Category Archives: Little Weirdos

Puking with a quiet dignity

“Daddy, I had to puke in the night,” he told me.

Of course, my first feeling was one of concern; Mommy gets a tad bit grouchy when she has to add an extra sheet-washing to the schedule, and I have to live with her.

The boy was lying on the couch, watching cartoons instead of getting dressed. We had already determined that he was too ill for school. I knew he had a belly ache and a little fever, but I didn’t know about the puking.

Mommy didn’t know about it either. We didn’t know because there was no sign of vomit in his bedroom, which meant that he had made it to the toilet. That’s not so amazing; he’s a practiced puker who’s been well-schooled on the drill of running to the bowl.

What is amazing is that he did it without waking anybody up. This boy, who bellows about every little scratch and had already made sure I knew all about his upset tummy and aching head with repeated updates before 8 a.m., had gone about his puking quietly and climbed back into bed without anyone knowing about his midnight troubles.

We would not have been upset if he’d woken us for so worthy a reason, and maybe he should have, but there’s part of me is proud of him for being stoic about his business and not making a big deal of it.

This is a kid who will get out of bed and call for help on the flimsiest of pretexts. Aside from the normal crises of illness, bad dreams, and dire thirst, this child has risen from his bed to complain about the following list of late night circumstances:

  • His nightlight was in the wrong outlet.
  • His blanket was upside down.
  • His blanket was wrong side up.
  • His sheets were kicked all the way to the bottom of the bed and he couldn’t find them under the blankets.
  • He needed a fingernail trimmed.
  • He needed a BAND-AID for an infinitesimal, bloodless scratch.
  • He had needed to examine his scratch by the glow of his nightlight and couldn’t get the BAND-AID to stick anymore; hence he needed a new one.
  • His nose itched.
  • He was too hot, sleeping under three blankets and a comforter.
  • He wanted his radio on.
  • He wanted his radio off.
  • What he really wanted was a kids’ BAND-AID. One with Spiderman on it, which we don’t have.
I want a kids' Band-Aid

“If you don’t have the Spiderman bandages, I’ll take the ones with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on them.” (Image: Keystone View Co.)

After all of these dubious disturbances to our nighttime peace, this boy gets up in the middle of the night, goes to the toilet, pukes, cleans himself up, and goes back to bed without so much as a Guess what I just did.

Remarkable? Responsible? Grown-up? Maybe, but once he’s feeling himself again, I have no doubt he’ll burst forth from his room at night to alert us all to the emergency situation caused by his incorrect arrangement of dirty clothes in his hamper or about how his hair hurts.

This is how they do it in the UK

Our kindergartener is into flags and geography. Whenever I’m looking at something on my WordPress dashboard, he always wants me to click on the stats page. “Can we see what flags are there?” he asks. (For those unfamiliar with WordPress, the stats page shows the flags of the countries from which visits to your blog originated.) We go down the list and he names the country that goes with the flag. I make him read the names of the ones he doesn’t know. He seems to enjoy this game, though it gets a little boring on days when all my blog hits come from the US and Canada.

I love that he has an interest in these things because I like flags and geography too. More than that, I think that knowing where different places are makes you more interested in learning what happened (and is happening) there. In my book, a grasp of geography is vital to educating oneself about the world.

It also leads to interesting mealtime conversations and creative fibs.

One day, my son was drinking out of a mug with a handle on it. After quenching his thirst, he said to me, “Daddy, I know how they drink out of cups in the United Kingdom.”

I was not expecting this statement, as I did not know there was a particularly British way to take a drink. Naturally, I was intrigued. “How do they do it in the UK?” I asked.

“Like this.” He lifted up his mug and conspicuously uncurled his pinky finger, extending it out straight, exactly as Queen Elizabeth might do if she ever sipped from a plastic mug with her name printed on it at high tea.

“Oh. That’s how they do it?”

“Yup. Just like that.”

He couldn’t tell me how he came to know such an interesting and amazing fact. He knew it in the way that kindergarteners know such things: he just did.

Spot of tea, Gov'ner?

Even with his low-brow family holding him back, he is determined to blossom into a society gentleman.

A few days later, at breakfast, I was spreading raspberry preserves on a saltine.

“Can I have a cracker?” the boy asked.

I offered him the one I had just spread.

“No. I just want a plain one,” he insisted. “I don’t like that berry stuff. It tastes terrible.”

“How would you know?” I scoffed. “You’ve never even tried it.”

“Yes I did.”

“When?”

“In Germany, in the 1950s.”

Raspberry preserves

As part of the Marshall Plan, post-war Germans were forced to consume ersatz fruit spreads from America.

Well, I guess that explains why I didn’t know about it. I’ve never been to Germany and I wasn’t even born when he went on his European fruit spread sampling tour. Maybe that’s when he popped over to have a drink with Queen Elizabeth and learned her people’s cup handling techniques.

He shut me up. I handed him a plain saltine and for the rest of the meal I sat quietly, trying not to draw attention to the fact that I needed all of my clumsy, provincial fingers to lift my cocoa.

If you have any housework that requires throwing stuff, I’m your man

A while ago, I wrote about how our older son likes to “help” me with my chores around the house. More recently, I posted about our younger son’s love of throwing things. Today, I can happily report that the little boy has adopted his brother’s penchant for helping. He has melded it beautifully with his hunger to throw stuff.

Whenever we take a load of laundry out of the dryer, we take the basket upstairs and dump it out on our bed for sorting. This is perfect for the little boy, because not only does he love to throw things and be helpful, he also loves to be on our bed. Once established on our bed, he swings into action in his desire to serve his parents.

Goals are important to this little helper, regardless of how far afield his goals stray from ours in completing the task at hand. His goal in helping us with the laundry is to throw it all on the floor as quickly as possible, and thus help us make our bed look neat and tidy again.

Winding up

A strong wind-up is important to a good throw.

Follow-through

The fundamentals of the follow-through are important too.

running start

Sometimes, a running start can help improve velocity.

checking his handiwork

There are still a couple of open spots on the floor.

Heart and soul throw

You’ve got to dig deep and pour all your heart and soul into it.

The level of industry he displays in helping us cast our clean laundry to the floor is admirable. The bed looks fresh and new in no time. That would be enough for most children, but our boy goes above and beyond. Everybody knows that pillows are an unnecessary eyesore that all parents wish removed from their beds, if only they could find someone who could complete the job cheaply and efficiently.

pillow time

Okay, laundry’s done. Now let’s dig these pillows out of here.

flood of pillows

You could drown in all these pillows – definitely unsafe.

the core of the pillow mess

Found the root of the pillow problem.

Well, while you struggle with the unsightly mound of pillows blemishing the aesthetics of your bed, my boy takes all these daunting worries out of his parents’ way. It is quite a heavy weight off of our shoulders to know that we will not need to call in a professional to do this work for us. Who says kids won’t make your life any easier?

so long, nasty pillows

Sometimes a hearty shove is as good as a toss.

Let me throw a little compassion at you

Our one-year-old is developing a couple of traits that seem like an odd pair of characteristics for a little boy to form simultaneously. He loves to throw things, which seems quite normal. What is less usual is the level of compassion he shows when someone in his family is hurt or sad.

The boy loves playing catch, minus the part where he catches anything. He has quite a limber arm and throws a ball, or any other convenient object, with a healthy velocity. He is not picky about the projectile or the target.

Meanwhile, he is always ready with a hug whenever his big brother is upset, no matter how ridiculous the cause. But big boys never cry over silly things anyway, right? Toddler Boy kisses boo-boos to make them all better and is never stingy with a pat on the back when he has run through his repertoire of hugs and kisses.

mini catcher

Only one of these children came dressed to play with the likes of my little boy. For the rest, he would have only sympathy.

At first blush, these two traits seem as though they would have little overlap in daily life. That is, unless the boy grows to become a baseball pitcher who rushes to the plate to console batters he’s struck out, or a football quarterback who passes out hand-written thank-you notes to receivers who catch his passes.

In reality, these traits are just two sides of the same coin for an indiscriminate living room hurler. Like the other day, when he beaned me, point-blank, with plastic balloon pump. I still have the red mark on my temple to attest to his marksmanship. The moment he realized he’d hurt me, he was all over me with hugs and kisses. It really made for a sweet scene, or I’m assuming it did; my vision was still a little blurry.

He appears to be right-handed, although when he gets on the playground, he throws mulch equally well with both arms. I hope he quits throwing mulch soon, because mulch scatters like birdshot and he might wing kids other than the one he’s aiming for. As an upstanding parent, I’m all for minimizing collateral damage.

everything's a missle

When we run out of balloons to blow up, we use this handy device as a projectile to keep Daddy looking sharp.

The responsible adult in me wants to discourage him from throwing things so much, but the sports-fan father in me wants him to keep his arm loose. You can’t warm up by throwing air. We’ll try to steer him toward tossing various types of balls and away from chucking random bits of nature. We’ll also encourage him to throw toward folks who are ready and willing to catch what he’s pitching. This may take some time.

As he learns to blindside fewer people with heaved objects, he will have less cause to call upon his vast compassion for the injured. I hope this won’t make that trait fade from his character. I admire his compassion and hope he keeps it always, so long as it doesn’t prevent him striking out batters with heartless precision.