Tag Archives: boys

Three boys at play vs. a natural disaster: who can tell the difference?

Back when I was a fresh college graduate, and lived in that special, naïve bubble that only fresh college graduates inhabit, I took my shiny Telecommunications – Emphasis in Video Production degree to Los Angeles. I had done well in school, so I would certainly be directing The Tonight Show within the blink of an eye.

I learned a lot in L.A. I saw things that were an eyeful, and then some, for a callow country boy. But the most important thing I learned was that I was unemployable there in my chosen field. Somebody with the authority to say so was kind of enough to tell me that straight out.

Consequently, I began my post-collegiate career making minimum wage in the mall. A few months later, I landed an office temp job. After the mall, it felt like I had made it to the Big Time.

Lost cause

The plastic furniture of our dinner table. Many a forlorn resume was spawned at this table.

One day, when I still worked at the mall, I pulled my little car into the bank drive-through, no doubt to withdraw my last $10 so I could buy my next supply of peanut butter and bread. My car began throbbing and shaking. Having no money for repairs, I was relieved when it recovered itself. It seemed okay on the way home, allowing me to hope its mysterious ailment could be managed on the cheap.

At home, I turned on the TV and sat on the stack of foam egg crates my roommate and I used as a couch. There was a Special Report on TV about the earthquake the city had just experienced. As I watched footage of smashed pasta sauce jars in a local grocery, I realized what I felt at the bank was an earthquake. I was ecstatic. It wasn’t anything serious, like car trouble; it was only an earthquake.

It was a mild quake by California standards. The “World Series” quake in San Francisco a few weeks later proved that. I felt only minor rumbles during the year it took me to decide to tuck my tail and make the long road trip home.

Now I live where quakes are rare. My Telecommunications – Emphasis in Video Production degree is as useful now as it was then. I’ll never direct The Tonight Show, but that’s okay; I’m where I’m supposed to be. I’ve got three awesome boys, and I get to spend lots of time with them because I’m not cooped up to all hours in production meetings.

And when we have that rare tremor, like we had last Saturday, do I worry about my car? Not at all. After the house thumped and the walls rattled for all of three seconds, I marched into the room where the boys were playing and yelled at them to leave whatever piece of the house they were destroying alone.

Trouble brewing

Most of our earthquakes begin with a little harmless wrestling.

We don’t have earthquakes here. Why wouldn’t I yell at them?

P.S. Sorry I blamed you for the earthquake, boys.

Exposed: the toddler battle plan

From the moment a child can stand on his own two feet, he begins reaching his little hands upward. This is the instinctive, human thing to do. In his simple way, the child is measuring.

He is measuring whether he can reach high enough to rip out his father’s heart.

He is not tall or wily enough to accomplish this goal in one stroke, so he satisfies himself with whittling down Daddy’s spirit by breaking all of his material possessions.

I have two categories of material possession that each of my boys has spent his late infancy and early toddlerhood trying to destroy.

The lesser of these is my CD collection. I spent decades carefully amassing this collection. They are all on my iPod now, but a CD is more concrete than a digital download and old people need to touch things to know they are real. A bookcase of my favorites still sits in the living room, near the seldom-used stereo.

It’s been the favorite hobby of every boy, at a certain age, to pull down the CDs, trod on the cases, and redistribute the inside media. My once pristine collection is a shambles. God help me if I want to play one of them ever again.

picking some music

“What’s this one? Days of Future Passed. That’s a classic.”

classifying

“Better throw it on the ‘Classics to be Smashed’ pile.”

Why don’t I stop being stupid and just move them?

The only other place I have for them is that “storage” part of the basement where obsolete items live with the spiders until everyone agrees they should be thrown away. For God’s sake, they are not an old vacuum!

Also, it has become a battle of wills. These children need to learn they cannot defeat me by attacking my cherished belongings. Nothing is sacred in this war.

Besides, history predicts that the last of them will outgrow this habit in a few months and I can reorganize the remaining rubble once and for all. Time is on my side, you little freaks!

The other thing they have all yearned to destroy are my glasses. Unlike the CDs, I use my glasses. I’ve had the same pair for 10 years. This is a testament to the strength of my will, and the fact that I don’t have vision coverage.

As we watch TV, like the peaceful family I always intended us to be, a little hand will flash before my eyes and snatch my glasses. If snatching glasses were a recognized superpower, our house would be the Hall of Justice. Thank goodness for flexible frames.

I don’t know why they want me to have poor vision, unless it is to make it easier to convince me when it’s time to go off by myself and die, leaving the pride in the charge of younger males.

I’ve gotten pretty good a seeing the world through finger prints, which is good because there’s really no other way for me to see it.

I still have two who do this, though the older one makes a show of cleaning the lenses for me. This is not kindness; it is cunning. But I see right through him like three layers of thumb prints.

Meanwhile, I await the teen years, for the heart-tearing-out to begin in earnest.

The hunter becomes the hunted

A couple years ago, I wrote about how Buster (then a baby) vexed Big Brother (then a four-year-old) by crawling among his play sets and tearing up all his railroad tracks.

And now you may be thinking: “Two years ago? This blog has been around that long? Wow, this guy doesn’t know when to give up!”

I don’t.

Anyway, Buster and Big Brother still fight over toys sometimes. But there are many other times when they play together, and (dare I say it?) co-operate to build things. There are even times when Buster accepts instruction from Big Brother in order to accomplish his playtime goals.

fine art

Working together to create a masterpiece of sibling co-operation.

Buster has no recollection of the havoc he caused to his brother’s play sets, nor of the gnashing of teeth resulting from his destructive ways. As far as he recollects, all of his frictions with his older brother have been honest disagreements between different engineering visions.

This lack of recall must make it especially hard on him that payback is a bitch.

There’s a New Baby in town, and his devotion to wanton destruction burns just as brightly as Buster’s ever did. The sock is on the other foot. Of course, the second sock has been pulled off and discarded, in the tradition of babies everywhere.

Now, Buster is the gnasher of teeth, shouting, “No, Baby, no!” using the same frantic urgency with which it was once directed at him. New Baby does him credit by living up to the very standard of disregard for admonition that he himself established all those forgotten times ago. Lack of recognition, coupled with an uncoupled train, makes it a hollow honor.

sacrifices had to be made

“I’m willing to let you chew on the plastic tunnel if it will save my train.”

I can’t explain to Buster that the unprovoked baby attacks he is enduring now are the same as he used to perpetrate. He can’t imagine that he could ever have been so annoying. Even if he could, it would only make him wonder why Daddy insists on bringing up random bits of ancient history that clearly have no relevance to his current suffering.

Daddy needs to be solving problems in the here and now, rather than telling his old-man stories of questionable accuracy.  New Baby needs to be taken away and possibly housed in a cage until Buster is good and done with his trains. Then, New Baby can be let out to tear them apart, so that when Buster is asked to pick them up, he can explain that New Baby was the last to use them. This is the kind of scenario that Daddy should be orchestrating, instead of fabricating some sketchy moral justification of New Baby’s outrages.

So much for compromise

Appeasement never works.

This house needs some law and order against the depredations of little brothers. At least until Big Brother gets home from school. Then we can renegotiate what little brothers are allowed to get away with.

Never let it be said that Buster doesn’t consider both sides of the issue.

Einstein didn’t have to poop on the potty!

Buster is adept at many skills for a two-year-old. He holds a pencil like a pro and draws abstract art as if preparing for his gallery opening. He makes up his own songs to serenade his Mommy at bedtime. He knows his way around an iPad better than I do and makes that little guy leap over the stampeding bulls in his favorite game with dexterity to make my head spin.

Helping with the baby

Teaching Daddy how to manage those tricky snaps on the baby’s Onesie.

Yet there are some toddler skills that Buster is not ahead of the curve on. It would be one thing if he didn’t have the capacity to do certain things, but he does. It’s more of a defiance issue, although even that doesn’t truly capture the spirit of it. It’s defiance mixed with indifference.

Buster thinks he’s pretty smart. I don’t know if he styles himself a genius, but his affinity for playing jokes can only lead to the conclusion that he believes he’s pretty clever. And a clever boy shouldn’t be asked to learn things he sees little use for in the rest of his life.

Just as an older child might ask about the long-term utility of Algebra, I hear, in Buster’s spirited remonstrations, the philosophical query: “When will I ever use big boy underpants in real life?” Such garments hold no candle to the convenience of the diaper.

“Einstein didn’t have to poop on the potty!” He doesn’t know anything about Einstein, and he doesn’t say this literally, but I can see in his eyes the formation of an idealized, toddler image of genius. His aggravated eyes tell me that the child genius would never waste his time on something so trivial.

Theory of potty relativity

“Everything is relative, my dear. Poop wherever you like!”

“Galileo didn’t pronounce K, F, or S sounds!” I bet he did, though this is not really about Galileo. It’s about a toddler whose opinion of his own world view dismisses the need to do inconvenient things.

Pope Urban's bad boy

Galileo Galilei: also too clever for his own good. The inquisition was not amused by his jokes.

It’s easy to replace the unnecessary consonants in words with the ever useful D and T. Mommy and Daddy understand the words formed by these substitutions, and since they are the only people he will ever need ask for a bowl of Lipton Noodle Doup, there’s no point in wasting effort on the unnecessary.

Buster can make the S sound. I know, because I’ve hounded him into doing it. He just doesn’t see the need. It is, after all, marginally more difficult for his tongue than making the D sound, so why bother?

Because Daddy is a trouble maker. One day, daddy wouldn’t make him any doup until he made the S sound.

“If you want soup, say ssssssss,” Daddy demanded.

Buster held out as long as he could, but he really wanted that soup.

Finally, he relented. “Sssssss,” he said.

“Now, say sssssoup,” the heartless Daddy persisted.

Buster sighed. “Ssssss . . . doup.”

That was close enough. Buster got his soup. And the last laugh.

Clever boy.