Category: the boy

Finally!

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I started this scarf  in October as a travel project, and I only *just* finished it.  It’s pretty but the lace got a bit repetitive, to tell you the truth, and I’ve only worked on it intermittently since then.  It’s so pretty, though, that I’d contemplate slogging through another one for myself as this one is destined for my sister. When I called to tell her it was finished, her only comment was, “But it’s like 80 degrees here now!” I’m not sure if that means she no longer wants it, but a scarf promised is a scarf promised and into the mail it goes.

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The color is truer in this picture–a really lovely lavender. In the 2 yo section I knitted through the back loop on the purl side rows, which I only realized I wasn’t supposed to do about halfway through the scarf.  I think it added a nice twist to the lacy parts, though, and actually like it. 

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Perhaps she’ll take a (sweaty) picture of herself wearing it and send it along to post? It’s always more fun to see the knitted objects on a person.

My next project is my first adult sweater, and I’m more than a bit intimidated.  Doing it with bulky yarn, so it should go quickly.  The yarn is Pacino from Artfibers in San Francisco.  It took me a long time to find a suitable project for the yarn–it’s almost too pretty to knit, to tell you the truth.  There’s always a bit of fear when you buy pretty yarn that the finished product will not be as nice as the yarn itself, or that you don’t do justice to it.  

Whenever this happens and a finished object is ugly, I think with sadness of all the people and things that went into that yarn for no good.  From the sheep, to the shearers, spinners, and even the dinosaurs who provided the necessary fossil fuels to transport that yarn to me, and then of course the time that I put in to make an ugly thing.

As a side note, I think of this too when it comes to ridiculous movies like “Mall Cop.” I mean, did cotton plants have to die to produce one stitch of clothing for that movie? And, again, the poor dinosaurs who gave their life to provide electricity to film it–my heart goes out to them. And the farmers who harvested the crops and chefs who cooked the food for craft services–would they have toiled so hard if they had known their food was going to be part of a crappy and irrelevant film?

Bagel Faces!

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My mom gave me the book Pretend Soup a few years ago, when the boy was about 18 months old.  Since then, we’ve made most of the recipes in it.  The boy loves to help me in the kitchen, and usually gets all dressed up for it in his apron.

This morning, we made one of his favorites, “Bagel Faces.”

Chopping like a pro

Chopping like a pro

You cut up cucumbers, bell peppers, and other veggies and put them on a bagel with cream cheese to make a face.  Most importantly, you must have a lot of sprouts on hand for hair.  This bagel had a face until the boy insisted that he was making a Daddy bagel, and daddies have a lot of hair.

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The best part, of course, is seeing your three year old shove it into his mouth, utterly unaware of the fact that he’s not supposed to like sprouts.

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Bagel Bliss

 

Science Experiments

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Remember “Mr. Wizard” from when you were a kid? No? He was this guy on TV who would do simple science experiments with kids.  I loved this show and watched it obsessively, much like every other kids science show.  “Newton’s Apple” with Ira Flatow? My heart still goes pitter-pat when I hear him hosting “Science Friday” on NPR.

Mr. Wizard

There was one experiment he did in which you mixed cornstarch and water together and played around with it.  I recently found a book of science experiments for toddlers and found this in it. Remembering how much fun it had been, I did this the other day with the boy.

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It’s pretty cool stuff.  Cornstarch suspends in water, making a substance that is a liquid when poured or manipulated slowly but will act like a solid when hit.  You can roll it into a ball but it will melt a second later.

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We had a blast, talking about what is liquid and what is solid. And, really, it doesn’t make too much of a mess.

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Okay, maybe by your standards it makes a terrific mess.  But it really isn’t hard to clean up at all.

I’ve realized that my daughter gets a bit of a short shrift in these posts.  Truthfully, it’s partly because she hasn’t been doing all that much.  She’s wickedly adorable:

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And as noted before will eat anything put in front of her.  She is starting to sign a bit–she’s got “fan” “milk” and “more” down pat. We’re working on a few others.  Her brother had over 100 signs at his peak, and it was really fun to be able to communicate with him that way. She also says “mama” and babbles a lot. We’re still working on the whole movement thing.  She has figured out how to get around by a combination of rolling and spinning, but isn’t really all that interested in crawling yet.  Who knows? She may surprise us yet and head directly for walking.

Houston, we have a problem

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The boy is obsessed with Neil Armstrong.

At first, I thought this was another naming phase. At one point or another, all members of the family (and some friends) have had names corresponding to various TV shows. We have been Bob the Builder characters, Sesame Street muppets, and friends of Christopher Robin.  At school, the boy read a book about the first moon landing and since then he has been Neil Armstrong. At first, I was Sally Ride, Sapana mawashee was Buzz Aldrin, and Eric was the mysterious astronaut “Billwam.” I’ve since been demoted to Neil Armstrong’s mom (sad, but true) but Neil persists.

This has now been going on for about 2 months, and it’s to the point where the boy asks to have his clothing labeled, “Neil Armstrong” instead of with his own, given name.  He has built rocket ships out of cardboard, and loves to dress up at the museum:

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But more recently, and somewhat bizarrely, he gets himself together like this:

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This is when he is Neil Armstrong landing on the moon.  He uses the links to connect himself to his toolbox and then proceeds to walk around the house, dragging the toolbox behind him, taking large wide steps. If he’s wearing pants with belt loops, the box is connected to those.  He is almost always shirtless in this scenario, which  makes me wonder exactly what “moon landing” book they were reading at school.

The girl, of course, has a name in this parallel universe.

She’s the SpaceDog.

Learned Behavior

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One of the things that I find remarkable about watching babies grow up is how much of what we, as adults, take for granted is actually a learned behavior.  Some of this is obvious, such as learning to toilet, or buttoning a shirt, but what I find fascinating is watching them learn how to eat.  The Boy has this down pretty well (in theory, I suppose, though not really in practice), but teh Girl is just beginning to figure it out.

The first time I tried to give her finger food, she basically swept it off the high chair in a futile attempt to grasp it in her little paws.  Poor thing got so frustrated she started bawling.  She’s better at it now, as you can see. She has this nifty little technique of raking up a bit of food, squeezing through her pudgy little fist until it is precariously balanced on top, and then quickly getting her fist to her mouth.

To the mouth!
Raking it up

Raking it up

success!

success!

Not to be outdone by the little upstart, the Boy had to show off that he can put food in his mouth too, so here’s that picture:

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Still, the thing I wonder about is how we learn our emotional bearings, how we deal with the world, and how we deal with ourselves, as those are things not so obviously mastered.

Montessori in the Home

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The Boy has started playing “Teacher”. He goes to a Montessori school, so this means that he, of course, is the teacher, and sets out “lessons” for other people. Here is an example of how he sets out his lessons:

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Here you see the semicircle of lessons lined up in front of him. The work he is currently doing involves sorting the curlers into various boxes according to color.

 

 

 

 

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Here is another work involving balancing completely unbalanceable objects. This one was pretty fun. There was another work involving wooden letter blocks in which you had to stack the blocks but match up letters on the touching sides.  He just couldn’t figure out how to match up two sides at the same time and kept turning them and getting progressively more frustrated.

In general, pretty funny, especially when he gets mad and starts to tell you, “No! That’s not how you do the lesson! Listen to me!” Or when he praises you and tells you “Nice work! Good job!” Nothing like validation from a 3 year old to make your day.