wild*life

Yesterday my little baby turned two!  And boy would you know it.  But that’s a post for another day.

Tonight I thought I’d spend a little time reflecting on what Nate’s all about at the ripe old age of two:

Nathaniel is crazy good at throwing.  Better even than someone who happens to be twice his age.  He’s always climbing and can already get up onto our bed by himself.  He runs like gangbusters but usually loses control.  There’ve been a handful of headlong dives straight into the cupboards.

Nate loves books.  And doing anything his brother does.  He could eat pretend food all day.  He likes crashing cars and knocking down blocks and wrestling.  He does a killer rendition of a puppy… never breaks character.  He wakes up every morning if he hears me, turns on his light, opens his door from his crib, and then waits quietly.  He’s developing a new addiction to his baybit (blanket).  His old addiction to his nah-nah (pacifier) has not waned.

Today at swimming I dunked him under at least 5 times.  He cried and high-fived me.  Then I decided it was a fine line between polywog water training and toddler waterboarding.  He doesn’t yet love swimming but has almost conquered his fear of dogs.  And if you heard his baaa, you’d think an actual sheep was in the room.

He eats smoked salmon and prawns, broccoli and guacamole.  He likes sweet and spicy pecans, salsa and ketchup.  The grass is always greener: if he sees something better he immediately spits out what he’s already chewing.  We have to keep all our condiments hidden, otherwise he’ll spend all of dinner sprinkling cheese, grinding pepper, and pouring sauce.  He’s a fan of babycinos.  And roaring like a lilon… sound familiar?

Nate LOVES music.  He’s an unbelievable dancer.  Lots of arms.  He gets bright red cheeks like his brother and has perfect hair.  Angelic highlights.

His words are particularly action oriented: do!, dump, eat, flush, jump, see see!  Plus he’s had an actual sentence for months now, I just didn’t know it.  “Ideeyit!” was in fact “I did it!”

And for posterity, a list of his latest vocab: agua, all done, alloh (hello), ange (orange), apple, baba, baby, bar, baybit (blanket), bird, book, boy, buhbye, choo choo train, dada, dark, duck, doggie, door, evevent (elephant), evy (heavy), eewee (owie), eyes, ghost, at (hat), hi, high, horse, ot (hot), hug, ice, ice cream, jacket, JJ, lilon (lion), light, mama, man, me, meow (cat), monkey, moo (cow), more, muk (milk), nana (banana), nah nah (nigh-nigh), no (no), no (snow), no (nose), ah oink (pig), onc (off), on, outside, pants, peese (please), pillow, poon (spoon), ribbit (frog), sauce, sheesh (cheese), shish (this), shashoo (thank you), shoe, sit, sorry, snuggle, teesh (teeth), tiss (kiss), tees (keys), treat, up, & zip.

Happy Birthday my little lilon.

Today I read an interesting series of articles in The Journal (That’s what people call it, right?  Makes me sound more like a CFO.  Way better than, ‘Last night when I was watching Downton Abbey’… not quite as impressive.)

So I read this article about innovation and entrepreneurs and this professor says, “When kids come home, instead of asking them, ‘What did you learn today?’  ask them, ‘What questions did you ask today?’ or ‘What questions do you still have to ask today?'”  He explains that asking provocative questions, observing, experimenting, and networking are critical skills for developing creativity and leadership.  Sounds good, right?  I think I’ll try it.

So tonight over prawn tacos— eating is an area where we’ve fostered risk taking and experimentation and have had a pretty good success rate with the two bottomless pits— I decide to try my new and improved question.

“Jakey, what questions did you ask at school today?”

And he says for the first time, “I don’t know the foggiest idea.”

Looks like I’m going to have to get more creative.

I can’t get anything past Jakey anymore.  Every word is under the microscope.  I feel on edge as we listen to the radio, or that’s he’s listening to what we’re watching on TV from the other side of the house.  The world is just teaming with fresh, inappropriate vocabulary.

Honestly, if I throw an unusual word into the conversation, I should be prepared to answer, “What is _______? (insert normal word you’ve never thought about much less described).”  I’ve found myself grasping for accuracy, simplicity, or at least some resemblance to what Merriam-Webster might say.  What exactly is the best way to explain mercy, translucence, morals and force fields?  I got in way over my head the other day when I tried to describe how a picture could go from Miss Dulce’s phone to mine.

This evening the boys are watching their two show allotment of cartoons and I hear, “Mom, what’s a fan?”  (Oh good, this one’s easy…)

“A fan is when you like something a lot.  You know, you’re a fan of swimming because you like it a lot.”

“Yeah, and like how I’m a fan of chocolate.”

True dat.

Ben & Jakey’s in June

So this week I’m in LA for work and of course the conversation invariably turns to celebrity sightings and all manner of brief brushes with fame.  It turns out one of my colleagues has an impressive collection of relatively well-known friends, including the author of a series of children’s books about a Siamese cat that speaks Spanglish and thinks he’s a chihuahua.

Over dinner last night, as we’re swapping stories and I learn that I’m just two degrees removed from an accomplished children’s author, I was reminded of a conversation I had late last week.

Jacob put the full court press on me about needing an animal.  He loves animals.  And animal rescue.  Especially baby animal rescue.  (The secret to developing a hit cartoon by the way is to combine transportation with baby animal rescue— you know, like trains that save zoo animals, or cars that are animals that rescue other car animals.  Expect a blog on this topic in the near future).  Back to my story:  This child used to refer to all snails as “his friends.”  Last summer he totally lost it when Uncle Geoff threw one of his minnow “friends” into the pond and it was immediately swallowed up by a bigger fish.  And he has invented an entire world of puppies and horses and all manner of pets at “his work.”  It seems Scruffy and granddad’s menagerie just aren’t enough.

There has also been a distinct change in his little Nate Dog of late.  It seems his puppy is not as obedient as he once was.  Quick detour: Over the holidays we went to the Ahwahnee hotel in Yosemite for lunch.  Afterward, as we were getting up from the table, James looked at Nate, outstretched his arms and said, “Uppy?”  (Now I don’t know why he said this because it’s not really in our vocab.)  The best thing?  Nate instantly drops onto all fours and pants… like a puppy.

But let’s get serious.  I need another thing to take care of like I need a hole in the head.

So we’re in the living room and Jake is doing his best to sell me on this pet idea.  I decide to deflect him with some of my weaker arguments… with the hope that I’ll be able to save my big guns until he’s at least 8 or 12 or whenever it becomes cruel and unusual to separate a boy from his dog.

“Mama, why can’t we have a dog?”

“Well JJ, we just don’t really have room for a dog.  They need space to run around.”

“What about a leetle chee-wah-wah?  They don’t need space.”

Damn Skippyjon Jones.

I distinctly remember my first swim lessons.  My teacher at La Madrona had a huge straw hat and she made me lay on my back a lot and I was completely freaked out.  All I remember is looking up at a lot of sky and straw hat.  I don’t think I did any swimming.  A year or two later a little boy taught me how to swim in less than 2 minutes at Harvey West Park.  No exaggeration.

So this morning we went to our very first swim lessons at the Almaden Valley Aquatic Club.  And it was SO fun.

Recently a friend of mine reminded me that I used to talk about Jakey and his triple bathing ritual.  He literally took a shower with me, a shower with James and a bath every night.  He would have climbed into the dishwater if we’d have let him.  He’s a Pisces.

So I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised that our little fish loved it.  I could see him listening to his teacher from across the pool, grinning from ear to ear.  The look of happiness on his face was unbelievable.  His teacher, Justin, even took the time to talk to us afterward to say how unusual it was that he put his face in the water and tried holding his breath, which he said can sometimes take weeks.  (Justin clearly doesn’t know about the swimming lessons JJ’s puppies have been giving him.)

Nate was less eager, despite his astrological designation.  There were some tears in the beginning, and at the end when the water splashed in his eyes.  But there were also some giggles and smiles.  He’s a natural at climbing out of the pool.  I have a feeling we’ll have an even better time next week.

And fortunately, not a single straw hat.

At school the teachers have coined him “Nate the Great.”  It’s pretty cute.

This past fall, I was visiting Jacob’s classroom and was lucky enough to cross paths with Helen.  Helen is the most cherubic, rosy cheeked little girl.  She has two older brothers and one time I recognized her pulling her own backpack through DFW. She was 18 months old.  Helen and Jacob are like two peas in a pod.  And according to Miss Dulce, they both love buttered peas.  Last January when the gas leak shut down school for two weeks, Jakey spent some time at Helen’s house.  For a week or two after, he would sob at nap time that he wanted to sleep in Helen’s brother’s bed.

Anyway, several months back Helen points to Nate and says, “That’s Nakesy!”

I thought maybe I just imagined it, except then a couple of weeks ago another one of his classmates, Olivia, made a reference to Baby Nake.

I’ve been asking Nate what his name is and for several weeks he has said, “Nnnnnnet.”  But then this weekend I asked him two or three times and now he says, “Nnnnnnek.”  Hard k.

This past week I finally got my act together and signed-up the entire family for swim lessons.  I was talking to a colleague at work and she asked me, “Why do you all need to go?”  I had a fun time explaining to her that there was no way I would be taking two little kids to a pool and wriggling them both in and out of wet bathing suits and slicked up with sunscreen like little buttered piglets.  By myself.  Plus the class for Nate is a parent/tot class.

Jacob’s “puppies” have already taught him how to hold his breath and “swim” in the bathtub.  We are clearly overdue for these lessons.

So I was telling Jakey that we’ll be going on Saturdays and he began peppering me excitedly with questions.  Will it be cold?  Will they have a diving board?  Will I watch him?  Then he started telling me about all of the twirls and somersaults he is already able to do underwater.  There were a lot of hand gestures and floor reenactments.  Then he tells me, “And Mom, Mom.  I tiptoe across the water.”

“Are you telling me you walk on water?”

“No, no.  I tiptoe.  TIPtoe.”

I just got back from six (adjective omitted) days in Las Vegas.  Business.  At least four of those I never saw daylight.

And on Thursday we were given the generous gift of a free day.  As I sat in St. Mark’s Square, sipping my cappuccino made at a gelato stand where they had never heard of an affogato, I sat on a bench and stared up at the infamous clock tower.  And at that moment it came to me like a message from above:

Mentally, logistically, financially… this is the difference between 2 kids and 3.

St. Mark’s Square

 “St. Mark’s Square”

Somehow I was lucky enough to marry a man who studied color theory and design and fonts and typography.  He can argue value and saturation and hue with the best of them.  Honestly, it’s invaluable having a life partner who actually knows the difference between greenish blue and bluish green.  You might be surprised how often we’re faced with these types of discerning situations.

So, tonight I called home and James told me that on their way to school this morning, the boys had the unexpected and magical experience of seeing a rainbow.  Apparently, as they rounded the corner there it was, right over the 7-Eleven.  Clear as day.

James exclaimed, “Wow…  How lucky are we?  Look at that perfect rainbow, you can see all the colors!”

And Jakey replied, “Well, not all the colors Daddy.  I don’t see in-dee-go.”

A little chip off the ol’ block.

Last night I spent some time trying to get the majority of my pictures off my computer and uploaded to the Internet.  It’s my personal disaster recovery plan.  In any case, I came across a couple of photos I’d forgotten about… and I started to notice a theme.

First, there was the time when Nate was 6 months old and I picked him up from school in someone’s rainbow heart pajamas.

Then there were last year’s Christmas pajamas from Aunt Janelle.  The ones with the scalloped edge and the girlie reindeer with eyelashes.

This past November, he came home wearing a sweatshirt over a sweatshirt.  It didn’t seem that cold.  And when we took off sweatshirt #1, we realized it was because they were trying to conceal sweatshirt #2.

And tonight I come home and what’s he have on?  A “Room 3” loner shirt with “Ice Cream Queen” across the front.

I’d say, he wears it all with ignorance.  I mean confidence.