First ice cream of the season

His name is Super American Compost, and he’s got your back

I Could Achieve Immortality

Rowan: I could achieve immortality by growing a creature without a brain and then putting my brain inside it.

Jes:  But would that be ethical?

Rowan: Oh, that's a good point.  I could let my brain grow *around* its brain.

Unrelated photo...

Natural materials

Rowan goes to an outdoorsy, nature-immersive school with an elaborate outdoor classroom, where children make their own artisanal candles, celebrate obscure and pagan holidays, and knit stuff.

“Rowan, ten, is now a Druid,” Mark narrated over my shoulder as I sat writing our Christmas letter. Mark takes a little bit too much pleasure in mocking the new school: gently, of course, because it is a nice place that has settled Rowan right down.  When the walkway proved a bit too easy to navigate one morning, Mark observed with surprise that the snow had been salted. “Salt? Shouldn’t they be using a fine paste of birdseed stirred into lard they rendered themselves? Isn’t that more the norm around here?”

All of this is a prelude to the fact that Rowan’s class did a series of fall art projects where they made their own paintbrushes out of natural materials (leaves, flowers, grasses) etc. instead of using paintbrushes that were, like, products of industrial manufacture.

“And would you like to explain to your parents what natural material you chose?” prompted his teacher at the next interview.

“Human hair!!” said Rowan brightly.

I flashed back to a frosty morning when I had climbed into the front seat of my car and found a gerbil-like clump of inexplicable furriness sitting in my cup holder.  “What IS this?”  I had asked Rowan.  “This isn’t...your hair, is it?”

I don’t know had been the answer to that question and, trustingly, I had left it at that.

“He had already chopped it off by the time anyone could say anything,” said his teacher.  “Right from the front!  At least take it from the back! we told him.”

“It does not matter,” said Rowan.  “It is an inexhaustible resource.”

*

“Kids give themselves haircuts,” was Mark’s summary.

“Well, yeah, at three years old! At four!  They hack off a little bit of hair with rounded pre-school scissors and say, I cutted my hair!  Not, It is an inexhaustible resource."

My cousin, who has a child Rowan's age, had coincidentally posted a photo on fb of her daughter with jagged bangs, looking adorably defiant.  The photo was fully six years old, by the way, because the child had done this thing, as is good and right, in junior kindergarten.  (Incidentally, the school's response had been to send the little girl home, not to say, Cut it from the BACK, dammit!, but that's neither here nor there.)

So we had a talk with our son -- our ten year old son -- about not cutting his own hair with scissors, because those people who DO cut his hair are trained stylists who go about their business in a skilled and professional way that ought not to be messed with.

Three weeks later, he brought home a book he had been working on, a monster book.  This book had been decorated with hair. It was a hairy book.  A large clump of hair had been taped to the cover with clear tape.

"Can you please explain your concept for the decoration of the monster book?"

"Yeah, it's just human --

"--okay, it shouldn't really be human anything, Rowan."

"My newest one is not even decorated in hair, so I do not know why you are upset."

"USE PENCILCRAYON for your cover pages, that's why! Nothing from your body!"

"Oh Mom," he said -- patiently, patiently. "What is your objection to nature?"

Halloween Hallowent!

It's almost a month after the fact and I haven't done my annual Halloween post yet!  I did make costumes: woo hoo! Rowan and Victor had spent 10 months loudly proclaiming that they were going to be Godzilla and Mechagodzilla, and  a last minute change of plans meant that, after my history of making a MegaCharizard Y, a Scuttle Claw, a Speed Stinger, and a Star Wars Triceratops, I was relieved from making something dragon-shaped and got to do something more duck-shaped. Soak this image up because it's the only one I have of Rowan's Scrooge McDuck, and it's missing the collar, the belt and the cane.  I really regret that I don't have a photo of the entire costume.  Actually, I didn't even see the entire costume.  Nonetheless:

But Victor's Huey, that we can gaze upon from every angle, because Victor wears it a lot.  I always try to make the boys' Hallowe'en costumes to be warm enough in their own right that they don't have to cover them further with outerwear.  In this case, Victor's sweater was knit years ago by his Grandma (for Rowan) and it kept him warm.  We had a balmy Hallowe'en -- a "green Hallowe'en" and not a white one.

Ruffly duck tail:

One might argue that it is hard to pick a favourite from the ranks of Huey, Dewey and Louie, but Victor likes Huey -- Ooey--because he perceives Ooey as athletic.  Ooey wears a baseball hat, after all.

Here, he is pretending to carry OTHER ducks in his hands:

And here is the costume's afterlife.  The hat gets worn to daycare, the webbed toes get worn to the mall.

The boys had a great night trick or treating with my friend Jes as well as Rowan's school friend.  The school friend was rather keen, and Victor trailed behind the running boys yelling, "My legs are TINY!"

But they are in fine working order for all that:

   Hope everyone had high times and much candy!

I'll take a nice picture of you

There's a Eugène Ionesco play where a man, living in an apartment, gets edged out by his chairs.  His chairs reproduce themselves, fill up space, displace their human.   This weekend, opening my hall closet to a cascading torrent of helmets, I suddenly understood that I was under a similar threat. 

This proliferation of head protection is partly because we are all now riding bikes. It is partly because I stall on getting rid of outgrown helmets, because I actually don't know what to do with them.  (I notice that our consignment store deals in helmets, but I thought that people were supposed to avoid buying helmets second-hand because the helmet's history is unknown...?   I guess a toddler bike helmet is not very likely to have been in a high-impact crash.) It is also, mainly, because of Victor's persistent attraction to activities that threaten the integrity of his skull. WHYYYY?

Victor--who on this date three years ago weighed six pounds--has joined a hockey league, and a year too late, in his own opinion.  Last year, Victor's daycare taped an enormous white sheet of paper onto the floor and marked it up as though it were a regulation rink.  Children "played hockey" on this "rink" by chasing small balls around with shortened pool noodles.  They wore jerseys and took themselves very seriously.  As well, a pretend ticket stand was in full operation, with toddlers taking phone calls and doling out tickets.  Other toddlers ran a concession stand, forking over ice cream, hot dogs and various other treats to spectators who cheered and cheered as the pool-noodle players did their thing.  It was a fully realized and very busy operation and it was Victor's whole world.  He could not wait to get out the door in the morning because it meant going to his rink.

That corner of the daycare is in endless metamorphosis and I love it.  Right now, it's a pizzeria.  Sometimes it's a fire hall--complete with lockers!--or a bear cave, or a space station, or a campground.   This corner of the daycare makes me want to BE in daycare. Here's the campground and lake, with tent and campfire and dock and picnic table, and with fishing boxes and interpretive centre, squee!:

Anyway, it occurred to me that the sum of Victor's hockey experience was pretending to be a hockey player, so I phoned up the league on Friday and said, "My son is just barely three, and he can't actually skate, so..."

"I can skate,"  said Vic.  "I can skate very fast."

By my own best recollection, Victor skates like a fish (i.e. horizontally and in full body contact with the H2O), but we took him to the rink on Saturday, to see whether a few months of age might have helped with the skills.

"I just gonna skate and my mom not going to hold me,"  Victor announced to his Grandma and Grandad over Facetime.  "My mom gonna be SO FAR AWAY."

That's how Victor likes his mom to be: far away.

So I released him onto the rink and voilà! It turned out that he can skate now  (no holding the side!  no holding a chair!  no holding a hand!), and that he also has a dogged program of self-improvement in mind. We spent three hours skating this weekend, over the course of two days. He worked and worked and worked at it.  He was soooooooo happy. 

"Look at THAT boy,"  Victor said, as a teen worked a swift crossover.  "I gonna skate like THAT boy."

"It's not that boy's first day, Victor! Take little steps!"

Then out went his tiny back leg in a figure skating posture, in imitation of a girl who was doing just that.  RIDICULOUS.

"I thought you had skates, Mom."

"I do."

"Why you not bring them?"

"I thought that I would help you balance today, without slipping and sliding around myself."

He looked at me with pity.  "I will hold you, Mom.  I will get out my camera and take a nice picture of you! And then I will take you to the french fry store."  He pronounces it bench fy dore.

 He was clearly feeling pretty confident on his blades, a hockey player in the making. And that's the story of how we acquired our latest helmet.





 

Victor's three!

Dear Victor,

Happy birthday, baby! A very happy third birthday to our bright spark!

Vicky, Vicky, what a guy! Such drive and energy, such passion and purpose, such knees and elbows!

He runs like wee Eck, I think to myself all the time, thinking back to my old Oor Wullie comics.  All low to the ground, all angles.  Actually, Wullie himself runs much the same way, so I don't know why I zeroed in on wee Eck:  possibly because he's a scrappy little thing in a Buster suit.  In any case, Victor, it must be said that you can't get from point A to point B without a veritable riot of movement:

 

I remember listening to my Dad trying to phone my Grandma once. 

"What's all that ruckus?" he asked.  "What's going on in your living room?"

"Oh!  I was just trying to teach the bairns to kick their height!" 

Grandma was undeterred from leading this kick-your-height tutorial at eighty, and I'm sure that if she were still with us, she would still be undeterred at ninety-nine. So as for you, Vix, it's really too bad you missed the chance to enroll in Grandma's School of High Kicking, because you would be a star pupil.  You kick high.  You power through.  "This was a mighty jump, a mighty jump,"  you say, evaluating your own entrance into the swimming pool.  "I dove right in!" you crow, assessing your own first bite of a burger. Yes, yes.

Vic, at three you are tough and persistent, quick to learn and eager to share.  You are a gregarious and spunky little man who makes friends easily. You'll insinuate yourself right into the heart of a given group without ever feeling the disadvantage of your always comparatively young years.  You'll keep up with the big kids, you'll converse with the grown ups: you are just a moving ball of YES I CAN. 

Rowan has lived a decade and has never had an accident that landed him in the Emergency Room.  We've been there already with you, Vic,  and we'll be there again and again, I suspect.  You fell down two stairs on your balance bike and hit a front baby tooth hard enough to displace it a little, though it didn't fall out. The blood!  The tears! 

I will never be able to look at Victor's smile again without feeling terrible, I told myself, as the panic of the moment subsided. 

That turned out not to be the case.  I am actually able to take in this sight and feel fine:

 Yeah.  I'm okay.

What was so cute about that misadventure was how much joy you took -- and still take--in recounting the story.  You revel in the details: how the doctor called you a good boy for wearing your helmet, how you got a little teddy and a popsicle.  And, this is the best part, the story always ends on a sublime note, with you arriving home from the hospital in the dark and seeing the North Star.  From the first mention of the knocking of the tooth I know what we are precisely thirty seconds away from you singing North star, north star! Are you near or are you far? Can I get there in my car? in a tender and vulnerable vibrato.

Though you and Rowan continue to hold meetings of the Mutual Adoration Society, you also lock horns quite a bit now.  You are bossy and headstrong, while Rowan is obsessive and unyielding, so, yes, conflict happens.  If anyone remembers that a year ago, I expressed my joy in the fact that my kids don't fight, I take it back.  I take it all back.

But, when you get along, you really get along.  The mini-me effect is too much.

You and Ro reviewed Godzilla Resurgence in a dialogue that was, for a day, the hit of my facebook page.

R:  "I just think the American version of Godzilla is an insult to the franchise."
V: "Yeah, I not like it too.  It too bitey, too bitey."

 And, like, you two are always in a pile. 

And then there is the dancing.  There is a great deal of dancing.

You love the outdoors so much, so much.  If it were up to you, you would never come in. Too bad you got saddled with a family of sedentary nerds, Vic! You work so hard to change us.

You are a cousin and a friend, loving and loved.  You ADORED your time playing with your cousins this summer.  You developed a relationship, distinct from Rowan's, with each and every one of them.

The eagle-eyed will notice that this is an attempt at getting the "tinkers" to sit side-by-side in order of age.  In your case, however, it is a representation of where you THINK you fit in, age-wise:

On your third birthday, you said, "I a grown-up!  I gonna eat spicy food and be someone's dad.  I gonna ask people, 'How was you lunch?  Did you enjoyed dat lunch?'"

 Every day we get to share in your heartbreaking cuteness, your vivacity.  Thanks for getting us out of our chairs, and for being the precious fellow you are, our darling son and brother.

Happy birthday, lovely Victor.