Morning entrances

Peter’s entrance downstairs this morning? Pantsless, wearing a costume fedora he found in his room, singing the Indiana Jones theme song.

His entrance yesterday? Shirtless in pajama pants, wielding two plastic kids hangers like sai swords, yelling “Hiiiiii-ya!”

(No, he wouldn’t let me take pictures either time.)

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Early Risers Play Dolphin Tennis

Despite falling asleep at 5pm last night, Peter made it through till about 5:30am. Or at least, that’s when he came in to our room, whispering questions like “Do you know how dolphins play tennis? With their tails!”

It’s a good thing that boy’s so cute and funny.  Because that’s way too early, even for me.

Also, there is evidence (in the form of a half-awake, cranky Jack) that we were not his first stop of the morning.

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Sleep is but a pause button

When Jack wakes up every morning, it’s a new day.  No matter how much crying or whining he does the night before, he usually wakes up bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, and tackles the morning routine (tea, morning show, breakfast, get dressed, off to bus stop) with a smile.  He rarely remembers whatever was bothering him the night before.

Lately, for Peter, 9-11 hours of sleep is but a pause button for his brain.  Witness the last two evenings:

Bedtime #1: Very late (9p) due to a long nap from 2-4p.  Peter still doesn’t want to go to bed; he insists that he needs to go back downstairs and “play with his guys.”  Finally, after crying and yelling, and a sippy cup of milk, he’s off to dreamland.

Morning #1: At 6am (way early for him) Peter comes into our room, and says, “Daddy — you open da gate so I kin go downstairs and pway wiff my guys?”

Bedtime #2: Normal bedtime (7:15ish), though Peter is upset because, after repeatedly denying he wanted to watch a show with Jack so he could play on pbskids.org instead, now wants to watch a show  (“Buh I changed my mind!”).  A sippy cup of milk breaks through the sobbing and he’s comfortably wrapped in his covers.  He asks me to find one of his favorite cuddly animals, a stuffed cow named Cow, but he falls asleep while I’m looking for it.

Morning #2: Peter slips into our room at 6:30 and comes to my side of the bed.  Does he say “Good morning?” or “Hi, Daddy!” or “You ‘wake, Daddy?”  Nope!  He asks, “Daddy — did you find Cow?”

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Jack’s Extinction Burst

Jack has a very powerful Extinction Burst — the secret weapon your brain uses to fight off changing new behavior it doesn’t like — and it was in full display while we tried to get him to do regular teeth-brushing with REAL toothpaste.  He had been brushing with the Orajel baby toothpaste for 6 years now, using a fluoride gel thing in the evenings to help… but he was already getting cavities.  When our dentist had Peter move to real toothpaste (and he’s only 3!), we realized it was time to force the issue with Jack.  Time to brush your teeth, with real toothpaste, both morning and evening.

First we tried rewards.  “You get a sticker on the chart every time you brush; when it fills up you get a new $0.99 iPad app.”  Not enough.   “We’ll give you an extra $1 every day you brush your teeth.”  Still not enough, even though he’s saving to buy a Wii game he really wants.  That evening Katherine moved on to “just do it” and “because I said so” and “I’m your mother” and that brought out the expected obstinate stubborn boy we know and love (and fear).  There was howling and crying.

A coworker told me she’s tackled her boys and held them down while she brushed their teeth.  I was seriously considering it.

The next morning I started off with gentle encouragement, since Jack is better in the mornings.  He made it to the sink, made it to holding the toothbrush, then balked.  I escalated to threats.  “You can’t watch any TV until you brush your teeth” was met with “Fine, I’m not gonna watch any TV today.”  Finally, I said, “I won’t let you go downstairs until you brush your teeth.”  That brought the extinction burst out in full force.  “I don’t want this toothpaste — I wanted the watermelon one!”  (This, after he picked out the toothpaste he wanted at the store.)  “I don’t feel like this right now.”  (Too bad.)  “I want Mama to help, not you.”  (Mama’s sleeping.)  “I’m going to go say hi to Mama first.”  (Okay, I’ll be right here, but you come right back…. tap tap tap…. tap tap tap… oh look, he’s now snuggled up with Mama in the bed.)

That morning we eventually got him to brush his teeth, practically wrestling him into the bathroom.  That evening, I went to rehearsal, and when I came back, he had put up a huge fuss again in the evening.  There were tears, there were I-hate-you’s, there were you’re-not-my-mama’s, the works.

The next morning, though, he brushed his teeth with the adult toothpaste without resistance.  And ever since then, he’s done it with little to no fuss — he’s already up to 5 stickers on his new sticker chart, after all.

It’s so, so hard to see the other side of the hill when you’re climbing up it.  There are so many things that Jack does that are hard to reinforce because it’s so much easier just to give in and say “Okay, buddy, I’ll let you do thing you probably shouldn’t be doing regularly just this one more time,” and then all our work is lost.  So it was nice to see Jack, in a span of a couple hard-fought days, make it through to the other side.  Of course I brush my teeth, morning and night, with regular toothpaste.  Doesn’t everyone?

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Toilet Paper Success

It’s morning time.  Peter is watching a new favorite cartoon (“Johnny Test”).  I’m puttering around as I’m wont to do in the mornings.  At some point, like every morning dad, I need to… ummmm… well in our house we call it “Sudoku” given that I’m sometimes prone to do a puzzle or two while taking care of business.  As today is no exception, I scoot over to the bathroom and sit down (puzzle-less) and…

There’s no toilet paper.  Crap.  Literally and figuratively, crap.

Now, as a parent, I have no shame in eventually shuffling upstairs naked at 6:30 in the morning to the other bathroom and enduring whatever ignominy is associated with being one of the Unwiped.  But, as a parent, c’mon, I deal with enough crap — again, literally and figuratively — that I don’t think I need to add this to my repertoire.

From the den, I hear, “Daaaaaddy…. Johnny Test i’ dunnnnnnn…  I need help!  I wanna p’ay da Batman Wii game…”

Light.  Bulb.

“Peter!  I need some help, Peter!  Can you come help me?”

An eager response: “You need da help Daddy?  I come help you!”

Enter Peter, and a plastic grasshopper toy which he is all too anxious to show me.  After agreeing that it’s a lovely pet, I tell him I have a problem: I have no toilet paper.  He looks over at the empty toilet paper holder to get some for me, then realizes my predicament.  “Peter, can youuuuuu… can you go upstairs and get toilet paper from the upstairs bathroom for me?”

“Sure!”  He trots off, initially in the wrong direction, then corrects himself and heads upstairs.

At this point I realize that, given the spare toilet paper is up on a shelf he can’t reach, there are 3 likely possibilities:
a) He gets distracted and never returns
b) He comes back with one tiny square of toilet paper.  Maybe that’s enough to get me started.
c) He comes back with a trail of toilet paper from the upstairs bathroom, all the way down the stairs, and hands it to me.

Deciding that option c) is still better than the naked run upstairs, I wait.

Peter returns.  “Here you go, Daddy!”  Bless his soul!  He has almost exactly the right amount of toilet paper, that he’s pulled and torn off the roll.  The boy still won’t pee or poop in the potty, but understands the vagaries of toilet paper consumption.  Hallelujah!

So, reason #42 to have a preschooler — morning toilet paper retrieval.

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Video game snooze alarm

Saturday morning around 6:30am, I heard our bedroom door open.  I had been out past 1am with some friends last night (you know, partying… living the high life… okay, actually it was playing a 3 hour board game called Incan Empire, which is my idea of fun), so I was dead tired.  Still, 6:30 is the normal wake-up time for Peter.  Eyes shut, I lay perfectly still as if prey trying not to be noticed by predator.  “Oh please don’t be awake… please don’t be awake… please don’t…. hmmmmmm, where’d he go?”

The door had closed.  I vaguely heard the stair gate opening and closing.  The mystery kid was gone.

Well, not much of a mystery.  Peter can’t open the gate, so it must have been Jack.  But I thought I heard Peter say something.  Maybe both of them?  Wouldn’t that be great?

It was.  They were both up.  They had gone downstairs on their own.  I slept another hour.

At 7:30, Katherine and I were both vaguely awake, and we started discussing what I would find when I went downstairs.  The TV on, certainly.  And they can get yogurt and juice boxes on their own.  Fruity Pebbles all over the kitchen floor?  Empty yogurt containers strewn on the carpet?  Pee all over the couch?  The more we brainstormed, the faster I got dressed. You think they fed themselves?   Would they try to make their own tea?  Would they go outside in the back to play in the sandbox on their own?  Holy crap… do you think they might have walked to Dunkin Donuts?

I rushed downstairs to find two unfed boys (one in need of a diaper change) on the couch in front of the TV tuned to PBS.  They weren’t really watching it, because they were playing games on our iPad.

Who knew that the best feature of iPad games like 100 Rogues and Plants vs Zombies was the one that lets parents both sleep in an extra hour?

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Signs that your Saturday morning is not moving very fast

Signs that your Saturday morning is not moving very fast…

You’re lying in bed, almost dead to the world, at 9am, three and a half hours after you first got up.  Your oldest son has proclaimed you are one of the walls to his pillow spaceship.  Your youngest is lying on top of you, scratching your stubble, and saying “I like-a your beard, daddy!  I like-a your beard.” And you’re not in any hurry to change this situation.

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Just another great Saturday morning

The leaves from the tree drooped over the sidewalk.  “Low bridge!  Low bridge!” I proclaimed, as I sped up slightly and pretended to get eaten by the canopy of branches.

The boys laughed, delighted.  Jack had chosen “sit” and Peter “stand” in our sit-and-stand stroller, making the front-weighted contraption harder to steer.  But both boys were happy without the help of treats or snacks or toys.  As long as that was true, they could ride upside-down, as far as I was concerned.

This was my wife’s final birthday present: “Tomorrow morning I want to sleep until I’m ready to wake up.”  I figured 10 o’clock should about do it.  It was a quarter till 10.  We had dined on garishly pink very berry muffins (their favorite), and a sausage-and-egg sandwich on a french toast bagel (mine).  It was only 9am after that, so then we walked to Wal-Mart to do some shopping… and stalling.  After all, I only needed a gallon of whole milk.  And another 30 minutes.

Jack turned and started another one of his let’s-play-a-game mixtures of reality and imagination.  “Let’s pretend that those leaves electrocute you.”

“Okay,” I replied, and proceeded to jiggle and made a bzzzzzzing noise like I had 1.21 gigawatts coursing through me.  More smiles.

“And when you get electro… electrocuted, you lose two mushrooms.”

Hmmmm.  Two mushrooms… not two hearts?  We had been playing lots of Lego Star Wars on the Wii, and he had asked to play before I shuffled them all out of the house so we could walk to the bagel place for breakfast.  “Dontcha mean two hearts, Jack?”  Nope.  Two mushrooms, he said adamantly.  Ahhh.  I remembered that we were looking at Super Mario Galaxies 2 when we wandered to the electronics part of the store.  And Lego Harry Potter.  And Lego Batman.  And a host of other games that elicited can-I-have-that begging.  So mushrooms were on the brain.

To the side of the stroller, the new $30 DVD player bounced atop the wheels.  I hiked up the bag a little bit.  Didn’t want to damage this one… as it was replacing the controller-less one we were using now.  You know, to substitute for the previous $30 one we destroyed.  Like the milk, the DVD player had become a necessary ingredient of parenting.

Peter decided he, too, would sit, making it a sit-and-sit stroller.  I liked this better, because now I could see his smiling eyes over the binky in his mouth.  We approached some overgrown grass shadowing the sidewalk.  I asked, “Will those electrocute me too?”

“No.  Those don’t count.”

The orange juice bottles rattled as the divisions in the sidewalk went kachunk kachunk kachunk beneath the stroller.  It was a pretty nice day for a walk.  Despite the wrestling and under-the-table shenanigans that told me It Was Time To Leave at the bagel place, they had been pretty good boys.  I almost regretted not buying them any of the please-can-I’s from Wal-Mart, but really, they have enough stuff.

Jack said something to me, but I couldn’t hear it over Peter’s look-at-me’s and the cars whizzing by.  I asked him to repeat it as we turned off the busy street.

“– don’t count…” he was urging me.  “Don’t count?” I repeated, puzzled.  “You don’t want me to count?  Like 1, 2, 3, 4, 5?”

Peter, looking up again at me with his binky-suppressed grin, covered his eyes in an approximation of a game of hide and seek.  “1, 2, 3, 4, 5!” he exclaimed, remembering us playing at The Cove picnic yesterday.

Jack clarified.  “Noooo… I said, the weeds don’t count!  You don’t lose any mushrooms if you touch them.”

“Ohhhhh…” I smiled as we continued on.  We passed some more weeds, and Jack reversed his decision.  He often does.  The back story or rules often develop as time goes on.

“If you touch these weeds, you’ll lose 1 heart,” he said.  Suddenly mushrooms were out; hearts were in.

Peter bounced happily in his seat, and told me, in his best Italian, “You lose-a one heart.  You lose-a the heart.”  Many of Peter’s sentences these days sound vaguely Italian: phrases like “he like-a me” or “I make-a you laugh” or “you move-a over” or “these shorts no fit-a me.”

“I thought you said the weeds didn’t count.”

“No.  THESE weeds by our house count.  THOSE weeds back there don’t count.”  With Jack, there’s always an explanation or a rationale, however small.

Peter looked up at me with a tinge of sadness and said, “I lose-a heart tooooooooo.”  To continue this frequent call-and-response, I echoed him. “You’re going to lose a heart, too?”  He finished the litany appropriately with a trademark “Yeahhhhhhhh.”

Almost home.  No cars on this street, our own delightful cul-de-sac.  Peter hops out of the back of the sit-and-stand stroller because he has dropped his binky on the street.  I retrieve it for him and he pops it back into his mouth, earning an “ewwwww” from Jack.  “That’s dirty, Dad, he di’n’t even wash it!  He put it right back in his mouth.”  I agreed with Jack, saying, “It’s like he licked the pavement.  Yuck.”  Peter might have caught on to some of this, because when I motioned for him to give me the binky he gave it up without a fuss.

Now Jack had escaped from his perch in the front of the stroller.  “Let’s race, Dad!  You can’t catch me!”  Peter immediately chimed in, “Can’t catch-a me!”  The two began running down the newly christened racetrack of a street.

I chased them down the street as a lazy stray cat watched us in disgust.  We were a little sweaty when we finally made it home, me always moderating my pace so as not to pass Peter, and Jack always holding up and waiting for us to reach him.  Soon we were home, and we sprawled into the kitchen and the den as I put away the milk and began unpacking the DVD player.  Upstairs my wife was just starting to stir.  Just another great Saturday morning.

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Worst. Morning. Evah.

Every morning has its snags.  This particular one last Monday, however, reached comical proportions.

We had just come back from a weekend stay at my uncle-in-law’s Cape House.  I’ve often found that after a vacation, however small, the boys are out of sorts upon their return.  I thought a night in their own beds would help.  It didn’t.

Peter woke up too early, at 5:50am.  Not deadly in and of itself.  He started demanding things.  “I want tea!”  “I want Backyardigans!”  Reminders to remember his please’s were grudgingly accepted.  Jack came downstairs shortly thereafter and started the same routine.  I offered them breakfast but they just wanted tea.  Since the exterminator was coming over at 8am to take care of a mouse problem, Katherine was awake early and offered to take on breakfast while I showered.  Exterminator arrives, throwing more chaos into the mix as Katherine serves breakfast and the boys just want to follow him around.

Eventually, Jack wolfed down most of his egg, but Peter refused to eat.  As usual, I was able to get Peter to eat by pretending to steal the food from my plate and eat it myself, which prompts him to eat it off my fork before it gets to my mouth.  While I was helping Peter eat breakfast, a hyperactive Jack danced over and grabbed my fork-hand.  I stabbed Peter in the cheek with my fork.  Ouch!  Upset that I had hurt the now crying Peter, and angry at Jack, I snapped at him: “What are you doing?!  You have to be more careful!  You hurt Peter.”

Then things began to snowball.

Whenever Jack does something wrong, and he knows he did something wrong, and he wishes he could take it back… he blows up.  Jack, clearly scared about having hurt Peter, and upset that I yelled at him, melted down.  Crying, grabbing hold of Mama, and wailing, Jack was inconsolable as I tried to calm him down and apologize for yelling.  Peter, meanwhile, with no actual holes in his cheek, stopped crying and continued eating breakfast.  At this point Jack decided that he did NOT want to go to the gym, that he wanted to stay home — not an option with Katherine’s workout and the exterminator.

We focus on just getting them out of the house so Katherine can make it to the gym with them.  (A sitter watches them in a room filled with toys they don’t have at home while Katherine works out.  It’s pretty much a win for everybody.)   We wrestle Peter into the car.  While we’re packing up gym bags, cleaning the kitchen, and getting shoes on, an almost calm Jack comes back into the kitchen.  “Look at my hair,” he beams.  He’s decided that putting silly putty in his hair would be funny.  It’s actually more like gum.  We spend 5 minutes trying to pull the silly putty out of his hair using an ice cube while Jack begins howling, realizing there’s nothing funny about this any more.  We debate whether to cut any of his hair but decide just to leave the last bit of silly putty in there.  Sheesh!

We coax Jack into the car… only 30 minutes later than we planned to leave the house!  And can’t find Katherine’s earbuds for her ipod.  She kinda needs them for the workout.  We spend 15 minutes scouring the house while the kids moan in the car.  Jack gets fruit roll-ups to calm him down, which means now Peter wants some too.  FINALLY we find them (in her purse which was in the car.  Sigh!  It’d be funny if it were someone else, right?)  As I take care of the exterminator paperwork, Katherine backs out of the driveway and punches the accelerator, the wails of still unsatisfied Peters and putty-haired Jacks heard like a train’s Dopplering whistle through the car’s open windows as she speeds off.

(The rest of the day improved, at least!)

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Overheard just before I got a pant and another clothe for Jack

This morning, I overheard a conversation from the den.  It showed both how a Jedi trains his little brother Padawan, and the reverse of words like “foots,” “go’ed”, and “gooses.”

— Peter!  Peter!  Let’s read some more.  Okay.  What’s that, Peter?

— I dunno…

— It’s pod racing.  See, these are pod racers.  They go really fast.  Now Peter!  Peter!  Who’s that, Peter?

— Boba Fett!

— No, that’s Jango Fett.  Boba Fett is green and brown.  <page turn> Okay, who’s that?

— I dunno…

— That’s an alien.  He’s the same… the same specie … the same specie as Jar Jar Binks.

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