The life of the keyboard

Pete has started typing words on our desktop computer: he does "PETER" and "MAMA" and "PAPA" without prompting, and he's working up some others. He is learning to write those words as well, but typing is easier, of course, given that he knows how to spell them. This all has made me wonder whether for him, a child of 2005, it would be possible to skip writing altogether and just learn to type. (For the thought experiment, set aside the process of learning handwriting in schools.) Will most of his school assignments be on computer? In how many jobs would anyone even notice if he couldn't write by hand? I'm guessing that electronic note-taking will be utterly routine by the time he reaches working age.

This fantasy may stem from my own struggles with handwriting as a kid. Boo, penmanship.

Thinking big

We finally got around to swapping Pete's crib and changing table out of his room to give him his own twin bed, known as the big boy bed. He's been excited about the idea for a while. After we put the bed in his room on Wednesday, Carolyn told Pete that we had a big surprise waiting for him at home. "Is it a sucker?" asked Pete. "No," said Carolyn, "it's much bigger than that." Pete: "Is it a big sucker?"

A subtle pronoun shift pays off for Pete

Carolyn finished her dissertation, and thus her doctorate, yesterday. Congratulations to Dr. Mama! The previous evening, as Pete got into his bath, we had this conversation.

Pete: Is mama here?

Erik: No, she's in Philadelphia.

Pete: Why?

Erik: You know why. Why is mama in Philadelphia?

Pete: She's finishing her DISS-PERTATION! When she finishes, she can have
candy! When she finishes her diss-pertation, she can have candy! When
she finishes her diss-pertation, WE can have candy!

You know how this ends.

Pete is accustomed to getting a complimentary lollipop when we check out at the grocery store. Today the cashier kindly offered him a balloon, which Pete accepted. When he gradually realized he had gotten the balloon instead of the lollipop, he got a little sad, and I wasn't sure whether he was going to descend into tears or not. When we got into the car, he was still teetering on the verge. No sucker. But balloon! But no sucker. And yet, balloon! Then the balloon popped.

Many many photos

My goodness, it's been a long time since I linked to photos. Sorry.

Here are updated Pete pictures, with hundreds posted since the last update here.

I have no idea how to title this post.

Pete, in the tub, just now, totally unprompted: "Plop goes your heart when you come to the end of your lollipop."

Hail no

Pete and I left dissertating Carolyn behind to go on Pete's first camping trip--and my first tent camping trip since college--last Friday, with a family of friends. Unfortunately, the weather killed off one of our two nights; we got caught in a nasty hailstorm on our bikes, and the forecast told us to head back to Iowa. The feeling of squishing the wet and icy bike helmet back onto my head to finish the ride (after we found shelter for the worst of it) is burned on my poor brain. In spite of the setbacks, though, it was a remarkably good time, and the kids held up beautifully. It made me think that there might be hope for us as a camping family yet, even though neither Carolyn and I grew up campy.

Freedom isn't free

from Carolyn

I was getting dressed this morning while Erik was dressing Pete. I heard Pete suddenly scamper down the hall and down the stairs. My Motherhood Superpowers told me that this was the scampering of a not-fully-dressed child. Pete exuberantly hollered back, "I'm free, Papa! I'm free!"

(On the other hand, he's currently in bed, howling, "Mama, come back" over and over, so clearly his freedom has its limits.)

Pete becomes a character in a bad rodeo movie

Erik: Pete, let's get you in the tub so you can finish your bath and say goodbye to grumpy.

Pete: Hold on, Papa. I'm suckin' on my juice.

Boy writes name, receives feedback

A few months ago, my son (who turned three in January) wrote his name for the first time. As a teacher of writing, I thought it appropriate to give him some comments. Here follow the image and my response.



Assignment: Writing Your Name
Peter Simpson
Introduction to Reading and Writing
April 2008


Dear Pete,


Congratulations on writing your name for the first time! You have done an excellent job learning the three letters necessary for completing this assignment, and you wrote them in sequence with only minimal supervision and guidance from Mama. She and I are both proud of you, and we hope you look back on this as one of the highlights of your three-year-old year.

I also have some suggestions you might consider as you continue writing your name in the future—as I would encourage you to do, given this promising beginning. The first point involves spacing. As you know, you ran out of room on this sheet of paper after the first three letters, so you had to make the final “e” next to the initial “p.” It would be better to plan out the spacing of your words in advance to avoid confusing the reader. Also, most readers and editors will expect any capital “e” to have exactly three horizontal lines. Drawing many more horizontal lines on each “e” is fine if you are writing for Mama and me, but when composing for a wider audience, try to stick to three. Along the same lines, you seem at this point to be capitalizing the letters “p” and “e” but not “t”; I would suggest either capitalizing all your letters or only the initial “p,” to make either “PETE” or “Pete.” If you want to know which of those two forms is preferable for a given piece, consult your teacher or editor. Finally, though I certainly understand your desire to reduce your spending on school supplies, especially since you will not even get an allowance for some years yet, I do think you’ll find that readers prefer letterhead or plain white writing paper to hotel stationery. Mama or I can show you where to find such paper at home.

Do not let these details overwhelm my main point, Pete: you have done very well with this assignment, and I sincerely look forward to seeing what other words you will write soon. Nice work!


Best,


Professor Simpson (Papa)

So that's what they do behind the cameras

from Carolyn

Pete asks for an adventure every night, and tonight we went over and had a picnic on campus, about half a block from the house. And then we went with Pete to hit balls with his new baseball bat on Mac Field. Pete was getting creative--stepping away to let "another batter" hit, etc. At one point he walked over to the left of the "plate" and said he was "going where the baseball players live" "behind the gate"--i.e., to the dugout. Erik and I played catch, waiting for him to decide it was his turn to hit again, and when I looked over a minute later, his pants and underwear were around his ankles and he was peeing on the grass.

I just hope it's not mildew.

from Carolyn

Pete in the dark at 4:30 this morning: "Mama, there is something huge on the ceiling. [whispers ominously] It eats boys."

You have to admit he's communicating clearly

Another one from Pete, who is on a roll:

Pete: Mama Mama Mama!

Erik: Pete, Mama's busy right now. Can I help you?

Pete: Yes.

Erik: OK! What can I do for you?

Pete: Get Mama.

The boy needs work on pronoun referents

This morning:

Pete: I'm going to tell you a story, Papa. It's called "The Cereal Goes into the Owie on My Finger."

Erik: How does the story go?

Pete: It goes into my finger. And then it feels better.

I think I was in the other room hoping you were asleep.

I just walked into Pete's room, about ten minutes after he went to bed, because he was yelling for me to do our ritual of cuddling for a second in a rocking chair before counting to ten and blasting off (lots of rocket sounds) into his bed. Upon my arrival, Pete gave me this monologue:

I was being silly in my crib (pron. "cri-buh").
I thought my pillow was a cabinet.
I thought my pillow was a cabinet with lots of toys in the drawers.
I was PRETENDING my pillow was a cabinet.
I think you were in the cabinet, Papa!

Four items, no unifying clever title

1. He's utterly obsessed with books. I mean, one wants kids to like books, right, but he's relentless, especially now that he's discovered the wonder of getting a whole new batch of library books every week. I can step back and think objectively how cool this is. But I admit that there are also times when I want to give him a Clifford video or a donut so he'll give the reading a break already.

2. Lest #1 seem a bit of insufferable puffery of little Pete's intellectual ambition, consider this point as well. He was counting something a few days ago--coffee scoops, I think--and made it up to fifteen. I took the opportunity to talk him through the late teens, and then he remembered twenty, and I told him about the twenties. Then I explained thirty and, getting increasingly excited, told him that if he figures out how the twentys and thirtys work, he'll be able to do hundreds of numbers in no time at all! Pete mulled that over for a minute and responded, "I want to play basketball."

3. This is less a Pete story than a humanity story. Pete got a new race car from a box of Cheerios a couple of days ago. He played with it for a little bit, then went upstairs and came back down. He said, referring to his established race car collection, "I put it with the other ones, and now there are ten." There's nothing unusual about that sentence in the conversation of Pete and his peers, but it blew me away that the human mind goes from no language to that kind of complexity in such a short time. The sentence involves space, numbers, time, categorization, agency, two kinds of pronouns. I've probably said this before, but the most of the things that amaze me about early development are the ordinary ones.

4. Pete has developed a completely diabolical strategic sense. For example, if he gets a little scrape on his knee, he will want a Band-Aid on it. When he was younger, he would want the Band-Aid right away. Now he waits. The rest of the day passes, then bedtime books, then getting in bed, then saying good night. 15 minutes later, he demands the Band-Aid. Knowing we won't refuse him that (or a couple of other key things like trips to the potty), he has saved it all day so that he has the right ammo for disrupting the bedtime routine and avoiding sleep. We have begun to evolve countermeasures, but he's winning the battle in a rout.

Yeah, well, so's Dick Cheney!

Pete, last night, upon pausing suddenly while getting his toy dinosaurs out of the bathtub: "Papa, do you KNOW? A spoon is a tool!"

Perhaps it goes without saying, but we have no idea where that came from.

Easter balls

Video update: a year ago, we brought you Pete watches airplanes. Behold the transition from phrases to stories! This year, Pete talks about Easter weekend.

I always wondered what that sounded like.

Just now, Pete was playing in the bathtub with some toys, and he started making an odd groaning sound. "Pete, what's up?" I asked. "Are you all right?" Referring to his little sponge dinosaurs, he replied, "They're just talking about their mamas."

Invention

Pete continues to love rhyming. Today at breakfast, he announced, "I found a rhyme in my bed!" It was a triple rhyme, even: stair and scare came first, then chair. So proud was Pete of himself that, contrary to his usual joy in compiling as many rhymes as possible, he proceeded to deny that anything else rhymes with those words. Bear, we asked? Or hair? Not today, mama and papa. Not today.

No, it's not a euphemism for death

Pete is now a three-year-old. (Incidentally, because Pete was born on inauguration day, that means the current Presidency also turned three on Sunday.) He had a wonderful birthday: he loved seeing his little friends, he loved his presents, he loved his amazing 17-car train cake from his grandparents, he loved his new fire truck and bath drums. Good thing, too, because none of us had much energy in reserve: he stayed up howling until midnight the night before and got up at six, leaving us with about four hours of sleep. In the morning, to try to get him to settle, I whisked him through the ten-below cold into the car, and we drove parallel to the rising sun until he slept just a little more--a nap that probably got us all through the day. Now, when we get in the car each cold morning, he asks whether we're taking the sleepy ride.

Using your book-learning to vex your father

This morning, after Pete had been rustling in his bed for a little while, he yelled to me, "I WANT TO GET UP!" I walked across the hall and opened his door. When I entered the room, he whimpered, "but not yet!"

(If you get Pete's Augustinian allusion without clicking on the link, bully for you.)

To the minute

from Carolyn

Pete took his first breath almost exactly three years ago (10:00 p.m.). He's really really great. I've been feeling amazingly fortunate all day. He and I even took a nap together this afternoon--something that only happened a handful of times back when he was an infant. Oh, Sweety P, we love you so much.

Not if you know what's good for you, monster.

We've back from visiting my parents, and Pete has again prompted
Pete to great leaps with language. He's really into rhyming and
stories. At first, he loved having me and Carolyn tell whatever story
we could make up, usually with Pete himself at the center of the
action. Now he constantly injects his own plot events, the majority of
which involve the arrival of new, scary characters. "And then a
monster came!" he volunteers. "And then the witch came
back!"

You can bet that those monsters and witches end up regretting the
day they messed with little Pete Simpson.

In retrospect, it seems a turning point in the primary campaign

Pete and Barack gave each other some (disputed) type of "five." They discussed a "high five" in the seconds before it occurred, Pete then offered what I'd call a "low five." Obama, after returning with an appropriate reciprocal gesture, referred to the interaction as a "soft five," and Pete referred to it this morning as a "small five."

Knowing your station in life

Something put Pete in mind of Space Shuttles this morning. After
noting the shuttles' salient features--wings, huge nose--he paused and
declared, "I'll be astronaut." Carolyn immediately pointed
out the wisdom of this ambition: space exploration is probably the most
prestigious profession that allows, and even requires, the wearing of
diapers.

When parents overestimate their children's readiness for public events

from Carolyn

Whoops. The first note of a percussion ensemble concert tonight did Pete in. He then inserted his own solo during the otherwise deep silence: "I want to goooooo!" Sorry about that, percussionists.

No connection with the voters, no nomination

from Carolyn

The phone rang last night, and it was a recorded message from Chris Dodd. Pete ran over, clammering to talk on the phone. So I handed him the receiver, saying, "It's Chris Dodd." Using one of his most friendly voices, Pete said, "Hi, Chris Dog!" Then a pause. Then, again very engaging, "Hi, Chris Dog!" Then a quizzical look at me, since Chris Dog wasn't pausing in his monologue to say Hi back.

Limits

Pete's favorite number has long been five. He insists that he has
five grandparents, for instance, and this evening he wanted to go to
five restaurants for dinner. He recently decided in the singing of
"Take Me Out to the Ballgame"--a frequent event here--that it
is, in fact, FIVE strikes you're out at the old ball game. I think we
have a healthy sense of the value of imagination over undue literalism,
but come on! Three strikes. Three. Carolyn is with me on this
one.

Let me tell you a tale of the upper Midwest ...

Pete has started to love "stories,"
whether established (we can struggle through a passable Goldilocks or
Three Little Pigs) or made up. I've been using a formula I think I got
from Adam Gopnik's brilliant essay "The Rookie" (about
telling stories to his son): make the main character like the kid and
throw a bunch of obstacles in for drama. Every evening, Little Petey
Fish tries to make it up a stream to find a sandwich (obstacles: log
and rapids, overcome by alliances with frog and salmon, respectively).
Or, in a Carolyn creation, Pete gets a family of ducks off a runway
using duck food from the zoo, thus rescuing a family vacation. Pete
loves this stuff, to the extent that stories even capture his attention
and calm him when he's really upset about something (e.g., having to
get out of the bath). Last week, Carolyn told me she had asked Pete
to tell his own story, but he just named a bunch of things from our
stories--the ducks and so on. Said Carolyn, in totally unironic
disappointment, "It was completely derivative." Little Petey
Fish meets a tough crowd!



During Carolyn's current absence, Pete understands perfectly that
Carolyn is in a place called Cleveland "running a
convention"--a phrase he has allowed me not to explain very
thoroughly. I hope this week doesn't give him a lasting,
little-understood aversion to northern Ohio.

Lit theory moment: language fills the gap left by the absent mother

Carolyn is running her convention in Cleveland until Sunday. Night
one of solo parenting is in the books with only a little crying from
Pete. He's gotten very good at saying "Cleveland."

Love and candy

This was Pete's first real Hallowe'en--the first time he was able
to anticipate the event, to know what he was going to be, to leave the
house.

He was Tigger. We got a great costume from a consignment store in
Davenport. Pete loved the idea and had been willing to roar and bounce
for weeks. When I picked him up from school yesterday, he was all set
to get into the holiday mood.

Then, a setback. We wanted to have a quick dinner before heading
out, but Pete was unwilling to eat. This would be normal for many
preschoolers, but it's very strange for him. It was the first sign
that he was uncertain about the whole business. But all went well when
first trick-or-treater--the older daughter of the family next
door--arrived at our house dressed as Carmen (as in Bizet). Pete came
with us to talk to her and seemed to like doing so.

Then, a big setback. The younger neighbor girl, Ryn, arrived in a
ghost mask. Nothing fancy, but Pete was truly spooked. He hopped into
my arms and hung on HARD. Fortunately, Ryn is very sweet and was in no
hurry, so she stayed for a few minutes, mask off, and talked to Pete.
Pete seemed able to separate his fear of the mask from his affection
for Ryn--he cheerfully waved and said, "Bye, Ryn!" between
bouts of cowering--but he wasn't getting over the fright anytime soon.

Back to dinner, with Pete now uncertain about the whole costume
business. The highlight of this time was not directly Hallowe'eny.
Pete and I were sitting at the table.

Pete: Mama's a sgurrial.
Erik: Mama's a squirrel?
Pete: Mama's a guirrel.
Erik: Mama's a girl?
Pete: Uh-huh! I love girls!

This is an instance of Pete's very recent tendency to declare his
loves. As far as I know, the first such declaration came last weekend
in Kansas City, during one of Pete's rare exposure's to cable TV--in
this case, the Food Network.

Pete: What's her name?
Erik, seeing Rachel Ray on the screen: That's Rachel.
Pete: I love her!

Talk about screen presence. No wonder Rachel Ray is a very wealthy
woman.

Anyway, we eventually coaxed Pete into the Tigger costume because
his fear of other costumes was temporarily conquered by his hope that
he himself would be scary.

We went around the neighborhood trick-or-treating, a process that
consisted mostly of our carrying a mildly anxious Pete to the doors of
people we knew. Another child in a mask caused another mild panic, but
everything went pretty well overall, and Pete gained confidence as he
went along. At most places, he was willing to bounce (like Tigger) or
roar or say "trick or treat"--sometimes before, sometimes
after lunging for the candy bowl. He did pretty well with saying thank
you and being generally sweet.

After trick-or-treating, it was clear that we had to work through
the frights. Pete talked about the scary masks many times, and then,
in his bath, he pretended to put on a scary mask himself. We would act
properly scared, then he would take it off, and we would express our
relief that the scary creature was just Pete. He repeated this perhaps
a dozen times.

By morning, however, the masks had largely faded from memory. Pete
is now, emphatically, all about the candy.

See how much you like it after the first stomach flu, kiddo.

from Carolyn

We're grandparents! Pete announced to me tonight that he had a baby, and proceeded to cup his hands together around what I gather is a very small baby. He then said, "I put her to bed," and disappeared into his room, turned off the light, and came back to me, hands at his side. "I threw her into bed. [pause] I missed." But he then went and retrieved the baby and gave no indication that she was hurt at all. I asked what her name was, and he wrinkled up his nose, as he does when he's thinking hard. Then his face opened back up with a smile and he said, deliberately, "My . . . Baby." A little later, he went to bed with no trouble, since his baby was there, and seemed to appreciate the little towel I gave him to cover her up. He seems to be adapting to parenthood a lot more smoothly than I did.

Would that all these moments were the reassuring kind

It's a cliche of parenting: parents are first horrified to hear something their child said and then experience a second horror when they realize that their child is just parroting back something that they themselves have said. Luckily, the same type of realization can happen with something really nice:

Pete: Can I have more cereal, please, Mama?
[I put more cereal in his bowl.]
Pete: Thank you! That's awfully nice of you!

I was first really happy about his manners (which aren't always quite that good), and then I realized that I could hear "That's awfully nice of you" in my own voice. It's good to have moments of reassurance that we're doing some things right. As Pete might say, Good job, MamaPapa!

The very special kitchen implement and other stories

from Carolyn

Last night Pete, out of the blue, started jumping on big pillows and hooting [the name of our friend, biology professor] "Jackie Brown! Jackie Brown!" Then he looked at me like he'd had a big revelation and said, "I'm Jackie Brown!" and went back to jumping and hooting.

He's been having trouble getting to sleep this week, and last night he seemed stuck in a bad place--cranky, wanting Erik to come and fly his planes around his crib, thinking he was wet when he wasn't. I decided he needed something to kick him out of the mental bog he was in, so I grabbed a small whisk from the kitchen and brought it up to him. I explained that it was a whisk and that he was going to be in charge of it for the night. I left him marveling at the shape of it, and that was the last we heard from him. Oh, thank you, whisk.

This morning:
Pete [flying a toy airplane around his crib]: Look, mama! Airplane!
Me: Yes!
Pete: There are people on the plane!
Me: Yes!
Pete [suddenly serious, as if he were correcting me]: *Pretend* people, Mama.

Seriously, you could just snap his nose off at any moment

from Carolyn

When Pete really really wants something, and wants you to know he's really serious about his request, he'll come over and in a low voice state his request very firmly right into your mouth. It's sort of the equivalent of getting in someone's face and looking right in their eyes, except several inches lower. Sometimes he holds your cheeks in his hands to make sure he has your attention. Although such moments are very serious to Pete, they always make me laugh. In part because they tickle.

Blog updaKA-BEEP!

Recently, Pete has reached the point of altering the routines he
has mastered to create jokes. For instance, if we ask him a language
question to which he knows the answer, he will often replace part or
all of the answer with "ka-BEEP." So if we ask him the color
of a purple car, he'll say "Purpaka-BEEP" and laugh. And
after learning how to steer one of his cars along the sidewalk when we
push him, he now sometimes steers it suddenly into the grass to shake
things up, again with much laughter.

What they ARE!

Within the standard big developments--picking up language and
movement and such--we see the oddest little developments. A few weeks
ago, Pete started asking about things he saw by saying waving his hands
excitedly, drawing his breath in sharply, and saying "Oooh! What
HAPPENED what they ARE?" The same phrasing would apply for
singular or plural referents, and often remarkably unexciting ones--for
one of many examples, we were walking downtown and had this exchange:

Pete: Oooh! What HAPPENED what they ARE?
Erik: Well, that's a door.

This kind of conversation happened all the time for about ten days,
and poof, no more.

Preparation for The Waste Land

from Carolyn

Pete Takes after His Parents:

Pete is obsessed with his first literary allusion. It's the framed picture on the wall in Goodnight Moon that reproduces in black and white a colorful illustration from Runaway Bunny. He holds both books in his lap, both open to the correct pages, and looks back and forth. He wouldn't hand them over, last night, and I left him in his crib, in a room too dark for him to really see the illustrations, still marveling at seeing a picture long-familiar in once context (the oft-read Goodnight Moon, newly discovered in another (the more-recently-added-to-our-collection Runaway Bunny).

Speaking of Goodnight Moon, Pete is obsessed with the "old lady whispering hush." When I used to read this book to him every night, he never noticed her. But now that we're reading it regularly again, she's the main focus for him. When we're looking at the pages where she doesn't appear, he always (ALWAYS) asks where she is. In some cases, where the picture depicts the room in such a way that she is simply out of the range of the illustration, I point to a place off of the page where she would appear if the illustration were larger. He's started to do that, too. But he's still unnerved about where she is when the book begins (and her chair is vacant) and ends (when it is vacant again). We talk about how she's probably doing the dishes at the end (since that's what I do after I put Pete to bed), and he'll sometimes suggest that's where she is, but I don't think he's convinced. Her comings and goings really seems to puzzle him. Goodnight nobody, indeed.

I think I should write an essay about all the disturbing things about the books we read to Pete. Like Harold and the Purple Crayon. Being and Nothingness for the toddler set is what that is.

I'm just axing!

In today's raised eyebrow category:

Pete's been testing the limits of being aggressive. He knows he's not supposed to hit, but when he's upset at us, he'll form a little fist and press it against, say, one of our arms, with a little push. He'll see if he can get away with that, and then try pushing a little harder, or pressing a little more suddenly. What is hitting, what isn't?

So the other day, he was doing this with (to?) me, and I said: "No, Pete. We don't hit."

He responded: "I not hit. [pause] I drum. [pause] With my ax."

More like it

from Carolyn

Making up for all the axing, Pete, for the first time completely unbidden, said, "I love you, Mama."

Also the phrase "rigor mortis"

from Carolyn

Pete [pointing to a cemetery we're driving past]: Was dat, Mama?

Me [flustered]: Um. It's where people go to remember loved ones.

[pause]

Erik [dryly]: Way to avoid the word "mouldering."

How fetching

Pete and Erik this morning--

Erik: Hey, Pete. I'm going upstairs to get my shoes. Do you want to come with me, or do you want to stay here and play with your cars?

Pete: I get them. I be right back.

Erik (confused--this hasn't happened before): You want to come with me?

Pete (starting up the stairs): You stay here.

Erik: OK. I want the brown ones, all right?

(Pause of about three minutes, punctuated by clunking and clomping upstairs. Pete slowly makes his way back down the stairs, carrying two of Carolyn's white sneakers, which do look like my white sneakers, by his fingers in one hand.)

Pete (on the stairs): I be careful. I have fingers in them!

Erik: Good job!

Pete (at the bottom, handing the shoes to me): Here you go! I did it by self!


Sometimes the most interesting milestones are the ones we never knew to seek.

EVERYTHING.

Scene: friendly conference with Pete's daycare teacher, Stephanie. Erik and Carolyn ask how she organizes lunchtime so we can reinforce the class's little rituals. Stephanie describes how she encourages kids to try everything on their plates before she gives seconds of anything.

Erik: And how does Pete do with that? Does he do all right with fruits and vegetables?

(Stephanie's eyes grow wide.)

Stephanie: Oh. (beat) Pete eats EVERYTHING.

Note the difference between a casual "Oh, Pete eats everything!" and this. It was an expression of a kind of mildly frightened wonder, one I immediately recognized from the comments of previous teachers. And from descriptions of a number of Pete's relatives on both sides.

Mirroring

Pete, on Carolyn's recent placement of some blueberries in his cereal: "Great job!"

Sometimes a cigar . . .

Scene: dining table, lunchtime.

(Pete begins making little waves with his hand and arms.)

Erik: Pete, is that the tuna fish? (referring to a song he knows)
Pete: No.

(Pete switches to a more overhand wave motion.)

Erik: Oh, are you swimming?
Pete: No.

(Pause)

Erik: What are you doing?
Pete: I'm moving my hand!

Changing the old ways

From Carolyn

For years, Erik and I have quoted Trading Places to each other to indicate that we're ready (to eat, to hit the road, to move on to the next thing): "Looking good, Billy Ray" "Feeling good, Louis." We had finished packing up the car to head to the zoo on Sunday, and I was helping Pete get into his car seat. Without thinking about it, I started in: "Looking good, Billy Ray," to which Pete responded (a la his recent response to Erik about his nickname "kitten), "I not Billy Ray. I Pete." True, true.

I not kitten. I blog post.

Pete made a big transition a couple of days ago. He and I had been in the car for a while, and when I got out, I said, "Hey, here we are, kitten!" (That was one of our first nicknames for him when he was born.) He responded, "I not kitten. I Pete."

Baseball and then some baseball, please

Pete has become utterly obsessed with baseball. He has been mildly interested in baseball for a long time, but something clicked when I got a new toddler-sized wiffle ball set for him. We started playing with it about a week ago, and to my surprise, he picked up the basics right away. He started out missing most pitches, and he still misses a lot, but he makes a lot of contact now, and he can handle overhand pitching. He lined a ball at my head yesterday, hard enough to make me flinch. The entertaining parts of this are two:

1) The sheer intensity of his love for hitting. Now when we're at home, every little while, the idea of hitting will come to him, and he begins a relentless campaign: "Hit some baseballs? Hit some baseballs? Hit some baseballs?" He'll make his way to the front door, desperately trying to entice us outside: "Hit some baseballs?" This morning, during one of these episodes, Carolyn said, "Oh, Pete, can you give me a little kiss?" Pete walked to her, put his face up to hers, put a little hand on each of her cheeks, inclined his head slightly to the side, and said, "Hit some baseballs?"

2) Out of nowhere, Pete has made the shift from wanting to play sports to wanting to imitate sports mannerisms, which is much funnier. Jackie Brown's kids taught him to run after he hits a ball; after seeing the Cedar Rapids Kernels play on Friday, he added the step of tossing his bat away with a flourish. The Kernels also seem to have taught him the art of tapping his bat on the outside of the plate before each pitch--Pete now gives his favorite anthill a few gentle whacks. And when we watched the French Open final on Sunday, Pete started swinging his indoor (foam) bat like a tennis racquet and doing Rafael Nadal grunts with each pitch. If you see him and ask him "What does Nadal say?" he'll give you a great little "Ah!"

A hoot

from Carolyn

We saw what I think was a small screech owl on campus yesterday, in the loggia between Clark and Dibble. We were walking through with Pete on our way to Mac Field, and it was just sitting about five feet up on a small pedestal in a corner. It was very exciting to see. ("I scared owl," Pete admitted, although he gave several excited hoots and has retold the story of seeing the owl many times since. I'm starting to think that when Pete says he's scared of something, he really means he's struck by it.) When we passed through again on our way home, the owl had moved to a bike wheel not far from where we had first seen it. Other birds in the area were making a big racket in nearby branches. Maybe because they were unnerved by the owl?

Pete defines the sublime

from Carolyn

We've been walking on campus with Pete most evenings, and we regularly stop in the art gallery in the JRC. We're big fans of the work in there right now (which is part of the draw), but I'm also curious about Pete's reaction, which, every day, is "I scared [of] art." He doesn't really act scared and I can't tell what would be scaring him. I keep hoping he'll elaborate.

Deadeye

from Carolyn

Pete is occasionally hitting shots (into his kid-sized basketball hoop in our livingroom) from about 13 feet. I'm still probably a better shot than he is, but I'm guessing that will change before he turns 4. Maybe even before he turns 3. It may depend on how much I practice this summer.

The song begins.

Pete started singing a couple of days ago, completely out of the blue. I've written before about how sudden these developments are. This time, he went from having never sung a note of the alphabet song to singing almost all of it on his own in two days. This video--a dark and grainy one, alas--captures the transition from passive to active ABCs.

Little blessing

from Carolyn

Pete has developed an occasional timidity (toward big dogs, high slides, sudden noises). As he puts it, when he's apprehensive, "I scary."

Adjectives of scale are still really important to Pete. He's emphatically invested in how big or small things are. Last night, when he was supposed to be sleeping, he sneezed a couple of times. I was in the room with him and so I said, quietly, "Bless you, Pete." His response was to say, in the little high-pitched voice he reserves for small things, "Tiny bless you!"

Big! Airplane!

Here is my YouTube debut. I'm disappointed to discover how much the compression degrades the video quality--it looks vastly better on my computer--but it certainly captures Pete's enthusiastic little self. Before we had a child, I would wonder why people ever ate at certain restaurants, the loud places with mediocre food at prices that would buy you more interesting fare in a quieter setting elsewhere. The answer: because at the loud places, nobody cares when your child mangles his cheeseburger while shouting at the window. This video will show you what I mean. And let me emphasize that you're seeing one continuous shot, the only one I filmed. It's a representative sample.

Airplane!

We got back yesterday from a trip to the DC area to visit friends and family on both sides.

The theme of the trip turned out to be aviation. Not only did we fly with Pete for the first time since he began to understand what airplanes are, but we also went to the new suburban annex of the Air and Space Museum, the downtown air and space museum, and then back to the suburban one! And just when we thought we weren't doing anything related to flying, we went to dinner with my cousin's family in Arlington and found ourselves right under the takeoff route from National. Now Pete regularly tells stories of seeing the Space Shuttle ("huge, huge, huge nose!"), the cool spy plane ("huge, black airplane"), the upside-down airplane, the airplane with teeth, missiles, and the Story of a Flight, with some mix of these components: "Big airplane! Here it goes! Take off! In the sky! Landing!" He had an amazing stamina of excitement for watching takeoffs; the hundredth one occasioned the same enthusiasm as the first. I got a great little video of his commentary that I'll share when I find the right cord to get it off of my camcorder.

Weekend of sick

from Carolyn

We've spent the weekend caring for a Pete who was sicker than I've ever seen him. I haven't left the house since I picked up him early from daycare on Friday, where he had already thrown up once.

Is it awful to admit that Saturday held some real pleasures, even in the midst of Pete being sick? He had a temp all day (104 at the peak) and threw up whenever he tried to eat anything. His only demand, really, was that he get to stay downstairs with us, and so we spent most of the day taking turns cuddling with him on the couch while he dozed and slept. We got to doze and sleep, too, which was heavenly. He's not usually very cuddly, so this was a treat of sorts. We watched a lot of basketball, and I read an entire book, which is unheard of in the era of Pete. When he was an infant and spent a lot of time in my arms, I was suffering from awful pains in my hands and wrists (an unusual syndrome that occasionally plagues nursing mothers), so I couldn't hold a book. But yesterday he was so worn out all day that I could read without him noticing. It was kind of great.

The one very strange thing about this whole episode is that he started adding "eeee" to certain words. "No" became "No-eee" and, similarly, "juice" became "ju-eeese." "Pooh" became "Pooh-eee." "No-eee" in his small little sick voice is pretty heart melting.

Today the fever was gone, but the vomiting continued. And the crankiness began. He still wanted to be held, but couldn't get comfortable, so was unhappy most of the day. Having a throwing-up two-year old is so much better than a throwing-up pre-1-year old, though. 1) the all-milk diet of a little one makes for a unique sort of nastiness. 2) two-year-old Pete is great at throwing up into a container, even when he's not happy about throwing up. "No-eee," he says over and over.

Ice storm!

Yesterday's was the second major ice storm I've seen--the first was a legendary storm in Virginia and elsewhere in 1994. This one was much more localized but much more damaging. We were without power from about noon yesterday until early this morning, and four or five large branches fell on our little property, including one that tore off the side mirror of what Pete calls Papa car. We were very lucky compared to a lot of people, including our next-door neighbors, who have at least a dozen large branches down, some of them huge, and some damage to their fences and perhaps also their deck. We were also very lucky in that we got our heat back overnight when radio reports were warning the outage would take "not hours but days." I walked two blocks last night and saw dozens and dozens of downed branches and a couple of power lines. The amazing thing about ice storms is that the damage is all about having the perfect temperatures for making ice accumulate on surfaces, so they can be ordinary-seeming winter storms, slow and fairly calm. It's like getting hit by a train that has almost stopped. It doesn't look like much, but you don't want to be hit by a train.

We had to get seriously creative about playing with Pete. We were well and truly stuck in our house. Two of the day's highlights:

1. In the morning (before the outage), we persuaded Pete to wear a bib when he refused by putting one on a doll of Shakespeare (a gift to Pete from one of our friends). Background information: Pete's big fabric model of Thomas the Tank Engine was folded flat on the couch.

Erik: Pete, do you want the blue bib?
Pete: No!
Carolyn (knowing this had worked before): OK, we'll have Shakespeare wear the blue bib. (Puts blue bib on Shakespeare, sets Shakespeare on another seat at the table.) Would you like the green bib?
Pete (hesitantly, eyeing Shakespeare): No.
C: Would you like the blue bib?
P: Uh-huh.
(C moves the bib from Shakespeare to Pete.)
(Pete looks at his cereal, thinks. Gets down and walks to the other chair.)
P: Shake speare seepy.
E: Shakespeare's sleepy?
P: Uh-huh.
(Pete takes Shakespeare to the couch.)
P: Move train.
(Pete tosses Thomas to the floor and gently sets the Bard, face down, on the couch.)
P: Shake speare seepy.
(Pete heads back to the table to eat his Kix.)

2. After learning volleyball hits earlier in the week (he now has spotty setting skills and an uncannily good bump technique), Pete turned his attention to baseball yesterday. He started out wanting us to pitch to him--underhand, with puffy balls aimed at where he usually swing--and later in the day decided to pitch to us. He's very good at the step-and-throw pitching motion, and yesterday he decided to extend that to many steps. As you recall, we were inside for many hours, so this had time to develop into its culmination. Carolyn or I would stand with a bat (a toddler maraca) by our front door, with Pete about five feet away. He would consider throwing the ball, then decide to get a head start and run with his quick toddler steps to the adjoining living room. (We have a small house with the kitchen gated off, so this is all the space he has to work with.) Stomp stomp stomp stomp stomp stomp stomp stomp stomp stomp stomp stomp stomp stomp stomp stomp stomp stomp stomp stomp stomp stomp stomp stomp stomp (circling around the dinner table and then getting louder) stomp stomp stomp stomp stomp stomp stomp stomp stomp stomp stomp stomp stomp stomp stomp stomp stomp stomp stomp stomp THROW!

And the pitch would come in from about four feet away, very fast and completely unhittable at that distance. Pete would collapse, laughing, then pick up the ball and start again. Stomp stomp stomp ...

On being overtaken

from Carolyn

For the first time ever, Pete expressed a strong opinion about what clothes he wore this morning. That's why he headed off to school with his Thomas the tank engine pajama top over his blue shirt and crazy striped socks that didn't match anything.

Actually, Pete would point out, as he did to me last night, that his pajama top has pictures of Thomas AND Percy. Where did he learn to distinguish between the two? I hadn't noticed that there were two differently colored trains on the article of clothing, and although I have a general sense that Thomas's friends are different sizes and colors, I wouldn't have been able to identify that Percy was Thomas-sized and red. I've learned a lot from Pete over the (two) years, and he has pointed out a lot to me that I would not have noticed on my own, but this might be the first time that he's concretely known more about a topic than I have.

I still know more letters of the alphabet than he does, though, so he'd better not get too high and mighty.

Pete becomes a toddler

I haven't written much about Pete lately, so as the Super Bowl winds down, I'll try to capture some of what it's been like to watch him pass his second birthday and careen into full-fledged toddlerhood.

We've been struck by how Pete develops in streaks and bursts. For example, he was a little slow to pick up his numbers; he had gotten pretty good at identifying two of something, and he had become fond of five ("Pie!") as a word for more than two. He had said three only sporadically and almost never four. Furthermore, he had never counted, even to two. Last Sunday, we all came downstairs in the morning, and Pete was standing in the kitchen as Carolyn prepared the coffee that would fuel the day. Pete looked around, then, as Carolyn put the scoops of coffee in the filter, said with complete authority, "One! Two! Three! Four! Five!" Or, phonetically, "One! Choo! Fwee! Fo-or! Pie!" And he squealed and clapped and laughed until he fell on his butt.

He's still shaky with three and four, and he still likes shooting balls at his hoop more than counting them--these developments have been complicated and cyclical, but the initial gains can be flashes of lighting. Just as he passed that tipping point from not counting to counting in a night, he later did a somersault out of the blue and began without warning to catch thrown balls; the kid who wouldn't leave our grasp in a swimming pool eight months ago wanted immediately to climb the ladder and jump in by himself this winter. In the last few weeks, Pete has gone from identifying no letters to naming about half the capitals most of the time.

I say these things not to brag about Pete but to wonder at toddlerhood: this is the stuff kids learn at Pete's age, but I find myself endlessly amazed by the way the process plays out, and my favorite part is how--as in the counting breakthrough--Pete takes such joy in the new things he can do.

Oh, a random bit of fun from the last week: Pete continues to love music--playing it as he can (mostly drums and kazoo), listening, watching videos, whatever. Becuase Carolyn's dad plays banjo, that is one of Pete's favorite instruments, so I found him this vidoe of Bela Fleck and the Flecktones. As we watched it together after breakfast a few days ago, Pete started holding his nose and saying, "oooo." Over and over. After watching this for a minute I realized what was happening: Pete was playing harmonica! So we learned that word and looked for other harmonica videos. Excellent.

Quiz question

Though he doesn't get to do it much, Pete likes to watch TV. Though he knows the words for most things he likes that much, he doesn't know the word "TV." He does, however, have a set word for the TV that makes a lot of sense. My guess is that nobody on Plans would have used this word for the TV at Pete's age. What word is it?



(answer coming)




Computer

Pete for THREE!

Pete now hoots "For three!" when he hits one from downtown. He also calls out "Yay, Papa!" or "Almost, Papa" (or "Yay, Pete! and "Almost, Pete!") as appropriate. I think "Almost!" is one of my favorite Pete expressions: he doesn't get down about a ball not going into the basket, he just celebrates its closeness to the basket.

He's also starting to string words together, often when he wants something. He was doing it a lot today: "Mama? Ball? Shoot?" when he wanted me to play, too. "Pete? Out? Snow?"

Tunney, tunney, tunney

From Carolyn

Pete turned two on Saturday. And he will answer you correctly if you ask him how old he is.

He's finally learning colors, or at least learning to tease us by insisting that everything green is blue. He can be quite crafty.

However, I think his repeated proud statements about his "big cup," in which he consistently replaced the final "p" with a "k" sound, were actually innocently spoken.

He traveled very well on our adventures out east, remembering how to sleep in the car and being game for new places to sleep many nights. The saddest moment, though, came the night after we drove through Pennsylvania. Pete loved driving through the tunnels along the Pennsylvania turnpike, and was very sad each time we headed out into the sunlight and left the tunnel behind. He woke up that night crying. Sometimes when he cries at night he's just fussing, but sometimes he's crying for some specific thing. If we can hear him say what he wants--water or his blanket, for instance--we'll go in and give it to him. That night, though, we heard him wimpering "Tunney, tunney, tunney." It took us a few seconds to figure out that he wanted tunnels, something we were unable to provide on the spot.

Companions

from Carolyn

Pete has recently started wanting his blanket with him when we get him out of his crib. And he's also gotten very invested in holding a single wet wipe. ("A one!" he calls it. "A one!" "A one!") So he often heads down in the morning or after his nap with a wipe in one hand and his blanket in the other (often draped around his shoulders so it won't trip him up). That leaves him with no hands free to negotiate the world. Yesterday he just sat looking at his cereal. I had to feed him a couple of bites. Finally he decided to put down the wipe to feed himself, but it took a while. The blanket makes some sense to me, but why does he want to hold the damp clammy wipe?

Giving Thanks

from Carolyn

I was putting a diaper on Pete after his bath tonight, and he burst into a little exposition on the subject of gratitude: "Home, yay! School yay! Thank you, thank you, thank you!" Oh, Sweety P! You're so welcome!

I tried to stump him last night by asking him where his tail was (while he was trying to hold Giddy's tail). He put both hands right on his backside, very matter-of-factly.

Character

Carolyn is gone from yesterday to Sunday running a convention in Chicago. I've never been with Pete for so long on my own. Though I'm fighting through a minor illness, we had a good day yesterday, going through all the routines cheerfully. Then, reading the very last bedtime book, as I began to exult in having conquered the first day, Pete turned to me with an odd expression on his face. I think it was somewhere in the middle of the second wave of vomit that I realized that the theme of Friday and Saturday had fully shifted from "father-son bonding" to "limit-testing building of character."

(We saw the doctor. Having regained his appetite, Pete should be fine soon.)

The Hawkeye of peace, and a floor show

Pete has been ridiculously happy this weekend, so much so that it's been hard to keep up with. This morning, we sat down in church, and he spent a minute checking out the silhouette of the dove of peace on the bulletin. Being the product of daycare in Iowa, he thought about it for a second, then pointed to it and yelled, "Hawkeye! Hawkeye!" On the way home from Iowa City, he said "Iowa Hawkeye." Note that he knows very few two-word phrases at the point--they don't go far beyond "big ball" and "big puppy"---so that's a remarkable development.

In the evening, in Iowa City (at Z'Marik's), Pete attracted the attention of a table of three female UI students. So he started waving. And screeching. And then spinning in circles, grinning, until he fell down from dizziness. Then dancing, in full groove. Then alternating among those activities and absolutely refusing to be removed from his little self-decreed stage in front of their table. This contined for a good while until the students finally left. As I said, a happiness so extreme it's tough to manage.

Take that, Eve!

Last night, Pete ate a whole apple. As in peel to core--the WHOLE apple. Less than a year ago, a tiny corner of an apple-flavored baby puff made him throw up because he couldn't handle such a big bite.

Summer photos

Here are updated Pete pictures, with scads of new ones from the summer.

Studio 916: The Art of Peter Simpson

From Pete:

I'd like my blog readers to know that instead of posting occasionally about my art here, I now put that material up at Studio 916: The Art of Peter Simpson.

Language acquisition runs hot and cold

From Carolyn:

Pete has been saying "hot," and making attempts at blowing on his food when we put it in front of him. We thought he was clearly a genius. Until this morning when he took a bite of his cereal and (cold) milk and insisted it was "hot."

He has been coming to grips with the concept "two." Often he says "two" when he sees two of any one thing: two cats, two birds, two cups. And although he occasionally says "two" when staring into a bowl full of dozens of pieces of Kashi, he has seemed to reserve the term for things that are actually in pairs.

Last night he blew us away by saying "two towels!" when I showed up with, in fact, two towels to wrap him up after his bath. This was the first time he had linked "two" with a plural noun. However, he then proceeded to say "two towels" when he saw the two cats together, two bugs on the wall, and two feet in one of his books. It's so hard to understand what he thinks some of his words or phrases mean.

He also said "two" and pressed the number "2" on a toy keyboard last night. I was ready to call the local news to proclaim the discovery of prodigy RIGHT IN OUR MIDST, and then he said "two" and pressed lots of other keys. Woah, Mama. Take it easy over there.

Dancing fool

We went to a fantastic dinner put on by Grinnell's International Students Organization--great food, lovely atmosphere. Pete was especially fond of tortilla soup and sweet potato pie, but he sampled a bunch of things. And THEN! There was world music playing, mostly dance-oriented stuff with a heavy beat, and Pete started dancing with his little friends Emma and Bea and Shivani, occasionally joined by Timo. The girls and Pete were all dancing like crazy, in Pete's case well beyond anything we'd seen before--jumping and waving and squealing and grooving. For a long time!--at least half an hour. All this was punctuated by occasional sprints around the gym where the event was happening. (We are grateful for the tolerance and sidestepping of everyone in the kids' path.) Pete's giddiness persisted until bedtime. He should sleep well tonight.

A limited adventure; pet sounds

From Carolyn:

Taking Pete out to CERA today didn't go as I'd hoped. He was scared of the forest and refused to walk on the mown path, wanting to be carried instead. He's heavy enough that there's no way I would be able to take a real walk carrying him, so we sat in the path for a while, and then went back to the car, where he played with the buttons and levers in the front seat for about an hour. I enjoyed standing outside the car, feeling the breeze, basking in the sun, trying to blot out the noise from I-80.

Pete started imitating the cats today. He's been saying "Ca[t]" for quite a while, but as with most other animals, he has chosen only one way to refer to them. (He only uses sign language to refer to birds, only uses a moooing sound to refer to cows.) But one of the cats meowed today, and Pete imitated it quite well. His cat noises are very accurate (no stereotyped "Meow"), and we've been getting a kick out of asking him to remind us what cats say. I only wish the cats were more vocal so we'd get more impressions.

Storytelling; eating like a big boy

I haven't provided any Pete updates in a while. Here are a few tidbits:

* Pete has started telling stories. He doesn't have the vocabulary to do this in English, so he does it in Pete, with all the cadences of sentences. We can usually tell what story he's telling because he punctuates each one with sound effects or reenactments of recent events. The first one we noticed involved talking about the time, a few minutes previously, when he had fallen off the chair. He started the story, then pointed to the chair, then made a little falling motion, then gave his analysis. He also likes to tell The Time I Saw a Volleyball Game and The Time We Went to the Scary Car Wash But It Was OK in the End.

* Pete now refuses to be strapped into a high chair or booster seat, and he doesn't like using baby plates and utencils. Most of the time, he's eating more or less like we do: he has Cheerios and milk in a glass bowl in the morning, drinks out of an uncovered cup, and so on. It is hard to believe that a year ago, he couldn't hold down the tiniest bit of a banana puff for babies. Now he sometimes eats more of the same food than I do at a meal.

* Pete's favorite activities suddenly include sitting in the driver's seat of the car with the keys--he knows how to put the correct key in the ignition, which is alarming--and going potty. We weren't thinking of potty training him yet, but a couple of weeks ago, he started insisting ("insisting" is now a hard verb to avoid) on sitting on the big toilet without a diaper, so we got him a training seat. Now he LOVES sitting on that and hates getting into a diaper. Usually, nothing, ah, emerges, but he has once peed right into the training seat. Good lad! Two or three times, he has peed near the training seat, which, it turns out, is less fun for us than his producing no pee at all.

Martial Arts for Babies

From Carolyn

We all got sick yesterday. Pete's problem seemed to be duplicating what he had last month, so this morning we took Pete to the emergency room, which, as far as we can tell, is what we're supposed to do when Pete's doctor's office is closed. Erik drove to Newton to get prescriptions filled. But now Pete seems much better, so we're considering holding off drugs until tomorrow, and maybe even waiting until Tuesday, when we can call his real doctor and ask for advice.

While Erik's nose was roughing it out against the grindstone this afternoon, Pete and I went to the Aikido demonstration. I wasn't sure if Pete would sit still for it, but he was great. (He called out "Boom!" once when someone hit the mat and made his train whistle sound/sign when a train passed, but other than that he watched quietly.) There was good turnout (I thought). I wish we could have stayed to see some of the practice that followed, but Pete wanted to go out in the hallway and yell "BALL" about 50 times while looking at the trophy cabinets.

Bedside manner

From Carolyn:

When I put Pete to bed every night, we have a series of little rituals: big hugs, forehead kisses, handshakes, high-fives, sticking out our lower lips at each other. When we go through this ritual, he is standing up in his crib, often holding on to the horizontal bar of the side of the crib. I've been kissing the backs of both his hands as they grip the bar, but recently he has started raising up his hands to me, one by one, to be kissed, like a lady offering her hand to be kissed. I got him to to offer his hand to Erik this morning so he could see how cute and silly it is.

Who is the drooler and who the droolee?

From Carolyn:

Pete and I spent yesterday afternoon in City Park in Iowa City, playing in and around a small amusement park there. Pete particularly liked the train ride. We went on it twice, and both times he sat perfectly contentedly through the whole ride. There were lots of kids and dogs to interact with.

We approach dogs cautiously, asking the owners if we can come and pet their animals. (More accurately, I approach dogs carefully, while holding back Pete, who would lunge headlong at them, if left to his own devices.) One dog was being walked by a young teenager. He was enthusiastic about kids petting his dog and had her lie down so Pete and another little child could approach. The dog licked Pete all over, which Pete loved. But when Pete leaned over to hug the dog, he drooled a little on the dog's back. The young owner got quite upset--very offended that Pete had drooled on the dog. "She doesn't mind, but I don't think it's right!" Whoops! I apologized a couple of times and we made a quick exit

Like a big boy

Pete has suddenly become much more independent in a lot of ways. He will now grab a book, wriggle himself onto a chair or couch, sit up, and "read" it, turning pages and commenting on the pictures. He has also sworn off riding in his stroller on our walks near our house; he wants to push rather than ride, and he almost always pushes to the street (he likes going over the curb and back), so today, we just left the stroller at home, and things went pretty well. When I think how recent his first step was, I can't believe how quickly his relationship to the world has changed.

Listening to Stevie Wonder, if you know what I mean

I mentioned that Pete had started to like the Stevie Wonder song "Supersitition." For a while, we could convince him to go along with a diaper change by conflating the changing table experience with listening to Superstition, which was cued up on the stereo in the nursery. Noting the need for a new diaper, we would say, "Hey, Pete! Do you want to go listen to Stevie Wonder?"

Perhaps you see where this is going. "Listening to Stevie Wonder" is now an established euphemism for the process that leads babies to diaper changes, as in, "I just have to listen to Stevie Wonder, and then I'll be ready to go."

Sadly, due to the diaper rash caused by a stomach bug, listening to Stevie Wonder is now horribly painful for Pete. It's hard to watch, like the kidney stone episode of Deadwood.

With emphasis

Notes from two alums, Erin and Elena, suggested that they always think of Pete's name with an exclamation point at the end: Pete! This made me realize that we do indeed, almost always, address Pete as Pete! As in,

Hello, Pete!
Good job, Pete!
Pete! Do you see the tractor?
PETE! WE DO NOT HIT THE CATS!
That's right, Pete! Gentle! Gentle with the cats!

And so forth until

Good night, Pete!

Incompetence

Dialogue from today:

Erik: Pete, can you say "octopus"?
Pete: op-ti!
Erik: Yes, octopus!
Carolyn: Pete, you say "octopus" like a pro.
Erik [aside to Carolyn]: Not really. More like a summer leaguer. He actually says it worse than almost anyone I know.
Carolyn [aside to Erik]: To be fair, we haven't heard a lot of the people we know say "octopus." Some of them might have a problem with it.
Erik [aside to Carolyn]: They'd have to say it really badly.

Shaking with excitement

From Carolyn:

Saturday morning, I bought Pete a very cute book about a young cat who has to go to the doctor because he has hurt his tail. He's apprehensive about the doctor, but everything goes well, and at the end of the appointment, the doctor says to him, "Shake," and he responds "Shake." The illustration shows them shaking hands. Pete seemed to be following the story more than he does with most books, and tonight, when I read that page, Pete stuck his right hand out in the air and shook it up and down. People have shook his hands before, but he's never really seemed to get it. And now suddenly, he gets it. He got up from my lap, turned towards me, and held out his right hand to shake hands several times.

So we ran up and showed Papa, and came back down and read the page several more times, and then throughout the evening he or one of us would hold out our hands and instigate shaking. Finally, as I was putting him in his crib, he and I were switching between shaking hands and giving kisses and giving hugs. Then he looked down at his hands, paused for a moment, and then gently shook his own hand.

Oh, my God, he is so adorable.

Jumbo things, such as dogs and trons

We've been busy. We had a busy but lovely trip to Milwaukee to see my brother's family and have our annual reunion with some of my college friends. We saw a bit of Summerfest and a thriller of a Reds-Brewers game on July 3rd, during which Pete pounded down most of a stadium dog and made the Jumbotron during the seventh-inning stretch. It's a busy work time for Carolyn and me, in different ways, but the weather is helping us have a little fun with summer as it all goes along.

We don't like admitting we frequent this place, but ...

From Carolyn:

After a trip to the zoo in Des Moines, we took Pete to Jordan Creek Mall, which has completely won me over by having the best baby/family care bathroom facilities I have ever seen. They also have a play area for kids--a slightly-depressed circle in the middle of the mall with a spongy floor and lots of structures kids can climb on and over. Pete loved being here. I was trying to work on my dissertation in the food court, but Erik reported that Pete got more and more tired there until he was repeatedly falling down with clumsy exhaustion. Finally he gave up and just lay on the ground, giggling.

Superstitious Pete

Stevie Wonder's "Superstition" was already one of my favorite pop songs, but this version, performed on Sesame Street, is even better than the standard. It lets you hear and sometimes see the way the band is building up the riffs behind Stevie (some planned, some not), and just when you think it's over, there's an astounding, vamping sort of shout chorus*. Incredible, in the same way as are the best extended versions on James Brown's live albums.

Spring and Easter photos

Here are the Petey pix from the Spring, including Easter in Davenport with both sides of his family.

Pete Art #7

Pete art mommy.jpg
Originally uploaded by Childe_Erik.

Greeting Card
2006
Peter Simpson, 2005- [and studio]
Mixed media

This piece echoes the use of pre-fabricated children's heart stickers in Valentine. Here the stickers attach a found object to the work: a four-line, jingling poem seemingly narrated by a small child to its "Mommy." The hue of the handprint varies, its lighter shades suggesting the simple pink of the child's card hinted at in the poem, its darker shades approaching the color of blood. The babyish innocence of the handprint is belied by the grotesque dislocation of the thumb and by the eight-foot height of the hand in the displayed piece, a signal that the "hands [that] were once so tiny" have expanded colossally and unexpectedly out of control.

Under the Table

From Carolyn--

Pete's new favorite place in the house is under the dining room table. He likes to go there to be chased and caught and tickled and kissed. You can tell he's heading under the table because he gets over-excited: breathing audibly and crowing with anticipation. He puts up a pretense of hurrying to get away, but he so clearly can't wait for me to catch up to him. The time I will spend under the dining room table in 2006 will far surpass the time I have spent there in previous years.

Wookie

From Carolyn--

Pete was tired after daycare today, and he kept making a sound like a small, high-pitched, grumpy wookie.

Parental expectations

I think, on the whole, I do a pretty good job of limiting my vicarious ambitions for my son. I'll let him do what he wants to do. But I have to say, it would be awfully cool if he could learn to do this. Or this. But the choice between the two is his alone.

Anthropological linguistics

It's been interesting to see ways in which Pete's language acquisition takes unexpected turns. Last week, he was bending his head sideways whenever we read a book's page that said, "A train runs across this track." It took us a while to figure out that he was hearing "track" and "neck" (of another book's "bend my neck") as the same word. He separates them now. And sometimes his metonymies are strikingly clear: he saw the big wooden cross at church and immediately made his sign for "fan," and as soon as he learned a sign for "train," he explored how well it worked for other big wheeled things such as trucks. And he started calling me "baba" (for "papa") a while ago. When he figured out that he could use "baba" to mean himself ("baby"), that meaning took over. Forget papa! But now, there's a fascinating confusion between the meanings. For instance, if he's downstairs with Carolyn and hears me upstairs, he'll listen, point to himself, and say, "baba?" I've heard that other male babies use the same name for themselves and their fathers, too, even when the same isn't so similar to "baby." Hmm.

Kisses

From Carolyn--

Pete kisses! Best Baby Ever.

He's been making kissing sounds in the appropriate places in a song he likes that involves a baby being kissed, but this evening he started making kissing noises out of the blue, and when I made one back, he leaned in and kissed me! (Well, smashed his lips against my mouth sort of awkwardly, but intentionally and very fondly.) It's the greatest thing. And when I put him into his crib right now, he was back at it. Kiss, kiss, kiss. I may never go to work again.

Train sounds

Did you know that your brain makes repetitive sounds appear quieter if you don't attach emotional significance to them, louder if you do? When we moved to Grinnell almost five years ago, I couldn't believe how loud the train horns were. I didn't care about them one way or the other, though, so they started to sound softer and softer until I almost never noticed them at all. Now, Pete is obsessed with trains, and I think that's great, so if I hear one approaching, I'll try to scoop him up and go see it. And quite suddenly, the horns have gotten dramatically louder. The brain just fries my chicken.

Pete Art #6

Pete art wax.jpg
Originally uploaded by Childe_Erik.

Wax
2006
Peter Simpson, 2005-
Wax on wood fiber

This piece, unfortunately, does not translate to digital media as well as some of the others because it is primarily an exploration of texture, of the different strokes produced by varying applications of colored wax on pressed wood fibers. Seen in person, this piece is one of my most topographical works.

Pete Art #5

Pete art blue green.jpg
Originally uploaded by Childe_Erik.

Blue in Green
2006
Peter Simpson, 2005-
Watercolor on wood fiber

The title of this piece is, of course, an homage to the legendary Miles Davis album, and I had in mind particularly Bill Evans's piano solo on the title track. The chromatics of the piece evoke grass and water, and the form hints at the figure of an animal. The style attempts to echo Evans's spare elegance, and the wrinkled canvas in the top right quadrant of the piece suggests one of the tone clusters Evans deploys so artfully.

Silly circles

Over the weekend, Pete learned from his month-older cousin Blake 1) the sign for "bird" (thumb and forefinger in repeated pinching motion)--there was a great moment when two birds flew close by and the two babies looked up and did the bird sign together, 2) the ritual of "silly circles," or spinning around in one's living room, and 3) the sound a monkey makes. Blake learned "uh-oh" from Pete. Both kids start with what they know, so Pete's monkey sounds a lot like his uh-oh so far, and Blake has a chimp-like uh-oh.

Now that he can walk, Pete is bonkers about going outside. He picks up a coat or keys or his sunhat, walks to the door, and says, "bye-bye." He didn't like the hat until he figured out that he only wears it on walks. Now he puts it on himself to push us to take him exploring.

Crash, Bang, Boom

From Carolyn--

Pete's favorite book at the moment is one that is just a lot of different noises. It's one I loved when I was little, called Crash, Bang, Boom. My mother hated it, so she thinks I'm getting my commupance having to read it over and over. Pete is also fond of Noisy Barn which involves lots of animal noises. And he now sticks out his tongue when we open a book consisting of baby photos to a page with a baby sticking his tongue out. He then looks to make sure I'm sticking out my tongue, too.

Little man on campus

From Carolyn--

Pete and I have been taking advantage of the amazing weather and taking walks on campus in the early evenings. Erik and I started doing this over break (when it was finally warm enough), but campus was pretty desolate. Pete is loving seeing people and exploring. He's oddly obsessed with the Harris Center (including the disco balls hanging from the ceiling of the concert hall) and game for any flight of stairs that he can find. If you're out playing wiffle ball or catch and hear a little voice saying "ba[ll]?? ba[ll]?? ba[ll]??" over and over, it's probably Pete.

Pete Art #4

Pete art hearts.jpg
Originally uploaded by Childe_Erik.

Valentine
2006
Peter Simpson, 2005-
Mixed media

My first mixed media piece using an opaque background, Valentine creates two literal and metaphorical levels. Slightly above the surface, a loose triangle of naturalistic postage-like stamps intersects with a rough circle of mass-produced stickers like those given to schoolchildren on holidays. These geometric forms are linked by the pure, bright red that creates its own circle of the six leftmost stickers. The machine-made precision of that layer contrasts with the similar but muted coloring and abstract forms of the canvas layer, inviting the viewer to consider the two layers' interrelationships.

Assuming a position

From Carolyn--

We've been reading to Pete a lot recently. He has an insanely cute way of turning the pages and then folding his little hands together in his lap to listen to us read what comes next.