Onward Christian toddlers

Big Man found Jesus.

He discovered the New Testament, anyway. If my Catholic youth doesn’t fail me, that’s the part of the Bible about Jesus.

Back when I was in college, a troop of elderly gentlemen would periodically spread out to the various corners of campus and hand out copies of the New Testament to passersby. One day, I came home with a dozen New Testaments in my bag; I just couldn’t say no to those kindly old men, and the echoes of my Catholic youth warned me against saying no to Jesus.

The New Testament Men don’t come around as much anymore, but I did run into one of them a little while back. As any one-time Catholic worth his salt would do, I graciously accepted the book, took it home, and immediately forgot about it.

Last week it turned up in Big Man’s hands. Big Man has taken a shine to books. Having seen the eagerness with which Daddy sneaks a minute of reading here and there, and watching the erudite Big Brother read his 20 minutes a day (most days), Big Man has become captivated by the secrets within books.

Up until now, Big Man’s favorite books have been the ones with pictures of babies, or animals, or preferably, baby animals. But there’s something about this New Testament he’s taken a particular shine to. Maybe it’s the right size, or the feel of it is just right, or maybe he’s been touched by the Holy Spirit. I’m not wise enough to say. What I can say is he carries this book around with him more religiously than he’s ever toted a teddy bear.

Reading the Good Word.

Reading the Good Word.

On Saturday, he and I ran some errands. He insisted on bringing his book. He carried it through four stores. When he held it up against his chest, he looked like the worlds shortest preacher man marching through Target.

In the fifth store, he rode in the shopping cart. He set his book down on the toddler seat beside him, leaving him hands free to reach for cookies, but as soon as we moved to the pasta aisle he checked to make sure it was still there.

Little preacher man.

Little preacher man.

There was a moment of panic when we got back home. He asked, “Where my book?” I couldn’t remember taking it out of the cart, and God only knows when someone will hand me another New Testament. But a miracle saved us; I found it in Big Man’s car seat.

I could read something exceptionally spiritual in a two-year-old’s sudden fondness for the Bible, but this kid has a history of glomming on to unusual objects for a couple weeks before progressing to his next obsession. It’s a unique choice for a security blanket, but none of his choices are straight out of the Toddler’s Manual of Style. And if it does have a deeper meaning than I appreciate, well, I suppose there are worse people for him to be hanging with than Jesus.

Everywhere I turn, somebody’s growing up

Big Man and I went to the store for groceries. As I lifted him into the toddler seat of the grocery cart, he noticed the advertisement card clipped to the front of the cart. He looked at the bottle on the ad, gave me one of those I’m about to say something hilarious grins, and announced to the world, “We need wine.”

His impressive vocabulary notwithstanding, I drove our cart away from the world in haste. It’s not so bad that a two-year-old can identify wine, and it’s not unusual for children to say they need items they can name in the store. But when those two things come together, it sounds like sketchy parenting.

To add insult to injury, I rarely drink wine, so he must have learned about it from somebody who didn’t have to look like the abusive parent in the store that day. Now, if he’d said, “We need beer,” or “We need a fifth of Tomintoul,” that would have been on me. If he had requested Tomintoul, I would have been more proud than embarrassed, because it would have proved his genius: first in learning a word like Tomintoul, and second in appreciating how low Daddy is on good scotch.

Despite the impression the child gave you, this is not our family car.

Despite the impression the child gave you, this is not our family car. (Image: Carol Highsmith)

I’m glad he can identify a wine bottle. He knows it’s not for him and he won’t confuse it for apple juice. I just wish he wouldn’t talk about it like it’s animal crackers.

Meanwhile, Big Brother’s third grade pictures were taken this week. In the morning, Mommy laid out a handsome sweater vest for him. I went downstairs to make my lunch, wondering if he would balk at wearing a sweater with some wild claim that his friends were wearing football jerseys.

I came back upstairs expecting to hear Mommy ask, “If all your friends jumped off a cliff…?” Today, they’d have to jump without him. He came out of his room shaking his head. “I can never find the right tie!” The clip-on he held in his hand was apparently not the right tie. It was also, apparently, not his only tie. Since when did an eight-year-old need a selection of ties? I wonder how many ties our little Alex P. Keaton has. I may need to borrow one sometime.

Not the right tie.

Not the right tie.

Buster does yoga in preschool. The other night he showed us some yoga positions he’s learned. He demonstrated the Tree and the Airplane. The airplane looked more like a lame duck to me, but my yoga eye isn’t as advanced as his. Maybe I’m taking it all too literally. I have little doubt he’ll be teaching me to see the metaphor and appreciate the symbolism in the form by the spring semester.

This is an airplane for as long as the Master of the Peaceful arts can keep his balance.

This is an airplane for as long as the Master of the Peaceful Arts can keep his balance.

This is the airplane doing a scene from "Sully."

I believe this is the airplane doing a scene from “Sully.”

People always warn us, “They grow up so fast.” As someone who longs to have a conversation, sit down, or merely think my own thoughts for 30 seconds without being interrupted, I’m not worried about them growing up too fast.

Well, most days I’m not.

Thursday morning in pictures

On Thursday morning, Mommy went to work and Big Brother went to school. Buster didn’t have school until afternoon, so he, Big Man, and I spent the morning together. This is how we spent our time.

Usually, when Buster and Big Man decide to play with the same toy, it leads to the outbreak of hostilities within two minutes. On Thursday morning, there was some kind of magic in the air. When they played nicely together for more than three minutes, I ran for the camera to get a rare shot of tranquility:

Railroad barrons at peace.

Railroad barons at peace.

These days I can’t get out the camera without them clamoring to take it away from me and do some of their own shooting. Buster was fastest to the camera and took these pictures of Big Man:

Then it was Big Man’s turn. Big Man quickly learned the ON/OFF button doesn’t yield memorable photographs. Moving his finger to the correct button, which it barely reached, made a big difference:

After the photo session, I left to boys to play (without the camera) while I put away some laundry. I’m logging that chore right here, in case my wife didn’t notice. I should have had them take pictures of me folding shirts as proof.

Then I got out the vacuum, because I can be a good boy who does helpful things around the house from time to time. Vacuuming is a nice, light, cool-down chore after the heavy exertion of putting away laundry.

Each of our children has gone through a phase of adoring fascination with the vacuum. Big Brother and Buster have both put that phase behind them. Now that he is old enough to actually vacuum effectively, Big Brother hates no appliance more. Buster is indifferent to the machine. He too will learn to hate it when he is asked to push it for five minutes and this ruins his entire day.

Only Big Man lives still in the throes of admiration for the mighty vacuum. The moment it appeared, he was all over it, unwinding its cord and plugging it in. I no longer live in the hope that this toddler-vacuum love affair will last into years of productive house cleaning. I’ve been burned before. It’s now merely a matter of letting a boy learn to hate the device at his own pace. And letting him enjoy the bloom while it’s still on the rose.

After vacuuming came lunch, which may or may not have undone all the cleaning already accomplished. No photographic evidence has survived. If you want an idea of what it was like, maybe you can Google images of “all Hell breaking loose.”

But, hey, I fed the kids. That’s the important thing.

We’d all be sunk without her

I’ve got the easy part. I go to work at the same time every day. I get to have a relatively stable schedule. Occasionally, my day gets twisted around a little bit, having to drop off or pick up a kid here and there or stay home with them when they’re not in school. It may get me frazzled from time to time, but it’s still the easy part.

These many time-twisting tasks fall to my wife on all the days between my sporadic turns. On top of this, she works. She doesn’t have the luxury of working a full-time job, because the combination of children, time, and space won’t allow it. She works part-time jobs – several of them concurrently.

This requires a certain amount of daycare, for any of the boys who aren’t in school at any given time, and when I can’t take time off to be with them. She sets up the daycare. Honestly, it would drive me crazy making all the complex arrangements she manages, but she takes it in her Supermom stride. I don’t know how.

My wife is the most adaptable person I’ve ever met. Not only does she have to juggle jobs while juggling children, she also has to be able to reinvent routines for everybody when the old ones don’t work anymore. With children, things can change quickly, and she might have to leave behind people and places where she had hopes and plans to find a situation that works better for her family. Just the idea of this task daunts me, but she always seems to be able to pull it off. She always bounces back and finds a new way that works.

Don't we make a handsome couple? And one of us is on top of things, too.

Don’t we make a handsome couple? And one of us is on top of things, too.

She must think I take all this for granted sometimes, and maybe she’s right. I’m human, and sometimes I get lost in my own issues. But I am always amazed at how, when the system seems near collapse, she bounces back and discovers a new way to make things work. I’m not that resilient, and I don’t know anybody else who is.

Our boys have always been the stars of this blog. My wife is funny, too, but that’s not the primary reason she deserves a little ink here. The fact is, our lives would not be anywhere near as fun or funny without her smoothing out the bumps for us. This is why she’s a superstar. This why I love her so much. And this is why we’re all lucky she’s the one masterminding the hard parts.