Thomisms

"Wrong answer, punk." Optimus Prime to Star Scream (via Thomas).

Me: "That was very clever."
Thomas: "Thank you. I thinked it in my head."

Me: "Thomas, I have to do laundry today. Do you want to help?"
Thomas: "No, Mommy. I've got a lot of things to take care of this morning. My toys...that sort of thing."

Puddle Jumping Goes Awry

For those of you suffering around the country (and world, I suppose) from unnatural heat waves, this has really been the summer to be on the east coast of the U.S. Most of our summer temps have been in the 70-90 F range, with only middling humidity. In fact, for the last several days it has been rainy and chilly outside. Today we topped out at a smoking 67 degrees. Right now the temp is about 62. We've gotten increasingly tired of being stuck in the house, so earlier this afternoon, I outfitted Thomas in his rain gear which, I am embarrassed to admit, consists only of waterproof boots and a jacket with a vinyl-like exterior that keeps the wearer dry for roughly ten minutes of outdoor rain action. We really ought to get him some actual raingear, but I only remember that when it's, you know, actually raining.

Of course, Thomas, being Thomas, doesn't do anything halfway, so when I told him he could go outside and "jump in puddles" he interpreted puddle as "any available body of water" and "jump" as a verb covering WWF moves.

I take some comfort in the fact that even if he had been outfitted in actual waterproof items, he still would have ended up soaked. Don't feel bad for him--he loves the cold (he's strangely insensitive to pain, too. Should I be worried?) and he still got to have a nice warm bath afterwards.

Here's the evidence:

"But you need a little Bubby"

Thomas and I have been singing the "Frowny face" song today, which goes:

No one likes a frowny face
Change it for a smile
Make the world a better place
By smiling all the while

One way Nate and amuse ourselves and (mildly) distress our children (well, only Thomas since Seth is oblivious to lyrical correctness), is to change out various words or lines in songs such as this with one or both of their names. After singing the song through the right way a couple of times, I teasingly sang to him,

No one wants a Thomas face
Change it for a Seth...

At which point, he stopped singing along, blinked, and then said, "But you need a little Bubby." (Bubby has been Thomas's nickname since he was about six months old)

I said with a smile, "Oh yeah? Why do I need a little Bubby?"

"To make things for you."

"Like what?"

"A.....peanut butter and mud cake."

"Ewww. That doesn't sound so good."

"But Mommy, it's your birthday. You don't have to eat it, you just have to look at it. All the time."

Thomas and I can have conversations like this all day. Peanut butter inevitably factors in, just as unicorns did for me when I was his age until, oh, about 15.

Ok, 21.

Ok, last year, but that was, really, the end of it. Really.

Anybody seeing Stardust this weekend?

Rules of Engagement

Witness the dating ritual of the suburban mother. There is the list of hopeful potentials. The first, awkward, giddy phonecall. The well-rehearsed invitation. Relief at acceptance or forced flippancy in the face of the polite decline--you wonder if their excuse is valid or they don't really feel the same way about you that you do about them. The first group date. Later one of the polite declines calls you back, asks you out this time. You wonder, is this one for real? Is this burgeoning relationship going to grow into something that will stand the test of time?

I'm actually talking about something far more trepidatious than just romance, though it gets a lot less ink in women's media: the making of friends among married women with children, especially those of us who have opted out of immediate careers in order to be our kids' primary caregivers. When I worked, most of my friends came from my job. If your personalities are at all compatible, it's a lot easier to become friends with someone you're forced to be around day in and day out. There are no awkward introductions, no wondering when it's an appropriate time to duck out of a get together. Plus, you always have something to talk about: work. Many years now of moving around and restarting the new friend dance has made me a veteran. I don't know that that means I'm terribly good at it, but at least I know the moves. Church seems to be the easiest way to ingratiate yourself with potential friends. Here are three hours a week where you get a mini-work environment--a chance to chat with people who just might share some common interests and with whom you're expected to socialize. Once you've appeared on the scene and scoped out potential friends, the best thing you can do is casually remark how you ought to get the kids together to play. This is, of course, a front, but it's well-established and the underlying meaning doesn't get lost. If you're pretty gutsy, you can go ahead and try to acquire their phone number or email address on the spot. If you are the newbie and they already belong to a group of friends, you can hope that they will make the first move and invite you along to their next gathering. If that works, you should host the next event to more firmly entrench yourself in their posse.

This is the stage I've reached with a group of women from my ward. I had one false start where a woman gave me a general invite to her playgroup, then told me she would call or email the next time they met and I never heard from her again. Further attempts to chat her up or find a time to get together have pretty much failed. I'd like to think this isn't because she suddenly decided I wasn't her type, but just because sometimes these things fall through. You're too established in your life to make the outreach past the first Christian fellowship moment. The window closes for making the connection permanent and you're left with awkward church run-ins--the newbie's face going from eager and friendly to guarded and polite.

I am that newbie. Today I hosted a little pool party for Thomas's new friends--and by extension, maybe mine. I had gotten pretty comfortable in New York with my group of friends. Thomas had a regular gang of three to five year-olds (including his best pal, the affable and ineffable Desmond P. Jones) that he loved to run around with and their mothers were my really close friends. We hung out several times a week. I had friends to confide in and friends to talk books and movies with and friends who were just good humor company. Now that I've moved, I find myself relying more on distant friends, email and phone friends, to stay connected. But I started the suburban "dating" dance here, too. Virtual friends will do for only so long. Eventually you need someone of flesh and blood or you start to feel unreal.

Sometimes I wish I still worked a 9 to 5 job so I could get all my socialization in automatically and not have to "work the scene". Making and keeping a friend you have to actively engage over and over again in order to stay connected takes so much more effort.

At least, though, if things don't work out, you don't have to performance review that person later.

Gingerism: It's Real

Nate and I have talked about the possibility of living abroad at some point, usually focusing on the British Isles (not having to learn another language being key here. We're kinda lazy that way). Recently, though, Nate mentioned that we might have to dye Sethie's hair in that case, due to the rampant "gingerism" in Britain. At first, I laughed, thinking the idea of red-haired people being harrassed was simply so ludicrous, it couldn't possibly be true. Frankly, I'd never even heard of such a thing--not even the term "ginger".

Apparently, it is true and seems to stem from England's long-standing bias against the Irish and the Scottish (in Scotland, about 13% of the population is red-haired; in Ireland, about 10%; in the U.S., the figure is about 2%). Of course, once I heard about ginger bias, I started noticing it everywhere in the British cinema we frequently watch. Just tonight, we watched the movie Hot Fuzz (both hilarious and disturbingly gory, just like its predecessor Shaun of the Dead) and during the climactic fight scene, the villain grabbed a red-haired boy and threatened to shoot the "ginger-nut". Earlier this week, I rented School of Seduction, another British comedy. Again in the climactic scene, one of the heroines this time accused another character of being a "four-eyed geek" and a hideous "ginger whinger" who was bullied in school.

Both Nate and I have red-haired nieces and nephews and I had always kind of hoped I might have a red-haired baby at some point. Thomas was born with almost black hair that's lightened now to a mid-brown, about the same color as Nate's (though Nate was a toehead as a baby). But Sethie was born with strawberry blond hair that has both deepened and brightened into a shiny copper. His red hair has always solicited gushing comments from the people around us. How interesting that here in the U.S. red hair is something to be admired and desired, while our nearest neighbor in the western world treats redheads as trash. I wish I had something pithy to say about it, but frankly, it's gotten so much under my skin, I can't think what I could possibly say.

I guess if we do go to Great Britain, we'll have to stick to the "inferior" isles--Scotland and Ireland. No problem here. I've always liked my men in kilts.

Science and bath time collide!

Normally I would be loathe to embarrass my children with a bathtub pic or video posted to the web, but this one is pretty cute and I think Nate did some excellent camera work in avoiding accidental exposure of anything, uh, important. Note that both Nate and I are in full baby-talk mode which no parent can help, no matter how cynical.

Captain Wonder Crawl

About a week ago, Sethie started crawling in earnest. This week, he also learned how to sit up (mostly). This makes him my second child who has crawled before he sat up, though Thomas had a much bigger gap between the two: he crawled at seven months and didn't sit up until he was nine months. In Thomas's case, it had to do with his muscle tone--let's just say he's a natural gymnast. He has great muscle strength, but low muscle tone, i.e. he's very very flexible. Because of it, he needed both speech and occupational therapy until he was about three years-old. Now people are amazed when I mention Thomas's speech therapy considering the fact that he talks about as much as he moves, which is to say, all the time.

When I was pregnant with Sethie, I wondered what it would be like to have a child that hit all his milestones on time, like most of the other babies we knew when Thomas was little. I was never embarrassed to have Thomas in therapy; he clearly needed and benefited from it. Still, it was a stress. You don't like your children to suffer for anything. Listening to him struggle day in and day out to make sounds and form words broke my heart. Of course, every little triumph was a cause for celebration. And he is so very naturally happy in attitude, his struggles didn't seem to affect him as much as they did me. Still, I thought, how much better would it be to have a baby who didn't have to struggle?

I recall telling a friend who was worried about her baby being born with birth defects something to the effect of, "Even if they're born fine, they're still going to have problems. You don't get to choose their problems. They might not have any real problems until they're older and it might be problems with school, or friends, or something we can't even fathom now. You just have to help them with whatever it is. That's what being a parent means." I never could have predicted that I would have a baby two months early, which means of course that his milestone schedule is completely off. He is ten months today, so he's off the sitting up by about four months and the crawling by two or three, depending on who you ask. Does it matter? I look at Thomas whose muscle tone issues might actually benefit him now as he starts into sports requiring flexibility. Sometimes problems become strengths.

And sometimes your children are Captain Wonder Crawl and other times, TV Watching Zombie.