Froggy: The rabble rouser.

Poor E has been MIA for a while due to work. P rarely vocalizes this absence, his sudden neediness says it all. Instead of having 10 minute blips of independent play every couple of hours he is glued to me, demanding a constant playmate. He asks when it will be Saturday. Lots of play food gets set aside for Papa, stories of Papa polar bears get pulled off of the bookshelf. Much to Phoenix's excitement, E was home this weekend and that meant it was due time for Froggy.

Froggy is a soft puppet Grandpapa gave P for his first birthday. E has this special voice for Froggy - one I cannot duplicate - that P adores. He often asks me to do Froggy when E's been working a lot and then sighs, saying "That not how Froggy sounds. That not how Papa doodit." Truth be told, even if I could do the voice, I still couldn't "Do Froggy." Froggy is like E's evil alter-ego. He steals P's toys and runs off with them only to be tackled and bitten by an angry P. He plays guessing games, always guessing incorrectly, causing complete wrath to rush from P. He basically spends his entire existence baiting and wrestling (or being abused by) Phoenix. I've been torn by these dynamics for a while - I was more the "feed the baby" kind of kid than "hang the baby like a pinata" kind of kid. But he loves rough play. And it gives him someone to rail on without anxiety, his aggression can run wild, unhampered by "Please, I take a turn?" But the real reason I've never said anything is, for whatever twisted reason, P loves it. Usually.

Yesterday, still getting over the stomach flu, P was super sensitive. Froggy was being his usual annoying self, taking P's abuse and begging for more when P had had enough. First, Phoenix requsted something sharp, preferably the carpet knife I had been working with, to use on Froggy. Shortly after being placated with the slightly safer screwdriver, he stormed out of the bedroom and announced "I Don't Like Froggy Anymore!" He usually gets mad enough at Froggy to ask me for help, but will be giggling 2 minutes later. This time he continued to storm and stomp and even yelled at E and I over various needs. "Give me Water!" "Where's my car!!!" This was veeeery out of character. While he has Constant demands, they are generally phrased in graciously angelic terms. "Mama, please I have more water?" "Mama, please help me find my yellow truck." Or even just a neutral "Where's my squishy T-rex?" or "Waaaaater." He's been sick, we gave him his space, his water, his car. Gentle attention didn't calm him. Fulfilling his needs didn't soothe him. He was, quite frankly, just out of whack. As he stormed into the playroom an hour later I told E it might be because of Froggy. Could Froggy maybe be just a little nicer? Set a little better example? Could he perhaps be less, um, devious? So Froggy apologized to P, saying he wanted to be best friends. P instantly mellowed and invited Froggy to dinner. And while he's still a bit sensitive even today, he spent the remainder of his evening talking to the bubbles in his bath and telling them how much he loved them :)

And just a note about the video. My mom mentioned she couldn't tell if P was upset at the end or not. This isn't a video from the night he was volatile - here he was begging for Froggy to smack him and laughing afterward :) It just cuts off with a weird P face - Promise!

The climber

Phoenix is a monkey. He climbs when he has extra energy. When he's curious. When he's nervous (until recently, whenever a guest came to visit he would immediately start scaling our bodies, often coming to rest on our heads). His little legs just can't help but to go vertical. He also likes free-fall. Flinging himself from great heights tops his list. Letting a chair he's sitting in tip over works too. Fighting these urges is futile and he's too short for roller coasters, so we try to find games that revolve around him going high and low but not going to the emergency room. This is his new favorite...

Monsters and Minotaurs

Capitalistic implications aside, "The Foutainhead" is so brilliant it made me shiver. To have the integrity and lack of baggage that defined the hero, that so often defines kids. But I consistently found myself wondering how wee ones could grow into adulthood so unscathed, especially with our current cultural parenting paradigm. Roark often reminded me of P, but nowhere more so than in his line "I'm only myself."

Ask P what he wants to be when he grows up and he'll give you a look of confusion and say "Phoenix!" And while some of his friends really enjoy being roaring lions or jumping frogs, P is only P, roaring or jumping. Meanwhile, I am never me. The small, original cast of his toddlerhood has been replaced with a never ending line of impersonations starring friends/family or characters from books and songs. His demands for alternate playmates start at breakfast and ends at bedtime. He misses me occasionally and says "I want Mama now." Usually just to ask me a question, verify some information a character has given him or to ask to nurse. Then its "be Tigger now. No, be Puff mama. Now be Jackie Paper." Yet after all of this, comments like "this way little bunny" aimed at my bouncing son, are met with a wry grin and a "nohhh, silly, I'm Phoenix!"

So when he decided he wanted to be a minotaur the other day I was fairly surprised. He asked me to make him some horns, hooves and scary eyes. Knowing his level of patience with excessive creativity I grabbed what was closest at hand and was shocked when he remained a minotaur for more than 2 minutes. He'd chase me and then magically turn back into Phoenix by lowering his glasses, reassuring me that he wouldn't really eat me :) Then he dressed his "baby brother," aka monster doll, as a minotaur and took the above picture. The plot then changed slightly. Where I was supposed to be scared of Phoenix the minotaur, I was now to menacingly move the Monster minotaur providing P a chance to save us with his toy pretzel stick. I've never seen a pretzel stick wielded with such fury and such natural stabbing motions. It was the first kill game we've ever played and I tried to roll with it, attempting to kill my pacifist tendencies and pretend die with gusto. Looks like "Killing monsters - why children need fantasy, super heroes and make-believe violence" by Gerard Jones will have to be my next book...

Worms!

We have missed our worms. Once you're used to composting all of your food scraps it just feels weird to throw them in the garbage. Our worms all found happy homes during our last move and we've been waiting to house more until P seemed ready to participate. Or at least not be an obstacle :) We think he's ready, so we put together worm bins last weekend and P is sooo excited for our worms to arrive. I'm curious to see if he'll be tentative or torturous with the little guys..

Big Boy

While my computer was having its innards replaced P hit some new notes.

First, he walked to the zoo. This is big for P. My mom loves to tease me about our attachment parenting - as I cook with P on my back - by saying, "Well, it worked. He's attached!" And its true - he Loves to be carried. He will accept stints in the stroller, but would much prefer to be hanging off of our bodies. But as he's passed 30 some pounds this wimpy mama has been hoping for some independent walking. So on an unusually warm and beautiful day we went hiking in the woods across the street. As we wandered more deeply into the park, lifting leaves to see slugs, piling rocks and jumping stumps P decided he wanted to go to the zoo. Great! But no stroller or mei tai.... He said he'd walk and lo and behold the child did it. From one side of the park to the other, all around the zoo and back again he walked and jumped. It felt like a page of his childhood book turned - he seemed sooo big. Especially as he jumped from rock to rock chanting "fuck, fuck, fuck." :) It was his first foray with fuck and he was really working on giving it the oomph it deserved. A back-hoe was working at the zoo and combined with the warmth and lovely walk made for a perfect Brooklyn day.

A few nights later he slept for 10 hours. Straight. Without waking once.

I feel like that needs its own paragraph it is so huge for him. He hasn't repeated it since, but he's gotten close with a some 7 or 8 hour nights. And then he dropped his nap. Just like that. He'd flirted with this for months, skipping a day here or there, but quickly reverting back to happily going to sleep after lunch. I'm pretty psyched. Going into the city for the day is easier, playdates are easier, he wakes up better rested (say, at 5:30 today...) rather than wanting to nurse and nap for hours each morning. He hasn't quite settled on a replacement schedule yet, but its getting there.

And he started taking things apart. My little brother always did this. I love making things, Cash loves taking them apart. P apparently has that gene, the "break stuff to see how it works" gene. Our house is quickly becoming filled with toys that don't quite fit together anymore amongst large piles of removed tires and car bottoms reconstructed into "skateboards." My silly notion of peaceful afternoons spent finger painting have been quickly replaced by the reality of little boy. Fuck, scratch that, I meant Big boy.

Geronimoooo!

So, its cold up here. P does not like the cold. Bad combo :) If he spends lots of time at home he gets, well, ornery. Very ornery. Not in a bad way, of course - a better word might be... curious. He's just trying to figure "something" out using the wiles of his three year old brain. But when the "water balloons on the bathroom floor" experiment (he recently learned about the basilisk lizard that runs on water and he wet the floor down to run on it) passes my comfort zone, something new helps. Helps My sanity, that is, he's perfectly content with flooded floors :)

One such diversion is "Dance Class" (his name). This is basically us thrashing about to music too loud for our neighbors. He climbs to the top of his house and flings himself off into the Sumos below, doing "fancy tricks." This can include a shnazzy jump and slide combo followed by hops to "lily pads" (aka hot pads) or jumping into balloons. Whatever the trick, our Curious George going Geronimo is helping pass the coldest days peacefully. Our neighbors may disagree!

Monkey See, monkey unscrew...

Yay!! My computer is back from the shop and humming along. Gawd I missed this thing....

So we had a couple of friends over for wine and indian food and P chilled with Pooh. It was the first time to try such an evening and the little man seemed to handle things really well. The enormous melt-down at the end of the evening (something that used to be an everyday occurrence but we haven't seen in months) told a slightly different tale but...

He seemed really engrossed in his film and his play so I was surprised the next day when he dug into the recycling bin to grab an empty bottle. He had found a cork on the cabinet and after claiming the wine opener he proceeded to practice his uncorking style. Apparently he had been paying more attention to us the night before than we realized :)

AMNH and Strewing the Arctic

I generally hear 2 worries concerning the unschooling of P. What about socialization (already addressed in a previous post and a fairly dull question since he's around all sorts of people of all ages all of the time) and how will he learn if you don't make him? Some believe children don't have an internal fire to learn, they need to be bribed or pushed into it. Sadly, it seems true that this fire can be squelched in a wide array of ways, but fortunately, also nurtured. In the unschooling community, one such igniter is dubbed "strewing." Basically, you leave new ideas or objects out to ignite their imagination and natural curiosity on a regular basis. While at 3 this doesn't even seem quite necessary for P (anyone who's spent a day with a three year old and their endless procession of "why's" can understand why this is true) we've started strewing as a matter of habit just because he (in his words) "gets a kick" out of discovering new things.

The past 2 weeks we've strewed the arctic. There are some great books out with penguin and polar bear stories. Some just feature the animals with little factual basis, but some have great info mixed in brilliantly with interesting tales and maybe even a glossary. P's learned about the northern lights, the melting polar ice caps, saving energy, the food chain, indigenous peoples, and various arctic animals. His understanding of mammal vs non-mammal has really been strengthened and he seems to be finding a little more peace with the idea that omnivores or carnivores aren't "mean," just necessary in the wild.

This was all supplemented by lots of pretend play with his little arctic animal toys (a polar bear, a narwhal, an arctic wolf, various whales, a fur seal, a walrus, penguins and puffins etc) where some ate the others, some helped one another and some gave birth and nursed. I knew the theme was resonating with him when I wore a white shirt one day and he said "your shirt looks like the arctic mama." :)

We also watched a video from national geographic about the polar bear and the walrus. The footage was amazing and P grabbed all of his local wildlife to watch with him and then act out scenes. It was a much more rewarding experience than any Pixar film that leaves him slack-jawed in awe for 90 minutes. There were so many questions that turned into plots and plans for the week following the show.

We froze small toys in ice cube trays and then let them float like icebergs in the sink. We watched them melt to see the ice turn to water and the water level (imperceptibly) rise. We danced to music like polar bears trying to break the ice looking for seals. We fished off the dock of his house with a magnet string and S hook fish to feed either his seal or me as a Neanderthal (he can't bring himself to even pretend to eat meat!)

Then we went to the Natural History Museum again, taking his cousin Sean this time, and the week's theme seemed to really bring a lot of the displays to life for him. Polar bears seem so fierce, but they can't easily take a walrus? Standing beside the two windows he could see that a walrus really is double the size of the bear, a fact he had heard but was now experiencing too. It was so fun to see him put it all together. He could often stand and absorb a display for much longer than I - I would have to remind myself to not interrupt his study with "Oh! Look at that one over there!" In fact, as I breezed past some dinosaur bones he asked me why there was a balloon in one. I had no idea what he meant until I looked for a good long while and saw a white helium balloon, floating inside a rib cage. And as I saw children hushed and rushed from exhibit to exhibit in their school groups I was so thankful that P had the time to make his discoveries and keep his fire burning bright - if I could just shut my mouth and be still :)

P.s. The top photo is his favorite "Squid and the Whale" display.

A Narwhal!

P helped me make tortillas for dinner tonight. Homemade tortillas are so yummy, but I haven't made them since P was born! We made extra dough so the kid could fulfill his flour fetish. After rolling most of them out for me he asked to keep two balls to play with. He then busied himself with shapes, stories and questions while I cooked the tortillas. Then, "Mama! Look! What's this?" Ummm, I hate these kind of questions because I never know the Right answer. Adding a level of difficulty to such a question is the fact that art-wise I've really followed the hints in the book "Young at Art." Research shows that letting children operate abstractly (artistically, at least) during their youth helps them in numerous ways. So P has never been shown a smiley face or had a paper plate made into a gawd awful turkey. And therefore he rarely copies animals into clay or faces into chalk. He just scribbles and discovers texture, form, shape etc. And his work Looks pretty abstract :) So tonight I turned to see a large, longish blob, dotted with tiny holes to achieve a polka dot look, finished with a toothpick stuck in one end. "Gee, honey, umm..." And he saved me. "A Narwhal Mama!!" And I think this was the first time his figurative art achieved its goal - it actually looked like the animal named. Then I had to chuckle that a wacky creature like a narwhal was his first figurative sculpture :)

Holiday Confusion

I think the holidays messed with P's head. We don't want P to feel "deprived" of the holiday season that so many enjoy, but we don't want to push (or be pushed into) extreme consumerism either. And neither of us are excited to lie to our child for the first time with that lie consisting of a fat man sneaking into our house in the middle of the night. But we both have such fond memories of the season and want it to be special for P too. So instead of a Christmas day free-for-all (we're not even Christian!) we spread the joy out a bit and celebrated the cold with Winter Solstice, the family on Christmas and then the new with New Year. Each holiday was represented with a gift or two for P and a mellow dinner with loved ones. But every day since Xmas P has asked upon awakening "What day is it today?" Monday. "There a present today?"

God bless the kid, he's an optimist. He's still asking daily, 2 weeks later, if it could, please, possibly be another holiday. Today I tried to describe the calender and tell him that the holidays for the rest of the year are pretty spread out and there aren't too many of them. He had one good question to that ridiculous idea: "Why?"

He was also confused with the concept of having to wait for a present. His gifts came UPS and he saw a couple carried upstairs. Much to his dismay, he couldn't open them. He didn't understand why, if the gift was for him, the gift was in his house, and we had scissors, we couldn't just open it right then and there. Then came the morning of Solstice. Just as he ran for his box Ethan disappeared into the bathroom for a long stint. I tried to coax P to have breakfast first and wait for Papa. This was insulting to him. So he daily presents me with presents; his bulldozer, his fire truck. Then he tells me its my birthday, sings to me and informs me I have to wait until after lunch to open it :)

Magic

Seth came over with some friends and did a magic trick for Phoenix that he Adored. Holding something small in his hand he'd bounce it three times in front off P's face, tossing it over an unsuspecting Phoenix to Alicia's waiting hands. Then as P inspected Seth's magically empty hands, Alicia would pass the item back and Seth could make it reappear out of P's ear. When P requested that it come out of his mouth the next time, Seth obliged. As Seth "pulled" the toy from P's mouth Phoenix grabbed it, asking "Is it wet?" He was miffed as to how it came out of his mouth but didn't have slobber on it.... Because that was obviously the most perplexing part of the show :)

Counting Trains

Typical to his age, P loves trains. He loves to make Long tracks with Long trains and does the cutest "Whoowhoo" and "Chuggachugga" sounds while pushing his engines around. When I told him there were two train exhibits in the city for the holidays he was pretty psyched.

The largest was at the Citcorp building in Midtown. The thing was Huge. An entire victorian building was built in the atrium to house the tracks running with tons of trains. They start in the "city" during the spring and travel up the Hudson through the seasons, ending in a winter wonderland. It was cute to see so many young train aficionados drooling and dreaming at the exhibit's railing. Free, and only up for a few weeks, the operators had to keep the mass of kids moving through at a decent pace so P and I had to go through a couple of times before he was satiated and requested "a cafe." He noticed every little detail and was particularly fascinated by the dimming lights. It was as if the sun was moving across the expanse of tracks, seasons turning to night, followed by tiny sparkling town lights. He also loved the moving backhoe and the itty-bitty man with a hammer, of course!

After noshing some pizza and napping P was ready for the Grand Central train show. Smaller, but more relaxed, he loved standing and staring- for an hour. We also wandered through the train platforms and watched actual trains leave to truly travel up the Hudson. He's done this before, but it seemed to strike him differently this time. He's been trying to understand the passage of time lately, and all of the vocabulary that entails, so he asked a million questions about the pace of different passengers and how soon their train would leave.

Which leads to his other current top confuser: numbers. He likes to throw random numbers into his prose lately (as a faux price, time or train schedule), imitating how often our conversations include the digits he is trying to understand. He sees Ethan's family count objects a lot and imitates that, sometimes with success, sometimes counting the same object twice. He has the verbal string of numbers memorized, but I 'm not sure he really gets the purpose of "counting" yet - anymore than he understands nap versus night or quarters versus dimes. As a label, specific amounts don't seem to hold much weight for him. He will get out his little trains and hook them together. He may count a pile of them on the floor, just for the sake of counting - an end unto itself. But what seems to really matter to him is that when they are put together, they make up a LONG train or a circus train. He has no interest yet in Longer Than; one train having eight cars to another train's seven. While more is definitely more to him in the world of toys, less is still more, because it is at least Something. Its a lovely time in his life where expectations of More Than or Sooner don't really exist because it is all in the Now and all New and therefore More than he knew just before now. But I'm guessing this period is ending because it has entered his play - and with it will come an accuracy for nap/night and numbers. Until proficiency hits though, I will grin like a chesire cat each time I say 5 minutes and he tries to manipulate his little hands to hold up just three fingers and asks "That train leave in this many minutes?"

Messy little man

Messes don't exist for Phoenix. He overturns his book bin to become a zoo cage only to realize the spilled books are all lily pads and there is a mad crocodile loose in the river. As he hops and slides on said lily pads the mess grows and he grins. Most of the time this is charming. Instead of eating his muffin the other day, he gave it to his dinosaurs. But they couldn't just nibble the damn thing, they had to stomp on it first and then graze. The other night he found the baking soda in the fridge and created a snow storm on the table. Still charming. Dried rice, millet and beans were added for texture and digging options. Trucks and excavators joined the fray. His race car started doing laps and spraying dried bits loaded with powder to the floor. Then off he tromped to the other room to grab more toys, trailing white foot prints across the carpet that had been vacuumed, literally, 5 minutes before. When he realized I was no longer charmed he took the vacuum from me and cleaned the entire mess up in his own, charming, way.

P gets clean

Phoenix will go days, many days, without feeling the need for a bath. Then, suddenly, he'll be in the tub 5 times in 2 days, pruning out to his heart's content. And on that rare, precious, occasion, he'll even suds up his hair.

Testing Quote

I recently read a great quote concerning testing. Every teacher I know bemoans Bush's policy and most parents I know roll their eyes at all of the ridiculous testing in schools. It isn't working. This pretty much gets to the bottom of it:

"If you think you can improve education with a test, you must also think you can fatten a calf by weighing it."

I really appreciate this as an unschooling family too. Watching P and hearing some knew knowledge spout from him does feel warm and fuzzy; He's Learning! He's so smart! And other parental pride based bull. But really, the vital part in P's life is what P knows, not that I know he knows x, y or z... Sure, knowing where a kid is (can he converse? can he read yet?) developmentally is paramount to interacting with them. But really, I can learn more about P by playing with him than quizzing him or having him fill in small circles with a number 2!