Category Archives: Little Weirdos

Why can’t you see what I’m thinking?

Precision is not a trait easily mastered at age three. My son has a lot of things he’d like to discuss with me, but he sometimes has trouble making me understand just what it is we are discussing. He knows exactly what he’s talking about, and it makes little sense to him why a grown man can’t follow his train of thought.

My son will ask me a question like, “Daddy, what kind of engine was pulling that train?”

Instead of just saying it was a diesel engine, like any sensible father would, I ask, “Which train?”

He’s very willing to supply details: “That one we saw the other time. The one that was on the railroad tracks.” Then, to make absolutely certain that I will know exactly the right one, he’ll add, “The one I’m thinking about.”

“Oh! That one!” I say, finally learning the first thing about becoming sensible. “That was a diesel engine.”

Often he will ask important questions from the back seat while I’m driving. In heavy traffic, he might ask, “Daddy, what kind of car is that?”

Since I never learn, I ask, “Which car?”

“The one I was looking at.”

“It’s a diesel car, son.”

He even points things out with the vaguest of gestures. This is not really his fault though. His mother has always tried to discourage him from pointing, since pointing can be considered to be rude in certain contexts. Instead of using his index finger to point things out, he has been schooled to use an open hand, in the same way that a spiritual guide might show the pathway to Nirvana.

This is either the general direction of path to enlightenment or an invitation to watch a dog peeing on a fire hydrant. It is difficult to tell because neither is exactly in the direction indicated.

The boy looks like one of the apostles whenever he points at something. It tickles me, but it also leaves me wondering to what sight he is attempting to draw my attention. Open hand pointing is an imprecise art form, and its practitioners tend to turn it into a flowing gesture that encompasses up to 180 degrees of the possible horizon.

Whenever my little Holy Man points at something, I am filled with the urge to follow him toward a spiritual awakening, but I am given only a very general idea of where that awakening lies. This would be fine, as I never expected enlightenment to be an easy thing to find. The problem is that he is actually pointing at a funny-looking squirrel across the street, which I will probably also never see.

I don’t care about missing out on entertaining rodents though. My road to happiness will, more or less, be pointed out to me by the sweeping gestures of my children.

My boy wouldn’t make a very good recruiter. People would think that he was pointing at the guy standing next to them. (Artist: James Montgomery Flagg)

The urinal whisperer

In a three-year-old’s world there are a lot of things that can distract from the need to take action when the urge to potty strikes. At home, my son sometimes gets so involved in his play that he needs to be reminded that nature won’t just leave him alone because he can’t find a spare moment to heed its call.

Way back in his caveman days, he didn’t need to worry about taking time out of his busy wild man schedule for potty breaks. Now that he is civilized, having traded the diaper for underwear, life is more complicated.

Accidents at home are one thing, but accidents that happen when the family is out are doubly inconvenient. We quickly learned the habit of making the little man empty his bladder before we head out of the house. We continue to do this as a precaution, though I’m not sure it’s necessary anymore.

It is not necessary because our little guy has developed a most disturbing hobby. He loves to patronize public restrooms. He did not inherit this trait from me.

The boy is fascinated with urinals. While I agree, urinals are amazing pieces of technology, allowing men to get in and get out of the restroom faster than ever in recorded history, my appreciation for them falls far short of fascination.

Some people like to go around to different cafes, making mental notes of which ones have the best lattes or creamiest cheesecakes. Like these folks, my boy is also an amateur critic. He specializes in comparing our community’s urinals.

In 1917, Marcel Duchamp entered this urinal into an art exhibition. If he had been there, my son would have voted it a blue ribbon. Then he would have put it to the test as functional art.

The first criterion that sets a particular urinal apart from the competition is height. He bursts into the restroom scouting out a “little one.”  I’m always relieved when he finds one, because I’m never comfortable with his accuracy when he has to aim high.

Another exciting feature is the self-flushing urinal. I appreciate this advancement also, as I don’t like for him to have to touch anything not absolutely necessary in the public restroom. Whereas flushing occurs to him to be optional at home, he insists on being a good citizen and flushing even the most repulsive receptacles in the public arena.

While I try to be patient with the boy’s desire to chart all the public restrooms in town, it really drives me up the wall in restaurants. He usually waits until our food comes before announcing that he has to go. In the olden days he could go with Mommy sometimes, but now he’s getting big for that, and he’s also noted a disturbing lack of urinals in the bathrooms Mommy frequents.

If you asked my son to read this sign, he would tell you it says, “There are only boring toilets in here. Go to the other bathroom.” Image via Wikipedia

Instead of eating our food before it gets cold, we are off to the men’s room. Hopefully, there is no novelty in this one to catch hold of his imagination and derail him from focusing on the task at hand. Regardless, there are a lot of steps to a successful toddler trip to the bathroom. These steps take time.

Time-consuming procedures are bad enough in a clean, comfortable bathroom, which some restaurant bathrooms are certainly not. I hover around him, making every effort to slap his hands away from anything that is not soap or water. Even so, I usually emerge with a waning appetite. The cold food that is now waiting for me doesn’t do much to help.

It may be that urinals are something that are helping the boy establish his gender identity. I’m no psychologist, so they may just be something that allow the kid to pee at a wall. That’s a good reason to like them too, I suppose. Either way, I can’t wait until he can hold it until after dinner.

Give up your lost cause, Daddy

Pickett’s Charge was the crescendo of Gettysburg, the high water mark of the Confederacy. Thousands of men charged toward a strongly defended line. They reached that line and punctured it. At that moment, they must have felt the euphoria of hard-fought victory.

Then, their charge ran out of steam. They were thrown back, battered and bruised. It was the beginning of the end for them.

Why do I mention Pickett’s Charge in a parenting blog?

Because at 1 a.m. this morning, as I was struggling to get the baby to sleep, I thought about all the men in history who fought hard and thought they had won, only to be cast backward into defeat. It isn’t that I wish Pickett’s Charge had succeeded; I’m very satisfied that it failed. Yet, as this fidgety baby turned my hard-won victory to defeat, I felt the weary pain of having the tables turn against me at the crucial moment.

The High Water Mark at Gettysburg. The monument to Daddy’s High Water Mark is the bruise he got while walking, half asleep, into the bathroom door frame on his way to the shower in the morning. (Photo: National Park Service)

At 11:30 p.m. the baby started crying. I took him downstairs and poured him three fingers of milk. He finished about two fingers worth before he waved off the bottle with his spastic little hands.

For an hour, I rocked him, swayed with him, and bounced him on my knee. He didn’t cry, but he didn’t close his eyes either. He just sat there looking cute, and awake. Occasionally, he would punk me by fitting a tall yawn in between his moments of contemplative staring at the ceiling.

Finally, his eyes got droopy. I took him upstairs and put him into his cradle. This perked him right up again. To keep things moving in the right direction, I gave him my pinky finger to suckle. He settled down.

For long, uncomfortable minutes, I hunched over him, rocking his cradle and feeding him my finger. It was working. As he drifted further into sleep, I eased my finger loose from his gums. In another instant, I would be free. Victory and a soft pillow would be mine!

Then the tables turned. We were doomed by the Moro Reflex.

The Moro Reflex is that instinct that makes babies fling their arms up over their heads at moments critical to their parents’ escapes. I have noticed two variations of the Moro Reflex. The Little Moro Reflex is the one where the baby throws his arms up in one fluid motion. I call this the Praise the Lord Reflex. The baby comes out of R.E.M. long enough to ask his dreams, “Can I get a witness?” then slips right back into deep slumber.

The Big Moro Reflex is the one where the baby violently jerks himself awake throwing his arms up and casting them all about for some vine or lemur tail to catch hold of. His eyes jolt open, and in them you can hear him think, “Holy shit, I’m falling out of the monkey tree!” The baby is now irrevocably awake.

At 1 a.m. this morning, my baby boy was stricken with the Big Moro Reflex. It was my high water mark.

An action shot of the Moro Reflex. This is only a dramatization; no parents were exhausted during the taking of this picture.

I jammed my pinky back into his mouth, but it was too late. My victory was slipping away from me, and I knew it. Everything was trending in the wrong direction, right up to the point when the boy signaled my defeat with his battle cry.

This cry woke my wife. She saw that I was a shell of the proud soldier I had once been. I was summarily relieved of duty. Maybe I had earned a rest, but I had earned no victory. Just like the survivors of Pickett’s Charge.

 

My kid is really sharp . . . and I’m running low on bandages

My son can’t stand to see me lying down comfortably. He seems to have some sort of instinctive need to keep me on the lookout for invasions of my personal space when I really just want to relax for a minute. Perhaps this is some holdover from evolution. Maybe lions and cavemen would all have been wiped out by sneaky foes with pointy sticks if the young of the group had allowed the older males to close their eyes and let down their guards for a minute.

Whatever his ancient justification, my son views the sight of me in any kind of reclined position as an invitation to climb all over me. I should say, when I am fortunate he climbs all over me. This is the gentle treatment. When I really need a good bruising, he climbs to the top of some piece of furniture, from where he leaps at me. So far, his strategy has been successful, as we have not yet been driven from our home by a sneak attack of creatures bearing pointy sticks.

Like millions of old lions, I suppose I could grow to live with this helpful effort to keep me ever vigilant, except that the lions must have had softer offspring. My son is the sharpest object we have in our house, and that includes the steak knives. His elbows, knees, and heels never touch me without making me wonder if we have a whetstone for such joints hidden somewhere in his room.

Some of these are almost as sharp as my son's elbows.

And, of course, a boy is going to use his sharpest parts when he needs to dig into the cliff face of his father’s mid-section. I swear I still have dents in my ribs that perfectly match that boy’s elbows. I’ve got two good knee prints in my back, in case the doctor ever needs a map to where my kidneys used to be.

I could probably even write off the dings in my ribs and my back as the occupational hazards of housing a three-year-old. But these are not my most vulnerable parts. I suppose my kidneys can shift over and shack up with some of my better-protected organs for a while, but I’ve got some extremely vulnerable parts that have no place to go. For better or worse, they are planted where God put them. They can’t run and they can’t hide. Together, we all live in fear of that ice pick my son uses for an elbow.

They always take the blood out of the cartoon versions.

I’ve learned to sleep with my hands cupped into a strategic dome of defense. Someday soon, I may start awake to a dislocated finger, but considering the alternative, I will chalk this up as a great victory for both fatherhood and the adaptive genius of evolution.