kill anyone with a nice soft string mop, right? So I handed him the mop and said, "Wanna smash some icicles?"

Oh hell YEAH!

Not that he says hell, but that was in effect his response.

So he set to the project with great gusto and smashed a whole row of them off one side of the house. But then he remembered other low-hanging fruit out by the back door and rushed through the house and out back to get those too. It all happened a little too quickly for me to see the obvious problems with the plan… I was still collecting Elias… like the icicles over there were not the cute tinkling kind, but the thick, woody, tree-branch like ones, and that there was not a great place to stand while hitting them.

Fast Forward 20 seconds and Isaac had been cracked across the bridge of his nose by a huge, sturdy chunk of ice!  It immediately began swelling up, and there was a small cut there too, and Isaac was air-raid-siren screaming. Oh… crap…

So I got the Thomas-themed boo-boo-buddy (a nice silky train containing an ice pack) and tried to examine the damage. Was it actually broken? It was hard to tell right off how serious it was. I called Ben and left a worried message, and began to fumble around for the number to the nurse on call. Ben himself broke his nose when he was four, and part of what was on my mind was that his nose has been screwed up ever since and still to this day creates a nuisance for him. So I was thinking that if it was broken we should get it reset, or something, so as to not have the same outcome.

But after real-sobbing for a good 20 minutes, Isaac started to shift into fake-sobbing. An hour later he was climbing me and running laps per usual. The nurse, who didn't call back for hours, said that they wouldn't want to see him for a week anyway, so that the swelling could come down enough to assess the internal damage if any. But his behavior leads me to think he's fine.

He looks pretty tough though. It's still a little swollen today. On the way to school this morning, he said that he would come in and say, "I have something to share for show and tell: my nose!"

Yesterday when we were back home after Tae Kwon Do, and getting from the car to the house, Elias began yelling, "Bokadoo! Bokadoo!" From context clues, it seemed that he wanted an icicle, which are quite abundant lately. I plucked him a fine specimen and handed it to him. "Bokadoo," he said, admiring it. A little while later we had to go inside. He set his icicle down and said, "Bye-bye, Bokadoo. See you later!" Later on last evening I asked him, "Elias, what was your word for icicle again? Bokaboo?" He said, "No. Bokadoo." He has strong views on such things. And so yet another useful word is created in the language of Elias. Here are some others:

Aaa-gn: still means Isaac; sounds funny when Elias puts in an otherwise normal sentence, like "Are you okay, Aaa-gn?"  And now he's got us all doing it. It's an odd nickname, but I think it has legs.

Bok: milk

Ziggy-zub: lady bug

Dirth: nurse

Rain: train

Hamburger: helicopter

Apple juice: octopus

Ruck: truck or trunk

epident: elephant

He says a lot of clearly understandable sentences, too, like, "I colored blue marker!" and "I have a snack please?" He has an adorable habit of when someone gives him something, he says cheerfully, "Welcome!" It's just the old confusion of "you say thank you and I say you're welcome," but it smacks of "You're welcome for the honor of serving me."

It occurs to me that I created a similar list when Isaac was just about this age. I re-read it this morning and it delighted me so. It's so hard to REMEMBER any of that. I think I was in a sleep-deprived haze for years there. Come to think of it… still AM. Anyway, I'm very glad I have my old blog entries to remind me that Isaac wasn't always the incredibly competent, verbally skilled, often fiercely challenging young man he is today. If you want to read it, you can find it here:

http://dev.freeverse.com/blogs/catherine/archives/2004_07.html 

I include the whole link spelled out because it's acting funny and I figure if you can't get it to link you can at least key it in. Feel free to read around of the early escapades of Isaac, too. They're pretty funny to look at now.  

welcome 44!!

I have spent the morning doing all my normal stuff, and then appending the words "on this historic day" to everything.

I got my kids dressed and fed on this historic day. I cleaned snow off the car on this historic day. I took them to school. I went to the post office. The bank. The grocery store. I unpacked groceries on this historic day! And I listened to the radio on this historic day. I don't have a tv and was in the car during The Moment. Still, even audio only it was so exciting and so wonderful.

I explained to Isaac en route to school this morning– "right now our president is George W. Bush, the 43rd president. When I pick up from Tae Kwon Do, our president will be Barack Obama, our 44th." Isaac thought this was pretty exciting stuff and wanted to dish about how bad Bush was. I did too, but almost nothing that Bush did is something I can possibly repeat to a six-year-old. I won't go through the list, because we've all been over that. But think of how you can explain "dancing a jig on the constitution" or "allowing torture" or "putting people in jail without a trial" or "lying to the American people"… you name it. I was coming up empty, but managed a short description of tax inequalities that seemed to resonate.

It makes me realize how utterly mundane my life is on this historic day. There's a certain Zen beauty to it: "How wonderous! How Mysterious! I carry wood; I draw water." But how can I in any way help our new president with his staggering tasks? I did put in some energy saving lightbulbs… I have a lot of clothes to give to the Goodwill, to say nothing of the old kitchen cabinets… but is that really enough??

I'm kidding.

If it's going to be a new era of responsibility and service I will have to think of something grander. For the moment, though, seeing as this takes up literally all of my time, I will have to settle for helping to raise some fine young men, with ethics and sensitivity, who will use their powers for good.

It looks like Isaac is going to add to his arsenal of amazing skills: the cello. It's in the formative stages, but I've discovered a wonderful children's ensemble nearby, after my attempt to get him back into Suzuki piano proved to be horrendously complicated. But this cello deal is just down the street in the next hamlet over. (Ghent, pronounced Jent by these quirky locals… I mean, US.) I've had some delightful conversations with the lady who runs it, and we have a date next week for Isaac to see an actual children's concert. When I mentioned this possibility to him, he began jumping up and down chanting, "I want to do it! I want to do it!" for several straight minutes, in a fashion that would tire any aerobics instructor.

So, we'll see how it pans out.

We're just coming off an impromptu four-day weekend, because school was closed on Friday due to weather. It was 13 below — air temp– on Friday morning! Pretty brisk! And those wimps closed school, so I had the boys all day. Luckily our fitness center was open for business, and so I could turn them loose there to run amok for a while. We had a couple dinner parties, including one in which our wonderful guests brought octopus! Can you imagine Isaac's delight?? He got to thaw, play with, examine, and then eat real octopuses! And I'll tell you what, they were yummy!

And now, off to clean out the fridge and fold laundry on this historic day!