Book Smarts

After dinner things can get difficult. Especially if only one of us parents is at home. Cleaning up from dinner and getting Kiernan ready for bed is a dizzying process. He is so quick now; he can disappear in a moment. And he's too curious and good at climbing to let him get out of our sight for too long. I think he understands our trepidation in this regard, for often as soon as he does get out of sight, he goes silent, like a submarine. I wish there was some kind of parental sonar available for moments like that.

The other night I had to get the bath ready after dinner on a night when Wendy has to teach late. Kiernan had just been released from his seat at the dinner table and was ready to play. (The basic fact any parent of a toddler knows is that as the toddler gets more tired, he gets more active, more wound up. Meanwhile his parents are asleep on their feet.)

I sprinted into the bathroom to start the bath process, figuring I would do all the little tasks--rinsing out the tub, putting down fresh towels, getting a clean diaper and pajamas for afterward--in bursts. I'd run into the bathroom, get his bath toys out, then run back into the family room to make sure Kiernan had not climbed up onto the window sill. Then I'd dash back in, rinse the tub, and hurry back out to make sure he wasn't drawing on the walls. Every second Kiernan is out of my sight when we're alone is like the speed round on some game show. A huge digital timer pops up in my mind and wackily ominous music plays in my ears. I know I'd better get back out to him before that timer reaches thirty seconds or I'll be gonged out as a parent.

On this night, Kiernan made my job easy. He climbed up onto the reading chair and opened a book. He's been doing this more and more lately. Most of the time he still wants us to read to him, but time to time, especially when we are about another task, he will go and open a book and page through it himself. These are wonderful moments, so wonderful that they can become counterproductive. There are times I'm trying to do the dishes and he will just be sitting in his room, reading a book. All I want to do is watch him from outside the room, spy on his little moment of beautiful independence.

He's such a clever little guy. A budding intellectual, I'm sure of it.

Oh...I suppose I should mention what happened right after this picture. As I prepared to fill the tub, he followed me into the bathroom and tossed the book he had been reading into the tub.

Intellectual. Indeed.

The Picnic Lizard

A couple weeks ago we went to a local park for a picnic. We stopped at KFC after Kiernan's nap and picked up some stuff for lunch, then headed up to Chatsworth to the park. Wendy had just discovered the place the day before when she and Kiernan attended a birthday party for a friend of his.

Our first order of business, while Wendy unpacked and set up the food, was to throw the balls Kiernan had brought along up into the air over and over again. Much of our days are taken up with this activity. Whereas a few months ago we were predominately concerned with spraying water on everything in the world, these days we have to throw balls up into the air as high as we can. For hours on end. Kiernan is getting really good this, which I find interesting because it reminds me of one of the many games I came up with when I was growing up to amuse myself, particularly when we lived in Texas, and then later in Colorado. I was far removed from friends in both locales much of the time, so I came up with various single player games, including throwing footballs to myself.

Thing is, Kiernan does not view this game as a solo activity. If we try to sit down while he is throwing the balls up in the air, he stops, points at the grass, and says, "Daddy! Grass! Play!"

He's also getting very good at using the imperative.

After throwing the balls we ate our lunch. As we cleaned up our lunch, I noticed some movement on the blanket. It was a lizard. The little guy scurried up onto Kiernan's diaper bag and hung out for awhile. Then he took off and Kiernan followed him onto the grass until he lost him. A few minutes later the lizard returned and hung out with us for awhile longer.

Eventually he took off for good and we all went over to the play area. Wendy wanted to show me Kiernan's new skills on the slide. Up until this point I had only seen him go down the slide with help. Now he can do it himself. It's cool to see him do this at school now. He climbs the steps up into the little play structure, toddles over the slide, carefully sits down, and says "Ready. Set. Go!" And then he slides down. Often he is in cahoots with one of his classmates. One day it was a little girl named Bella. Another day it was a boy named Cameron (whose name Kiernan pronounces, "Cram-on"). He is just as insistent that his accomplice continue sliding with him as he is that we continue throwing balls in the air with him at home. Bella tried running off to find her twin sister at the swing, and Kiernan refused to continue playing without her. "Bella go? Bella go? Bella go?"

After sliding for awhile we packed up our stuff and went for a hike. Upon reentering the park, Kiernan saw another family having a picnic. More to the point, he saw their big blue soccer ball. He made a beeline for the ball, saying, over and over again, "Kiernan turn! Kiernan turn! Kiernan turn!" Wendy kicked into high gear, attempting to head him off at the pass. Luckily the little boy in the family was interested in sharing. He got up from his meal and brought the ball to Kiernan, letting him play with it. It was nice, especially since we'd had a rather ugly encounter with some other children before the hike. We played with the soccer ball for a bit before giving it back, at which time Kiernan practiced a few Spanish words with the family.

He's such a cool little boy.

Happy Chalk, Keep Chalkin' Happy Chalk

This is how Kiernan looks when his mommy gets home from work.

On this day we all ended up in the front of the house, chalking up the sidewalk. Cathryn and Keirnan had been playing Hopscotch, and after we walked her out to her car at the end of her day with him, Kiernan wanted to stay outside and draw improvements into the Hopscotch squares. Wendy drove up as we were doing this, and he went nuts, as he always does when she gets home.

She immediately joined us on the sidewalk and helped with the chalking project. A nice little bit of family time.

Pocket Rosies

I'm working in my office now. Kiernan's babysitter Cathryn just came out to let me know she had put him down for his nap and was heading out (she has class this afternoon). I said goodbye and thanked her. After she left I clicked on the monitor I have in my office that lets me hear what's going on in Kiernan's room.

Right now he is singing himself to sleep. He's singing "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" very softly.

Kiernan's ability to sing songs, actual songs that we know too, is a fairly recent development. For a long time he sang his own songs, just singing the colors he knows or singing the numbers he can count. Recently, however, he surprised us by beginning to string together the songs we sing to him. I think the first one I really picked up on was "Ring Around the Rosie", which was easy for me to pick up on because he turns around in circles while he sings it and falls down at the end. Not a lot of songs end like that. Especially if you're not in a mosh pit at the time. Kiernan's version of the song goes,

Ring a'rosies,
Pocket rosies,
All fall down.

That "pocket rosies" thing just knocks me out.

I see a lot of books right now that leave out the "ashes, ashes" when they print their version of the song. I just want all of you to know I have no intention of leaving out the "ashes, ashes" and sticking in some silly substitute that is kinder and gentler. I think one I've seen is "atishoo, atishoo". I'm not teaching Kiernan "atishoo, atishoo" because it is a silly word and we're not from England. I'm very particular about the words we use, even while singing about the Black Plague. (Incidentally, we're not.)

The next two songs Kiernan picked up were "Row Your Boat" and "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star". The latter seems to be his favorite right now, maybe because he can do the hand signs that go along with it. It's great to hear him singing himself to sleep, both because it's just beautiful to hear my son singing to himself and because it is good for him to be able to get himself to sleep without our help. Still, I will miss sitting in his room and singing to him as he goes to sleep. When he is done drinking his milk, nowadays, he pulls his bottle from his mouth and says, "Crib." He often points to his crib to make it clear that it's time for bed. We put him in his crib, and then he says, "Sing! Chair!" This means he wants us to sing to him from the chair in the corner. He knows it will be harder for us to sneak out of the room if we're sitting down. This is due in large part to the fact that the floors in our house creak at the drop of a hat. Even a very light hat. They creak if you even just think about them creaking. There they go. I just heard them over the monitor as I typed that.

We sit down, then, and we sing while he gets his affairs in order, gathering and re-gathering all of his stuffed animals until everybody is configured just right and his blanket is in a twisted ball beneath him. If you stop singing during this, he will cease all activity, wait a moment, then say, "Sing!"

The night before last I put him down in his crib and he just smiled at me and rolled over onto his side. I said, "Goodnight. I love you." I made for the door, anticipating the order to sit down in the chair and sing. But he only smiled a sleepy smile at me and watched me leave. Then he sung himself to sleep.

It's funny how independence can be exciting and sad at the same time.

The Aunt from U.N.C.L.E.

During our trip to Virginia, Kiernan got some quality time in with an aunt and an uncle.


My brother Mason (Kiernan codename: MayMay) just graduated from high school in June. I was fortunate enough to be able to go out to Virginia and attend. Everybody seemed pretty happy to have me there, although it seemed that the first words with which I was greeted were often, "Where's Kiernan?"

This is, I'd have to say, as it should be.

Luckily I could tell people that Kiernan would indeed be visiting in August, thanks to the tireless efforts of his mother, Wendy. She had two weeks of work in West Virginia and worked it out so that Kiernan and I could spend one of those weeks with my parents. I say "worked it out" because she had to work around the fact that I was terrified of flying alone across the United States with Kiernan. I should say this anxiety is not out of any fear of flying, just of a general apprehensiveness about wrangling a rambunctious boy who is on the cusp of his ___ twos (no modifier before the word "twos" is in any way implied) inside a metal tube for five hours straight...on my own. So Wendy arranged the flights so she would fly with us into Norfolk, turn around the next day and fly to work in West Virginia, come back to Virginia at the end of the week, then turn around and fly back to West Virginia at the end of the weekend with us.

Yes, yes...I know how lucky I am.

At any rate, Kiernan hung out with Mason for the first part of the week, calling him, as I mentioned above, MayMay. We're constantly trying to help Kiernan refine his language, so I spent the days in Gloucester Point, where my dad lives, trying to get Kiernan to say "Mason" clearly. He got it pretty quickly, but to my surprise, Mason preferred the early version. I should not have been surprised. One of the weird sadnesses of Kiernan's unbelievable aptitude with language is the cute versions of words he leaves behind. I'll probably post about this seperately (and more comprehensively) at some point, but one quick example is "Bup." For awhile Kiernan would not say any word that began with a vowel without putting a consonant in front of it. So his Aunt Amy, for instance, was "Mamy". And a request for us to pick him up was, for a long time, "Bup! Bup!"

Wendy and I have this little look of mourning we share more and more when Kiernan leaves behind one of his baby versions of a word for the more accurate, grown-up version. Having seen the way my stepmom Sandi looked whenever someone mentioned Mason going away to college at the end of August, I realized that parenthood is one long road of these types of looks.

Incidentally, it looks as though Mason is holding Kiernan somewhat gingerly, as if he's not sure what to do with him. This is not because Mason is unsure of himself with kids--he's a professional babysitter, among other things. It is because Kiernan is soaking wet, a hallmark of him being outside for more than two minutes.

Actually, the two-minute rule is true when we're in California; he makes a beeline for the hose and his water bottles and goes to work. When we were in Virginia the two-minute rule for getting soaked was changed to the anytime-when-he-was-awake rule. I'm not saying it was humid there, but I couldn't tell the difference between when we were in the swimming pool and when we weren't.

Which was fine with Kiernan. Regardless of what the weather is doing, he wants to be outside.

Later in the week Kiernan got to see my sister, Hope (Kiernan codename: Hope). I absolutely love this picture, because Hope is reading to Kiernan and I just love that.

Kiernan and I--and later Wendy--stayed in the guest room at Mom's house. The guest room used to be Hope's bedroom, and before that it was mine. The bookcase in front of which Hope and Kiernan are sitting still holds a number of Hope's books. As I unpacked our things, Hope and Kiernan just ran around the room playing. Kiernan saw the books and started to pull them off the shelf, asking Hope to read to him. One that he pulled off was a story I had not thought about in years, but one which immediately stirred warm memories in me.

The book: The Monster at the End of this Book.

Hope read the book to him a couple of times, I think, and he was just nuts about it, as you can tell from the picture. He gets such joy out of books. I cannot tell you how happy that makes me.

Shiny Humid People

At the end of our week in Virginia, the latter half of which we spent with my mom (Kiernan codename: Nana) and my stepdad John (Kiernan codename: Pop), Wendy flew in from West Virginia (where she was working) for the weekend. This was back in the era when you could still carry liquids on airplanes...those were the days.

Mom invited her sisters and some friends over for a cookout on Saturday. One family friend, Pat Dowd, shot the above picture of us. He's pretty good at photography, given that he is a professional cameraman, but I was surprised that he took this shot. Pat usually refuses to shoot pictures of anything that is not a teddy bear.

I particularly like the picture Pat took below. It's a great action shot of Kiernan that says just about all you need to know about what he's like right now. Always on the move. Always a blur. And almost always doing something with a ball.
It was a tough trip at times because there was a paucity of balls on the east coast. Apparently there is a correlation between number of balls in an area and availability of decent customer service. At any rate, Kiernan's Nana sensed this and brought this large purple ball home from the grocery store on our second day there.

Kiernan acknowledged it by thanking his Nana and promptly went outside to gather pine cones.

Shampoo Along the Mohawk

We're back home in California after a few weeks on the road. I'm pretty far behind in updating Kiernan's blog, because of that. I have every intention of catching up in the days to come. Really.

To that end I shall put up more pictures for the time being, and perhaps fewer words. I'll go through the pictures from the various trips we took, and post the ones I like with just a caption or a few thoughts, rather than the epic explanations I usually lay down. In this way, hopefully, I'll get you all up to speed on the goings on of Kiernan and his family more quickly. And you'll be able to read the blog without having to give up your job.

The picture above is from our visit to our family in Phoenix, Kiernan's Gammy and Grance.

It's been an up and down summer for us. Hope you have been well.

The Raspberry Conspiracy

Mealtime is always a challenge.


I've spoken before about Kiernan's tastes. What I did not know at the time was how rapidly they would develop. Indeed, what I could not have known was how much they would morph, not only over time...but from meal to meal. For awhile he refused steamed carrots, for example. Then one day--DING!--he gobbled them down. The next day...nope.

At his last checkup, his pediatrician assured me this was normal. I brought up concern about his appetite, and he basically said, "Don't worry. When he's hungry, he'll eat." Then he capped this off with, "If we all ate like toddlers, there'd be no obesity in America."

I was a little uncomfortable with the way he pointedly looked at my mid-section when he said this, but I tried to put that out of my mind.

Tonight was a good night for eating, though. He downed all of his mushroom turnovers (from Trader Joe's--best store on the planet). He ate a little bit of corn. Chewed on a bit of cucumber.

I wanted more vegetable action though, so I brought out a carrot. Kiernan has forsaken steamed carrots of late, so I just presented a raw, freshly peeled, carrot.

No interest.

So I started eating it.

Interest.

It was a great game. I'd take a few nibbles and he'd grab it from my mouth and take a couple of bites. Then I'd reclaim it and he would say, as he is recently wont to say..."Kiernan turn." We're trying to teach him the concepts of sharing and taking turns. So far he fully understands when it's "Kiernan's turn." It's a simple concept, though, since "Kiernan's turn" is apparently happening all the time.

We ate most of the carrot and moved on to dessert, which was, tonight, raspberries. He loves berries. Blueberries. Raspberries. Strawberries. His hand-sign for "berry" is perfect. It was, in fact, one of the first signs I remember him translating without any sort of cue. We could say, "Kiernan, what's the sign for 'berry'?" He would do it without hesitation. Or we'd do the sign, saying nothing out loud, and he would say his approximation of the word "berry." It's shocking how quickly he has learned the signs and words for the things he really wants.

The way he picked up the sign for "ice cream" leaps to mind.

I took to washing and cutting up the raspberries. At one point, I dropped one of them. It simply disappeared. I looked all over the floor. Under the cabinet ledge. In the cat's bowl. It was just gone. I even checked my earlobe, to no avail.

Then Kiernan smiled and pointed at the little drawer where we keep the scissors and twist-ties and rubber bands.

We had a huge laugh...then it was off to the bath.

Put Me Out, Coach

My son, the jock.
I apologize for the quality of the photo above (as with any of the pictures, you can click on the photo for a larger version), but the picture was taken on the sly without a flash. Kiernan had just gone down for his afternoon nap. I'm generally paranoid about waking him during his afternoon nap, especially during times like this when Wendy is out of town on business. She is in Alabama for a week and a half (!)--a statement that deserves an exclamation point for a variety of reasons--and while I have more help from friends and a fantastic babysitter during the week, the nap time during the weekend is very, very precious. But I just had to get this picture. I cracked the door to check on him, saw the above scene, and ran for the camera. I shut off the flash just to be safe, and snapped the picture as quickly as possible. Hence the poor lighting and general blurriness.

In case it's not clear what's going on in the picture, Kiernan is sleeping clutching his basketball under one arm, and his little football under the other.

A semi-recent development has been his tendency to cuddle up to his stuffed animals when he goes to sleep. This was not always so. He has never really had one special little animal or blanket, nothing we could dub his "woobie"...or whatever people call that special thing kids latch on to and drag around with them until they get sick and their parents toss it into a junk pile out back because they are afraid of germs and then a fairy comes and makes it real.

Um. Sorry about that. Didn't mean to go all velveteen on you. Blame Karen Hardcastle.

But lately he has been developing an affinity for certain of his animals. Most notably his Pink Panther, gifted to him by my Aunt Claudia and Uncle Jim, a man so unbelievably laid back that as I kid I had no choice but to refer to him as the Pink Panther. Usually Kiernan's affection for his stuffed Pink Panther is expressed by chewing on said Pink Panther. Kiernan chews on many things, but he especially loves chewing on certain of his stuffed animals. Pink, also Fluffles (a little stuffed lamb), and Pooh (his Classic Pooh Bear, not the Disney version). Of late, when he falls asleep, he has taken to throwing an arm over any or all of these three and sleeping with them held close.

Today when I put him down for his nap, the basketball and football were already in the crib. I knew this was a mistake, but I caught it too late. He was fairly drowsy by this time, but still lucid enough to notice the basketball in his crib. I was concerned that seeing the ball would make him want to play with it, and that this would cause him to pull away from sleep. Still, I knew that if I tried to remove it, he would snap awake and complain (by which word I mean, "freak out"). So I left it in the crib with him. The football was down near his feet, so I was able to surreptitiously cover it with his blanket. I made for the door.

He opened his eyes a bit more and said, "One more. Sing."

"One more" is one of those little things that Kiernan has picked up, something we did not try to teach him but that he adopted on his own. It came about fairly simply. Whenever we were done with something, say a snack, we would tell him, "All done." He would give us the sign for "more," and we would say, "Okay...one more then. Okay? One more, then all done." And he would nod. One day he turned this on us. We were finished with something or other, say a snack, maybe a cookie. We told him he was all done. He held up a single finger and said, "One more."

Talk about being totally disarmed. How do you deny something like that? It is unbelievably adorable. He, of course, uses it for everything he wants to continue now. Like reading. When you finish a book he wants to read--current favorites are Papa, Please Get the Moon for Me, and Chicka Chicka Boom Boom--he will hold up his index finger and say, "One more." This indicates he wants to read that book again. The problem is that "one more" in this instance--indeed, in most instances--doesn't really mean "one more" in the spirit in which we used it originally. It means, "one more until you finish this readthrough and I hold up my finger and say 'one more' again." And again. And again. And again.

Yesterday he made me read Curious George and the Bunny to him eight times in a row. This is mind numbing, but who am I to object to my boy being crazy about his books? I want him to be crazy about his books. If this means my brain goes a little numb, so be it.

So he said, "one more, sing," which meant he wanted me to sing some more as he fell asleep. I went back to the chair in the corner and kept singing to him. At one point I fell asleep myself, and he helpfully woke me back up by saying, "one more, sing," again. I know I've mentioned this before in these pages, but I cannot for the life of my figure out how single parents do it.

As I feared, instead of getting sleepier, Kiernan began to get more restless. He rolled around with his basketball, trying to find a comfortable spot. He said, "Football...go?" He is forever asking where someone or something went by putting the word "go" after it. This week has been a cycle of "Mommy...go?" and "She went to Alabama to do a project with Lisa and Pokie." A never-ending cycle. Mommy-go? Mommy-go? Mommy-go? And after I answer "Mommy-go?" with the above about Lisa and Pokie--two of her colleagues--he will then ask "Pokie-go?" and "Lisa-go?" Even though he doesn't really know who these women are. Sometimes he mixes in "Dada-go?" because Darren and Daniel are out of town too. So I've got that going for me.

I avoided the subject of where the football was, to no avail. He eventually located it, holding it aloft with a clear air of victory. I gestured for him to lie back down. He did, and continued rolling around. Eventually the restlessness grew less and I got up to leave the room, singing a couple more verses before squeezing out of the door. He complained a bit, but much to my surprise fell asleep within a few minutes. Sometimes staying in the room to sing some more actually keeps sleep from coming. Maybe he feels falling asleep during a performance would be rude.

So I took a peek at him about fifteen minutes after the complaining stopped and there he was, cuddled up to his basketball and football.

What an incredible kid.

The New Zoo Review

Before I went to Virginia for my brother Mason's graduation from high school (I'll include a bit about that as soon as he sends me some pictures), Wendy and I took Kiernan to the Santa Barbara Zoological Gardens. We have been to our own zoo here in Los Angeles a number of times, but have heard from other parents that the zoo in Santa Barbara is really something to see, so we decided to make a road trip. I had labored under the impression that this trip was going to take upwards of three hours, for some reason, but when I looked up directions on Google Maps (Google Maps is the best, true that, double-true) I found that the drive was only going to take slightly more than an hour.

We got a semi-early start one Saturday morning, figuring that Kiernan would take his nap in the car on the way up, and that would afford us an uninterrupted time at the zoo. What ended up happening was that he did not fall asleep until we were ten minutes away from the zoo. In point of fact, his mother started falling asleep before he did. So, when we got to the zoo we just decided to let him sleep for another thirty minutes before starting our day. Really, this was just for him. For his well-being.

Keep in mind, the picture to the right is from the beginning of our zoo adventure.

About forty minutes after this picture was taken, Kiernan opened his eyes, stretched, and signaled he was ready for the zoo. Another half an hour and his mother did the same. We headed on in, finding that our membership card to the L.A. Zoo entitled us to half off admission. This was a minor disappointment as we had been told it would get us in for free. Still, only having to pay half is better than nothing.

It was immediately apparent that this zoo experience was going to be different than our experiences visiting the zoo in Los Angeles. This is a bit unfair to L.A. because the times we have gone there, the zoo has been undergoing massive renovations. Because of this it seems that you walk for miles without ever seeing an animal, instead seeing huge plywood barriers with signs that promise you someday will get to see an animal. Whenever I'm there I am constantly reminded of that scene in Jurassic Park when the scientists and kids are first sent out into the park and there is nary a dinosaur to be seen. Jeff Goldblum's character leans up to the in-car camera and says, "Now eventually you might have dinosaurs on your, on your dinosaur tour, right? Hello? Yes?"

The first thing that occurred to me as we made our way into the zoo in Santa Barbara was that this zoo felt more, well, alive, than almost any other zoo I have visited. It felt more intimate. The animals were closer, easier to see because of the layout of the park and the design of the exhibits. In addition to this, the animals all seemed to be out and about on this day. Maybe it was the nature of the day, slightly overcast and mildly warm. Or maybe it was just the nature of the climate in Santa Barbara, which is more moderate than here in Los Angeles. I mean, if I were a snow leopard living in the blast furnace heat of the San Fernando Valley, I'd probably spend all my time napping in the shade far away from prying eyes, too. The Santa Barbara zoo is right by the ocean, as well. We took a train ride around the park and could see the beach from the train.

[The picture to the left is from the train ride. I just love how Kiernan looks, sitting on his mother's lap, with his little legs propped up on the railing of the train car.]

One of the first places we went was into the Eeeww! House. The Eeeww! House holds the creepy crawlies. Spiders and snakes and scorpions. They are in wonderfully creative little habitat displays that you view through small little plexiglass covered openings. For instance, the display holding the black widow spider was a simple 'S' shaped pipe in a box that looked like the cabinet under the sink. Not our sink at home, mind you. Rather a family that doesn't have five hundred plastic bags and two hundred empty spaghetti sauce jars crammed into the cabinet under their sink. It was a simple, elegant little display; the black widow had built her web in one of the upper corners of the box, so you had to bend way down and crane your neck to see her.

It is suitably dark in the Eeeww! House, and at one point Wendy, who is no lover of spiders but does not mind the odd ball python, intimated that she was about to throw up because she was just too creeped out. She wandered away from the arachnoid displays and leaned down to peer into one with centipedes or Madagascar Hissing Cockroaches or something. She was looking into the little plexiglass window when all of a sudden a human hand appeared, reaching into the display from above. This, understandably, caused her to jump. I had a similar experience later when viewing a scorpion and an unseen worker started spraying a mist of water into the scorpion's little home. A very cool, very creepy place.

One of the highlights of the visit was the lion exhibit. We first saw the lions during our aforementioned trip on the train, the male perched on one enormous boulder and the female on another, both looking majestic and unconcerned. We saw them again when we were walking the park, at which time they were more active. In fact, the lioness was at the far end of the enclosure, staring down a blue ball. Here we are, yards away from two of nature's most incredibly beautiful creatures, and what does Kiernan immediately yell?

"Ball!"

He pointed at the big blue ball the lioness was staring at, then he said, "Pleeeeeeeeeeeeease!" Now don't get me wrong. I'm happy we're teaching him to talk. I'm very happy with how quickly he is picking up and using words. But "please" is not always one of the words I'm happy about teaching him. Because he doesn't just say the word, and he doesn't just say it in the right circumstances. He also has figured out how to maximize the power of the word both by drawing it out for what seems like thirty seconds, and by pairing it with an expression of such pitiful pleading that you can refuse him nothing. It feels like not giving him a fourth cookie is tantamount to denying him water after he's been in the desert for six weeks.

The lioness, thankfully, was impervious to both his tone and his expression. She was not about to share her blue ball with him. To drive this point home, at the exact moment he asked for the blue ball she began playing with it. This was a wonderful moment. She looked like our cat Cali when she is playful. She grabbed the ball in her jaws and shook it around. She threw it and then chased it. Then she rolled over on her back and held it in her paws, wrestling it. It was like somebody at the park was controlling her with a remote control.

All in all it was a terrific day. For the first time Kiernan really seemed to get into the animals. During our other visits to the zoo he has been more interested in people watching than animal watching. Even when he and I went to the L.A. zoo with his godfathers, he was more interested in running around after other kids and entertaining Darren and Daniel than he was in looking at the displays. I do not mean that comment to sound negative, however. I'm enjoying all these stages. It is fun to go to a place like the zoo and see how he reacts differently each time. Each experience is something new, for him and for us. That may be the best part about being his parents, seeing these discoveries as they happen.

That's the main reason we keep taking him to places like the Cold Stone ice cream shop. It's not because we want ice cream, but rather because we want to see how he reacts to the experience each time. It's important to take note of such things. For his development and well-being. Of course.