The first egglien spaceship arrived in the docking bay. Close behind it was a second, this one with a more elaborate antenna, and an eye :
The hatch opened.
The eggliens had arrived,
bringing with them a unique and unforeseen dilemma:
How do you convince your kids to eat an egg that is looking at them? An egg upon which they painstakingly placed the eyes and hair themselves?
And am *I* going to have to eat twenty-two hardboiled eggliens in secret, all by myself?
Not this guy, silly–a beluga whale. (Mbot at the fabulous Phoenix Children’s Museum.)
To make things easy today, and to prove that the bots are still here, being their eminently quotable selves, I’ve transcribed a few lines from the past forty-eight hours. You can see that we haven’t been bored; our topics ranged from mammals to physics to love. They are all connected, after all.
Mbot, on the beluga whale: “We studied the Polar regions. All of us had to learn about the beluga whale. It hops around the sea scaring people.”
Gbot, on panda bears: “If I were a panda, I would eat ALL your bamboo.”
Mbot, on Gbot: “I want his stomach to get REALLY fat, so he floats away!”
Mbot, on me: “I think you taste good in your heart, Mom, cuz you make my heart beat really fast.”
Mbot on Junepbear: “Joompbear, you’re deesGUSting.” (I gasped inwardly when I heard this. Mbot was examining his old stuffed bear at close range, and I feared that he finally had gained some perspective on the ratty old thing’s rather poorly aging fur, which at this point doesn’t get a whole lot cleaner looking with washing. I feared I was witnessing the end of an era. I shouldn’t have worried. He continued lovingly, “You’ve got some jelly on your head!”
Mbot, on relativity: “So, germs think that garbage cans are continents?”
Gbot on ear cell hydration: “I poured water in my ear so my ear cells could have a drink.”
Mbot, from the back seat: “Can’t you please drop me off at Grandma’s, Mom? I really want to give you some peace.”
Mbot, having rethought his opinion of Gbot: “I want him to be cute for the rest of his life.”
Ditto, and right back atcha, kid.
The day began at 6 a.m. when Gbot, caught atop the box for his Fisher Price Circus in an attempt to extract marshmallows and sugar cereal (which is only in the house due to their inclusion in a Christmas cookie recipe) from the high cupboard, “I am checking to see if the marshmallows and poppers are not soggy.”
And then it was off to the potty. There are guinea pigs in the Montessori classroom, and Gbot adores anything guinea piggish or hamstery, and so I’ve been using that as bait to get him to the potty. For example: “When you go potty in the toilet like a big boy, you get to go to school with the guinea pigs!”
This morning upon successful pottying, he announced, “Oh, the guinea pigs will be SO HAPPY!”
Not as happy as Mama.
At school, Mbot led the family in one final flushworthy effort.
And then they were off.
I was thrilled. I was as thrilled as Gbot and the guinea pigs put together. I didn’t think, “Where has the time gone?” But I did want time to stop.
Maybe it’s having lived through the turn of the century that makes me so aware of the fact that it’s ’13, and to think about everything that happened in the ’13 that I’ve grown up with: 1913. Before World War 1. Before the Model T was in production. Before women could vote. Slavery had been abolished only forty years before. And in forty years, when I’m eighty-five, it’ll be 2053. The early fifties. In the early fifties, my grandpa was only just younger than I am now. He was born in ’15. It is impossible for me not to think of the young boys born near the turn of the last century, who I knew only as old men. Because for the children who will remember me as Great Grandma Etchart, wrinkly and white-haired, Mbot and Gbot will be those boys, who those children will know only as old men. I see this vaster span of time overlaid across every day like a web. And although I know it’s ridiculous, it makes me sad. Can’t we just replay the first day of preschool forever?
It was a Halloween miracle, or several: Gbot’s brown turtleneck arrived via UPS at 3:45 p.m. Having forgotten to load up their pumpkin buckets, I bought the last $1.99 cauldron at the corner drugstore at 4:10 p.m. There was a $1.99 bat bag hanging above it. In spite of a still-coldy, sore-nosed Gbot (and after the application to the nostrils of Vaseline, which ingited a bout of wailing that only a piece of pizza could stop), we were all outfitted in time to take pictures. And Gbot wore his costume. All evening. The Great Pumpkin surely was watching over us.
I hope The Great Pumpkin was watching over you, too!
Dot-to-Dot: The love child of Picasso, Euclid, and Martha Stewart!
Yes, it’s an old-fashioned connect-the-dots game, brought into the twenty-first century by Husbot with an unmistakeable you-can-do-this-at-home! vibe.
I mentioned to him last night that I’d like to see Mbot trying to focus more on the shapes of numbers and letters, and so this morning he Mbot on his lap and drew some impromptu pictures, just faintly dotted outlines with numbers (in order, of course) at strategic points around the periphery.
And this perhaps is an alphabet-outlined sea-monster (C monster?) that’s been caught on a fishing line. Abdominal spikes added by Mbot.
I thought Husbot, although neither Picasso nor Euclid nor Martha, was pretty ingenius. Husbot asked Mbot to say the numbers or letters aloud as the tip of his colored pencil reached them. And you know, it kind of worked. But the big lesson for me was that customizing a silly connect-the-dots game makes it more interesting for the weebots, which means they actively engage, which means they learn more.
It was perfect for just-turned-four year-old Mbot–not so engaging for Gbot, not yet three. When I drew him a hamster (not shown, in order to retain my dignity), he claimed that hamsters do NOT have whiskers, and when I wrote the number 1 on top of his head, Gbot was so upset that I covered it up with a fire hat. “Let’s pretend he’s a Wonder Pet!” I cried, but it was in vain.
“I do not WANT a hamster in a fire hat!” cried Gbot back.
So, as with everything in parenting, even great ideas, there are potholes, and you will fall into them. But at least we’ll all go down counting.
Buck-toothed shark. Will he get you? It’s a number’s game.
This little guy, eat me? It beats the alternative…. (Mbot. Photo credit: Solveig Haugland)
The weekend out of town with old friends was as wonderful as I’d hoped, and I returned home (extremely tired, but that’s part of the game) to about what I expected: requests I’d made had been ignored but everyone was alive. Husbot reported that on Sunday morning, Gbot awoke early, as usual, and announced, “Mbot ate Mama.” Then he added sadly, “Mama was our friend.”
His explanation for my absence made me want to laugh and cry at the same time. And up until a couple of weeks ago I might have just left it at “oh, how cute.” But I have been reading a book called “Bad Guys Don’t Have Birthdays: Fantasy Play at Four” (The University of Chicago Press, 1988) It was written by Vivan Gussin Paley nearly twenty-five years ago, won the 1990 James N. Britton Award, and should be required reading for anyone who’s ever walked into Party City and purchased a candle in the shape of the number 4.
At the time she wrote this slim volume, Ms. Paley had been a preschool teacher for two decades. In order to understand the complex systems of play she witnessed daily among three- and four-year-olds, she began recording conversations and transcribing them each evening, documenting the children’s play and interaction, discerning patterns, connecting the play to events occurring in each child’s life, examining the interpersonal dynamics and excavating the “rules” of play. The book follows a group of four-year-olds through a school year, acting out such complications as a new baby in the family, parents working, the appearance of an older relative’s boyfriend.
“In fantasy play” writes Paley, “you sidestep that which cannot be controlled and devise scenes in which fears are resolved.”
Discovering this book was like unearthing the Rosetta Stone to Mbot’s play and conversation, or, for fans of Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, like having a Babblefish on my shoulder: I suddenly and, it felt, magically, am beginning to understand the language he and Gbot use to describe the world they create daily–or rather create, change, destroy, and re-create–so richly inhabited by good guys and bad guys, Good Luke (Skywalker) and Bad Luke, Good Spiderman and Bad Cockroach Spiderman, Wonder Woman and Cinderella and Ree-punzel and dragons and four-headed monsters and bullet guns and laser beams and dy-no-mite.
What is all this violent talk and bam-bam-bam! with a Trio “gun”, I often wondered, when Mbot has trouble watching any movie–from Ratatouille to Babe–without running with a yelp into the kitchen while I fastforward through the parts where anyone is talking or acting in a hurtful way?
In part, here’s what this talk is: he is acting out his fears and overcoming them–just like Paley’s students do:
“A master of disguises, Fredrick will conjure up new dangers and, with a flick of his cape, be the instrument of rescue. In so doing it is he who is saved.”
He is taking control of his world. In Paley’s words, “Any unknown, it seems, can be made into a bad guy.” And in play, “I pretend, therefore I am. I pretend, therefore I know.”
If Mbot ate me, Mbot’s the bad guy, and my absence in much less threatening than if I had left on purpose. And in the bots’ world, it is a fact–reinforced in everything from Burt Dow, Deep Water Man to Your Body Battles a Stomachache–that what has been eaten can be rescued, regurgitated, or resurrected. And my return Monday morning showed him he was right.
Please accept these mushrooms as a token of my appreciation. (www.denny.co.za)
Not that I have a strong opinion one way or the other, but whoever came up with the idea of Intelligent Design is an unqualified, certified, card-carrying moron. In three hundred years, people will look back at us, the founders of that stupid idea, like we look at the preCopernican world. Because it’s basically the equivalent of believing the sun and all the other planets revolve around the earth. Which was actually worked out, mathematically, but according to Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow in The Grand Design, the equation was a solution neither simple nor elegant. When they did the math for all the planets, including (gasp!) the earth, rotating around the sun, the equation was both.
I bring this up, obviously, because this is Teacher Appreciation Week. Sure, teachers get a whole week and mothers only get one day, but I do not begrudge the teachers their week. We love Mrs. Pursell, Mrs. Doll, and everyone at Montessori, and they work their butts off. And so we happily went along with the protocol: a cupcake from the whole class on Monday. A thank you note from each child on Tuesday. A flower from each child on Wednesday. A vegetable or a piece of fruit from each child on Thursday. And, as parent-teacher liaison, I collected small monetary donations for a spa certificate to be presented today.
The stress began on Tuesday. Mbot, who is normally most content when left with pencils and paper, wanted to make rockets out of his Trio set instead. Then he wanted to draw a picture for his friend Ybot. Then for his brother. After three hours of on-and-off trying, we had three pictures (the Spanish teacher needed one, too). But there was something wrong with the amount of stress I felt during this exercise.
Wednesday, on the way to music class, we stopped at Safeway for two flowers. I told Mbot he could pick them out. I gave him choices of the least expensive varieties. He chose the sunflowers. Since they were only $3 for three, we got two bunches. He held one. Gbot held one. The flowers were dragged along the floor. They were swung through the air. They were carried over their shoulders like hobo sticks. By the time they got to music class, I’m sure several days had been taken from their already truncated lives. By the time Mbot had carried them in this fashion down the path to school, through the lobby, into the courtyard and into the hands of the teachers, I had decided that, when gifts are requested from little people, you have to take into consideration the fact that we, as adults, are pressing our standards and expectations and values onto people who have not yet been on earth long enough to learn our ways.
And so, by Thursday, when we went to school via the Safeway produce department, I found myself saying “yes” to the yellow bell pepper for Mrs. Doll ($1 apiece!). And to the carton of sliced mushrooms for Mrs. Pursell. The teachers were just lucky that, on the way to the checkout counter, we passed a display of very attractive strawberries at $1.28 per carton. Mbot agreed that they would be good, too. But if he hadn’t, Mrs. Pursell would have gotten the mushrooms. And I would have been perfectly okay with that. She could eat mushroom soup while admiring her world-weary sunflower and begrudgingly drawn picture of the antique cat.
It has been a week of lessons in weighing value, struggling for perspective, and drawing boundaries. I crawl out the end of it educated and exhausted.
They say that the behavior of three year-olds breaks us in for the behavior of teenagers. We get twelve years of practice before the big stuff starts. I believe it. The whole process has been magnificently designed. By The Laws of Nature. By Evolution. Give it up, all you Intelligent Designers. Relinquish control. If the universe had been designed by a humanlike mind–a truly intelligent female one, at least–there would have been a weekly spa visit included.
(humanewatch.org)
Last Friday Mbot was sent home from preschool with a big red bag and a list of food items I needed to bring into class on Monday. I’ve been faced with the big red bag and the accompanying list twice before; approximately every three months it’s our turn to buy a week’s worth of snacks for the Joshua Tree classroom. The list changes all the time.
I’ve always done the shopping well ahead because who wants to be the mom who can’t even find the caramel dipping sauce for the apple slices? (Although I had to visit three stores before I found it.)
But this weekend, having succeeded twice before, I was lulled into a sense of my own competence. And so, on Monday morning, when I looked at the list on the way to library story and craft time, I read along nodding: ten bagels, a container of cream cheese, a bunch of bananas, a bag of carrots, etc. etc. And then: Gogurts. Followed by: Pretzel Flipz.
Were they typos, spelling mistakes, or trademarked names for packaged foods I’d never heard of? I feared the last. There was no one around to ask. I couldn’t Google it because I left my smart phone in my other life, the one in which I’m savvy and hip. Hell, if I had a smart phone, I’m sure I’d already know what Gogurts where, just because hello, doesn’t everyone?
I cheated on the Pretzel Flipz and bought the funnest looking pretzels I could see, in little tic-tac-toe shapes. But after failing to find anything called Gogurts in the trail mix aisle, I admitted defeat.
I had to turn in the big red bag without having completed the assignment. I didn’t have time to explain my performance, which, if not improved within twenty-four hours, would surely result in midafternoon cries of starvation emanating from the Joshua Tree classroom.
By now, I have discovered that Gogurts are, of course, individual tubes of flavored yogurt that can be sucked directly out of the bag. I will go buy some this afternoon. Although, if I do say so: gross.
We are all learning something in preschool.
This is Chubby the Turtle. He is roughly the size of a falafel, and available, with a minimum order of 20,000 of his brothers and sisters, from Ms. Eileen Zhu (who is offline at the moment), the supplier at Ningbo Yinzhou Headway Stationery Co., Ltd., in Zhejiang, China. Chubby (not his original name) is an eraser. According to the company website, Chubby can be recycled. And contains no toxins. I am of course suspicious. I am going to call Ms. Zhu today to ask about Chubby’s molecular makeup.
As I was getting ready for bed last night, Chubby fell out of my bra. His shell had long since detached from his body (as it had been designed to do) and he was missing all four feet (nt in the design specs). Where they once had been, only ragged stumps remained. Ah, Chubby! I thought, picking the pieces off the floor and dropping them in the trash can (not knowing then that he could be recycled). I buried him, more sneakily than ceremonially, under a few square of toilet paper. I had completely forgotten, even though it had happened only twelve hour before: our shocking virgin Peter Piper Pizza experience, our encounter with Chubby, and the ensuing tearful drive to preschool.
Who knew Peter Piper Pizza was a dinging, flashing blitzkrieg of an arcade attached to a $4.99 pizza buffet? After thirty minutes of sensory assault, we had earned twelve tickets, exchangeable for a chintzy toy. Mbot was fixated on a plastic gun available for 300 tickets. The only thing our measly dozen could nab us was either two mini tootsie rolls or a turtle. We actually couldn’t even afford the turtle, but the sugar option was a no go, as my previously sensory deprived children (raised by wolves, with books) were already so amped. The guy behind the counter felt sorry for us and handed over a turtle. “It’s an eraser,” he said after I’d already taken possession of it. I almost handed it back but I couldn’t without triggering major wailing. Did he not see that I was in possession also of two midgets of the model that try to digest such objects? At least it made Mbot forget the gun. He proudly carried the turtle, who I christened Tubby and who Mbot rechristened Chubby, to the car, talking about how he would draw lines and then erase them, and wondering if his teacher, Miss Pursell, would let him do that.
We’d just hit the road when major wailing erupted in the back seat; Gbot was almost asleep, but Mbot’s face was distorted and wet with tears. Disaster had struck: Chubby was broken. Not only broken but, in an astonishingly rapid feat of decline, he’d lost all his feet. Of course he’d been helped out of them, but still. I silently cursed the makers of fragile turtle erasers with protruding appendages. It was more satisfying than cursing myself for not foreseeing the obvious outcome. There was no way I’d be able to fix Chubby with anything short of a toxic glue, which was not a possibility. It was an eraser for god’s sake, squeezed out of an eraser machine for nano-pennies. I would chuck it. But right now, I had to talk Mbot down before we got to school.
A quick aside here to explain that he goes to a Montessori program, It’s been in the family (on my husband’s side)—or that the family’s been in—for decades, but until a few months ago, I knew nothing about the curriculum. The first week, when Miss Pursell reported that my 38-month-old was doing “cutting work, shape work, and screwdriver work,” I admit I giggled like the unindoctrinated philistine I was. Then I noticed Mbot himelf referring to his “work:” necklace work and star work (learning about the solar system, I found). Countering his stubbornness in dressing himself, I started urging him to do pants work and shoe work .
So now in the car I heard myself saying, “Honey, Chubby’s just doing his work. He had falling apart work to do, and you helped him do it!”
I said it again, in the most convincing voice I could muster.
It worked.
I felt clever and slightly guilty.
But here’s the thing: What if it were true? And how do I know it’s not?
We pulled up to the school. I unstrapped the boys and made Chubby and two of his feet disappear into the nearest receptacle, which happened to be my bra.
I’m not a fatalistic, your-extreme-misfortune-was-meant-to-be type, but Fall Apart Chubby made me wonder what work I have to do, that the Midgets are helping me with, that I’m not even aware of. Sometimes (but less, lately, as they grow older and I get more sleep), it feels like I’m doing falling apart work, too, except it’s my psyche that’s crumbling. I’ve got optimistic work to do, for sure. It has never been a strength. And contentedness work. It doesn’t come easy. Mommy’s doing her contentedness work, I will think, sitting on the floor piecing a giant dinosaur puzzle together almost as fast as they tear it apart. You’re helping her do it!
What work do you have to do, and who is helping you?
