Or dot dot dot dot, as the case may be

Now that Pete can kinda follow along when we read to him, he scans every page for ellipses in order to insist that we read them aloud as "dot dot dot."

I don't even need to say it was a Star Wars card at this point

I yelled to Pete, who is in the next room taking a bath, that my dad (Pepa, to Pete, while my mom is Mema) said he loved Pete's handmade birthday card.

Pete's reply: "And tell him not to show Mema! Because it's only for him!"

[Pause]

"Papa! Tell him it's only for him and the cats. It's a private card for him and the cats."

We may have to have The Talk

Pete, this evening, out of nowhere, with a tone of deep suspicion:

"Papa, you don't believe in The Force, do you?"

Sometimes his knowledge of nature surprises us. To say the least.

Pete, to Carolyn:

"Mama, caterpillars can sleep in the trees or on the ground!"

[caterpillar conversation ensues]

"And BEARS make a sleep pack and turn into moths!"

Is this empathy or a wish for his parents' near-term annihilation?

Pete [referring to a friend who moved away recently]: "I miss Hunter."

Erik: "Yeah, it's sad when people go away, isn't it?"

Pete "In Star Wars, Aunt Beru says to Uncle Owen, 'Owen, he can't stay here
forever. Most of his friends have gone."

Mostly to set the context for every post for the next ten years . . .

from Carolyn:

Pete [walking in from daycare]: "Can I watch Star Wars Grinnell?"

Me: "Did you think about Star Wars all day?"

Pete: "Yeah."

Strike that. And that.

We've just returned from a fantastic trip to Austin, during which I introduced Pete to the culture of my youth, which is to say, bowling and pool.

I worried that Pete wouldn't be able to get the ball to the pins consistently, but he did fine, even moving to a two-handed version of the proper side release. Pete used bumpers and hit them most of the time, but in his second game (lifetime), he rolled two unbumpered strikes in a row on his way to a bumper-aided 104. The next morning, he chose to go back to the alley for three more games. Dude is ready.

I hope she said yes

from Carolyn

Pete, looking at an awesome photo of Ozzie Smith: "Is that Papa?"

The oddly bland fruits of his labor

A couple of days ago, Pete brought the materials from an Olympics-inspired day care project in which he was making his own flags. He held one of them up to me and said, "Papa, I worked hard on these flags, and that was like one of your students or one of Mama's students!"

I love that comment--love that he's valuing his own hard work, love that he admires college students for theirs.

After he said it, however, I did notice that the flag in question was a slightly rumpled piece of blank white paper. Does that transform the cute story into an inscrutable parable?

This is cheap, but we're not above it.

Pete, on learning to read The Cat in the Hat: "I'm really good at the F words!"

Our five-year-old potato

Today is Pete's fifth birthday. FIFTH. We still discover so much about him day by day. Sometimes the discoveries are purely cool: a couple of weeks ago, we realized that we hadn't done much lately by way of prompting Pete to try reading, so I started looking at the first few pages of The Cat in the Hat with him, and boom! Those words are sticking like anything. Watching the process is fascinating. Pete doesn't have one method for figuring out words. Sometimes he's using phonics; he gets the letter-sounds, but they do only so much for him. Sometimes he recognizes individual words. Sometimes he deduces words from context, or he remembers the phrasing of the book from previous readings. (You can tell what tools he's using by the mistakes he makes.) The big picture is the amazing part: you've got one little person with almost no reading vocabulary struggling against the whole of written English, with its arsenal of tricks and misdirections. It's not fair. But Pete--and any new reader--grabs every tool in the house and tries to get something to catch. Seeing the beginning of the process, I still wonder that Pete's going to read, really read, before long. And that any of us do.

We have also figured out recently--largely on the basis of an attempt to see The Lion King in Des Moines--that Pete is unusually sensitive to loud environments, which make him something between anxious and (occasionally) terrified. We've been slow to understand this characteristic, partly because Pete generally deals with new situations well (he sailed through our 2,700-mile holiday odyssey, for instance) and partly because we don't encounter loud environments very often. But after The Lion King freaked him out a bit, we started thinking through what has made him anxious: cheering at a minor league baseball game, the buzzers in Darby, a couple of concerts, fire alarms. We had been trying to reassure him about the content of the situations, telling him the environments were safe, but that reassurance never worked because, we think, we were missing the point: the sound is itself the problem. This too is fascinating, though discovering it has been hard on all of us.

So we learn how Pete will come to be like us, as he starts to read, and that we need to understand how he's not us but profoundly Pete. But the whole five-year-old him is wonderful to know.

In other ways, he's a pretty typical kid.

Every time we take Pete to the grocery store, he insists that we buy a cabbage.

That's the spirit.

Pete is grappling with the holiday spirit for the first time in many ways, largely because he now has a clear sense that he should expect Christmas presents, but we're also hammering home whatever anti-consumerist social consciousness we can muster. So he careens among generosity, thankfulness, and covetousness. Somberly: "We are very lucky." (Beat.) "Because we get MORE and MORE TOYS!"

Let's not even contemplate the kiss

Pete has revealed to Carolyn that he got a time-out at school today

Carolyn: Why?

Pete: Hugging.

Carolyn: ...

Pete: It's called a knockdown hug.

Bingo

Pete, at night, walks from his bed to the bathroom.

Erik: You goin' potty?

Pete: Yeah. You guessed it, Papa.

Pete's further career advice for Carolyn

Background: Jackie Hutchison is the volleyball coach. Her son Henry is a little older than Pete. Pete and Henry often play together at the volleyball games.

Pete: Mom, are you going to be like Henry's mom?

Carolyn: How so?

P: Are you going to be a coach?

Erik: Pete, Mama's a teacher, and that's kind of like being a coach.

P: Except it's different, and I want her to be a coach. (Pause.) Mama, do you just want to TRY to be a coach?

C: Well, I don't know a lot about sports.

P: I could teach you!

Not you either, kiddo.

Erik, reading Space Heroes to Pete, comes to the part about Sally Ride.

Pete: Mama! There have been boys AND girls who have gone into space on rockets!

Carolyn: Yeah!

Pete: Though not you!

We didn't even think to ask!

Pete has recently called a minor ruse "a dusty trick."

And informed us that when he was still in mama's belly, he wanted his name to be Braxton.

Wait'll you hear how we plays War--

Pete: After dinner, we can play 52 pickup!

(beat)

Pete: When you have cards, and you drop a few of them on the floor, that's 52 pickup!

Carolyn (gently): Um, I don't think that's right.

Pete: Yes! You can drop one card, and it's 52 pickup!

Carolyn: I think that would be one pickup. See, a whole deck of cards has 52 in it, so when you drop the whole thing, you call that 52 pickup.

Pete (with pity): No.

Fotografías

Ecuador pictures



iguana | hatching Pete | the view from the house | same, at night | how we woke up | the twinkle in Pete's eyes | fantastic flower blooming steps 1 2 3