Looks like we got ourselves a reader...

In continuing with the reading theme from the following post (The Turnover Artist), I thought I'd post a couple pictures of Kiernan with books.

As I said in that post, one of the last activities of the day is reading. Lately, it has become one of the first as well, and not because of us. Because of him.

He gets up pretty early in the morning these days. Five o'clock or so. Sometimes a little later. Sometimes a little earlier. Wendy feeds him and then tries to convince him it would be in his best interest to sleep a little bit more. He always disagrees. 99.44% of the time he wins the argument, and one of us must drag ourselves out of bed to start entertaining him. The world is still dark--as are we--and here we are giving piggy back rides.

Of late he has finished his feeding and gone back into his room, heading straight for his bookshelves. He just starts pulling books off the shelf and handing them to us. Some of them he pushes away after a couple pages. Some of them he tells us (by use of his hand sign for "more") to read to him over and over again.

On the morning pictured above, he sat by himself for about fifteen minutes just, well, reading to himself. Sometimes he makes noise while he's doing this, like he's mimicking the way we read to him. Sometimes he just silently turns the pages. Sometimes his lips move. I guess he's been watching me read to myself.

The picture below is another shot from that same morning. I like this shot because it feels like he's about to say to his mom, who took the picture, "Do you mind? I'm trying to read here." (Yes, he looks a mite bleary. But keep in mind, the sun hasn't even come up yet. He's barely got one cup of coffee in him at this point.)

NOTE: The marks on his face were from a spill he took while walking a day or so before. He was chasing birds and got two good steps on me and went down. He's usually quite good at catching himself and bracing his fall when he goes down, but he was too close to nap time when he stumbled, and his arms were getting too heavy.

The Turnover Artist

Kiernan did something really cool the other day, something that will seem mundane to most people but which I had to share with you nonetheless.

He turned a book over.

I know, I know. Stop the presses. Kiernan turned a book over. But it's little things like this, these little things he does for the first time, things we may not be actively teaching him that he just starts doing out of the blue, that really rock my world. Maybe I should explain somewhat. You see, he was sitting there on the reading chair with me, reading a book. That sounds like it should be in caps: The Reading Chair. Sounds imposing. It's not. The Reading Chair is this enormous chair we bought last year because we fell in love with this ridiculously comfortable and huge chair at Daniel and Darren's house. Before we started hanging out at their place I did not even know such chairs existed. It felt like I'd walked into a house in Brobdingnag. I guess the thing is actually called a chair and a half, and we fell in love with it because it perfectly fits two people. It became the place for us to sit when we went to watch movies on the ginormous tv at Darren and Daniel's. Or rather, when I went to watch movies and Wendy to take a nap. That is until our friends Heather and Joe started being invited over too and showing up earlier than we did and staking claim to our favorite chair. This happened without ceremony or the slightest acknowledgement. We didn't even get to thumb wrestle over it. So, we had to buy our own.

Our routine for putting Kiernan to bed at night has always included reading a couple books before his final feeding of the night. We used to do this in his room, as that is where his bookshelves are. We'd clean up all of his toys (singing the "Clean up clean up" song, of course), change him into his sleepy outfit, read a couple books, then feed him and put him to bed. This was fine until he really learned the sign (sign language sign) for 'milk' and would start to give it with startling insistence as soon as he was in his pajamas. The one drawback about teaching your kid to communicate with sign language is that you really have to honor the signs when he uses them. It was tough to deny him and it began to feel that we were having to force the reading before bed issue. And the last thing we want is for him to start viewing reading as a chore. So we tinkered with our routine, moving reading time out into the living room before changing him for bed, putting a basket of books next to the chair and a half and thus turning it into The Reading Chair.

Whew...talk about digressions. Anyway, he and I were sitting there, reading a couple of books. He was reading this tiny little Winnie-the-Pooh board book called Two Friends in which Winnie and Piglet clean up the house, ostensibly together, because two friends make cleaning fun. I say "ostensibly" because what actually happens in the book is Piglet does all the cleaning, sweeping and washing and stacking and shining and scrub-a-dub-dubbing (Kiernan's favorite page, incidentally) while Pooh looks on and basically does the smiling. He's the children's book equivalent of that guy in every road construction crew who can't even be bothered to hold the stop sign, so busy is he watching everyone else. The last page is "Two friends share a hug," and to be fair Pooh does the hugging. Still, I think he's using his stardom to get out of doing his share of the work.

So we read this little board book--it's like four pages long--the requisite fifteen times and then we moved on to another book (Five Ugly Monsters, I think). After reading that a couple of times Kiernan reaches for the Two Friends book again and opens it himself. As is sometimes the case, the book is upside down when he opens it up. This is usually not a problem. As advanced as I like to think he is, he may not actually be reading the words yet. I know that sounds crazy, but it's something I have to admit to myself. This time, however, he turned the book over so that it was right side up.

I had never seen him do that before. He righted the book, aware that it was upside down and that there was a difference. Now again, this is hardly earth-shattering. It is obvious when Winnie-the-Pooh is upside down and when he's right side up. You can tell just by looking at him. (Hint: when he's upside down his head is pointing downward.) But Kiernan has never really cared before. Now he does. Now whenever he reads a book on his own, he turns it right side up.

I love that.

One other cool thing he did, that is book related, and I'll let you go.

As I talked about in an earlier post, Kiernan is going to school two days a week. It's an infant/toddler program that we attend with him. They have singing time during the program and the kids all sit in a semi-circle around the teacher. The teacher lets each kid decide which song the group will sing (unless it's a bigger group) by holding up two cards; each card has a song choice pictured on the card (a school bus for "Wheels on the Bus", for instance, or a spider for "Itsy Bitsy Spider", or a picture of a car trunk for "Baby Got Back"). The child is encouraged to choose a card and thus choose a song.

We've taken this up at home during reading time, holding up two books at reading time and letting Kiernan choose. He really goes for this, getting this awesome look of satisfaction on his face when he chooses the book to read. You can really see in his face how getting to choose for himself makes a difference. Well, the thing he did the other night, after choosing a couple of times and reading the books of choice, was he started holding up two books for me to choose from. He started giving me the choice of which book we would read. He'd hold up two books for me, just like we do for him, and I'd pick the one I wanted, and he would put down the other one and we'd read my choice. It was surprising and fun.

He was a good sport about honoring my choices too, even when I kept picking The Fountainhead, which is really not one of his favorites. I guess he prefers Atlas Shrugged.

Oh well, as long as he's reading. Right side up.

Adventures in Babysitting

The following post was written last Monday, February 6, 2006. It did not get posted until today for technical reasons. Or just because I'm a dork. So, from last week:

This picture is from this morning. Today is a weird day. While I am working at home, our new babysitter Catherine is looking after Kiernan for the bulk of the day. While we did it all ourselves for the first year, plus, Wendy and I both figured it was time for me to start getting back to getting some of my stuff done. I want to get that novel I talked about earlier finished. And I need to start sending out a screenplay I wrote last year. In addition to the writing I need to do I've got to get back to acting. I've just been cast in two plays.

So we interviewed a couple of babysitters. The first one was supposed to come in to help a couple of afternoons during Wendy's last trip out of town, but she flaked. The next one, Claire, is wonderful with Kiernan. She is also, however, in eighth grade, so her availability is understandably limited. The next one we found when Wendy was chasing Kiernan during our sign language class a few weeks ago. We were meeting at a Starbucks and Kiernan decided he needed to pick up a few things at the bagel store down the way. His mom followed him into the store and they met Catherine, who worked there and was immediately attentive to him. She was also, as it turned out, an experienced babysitter, a college student over the age of twenty, and reliable. We interviewed her and scheduled her to come in a couple times a week.

As I said, today is the first day she'll be here looking after my boy for an extended period. Even though I'm here working--I have an office in the detached garage--I'm feeling pretty weird. Nervous. Distracted. A touch irresponsible, like I'm shirking my duties. I suppose all parents go through this. Many of them don't put it off until their kid is fourteen months old, so that's part of my problem. I really feel for my friends who must put their kids in daycare at an early age because they both have to work full-time jobs. That just must be torture.

Oh well, I guess it's all a part of growing up. For him and for me.

The Out of Towner

I was away last week in Park City, Utah at the Sundance Film Festival. This was the longest I have been away from Kiernan since his birth, and it was much harder than I would have imagined. Oh, I had a great time at the festival, watching new independent films all day and into the night and talking films with a group of really cool people at all moments in between. It was a blast. But man I missed my family. I have a much deeper respect for Wendy now. The business traveling she must do for our family is rewarding professionally, but it's also a lot harder than I realized. She's a trooper, that one.

While I was away, Kiernan's Gammy came into town from Arizona to lend a hand. Apparently they had a good time too. One day in particular Gammy and Wendy took Kiernan to a local petting zoo with a new friend of his, William. This is the second time he's gone to this little place, and he seems to love it. I'll post a couple pictures of his first visit when he had an...um...interesting encounter with a goat.