Monthly Archives: June 2013

Baby’s first television theme song

Our one-year-old loves music. He’ll ride in the car and sing along to the radio in his baby way. You can’t understand any of what he’s saying, but you get the idea that he’s attempting to express himself musically. To my 45-year-old ears, that makes it a lot like Hip-Hop.

Music has been useful in soothing both of our children. When he was a baby, the big boy used to respond well to the soulful blues of Luther Allison. Somehow, my wife supplanted Luther with Robin Thicke this time around. I’m not thrilled at this development, but if it keeps the baby happy, so be it. The Wiggles will probably take precedence over everything in a few months anyway.

Babies are geniuses at mimicry. This explains why the baby loves to sing. I mentioned previously that we have a new cuckoo clock. They baby loves to mimic this too. He points at the clock and says, “Uh-oh, uh-oh,” which is not exactly “cuc-koo, cuc-koo,” but he has the inflection down perfectly. The baby’s impersonation is that of a cuckoo who has spilled his juice all over the carpet precisely at two o’clock. “Uh-oh, uh-oh!”

Uh-oh, uh-oh.

“Oh no, I spilled my juice! By the way, it’s two o’clock, if anybody cares.”

Mimicking simple sounds is standard fare for babies. When they put enough sounds together, it can blow your mind. The other day, the baby was sitting on the floor playing with some toy, or maybe it was a strand of cat fur – who can tell with babies? What mattered was that he was quiet and content.

I was working on the computer. From somewhere behind me came the soft melody of the theme to the 1960s Batman TV show. I turned very slowly as my mind ruled out possible sources of this music: the TV was off; the big boy and his mother were out; the cuckoo only knows two notes, and he was nailed to the wall in the other room anyway; and the cat can’t carry a tune to save his life.

I steeled myself to face a cheesy-TV-show-loving housebreaker, but there was no one there. There was no one except an unusually self-contented 14-month-old. The baby looked up at me and crooned, “Soba soba soba soba sot, YAN YAN!”

Okay, the vocals weren’t all that discernible, but he’s a child of his musical era. The melody was dead on.

Batman gets his goat

Just imagine how many evil-doing goats he’d be able to apprehend, now that he has a baby brother to sing his theme song.

His big brother likes to watch old Batman reruns on Saturday nights, so it’s not a mystery where he got the tune. The thing that blew my mind was that we had missed the last couple of Saturdays. It had been nearly three weeks since we’d heard that theme. The baby sat on those notes all that time so he could pull them out of his diaper weeks later and give Daddy a good shock.

Since then, we constantly goad him into singing the Batman theme for the amusement and amazement of our friends and acquaintances, because, to the best of our knowledge, that’s how parents are supposed to garner attention by exploiting the talents of their children.

Eavesdropping on the class of 2026

Kids have the best conversations. If you ever fall into the habit of eavesdropping on kids when they discuss the world with each other, you will discover vast storehouses of knowledge. Between them, kids having a conversation know nearly everything, even if much of that knowledge is manufactured on the spot by their collective imaginations. There is only one thing kids in conversation will never know, and that is just how funny their conversation is.

The other day, I spent the afternoon with my four-year-old son and his five-year-old friend. We were driving home from the museum when we passed our local university’s beef cattle research facility.

5YO: “That’s the place where they butcher cows for meat.”

4YO: “Wait a minute. I thought we get milk from cows.”

5YO: “There’s different kinds of cows. There are cows we get milk from and cows we eat.”

4YO: “And cows that wag their tails.”

5YO: “Those are horses.”

Taft's pet cow

And then there are the smart ones who go to cowlledge.

(Further reading about cowlledge here.)

Later, at a red light, my son spotted a man waiting to cross the street. The man was wearing a McDonald’s cap and a polo shirt with a McDonald’s logo on the breast. He was holding a McDonald’s bag.

4YO: “Hey, look, there’s a McDonald’s man.”

5YO: “Yeah. He works at McDonald’s. He’s carrying a McDonald’s bag too.”

4YO: “He probably got fired. Then he said, ‘Well, at least I can get some food before I have to go home.’ That’s why he’s got some hamburgers.”

5YO: “Yup, he got fired.”

Get your burgers and go.

“Your severance package is frying up as we speak.”

When we got home, the kids started playing with an army tank and a helicopter. This is the conversation the tank had with the chopper.

TANK: “Hey, Buddy, you wanna go out to lunch?”

CHOPPER: “Okay, where should we go?”

TANK: “We can go to Wendy’s.”

CHOPPER: “Yeah! And we can have [soda] pop!”

TANK: “Actually, I don’t know if I can eat anything. I don’t really have a mouth, just some guns.”

Tank and helicopter make lunch plans.

“I’d love to have lunch with you but I have a problem. You see, I’m orally challenged.”

I only wish I could remember some of the other entertaining exchanges between them. I’m tempted to follow them around with a tape recorder, except that when I play it back I’d have to fast forward through all the fake fart noises and ensuing hysterical laughter. That would take way too much time.

SEAL Team Four and a Half

Over the past school year, my son developed a fascination with all things military. He shares this interest with a number of his preschool friends. As I recall my own youth, I find that it is not so unusual. I played “army” regularly as a child, as did most of my friends.

A consequence of my son’s military phase is his desire to wear camouflage clothes. Camouflage pants weren’t so easy to find in size 4T when I was a boy, or I probably would have been bent upon getting a pair to go with my plastic army helmet.

When my son first began his collection of camouflage fashion wear, it was cold outside. He was either indoors or playing in snow the entire time. The kid in the Camo jacket or pants stood out against painted walls or people dressed in winter clothes. It made him easy to spot.

Then something alarming happened. That sneaky outdoors got to looking very much like summer.

In summer, camouflage clothing does that horrible thing it was developed to do.

Two weeks ago, my wife took the boy to his preschool’s end-of-year picnic. Still in her winter frame of mind, she let the boy convince her that he should wear Camo from head to toe. It would make him easy to see among the other children.

And maybe it did, except the park had lots of other things besides children. These other things are known as trees and bushes.

Odd branch.

Who knew? Trees make such stylish fashion accessories.

My wife called me from the picnic. She laughed as she explained their miscalculation. “Oh my Gosh,” she said, “he’s playing over by the tree line and I can hardly see him. Now I have to pay even closer attention.” This was not part of the plan.

It was a disappointing development, because my wife is a good talker. She would much rather be chatting it up with the other moms than trying to follow the one tiny bit of human foliage around a park filled with vegetable foliage. It’s difficult to be an engaging conversationalist when you can scarcely lay down your binoculars, making it toilsome to spare an eye for your speaking companions.

Struggling with tree

Get out of here, kid! The tree doesn’t want to have to watch you either.

But my wife would have made a good soldier too. She’s a problem solver. If she had trouble tracking the object of her surveillance,  she’d find a marker. “It all worked out in the end,” she explained later. “His friend, John, had a bright red shirt on. I made him play with John all afternoon.”

“Did he want to play with John?” I asked.

She shrugged. “As far as I know, he did.”

Let that be a lesson to the boy. If he wants to wear Camo to the park, he’s bound to be the best friend and playmate of the kid with the loudest clothes.

You kids can’t have nice things

I grew up in a big family. As one of the youngest, I lived under whatever reputation my older siblings had created for us, no matter how poorly I fit that reputation.

The reputation that became firmly attached to us was that of being destroyers of all things pleasant, carefully crafted, or well-intentioned. It didn’t matter that I cared for my toys and did not try to break things merely because broken was the natural state in our world. I was a cemented piece in the group, you kids, as in “You kids can’t have nice things.”

My only relief was the hope that when I grew up I could surround myself with things that were not broken and people who did not shake their heads at me with the sad knowledge that it was only a matter of time.

Fortunately, I was never able to afford the expensive sorts of nice things. The nice things I collected as a young adult were modest. My possessions were not impressive, but they were not broken either. Against all odds, I proved that I could have nice things.

For a while.

Then came children – two boys who love to use all the strength possessed by their little fingers to affect change. Everything they touch is altered by their hands. I’m learning to think of these objects not as broken, just different than they used to be.

Playing with cat and bus

Younger children sometimes labor under the misapprehension that upside-down is adequately broken. It is not. His big brother will teach him how to thoroughly break things.

At first, I tried to move things out of the reach of active, little hands. But there is only so much space up high. Some things must be left to take their chances. Consequently, I now have a fine collection of CD cases that don’t stay shut, filled with ripped paperwork and the wrong CDs, which are all scratched to hell. It’s a good thing only old people use such ancient media anymore.

The boys’ aunt gave us a German cuckoo clock. The clock is too beautiful for us. If we had any gratitude, we’d buy a better house to move the clock into. The boys, unused to seeing such fine things in our house, were overcome with the desire to handle it with their inquisitive, spasmodic hands. I quickly hung it high on the wall, much to their mutual disappointment.

Reaching for the cuckoo

A scene from the baby’s fantasy, in which he can reach the clock and straighten out that crazy bird once and for all.

Every hour, a bird shoots out of the clock to renew their disappointment. If only they could get their paws on that clock for two minutes, what happy boys they’d be.

Yesterday, I brought sleeping Little Brother in from the car as the clock struck one. The cuckoo popped out and did his thing. The boy woke and pointed at the clock. “Ooooh,” he said, before dropping back to sleep. For those not fluent in Babyish, “Ooooh” has many meanings, depending upon the context. Here, it means: “That bird is adequate. One day I’ll get up there to yank on him, and then he’ll be perfect.”

Don’t get the idea that I resent my children’s object-altering hands. I adore those four hands. I wasted years running away. Those hands have returned me to my roots.

I can’t have nice things.

I’m home.