January 7 - January 27
Happy Arabic New Year to you all! Since we are officially starting the New Year here on Monday, I thought I would begin by working on one of my New Year’s resolutions: writing a family blog. The nice thing about having two new years in January three weeks apart is that by the time the second one comes around, you can scratch off all of the resolutions you now realize you never had any intention of keeping, and you can get a bit more realistic. For example, my earlier resolution of working out at the gym everyday has been replaced by a program of daily deep breathing with an occasional pushup. No sense setting yourself up for failure has always been my motto.
Okay, so other than Rich becoming the designated jerk of the month in the local tabloid here, (a fact that he is a perhaps just a little too proud of), we are doing really well. Amy has started a new semester teaching American Literature at the American University here, and has already broken the bad news to her students that the readings on the syllabus are not merely “suggestions,” as they had heretofore supposed. Christian and Henry have seen more of their daddy this month, and Rich and I had a chance to take up a new hobby: mosaic making. It’s basically using a really big pair of pliers to crush up a perfectly good ceramic tile into thousands of tiny pieces, and then gluing them back together again on top of a piece of wood. Okay, it’s not quite that lame, but for a craft-challenged individual like myself, I have much vested in making fun of projects that I will either never finish or never even start. It looks like this project will take at least a good third of my lifetime to finish, after which it will find a nice home in either the mudroom or the back of the garage. Rich’s piece, on the other hand, is coming along quite nicely. At least he can’t cross-stitch better than I can, or should I say at least he can’t cross-stitch at all?
Henry is making some great verbal progress. His newest addition to his two word-vocabulary is “yeah,” spelled, “yeeaah.” He has realized that it is an appropriate response after anyone’s voice goes up at the end of a sentence. The problem is he has no idea what the question is, so it’s hard for him to know when “yeah” is actually a valid response: Henry, do you want to eat bugs? “Yeeaah.” Henry, is that a rhinoceros? “Yeeaah.” Henry, do you want us to beat you within an inch of your life? “Yeeaah.” He also knows uh-oh and uh-uh (meaning no), and he always shakes his head back and forth for emphasis on that one just to make sure we know he doesn’t want whatever it is he’s being offered. Henry is also becoming master shape-sorter and pan banger. His favorites toys are old batteries, broken flashlights (well, they didn’t used to be broken), and a variety of recyclable garbage (you know, old milk cartons, crushed up boxes of breakfast cereal, empty cans of cream of mushroom soup, etc.). If he lives to be three, he’s going to have one heck of an immune system.
Henry has also officially become the newest member of the biped family, as he now prefers walking to crawling and has the scrapes to show for it. One of his favorite activities is taking all the cushions off of the couches in the living room (with a lot of help from his older brother, of course), scattering them around the room, and then flinging himself over the back of the sofa onto the metal springs below. I’m not sure why this seems like so much fun or even a good idea, but I guess that’s the workings of the male toddler mind.
Speaking of the older brother, Christian is becoming very helpful when it comes to Henry. He feeds Henry all the stuff he doesn’t like on his own dinner plate (which is almost everything that is on there), and he loves to turn out the lights and turn on the musical bear in Henry’s crib (courtesy Alicia and Garry) when Henry is going to sleep. I think it gives Christian great satisfaction to see and/or force Henry to do all the things that he doesn’t want to do. He’s going to make a damn fine parent one of these days.
Christian is also learning a lot about the adult world. He has started to catch on to mommy and daddy’s tricks to evade his requests. For example, in order to discourage him from asking us to get all the adult games down for him to rummage through and make a mess with, we used to tell him that those games were boring. Now, whenever he wants to play with them, he tells us that he wants to play the boring game re re bad. He is developing quite a collection of bedtime stories and loves to be read to. Even though he is very good at keeping the variety coming in general, he often gets stuck on those annoying books you bought at that garage sale because they were only 25 cents, and demands to read those night and day. A good example is the Muffin family books where Maxi and his little sister Minni get into scrapes that Mommi and Poppi help them out of using good old fashioned Christian values with a less than subtle emphasis on traditional gender roles. While Poppi only looks at Maxi’s messy room, delivers a sarcastic response, throws up his hands, and walks away, Mommi is the one who, while putting away Maxi’s shirts she just ironed, is stuck with actually doing something about the pigsty. It’s times like this that I realize 25 cents was an outrageous price to pay for a book that merely mimics the reality of own family dynamic. The bright spot of this book is listening to Christian come up with variants on Maxi’s name since he can’t really say the letter X. (My favorite is Masksi—it’s like ski mask, only backwards.)
Christian is learning a lot in primary class on Sundays as well. When we asked him who made his body on the way home from church last week, he thought about it for a minute, and then said, “somebody else.” His obsession with motorbikes continues to be fed by a month-long fair at the nearby park complete with motorized motorbikes and a tire-lined mototrack. He keeps telling us that when he grows up he is going to put a helmet and gloves on and ride his motorbike, and we keep saying, “over our dead bodies.” Henry responds with, “Yeeah.” He is also becoming a brave little zip-line rider and waterslide patron.
Okay, that’s about it for all of us. Hope you all are doing well. Our movie quote is in response to Iran’s latest crazy kook and his kookish ideas and claims.
“Well, you have got to be the toughest, talkin’ blowhard I ever heard.” “Support Your Local Sheriff”