Cerin Amroth

There is a good reason that parents use mittens for their kids’ cold weather gear. Assisting a toddler with getting his fingers into gloves has to be one of the most difficult routine parenting tasks. I was trying to stuff Dominic’s fingers in his gloves this morning so he could go out to play in the 5 inches of snow we got yesterday.

It almost seems as if he’s working against me. Or maybe he just doesn’t understand that his fingers are each supposed to go into one of the holes inside. For a brief moment, I wonder if he knows the difference between his thumb and other fingers.

After much struggling, he manages to get one finger into its proper place. He triumphantly says, “One finger. The rest are sleeping.”

I figure they’ll be warmer as sleeping fingers, anyway. And proceed to the next hand. I was able to wake up two sleeping fingers on that hand. After loading him up in all his warm gear, he only wanted to stay out for 20 minutes, anyway. The siren call of Legos drew him back indoors.

Yesterday morning, Ella and I were sitting at the kitchen counter eating breakfast. Morning Edition was on, and there was a story about a microscopic pond creature that scientists suspect reproduces aesexually. This meant that the word “sex” was used with abandon in the story.

Ella was running late, so I urged her to go get her shoes on immediately after she finished her cereal. After she got to the hall, I thought I heard her ask me, “Mom, were they talking about sex in that story?”

I nearly choked on my yogurt. Had she just used the word “sex”? She used it in such a matter-of-fact way. How much could she possibly know about sex? Does this mean I’d have to think about how to have the sex discussion with her? How in the world was I going to explain that to her?

I slowly walked over to the hall and said – in as non-chalant a voice as possible – “What did you just ask me, Sweetie?”

“Mom, were they talking about skex in that story?” She took her foot off the ground and pointed at the letters on the back of her shoe – S, K, X. “You know, skex.”

Boy, am I glad I still have an innocent six year-old. Now does anyone want to help me prepare for THAT conversation …

Ella read all of Hop on Pop Sunday night before going to bed. I had to help her out with a few words – which were mostly the ones that don’t follow the usual phonetics. These were – they, word, say, and other. I couldn’t convince her to try the big words at the end – Constantinople and Timbuktu. After I sounded them out, though, she seemed to think she could have done it herself.

I was putting both Ella and Dominic to bed because Nate was doing online gaming. The three of us were reading on Dominic’s bed. If Ella hesitated at all on the words, Dominic chimed in – reciting the book from memory. I’m sure Ella knows it by heart, as well. I was glad that she wasn’t reciting it, and instead focusing on reading.

As she got to pages she hadn’t read before, she kept saying, “I’ve never got this far before.” At the end of the book, she was very pleased with herself. There wasn’t a single time that she got really frustrated with herself. She was persistent on all the words she couldn’t figure out at first. It’s amazing how much progress she has made on reading in the past few months.

Dominic has developed interesting uses of “only” and “never” in his style of argument. He uses “only” when he wants to state with absolute certainty that he really means something. Here are a few examples:

Suanna:  I don’t think Dominic wants to play Legos right now.

Dominic:  No. I ONLY play Legos. [Incidentally, this is practically true.]

Ella:  Dominic doesn’t like to eat fruit.

Dominic: No. I ONLY eat fruit.

He uses “never” to emphasize that he absolutely doesn’t want to be associated with something.

Nate:  Dominic, I’m going to put you to bed tonight because Momma is reading to Ella.

Dominic:  No. You NEVER put me to bed.

Suanna:  Dominic, did you play in the sandbox at school this morning?

Dominic:  No. I NEVER play in the sandbox at school.

There’s no mistaking that he’s three and trying desparately to control his world. Or maybe he’s just trying to start his own dialect.

We have told Ella and Dominic that our friends (and Dom’s godparents) Matt and Sarah are coming to visit. They are very excited.  Dominic, anticipating competition for their attentions, talks now about how Sarah is HIS friend and Matt is ELLA’s friend. Matt will play LEGOs with Ella and Sarah will help him with puzzles. That sort of thing.

This morning Dominic had it in his head that they were coming for supper tonight, so we had to correct him. But long after he realized the truth he realized he could annoy Ella by continuing to assert that they were were, in fact, coming tonight.

D: Matt and Sarah are coming for SUPPER, Ella!

E: No they’re not! They’re coming in TWO WEEKS!

D: They’re coming for supper! They’re coming today!

E: No! You are WRONG about that! They are NOT coming today!

D: Matt and Sarah are coming for SUPPER!

E: No!

D: Matt and Sarah are coming for SUPPER!

E: Daaaad! Dominic thinks Matt and Sarah are coming for suuupper!

D: (grins impishly)

Nate and the kids picked me up from work the other day. We were heading home to get some dinner. Dom asked where we were going, and I said we were going home to eat dinner. Dom insisted, “I NEVER want dinner.” He couldn’t be dissuaded at all from his insistence on not wanting dinner – even though we knew he was hungry. I told him that after we ate dinner, they could watch some TV. This didn’t help a bit. “I NEVER want to watch TV.”

Ella interrupted the drama and explained the intricate details to Dominic: 1) when we would arrive at home; 2) what we would have for dinner (it was something they liked); and 3) what they would watch on TV. Dominic paused his complaining to think about it all, and then he said, “Oh, I want to have dinner and watch TV.”

Ella triumphantly announced that she was really good at taking time to explain things to him. She insisted she could help him understand it. I told her she did a really good job at that. Then Dominic chimed in. “And then when Ella is all done, I say ‘Oh’.” He was very pleased at his role in the whole process.

Ella’s having her friend Taryn over for a playdate.  I think this may be the first time I’ve seen her self-conscious in this particular way — she is trying to Act Cool around Taryn, which includes just a little bit more defiance toward me and a few more casually-executed karate kicks in the living room.  It’s cute.

Dominic, meanwhile, is the tragic figure.  He has been excited all day that Taryn was coming over this afternoon.  At one point earlier today when we were playing with LEGOs, Dominic looked up at me a little sheepishly.  ”Daddy?” he said.  ”Yes, Dominic?”  ”Maybe Taryn will play LEGOS with me?”  ”Maybe she will,” I said.  But of course she and Ella have a different project in mind, and are moving a little too fast for him to keep up anyway.  So instead he tags along behind them and watches Taryn, star-struck.

We got Ella a digital camera for Christmas.  Initially we got her a kiddie camera, a step up from the one she had received a couple years ago, but we quickly realized it was still rather shoddy, with a barely-visible LCD screen.  We returned it, and for the same money I was able to buy a used 5MP Canon Powershot from somebody on Craigslist.  She loves it.

I picked up the cheapest memory card I could find for it, and after she had been playing around with making movies on it for a good while I drew her aside to make the sobering point that movies use up a LOT of memory.  I expected to be pointing out to her that she had already filled up the card and there was only enough room for another two or three minutes of video.  But no, there was still space for freakin’ 45 minutes of video.  I’m going to have to get another hard drive just to store all the footage she’s going to want to take.

So far she has been having the most fun interviewing Dominic as he plays with LEGOs, and conducting a narrated tour of various places in the living room.  More fun than actually taking the videos, of course, is watching them again on the camera immediately afterward.  I can remember the exact same thrill when I was a kid, playing around with a tape recorder with my sister.  Except Ella is doing it at least four years earlier than I did, with technology that can do so much more than that tape recorder did that it’s hard to fathom — and probably for far less, in real dollars, than that tape recorder cost back in the day.

Wow.

Yesterday and today we’ve been engaged in a post-holiday annual ritual:  the weeding out of toys and assorted stuff from the kids’ rooms in order to make room for all the new stuff they’ve acquired in the past month.  We set up a bag for Goodwill and a bag for trash and do what we can.  In previous years, the breakdown of roles has been as follows:

Nate:  Try to get rid of as much as possible in order to silence that shrieking voice inside that’s freaking out because we have Too.  Much.  Crap.

Suanna:  Defend the barricades against Nate’s brutal assault on treasured memory by preventing as much as possible from being actually weeded out.

Ella:  (Two years ago)  Remain blissfully unaware.  (Last year)  Take Suanna’s side and mournfully plead for the retention of every last item bound for bag #1 or bag #2.  Items that have remained in a drawer for six months or more are suddenly discovered to have Extreme Sentimental Value.

This year, Ella and I have tackled the weeding out just the two of us.  This may seem like a ploy on my part to have greater leverage in deciding what makes it to the bags.  Actually it was more of a practical concern:  Ella’s room was so cluttered already that the weeding out could not afford to wait for the weekend.  That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

I prepped Ella the night before about how we were going to make room in her room for her new toys and things.  She remembered the drill and became agitated, but I told her that she could be there to help with the decisions.  With lawyerly precision she sought to clarify whether she was a Co-Decider or merely an Advisor, and I admitted that she was the latter, which she grudgingly accepted.

The next day (yesterday) we set to work.  And Ella was on fire, but not in the way I expected.  From the minute we upended the infamous Red Drawer she was hell-bent on clearing out as much stuff as she could.  She’s grab something and ask me, business-like, “Goodwill or trash?”  Rather than cajole her into getting rid of stuff, I found myself deflecting some items from oblivion by suggesting that they could go to Dominic’s room.  When I revealed my plan to thoroughly weed out all the broken, dry, and orphaned materiele from the Paint and Drawing Drawers, she nonchalantly agreed.  The words “do we really need to keep those?” were, in fact, uttered, but by her, not by me.  Then she turned her attention to her walls, still covered mostly with stuff she had brought home from preschool in previous years.  ”I don’t like all the things with scribbles any more” she declared, and started tearing stuff down with abandon.  I literally had to get in her way to make sure that we could save one or two examples for posterity.

Dominic’s room remains to be done, so we’ll see what position he’ll take when it comes to his stuff.  But if he ends up being a Suanna-style preservationist, that’s fine by me.  Ella’s on my team now.

It’s a stay-at-home day with blizzard conditions in the DC area. The snow started last night at 9 pm and hasn’t stopped since then. The kids went outside at 10:30, and then Ella went out again at 4:30. I’ve been working on a 500-piece puzzle and taking pictures of the snow. Here they are.