Asleep at the paddle

Beckett and I visited friends in Vermont for Labor Day. We took a gorgeous paddle in Lake Hortensia. Beckett enjoyed it so much he took a nap half-way through!

Grand Central Vacation

Recently, in quick succession, we hosted Linda, Devin, Loren and Adelle, cousin John, Nettie, and Mina, and then Ken, Debbie, Chris, and Kyle. We enjoyed them all, and I should really give each visit its own post, but in the meantime, here are photos.

[Beckett making his father proud by demonstrating wrestling prowess, and Ken making Beckett's mother retroactively nervous now that she can see how we play with Beckett when she is away.]

More Rocks

They say that once you have kids, you forgive your parents. I don’t know that I am ready to give up my excuse for all my neuroses just yet, but I have had two experiences recently that have me rethinking Mom and Dad’s choices and my choices as a parent. When I was little, we had to meet with Dad every few months to review our goals and set new ones for the next few months. At some point while in college, I looked at my goals and found one from when I was three which was to wear my shoes. The thing about this goal is I am having a hard time imagining that I was the one who made the goal to wear my shoes. I can’t see myself doing such a thing. This goal has all the marks of a suggestion from Dad, and I’ve always gotten a snarky pleasure out of telling people at cocktail parties that my parents once made me make a goal to wear my shoe when I was three and rolling my eyes in that way we all do when we reflect on all the ridiculous things our parents did to us.

Enter Beckett. And I am revisiting the those self-satisfied smirks. Beckett doesn’t like to wear his shoes, and in theory I would like to be in favor of this just to demonstrate how far I have advanced from my parents’ benighted behavior, but it turns out that there is a reason why everyone but Australian bush people wear shoes: slivers. One really has four options in the shoe wearing department. One is to fly. The second is to not wear shoes for long enough that the soles of your feet get hard enough to repel thorns, nails, sticks, tacks, glass shards, and other on-ground detritus (this is what bush people do). The third one is to not wear them occasionally, and get slivers. The last is to bite the bullet and wear shoes. In the case, of Beckett, we haven’t been successful at options one or two, which means we are mainly doing three, but beginning to think that maybe four is not such a bad idea.

While traveling to grandma and grandpa’s recently, Beckett ran around on the back patio in his bare feet and used his heel to separate a little sliver of wood from the deck, which he subsequently took with him. Jeanne and grandpa got out the tweezers and the sterilized needles and began digging around in Beckett’s heel to try to get the sliver back out. They had the easy job. Digging around. I had the hard job: holding him still so they wouldn’t run their needles all the way to bone, and being close to his head. It didn’t take but one second of digging around for Beckett to decide that he didn’t like slivers but he hated getting them out even more. By now, he has plenty of language tools at his disposal. He cried and yelled and screamed, but what was worse is when he stopped screaming and started talking. He pled with us to stop. “No, I don’t like it. I don’t like it. I don’t like it.” I was holding him from wiggling and tearing up myself. I wrote an blog recently about me enjoying Beckett’s joys, but the obverse is me feeling pain at his pain, and my capacities to do both seem equally matched. Call it the curse and blessing of empathy.

Beckett is now minus one sliver, and since then gotten another, but the pain of slivers seems not to last as long as his desire to be free of his shoes. So maybe Dad had encouraged me to make the goal to wear my shoes, not because he cared about shoes per se, but because he didn’t want to see me get slivers, and he didn’t want to have to be the person holding me still and listening to me plead with him to stop digging my slivers out. Maybe he was half looking out for me and half trying not to break his own heart.

There is one more facet to the story. When I was little, I also remember filling my pockets full of rocks. And I do mean full. I would stuff my pockets full up to the brim with rocks. So many rocks into my pockets that I could not quite properly take my pants on and off, because the rocks had my pants bulged out taut so even though I didn’t have any hips or waste to speak of, my jeans were tighter on me than any 80’s girl. Now, I don’t recall that my Dad and Mom ever had me make a goal to put fewer rocks in my pocket, so I can’t be smug about my parenting, but ever since Beckett made the transition to toddler, I have been looking forward to the day when he would stuff so many rocks in his pockets that he couldn’t get his pants on and off, and feeling some strange proleptic pride at the thought that he was certain to do so.

[Beckett picking up a rock (meteor) to put in his pocket at the Natural History Museum]

Today, was not that day. Not yet, that is. We came home from school, and went up stairs to play in his bedroom, and he wanted to lie down on his bed with his stuffed dogs, bears, and monkey. Then I felt something strange like crumbs all over his bed. After a little searching, I realized that he while at school, he had stuffed a quarter inch layer of pebbles and sand into shirt pocket, which now that he was horizontal was spilling out on his bed. I began to realize that maybe its not such a great idea to wait anxiously for the day when Beckett fills his pants pockets with rocks, because those rocks will have to come out somewhere and it seems likely that they will come out in his (or worse, my) bed, or in the laundry, or on the living room carpet, or in the bathtub, or on our hardwood floor. And none of those places seems like such a great place for a pocket full of rocks. Again, in theory, I would like to be pro-rocks, but in practice, I am afraid that I’ll not enjoy the rocks nearly as much as I thought I would a week ago. Next thing you know, I’ll be setting goals with him not to put rocks in his pockets.

[Beckett dumping dirt in the hair of cousin Mina]

Beckett and his Grandpas

We went to Utah, Wyoming, and Arizona, but somehow hardly ever got out our camera. But here is Beckett hearing a story from Grandpa Al, and Beckett on his first horse ride with Grandpa Jim (with a shout out to Ashley for being such a great co-rider)

All About Eve

The Scene: Preschool

The Players: DL (day care provider and grandmother of Jojo) Beckett, Jojo (see preceding post) and Eve (roughly Beckett and Jojo's same age, has older brother--coincidentally also named Beckett--and thus is long suffering)

Jojo hits Eve and sprints for a secluded corner on the other side of the stairs and behind the coat racks. DL chases him, and comes upon four little legs poking out--Beckett and Jojo are sitting side by side in the narrow spot conferring.

Jojo: I hit Eve.

Beckett: Hmm.

Pause

Beckett: Better go kiss her.

Jojo and Beckett race out of the mini-cul de sac and over to bestow hugs and kisses on Eve. Jojo hopes this will earn him a repreive. Beckett is either just along for a gratuitous hug or else feels that he needs to support his friend who is likely to get in trouble otherwise.

Get back to where you once belonged

Recent Conversation:

Papa to Beckett: What did you do at school today?

Beckett: Push Jojo, sometimes hit.

Papa:.....

A day or two later:

Beckett: Jojo says, "No head butting."

Papa:.....


Another day later:

Beckett: Alex bit you.

Mama (understanding that Beckett has not mastered personal pronouns yet, and meant "Alex bit me"): Where did Alex bite you?

Beckett: On back.

Mama:.....

(Jojo, is Joey. Beckett's friend, and grandson of the owner of the day care. Alex is Alexandra, also a friend.
Does Beckett know that this can't last?)

Better things in heaven and earth, than are dreamt of in your philosophy

Once I read or heard of someone who said that even the most insignificant of human accomplishments is intrinsically better than anything in nature. At the time, I thought of this as overly demeaning of the wonderful world around us. I compared airplanes with birds, dolphins with submarines, and the color scheme on parrots with the tints and hues in a Monet painting and concluded that whoever thought that human accomplishments were better than nature obviously had addled brains. Then I stood on the shore of a lake with my niece Gena during a family reunion and skipped stones across the placid water. We were right smack in the middle of nature at its finest. Blue sky above, mountain rising from the opposite side of the lake, pine trees skewering the skyline, and in symmetry, half-reflection half-real pine tree-diamonds on the opposite shore of the lake. I was very satisfied with myself for selecting stones with the care of David and sending them bouncing across the top of the water as many as sixteen times. After having gotten my fill of feeling good about myself, I turned my attention to the fact that Gena could not skip a stone. I realized that while my prodigious efforts must have been duly enjoyable to her, she was bound to get more enjoyment out of participating in life than watching me fill the lake with all the best and flattest rocks. So I set out to teach her (and several of her cousins) how to skip a stone. This presented a whole slew of challenges. I had to down-size my definition of what constituted a perfect rock. Luckily, the rocks that were good for her, were the very ones that I had passed over as not the best for me, or they would have already been in the lake. Then I wanted to convey to her the necessity of spinning the rock. In the end, I am not sure that at the time she picked up on that crucial point. It often seemed to me that her rocks were more like knuckle-balls. They were heading to the water more or less flat (and often a lot less than flat—sometimes even end-over-end), but seemingly without spin. I adopted the second best strategy of getting her to place the rock flat in her hand and throw side armed. At some point, her little wavering knuckle-ball rock took one little bounce on the top of the water. She jumped up and down and squealed with delight. I thought about the joy that I got out the beautiful nature around me and out my sixteen skips, and the joy I got out of watching her skip a rock for the first time in her life. Then I realized that the person who said that that human accomplishments were intrinsically better than nature, did not have addled brains, s/he was merely looking at the world from a different viewpoint, that of a parent.

I thought of this twice recently. About a week ago, we went to the Mystic Aquarium. We watched the beluga whales, seals, and sea lions, but Beckett liked most the more interactive exhibits. One was plunging his hands into the tide pool and picking up star fish and crabs (which he was not supposed to pull out of the water) and also licking the salt water off his hands. (You would think he doesn’t have enough sodium in his diet, but considering the amount of cheese he eats, I can’t see how that is possible.) He also loved the tanks that were set down at his level, where he could peer into see the puffer fishes and the like. He really went gaga over the puffer fish. But what he liked most of all, was feeding and petting the rays and feeding the parakeets.

We paid two dollars and bought some sardines—the idea was to hold the sardine in your fist and put your fist under the water and let the ray come over the top of your fist and eat the sardine. So I would give him one to hold in his little chubby fist, and he would usually drop it right away and I would have to scoop it out of the water before it floated to the bottom. Despite the snags, we got to touch a lot of rays and feel their smooth skin. Then we went to the parakeet aviary where we bought little popsicle sticks with bird seed glued to them, and fed the birds. Beckett was so earnest in holding his popsicle stick out for the birds to eat, and so interested in them.

A week later, we went to the town commons for The Taste of Amherst Festival in which all the restaurants offer little amuse bouche in hopes of drawing you back to their establishments in the future if you like what they serve. Beckett acquitted himself admirably on the Tikka masala from the Indian restaurant, and then downed almost a full cup of a strawberry and yogurt concoction, and spilled plenty all over his shirt. We had dressed him this morning in a new outfit which is actually for 2 year olds and the pants were too long, so he ran around and dirtied the cuffs of his pants considerably. He was soon quite the sight with pink and curry-yellow dribbled down his front and soggy brown on the seat of his pants and cuffs.

There were also a few rides to go on, a climbing wall, and bungee jumping trampoline in which you get strapped into the bungees and with their aid can jump and do flips. Minimum weight is 30 pounds (and two years of age) and maximum weight is 160 (which meant that Jeanne could easily jump, but left me out), but Beckett was pestering us that he wanted to jump. So we went over to see how much he weighed. In an ultimate irony given that I was a wrestler and was always trying to weigh less, I had to put him on the scales and sort of lean while I steadied him to get him over 30 pounds, and I rounded up on his age by three months as well. The woman manning the scales didn’t seem in the mood to be too exacting about whether I was touching Beckett while I steadied him on the scales, or asking for any birth certificates, so in we went. Another worker then strapped him in to the harness, and Jeanne got to jump exactly across from him so he could see her and she could see him. However, Beckett cannot yet actually jump, let alone do flips. So I sat on the edge of the trampoline in front of him and got him bouncing and then each time he came down, I would grab under his crotch and push him upward so that after a bit, he was bouncing ten or so feet in the air. He squealed with joy, and sometimes when he was up in the air, bicycled his legs kicking furiously.

So there I was about every two or three seconds, in time with him bouncing up and coming back down, grabbing his soggy pants and slightly mushy diaper right at his crotch and giving him a heave upward and watching Beckett squeal and grin. And to tell you the truth, I was having the time of my life, just as I was when he was dropping his sardines into the water but squealing when he actually got to touch a ray. And then I was marveling at my capacity to enjoy his joys, which seems to exceed my capacity to enjoy my own joys. I am not sure you could even characterize what Beckett was doing as an accomplishment at all, (except that he didn’t get scared). All he did was get strapped into the bungees and then enjoy the ride up and down (or drop sardines). But for me it was better than anything in nature.