Month: May 2010

I was playing with Lego’s with the boy tonight for awhile. My Mom dug them out of their storage spot back home and offered them up. Fortunately, the space based Lego’s were separate from the rest. He immediately latched onto them and hasn’t looked back. I’ve been building different spaceships to try and encourage his new habit.

Alas, the lass also likes to play with them. Unfortunately, she doesn’t take care of them and she’s already misplaced some pieces that are used to make a rocket. I told her she couldn’t play with the Lego’s until she’d found the pieces. She spent about 10 minutes looking, 9-and-a-half of which consisted of me saying “Having you looked in —?”

Finally, she declared “Daddy, I don’t really want to play with the Lego’s.”

They say water always finds the path of least resistance. I wonder what that makes her?

She then disappeared upstairs. After a few minutes, I asked the boy to go a see what she was up to. He came back downstairs and said she was sleeping under her bed and that I had to see her.

After a few more minutes, it was bedtime, so we cleaned up the Lego’s and then went upstairs. Sure enough, she was under her bed, fast asleep. I never realized how much room is under the bed. The Wife has a bed skirt on her bed which serves to make the spot a great fort.

She was curled up under the head side of the bed, with a blanket and pillows. She had her Horton (as in the Dr. Seuss elephant) tucked under her arm. There were a couple of books under the bed with her.

I considered throwing a blanket over her and leaving her there, but decided if she woke up disoriented in the middle of the night there would be hell to pay. So I pulled her out by her feet, hoisted her into bed, placed her blanket next to her and tucked Horton under her arm. She pulled him in tight to her. Other than that, she barely stirred.

Nothing like a cozy nook to fall asleep in.

The boy is filling up buckets with water at the moment. The hose he’s using has a multi-flow nozzle on it and all the settings are labeled; for instance ‘shower’ or ‘mist’.

One of the times he started filling up the bucket, he said “I’m going to switch it to ‘slobber’.” I laughed and looked at the setting on the nozzle- which read, as I suspected it would, ‘soaker’. This setting has no pressure behind it and the water just gushes out the end of the nozzle.

He had misread the word and I helped correct him. But afterwards I told him I preferred his original version. He liked that.

Maybe you had to be there…

BTW- He’s on the deck with the hose, I came in the house briefly to write this up. I keep the EEE far from him and water nowadays.

I’m sitting here trying to simply explain the He-man universe to the boy. When I was growing up we had the cartoons and my parents humored us by getting us most of the action figures and accessories. My brother and I played with them constantly- creating and destroying worlds. Even today, it’s still second nature to me. I imagine it’s the same for the brother.

The boy doesn’t have that reference to work with- so he’s sitting here fascinated by Castle Greyskull wondering how it came into being. He’s wondering what’s so special about He-man. I explain that He-man is super strong and can punch through walls. The boy wants to know if he can fly- I tell him no. Then he sits back and ponders the windows and doors in Castle Greyskull and concludes that He-man must have punched through those and how can a toy actually break rock?

So then I explain that it’s all in the imagination. That when he’s playing his toys are only limited to what he thinks they can do. That’s it’s pretend and that he can build his own universe and rules. That it’s important for him to have an imagination so that he’ll be able to look at problems and dream up solutions to them.

He turns and stares at the castle and ponders my words now.

All of this is over his head right now, but someday it won’t be.

One behavior I’ve noticed in the kids that quickly drives me to drink is the tattle-tailing. It would be one thing if we got useful updates like “The boy is lighting the curtains on fire!” or “The lass is dipping the dog’s tail in milk and flour!” or “She’s drawing a picture on the couch in permanent ink!”

These are, you know, useful pieces of information that I can act on.