Like Father, Like Son

My Aunt Claudia sent me this picture. I had sent a picture of Kiernan to my grandfather--his great-grandad--in Virginia (it's one of the closeup pictures below...probably this one) and it reminded her of this picture she took of me many years ago.

This picture made me pretty happy. I love the hair in particular, because up until two days ago Kiernan's looked like that, all shaggy and long. We were out in public this week and somebody asked me if we were going for a Luke Skywalker look for him. Poor guy could barely see.

So Wendy arranged for his hair-cutter extraordinaire, Godfather Darren, to come over on Thursday and cut his hair. Boy, was that fun! Yeesh. I swear, Kiernan was less fussy about open heart surgery. It was something of an ordeal, but not because of Darren, of course. He is amazing at cutting hair and is just wonderful with Kiernan, but the little guy was having a rough day. We had dropped his mom off at the airport early in the morning for a business trip. His schedule was a little off because of this, but more to the point, he was in Super Clingy Mode, which he gets in every time she takes a trip. Super Clingy Mode means I cannot take two steps without him jockeying to get in front of me and holding up his hands and saying, "Bup! Bup!" (his way of saying "up") over and over until I pick him up. This is especially fun when I'm trying to cook his meals. He wedges in between me and the cabinets, squirming in and holding up his hands. Makes it a bit difficult to cut carrots and grate cheese for a quesadilla when you're holding a twenty-two pound weight on one arm.

A friend of ours recently got us a cookbook called "The One-Armed Cook" which might be of help. I'm not sure if it will be, since I got annoyed with it when I started reading it. This is very silly, I know, but in their introductions the authors--two women--were constantly referring to the challenges of stay-at-home moms. Moms, moms, moms. Nary a mention of dads who cook. Just the constant assumption that the book was only being read by moms, as if they are the only ones doing the cooking in all families. As I said, I know this is a silly reaction on my part, but the rise of political correctness suddenly became a little clearer to me.

I also got an idea to write a cookbook of my own, for dads. Great idea, except for the fact that all but maybe two of my recipes come from The Joy of Cooking and Alton Brown's television show, "Good Eats" (and his excellent books). Borrowing recipes for your own book...that's not plagiarism is it? I mean, food is in the public domain after all.

Anyway, he was having a clingy day anyway and we did his haircut. He's so good natured usually, but this proved to be too much for him. Part of this is my fault because I really chose the wrong distraction video. As I've written earlier in this blog, our policy is not to let Kiernan watch any television until he's older. He does see some things--it's hard to avoid basketball this time of year, for instance, and we went to Darren and Daniel's house to watch the Oscars, and it's hard to avoid seeing their television if you are anywhere near their house. Which is why, when we can, we watch movies over there.

Wait a minute. Awesome television and great sound setup. Jacuzzi. Great beer. Excellent cooking. Come to think of it, I may spend my next vacation at their place. I wonder if they have any openings later this spring.

So he does see some incidental teevee, but we just don't park him in front of it and let him watch videos. When he's getting a haircut, or we're cutting his nails, we do put a video on and put him in his feeding table. Because he watches so little television, it's usually a very effective way of distracting him for these tasks. This time I made the mistake of turning on the television and checking some kids' channel before putting in one of his "Baby Einstein" dvds. The show that popped up on the channel was a collection of "Tom and Jerry" cartoons, something Kiernan had never seen before and which he immediately liked. I mean instantaneously. The mouse dropped an anvil on the cat and he just giggled, like we were testing his reflexes or something. But I got kind of a queasy feeling about this, especially when I saw that the mouse was smoking a cigarette. (I kid you not...Darren told me it was part of the pre-execution ritual: blindfold, cigarette...sadly they left out the hooker.) I don't think of myself as a fuddy-duddy about such things as cartoon violence, but the idea of my fifteen month old getting images of cartoon characters executing each other just didn't seem to jibe with what I want for him at this stage of his development.

The damage was done, however, because I put in the educational dvd, with its classical music and sweet images of kangaroo puppets and stars and while he liked it, it couldn't hold a candle to "Tom and Jerry" in the attention holding department. He was okay for a lot of the haircut anyway, especially when Darren squirted him with his spray bottle. He uses it to mist the hair, making it easier to cut, and Kiernan, water baby that he is, thought getting misted was just hilarious. He'd start crying because I was holding down his hands, but when Darren would spray him the crying would stop instantly and Kiernan would start giggling. Daniel and I sung along with "Twinkle Twinkle, Little Star" as it played on the dvd and that helped too. But eventually he just had a meltdown. It was not pretty.

I feel the worst for Darren. Here he is trying to help out, performing one of his godfatherly duties, and Kiernan is just going nuts. To their credit, he and Daniel were patient and upbeat through the whole thing.

Anyway, he's got short hair now and it looks great. Also, his mom's back home from her trip so all is well with the world.

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.

A Shortcut to Ahi

The day after Christmas, Kiernan and I went for a hike in Topanga Canyon with Grance, Kiernan's Aunt JoAnne, and his Uncle Mitch (JoAnne and Mitch are pictured bottom left). It was a beautiful, mild day that was just a little bit chilly, and therefore perfect for a hike in the mountains.

One of our big gifts from Gammy and Grance was the backpack you see pictured. Kiernan has grown too big for his original carrier, the Baby Bjorn that held him to my chest. His Gammy, Susan, was good enough to rent us a backpack carrier when we visited Phoenix in November, and we discovered it worked very well. Kiernan just loves to be outside, so a new backpack immediately went on our Christmas list.

Kiernan's mom, his Gammy, and his Aunt Amy did not go on the hike, as they were at the time enduring a grueling day of spa treatments. Our family gift to Susan and Amy was a day at the spa, and somebody had to go along to make sure they made it through the ordeal unscathed. Lucky for me, Wendy bit the bullet and accompanied them.

Meanwhile, the rest of us had a great hike, led by our intrepid leader Rance (pictured above right), who, without falter or the slightest fret led us on a labyrinthine trek through the wilds of Topanga. I have to tell you, there were times when we feared we might never return to civilization. JoAnne--Rance's daughter--at one point came close to inciting a mutiny. Mitch--her husband--briefly lost his mind, squaring off against a chipmunk and threatening to "Rip that grizzly bear apart with [his] bare hands." I am ashamed to say I broke down and wept openly, crying to the heavens, "Why? Why? Why?" But Rance, he never wavered, never doubted. And neither, for that matter, did Kiernan. They were our rocks. We shall not soon forget that day.

Especially since the hike was followed by a sushi dinner. This dinner was the idea of our indomitable guide, who never for a moment was in the slightest danger of getting us lost. And the sushi dinner was in no way intended to keep us quiet about almost getting us lost, since that never happened. Nope. Nope. Nope.

Man that sushi was good.

The Bubble Boy

So Cool For School

Last week Kiernan had his first day of school at the infant/toddler program. He had an auspicious beginning by using a new word that day...school. Or, as he says it, "Cooooool!" It was a nice surprise, as this is not a word we've been working on with him. But on our way, Wendy said to him, "Kiernan, we're going to school!" And he responded with the above as if on cue. Now it's possible he was actually commenting on how he felt about going to school, but I don't think so. The spelling I've used doesn't quite give the way he said it justice. He didn't really say the word "cool". Imagine what he said with just the barest hint of an 's' before it, a tiny little 's' too tiny even to put down in writing. It was clear he was trying to copy his mother. He's becoming quite the little mimic.

School is going well. He seems to like it a great deal. It's a loosely structured affair. The first forty-five minutes or so involves playing. There is a theme for the week--last week was animals, this week is transportation--and toys that deal with that theme are set out all around the room. Children are welcome to play with whatever toys they want to from the shelves, though. They are also welcome to wander into the adjacent room with the previously enshrined ball pit. Kiernan still loves the ball pit, but his clear favorite in that room is the laundry basket full of pom poms. Since his mother and his godfather Daniel were both cheerleaders, and indeed cheered together at William and Mary, this comes as no surprise. Kiernan loves to take all the pom poms out of the basket, shake them a little bit, then put them right back in. It's surprising how many times this has to be done. As a non-cheerleader I clearly do not understand the many nuances of dealing with pom poms.

Next everybody goes outside to play in the yards set aside for the little kids. Since the infant/toddler program is on the campus of a middle school, it is important to set aside areas like this. Kiernan does not agree that this is important, however, as he took every opportunity that first day to try to get to where the big kids were playing basketball and dodge ball. Perhaps he just wanted to cheer for them. Or perhaps he just sees himself as more mature.

Outside the kids ride around in little cars and wagons, and go into the sand area to slide down the slides and make sand castles. The other day Kiernan discovered how to use a little sand shovel to move sand from one place to another. Today, which was our third day at the program, he discovered that the primary function of the shovel is clearly to throw sand on himself and his father. The teacher was none too interested in him acquiring this skill, and I think she's going to give me a demerit, or maybe a time-out on Friday, for letting him learn it.

After sand-throwing class everybody heads back inside to sit in a circle and sing. This is followed by snack time, during which everybody sits around tiny tables and has a snack--crackers, apple, cheese, pea-pod with shrimp--and a drink--apple juice, water, martinis--together. It was at this point on the first day that his mother almost started crying she was so proud of Kiernan. All of a sudden she just looked at me, her eyes glistening, and said, "Look at him. He's sitting there in a chair. Eating with other kids. He's just so good."

After snack time the kids play again for awhile, then everybody cleans up (while singing the clean up song, of course). Finally, the kids all get in a semi-circle again and sing the goodbye song to each child.

Kiernan has had three days of school so far, and he seems to really enjoy it. I feel like I'm falling behind, especially in the homework, and I'm a little annoyed that they don't have a special snack time for the parents, but as long as he's having a good time, I guess I'll just have to deal with my disappointment.

Just like high school.

Product Placement

We must have spent about seventeen hours trying to come up with a decent picture for our family Christmas card this year, when you add up all the different venues and poses and outfits we tried. And when I say 'we' above, I mean, as I usually do, "Wendy". I believe I've made this clear before, but most of the time when I'm talking about some sort of task we have undertaken to better organize our lives, or be more active socially, or reach out to our family, I mean Wendy when I say 'we'. "We" is, after all, a reasonable abbreviation of her name.

For minute, after grueling minute, Wendy tried to capture just the right image. Digital cameras are wonderful. You can click away to your heart's content, never worrying about wasting film. Unfortunately you also have to be able to predict two seconds into the future because of the lag time between button being pushed and picture being taken. We never take pictures of Kiernan when he is smiling. We take pictures of him when he's going to smile. As with most of the things we're teaching him to do, I'm not sure who is being trained here, us or him. Wendy got a bunch of pretty good shots, but nothing she was ecstatic about.

So, the day before Christmas, we got Kiernan in his Santa suit--a gift from Wendy's Uncle Tom and Aunt Bonnie--and chased him around the tree for half an hour. This activity yielded several great shots, like the one above. The only problem was that stupid soda bottle. It seemed like every good shot had some dopey product placement in it like that.

Eventually Wendy just picked a variety of shots that went to different people. You probably know this, as you probably got one. I love the one above. I also loved this one of him riding the traditional Rocking Moose that he got for his birthday from Amy and Lisa. The only problem with that picture being the offstage arm of his mother. It's a cute arm, and structurally necessary, but it kind of throws off the composition of the picture.

Kiernan now has a Rocking Moose (pictured), a Rocking Horse that his Nana and Pop sent him, and a Rocking Fish that his Gammy and Grance gave him. Eventually we hope to have a rocking representative of each member of the animal kingdom. Kind of the Noah's Ark of rocking animal collections, if you will, but with only one of each.

Lord knows I don't need these things breeding. We have enough toys that make noise as it is.

Most Favored Gift Status

Kiernan's favorite gift this Christmas--aside from the one YOU gave him, which is the gift he really loves to play with/wear/save for college the absolute mostest because YOU are so special to him--was this box filled with packing peanuts. Clearly the folks who picked this one out, his Grandaddy Jake and Omi Karen, knew what they were doing. They shipped it out from Colorado, protecting the little styrofoam peanuts inside by placing a bunch of wrapped presents inside among them. This kept the peanuts from overcrowding each other too much.

After the presents were removed, Wendy had the bright idea that if he loved the ball pit at school, he surely would love to be put in a box full of packing materials. She was right. He must have spent twenty minutes in that box just rooting around. Then he spent another ten or fifteen minutes climbing/diving out and immediately demanding to be put back in. It was quite a Christmas morning.

I predict shopping for him is going to be much easier next year.