The Boys of Sunset

As I mentioned in the previous post, the first thing Kiernan and I did after checking into our place in San Clemente was head across the street to the beach. Actually, that's not entirely true. First we tried to get Kiernan to take nap. He did not go to sleep. I guess I can't blame him.

In order to give Mommy a couple hours to get some grading done, we boys decided to hit the beach ourselves. It was late in the afternoon, so we didn't bother changing into our swim suits or anything. I just grabbed the camera and we headed across the street.

After dropping our shoes off underneath the closed lifeguard stand, we headed down the beach. Kiernan just took off, following the tracks that one of the jeeps that the lifeguards use had made in the sand. Every now and then he would leave the track to go and chase some birds.
This would be a recurring activity for this trip.

We spent some time exploring the beach, checking out the shells and the huge mounds of seaweed that had washed up on the shore ("What's that, Daddy? What's that, Daddy?"). After awhile Kiernan started back the way we had come. We ran into another father and son, and older version of ourselves, playing one of those paddle ball games people play at the beach. The man stopped to hand his paddle to Kiernan and I helped him hit the ball back to the man's son. Then I said, "C'mon, Little Man, let's go." The guy with the paddle laughed. "That's what I still call him," he said, indicating his own boy, who was probably around twelve. "Little man."

I said, "Yeah. I'm not in any hurry for that to stop."

"You and me both," he replied.

Kiernan and I continued back toward the pier, which was still a good ways in the distance. Kiernan said, "I want to go play with those boys." I squinted. I couldn't tell what he was talking about, but we pressed on. When we were almost to the pier Kiernan sprinted ahead to a little boy who was lying down in the sand, tying long thin strands of seaweed into a rope. He looked up, saw Kiernan, and said, "Hi!" I would later find out from his mother that he was six years old.

He popped up to his feet, gathered his seaweed rope, and said, "Come on!" Kiernan followed him to a big pile of seaweed on the other side of where his family was beached and the two boys set about the task of untangling seaweed.

I stayed close, but out of earshot, letting the two boys play. It was so cool seeing Kiernan just dive right in and start playing with another kid without any prompting or help from me. The only time I had to intervene was when Kiernan started to throw sand. The other boy looked past him at me, as if to say, "Are you going to handle this?" I came over and cautioned Kiernan to stop and that was that.

A little while later Kiernan took off for the pier. The little boy kept working at his seaweed rope task, so I followed Kiernan. Once under the pier Kiernan turned, saw me, and said, "I want Andrew to follow me." Without any solitication from me he had introduced himself to this little boy, found out his name, and remembered it. This is a simple task, but it struck me as a giant step.

Life is full of these kinds of moments these days. Things that seem so simple, but are nevertheless fascinating little achievements for a toddler.

Kiernan went back and played with Andrew some more. Everything Andrew did--flopping on his back to do a sand angel, trying to do a back roll in the sand, making weird little trenches with his head--Kiernan wanted to try. I was happy to sit at a distance and let him play along, at least until Andrew and his older brother ran over to the aforementioned closed lifeguard stand, climbed the steps, and jumped off.

I guess you have to draw the line somewhere.

Walking Distance

At the beginning of April we took a little family vacation. This picture is from the San Clemente portion of our trip, which was the second part of the vacation. The first part took place over a weekend in San Diego, where Wendy was slated to give a presentation to a conference. After all, it wouldn't be a vacation unless you had some work to do on the trip.

San Diego was good. We got to visit Seaworld, thanks to my dad and stepmom and brother, and did a little touring of the city. I'll post some pictures from that part of the trip as well, and talk about it more then.

I just wanted to get off the schneid and start posting again. So I decided to go with this picture of Kiernan on the beach in front of the San Clemente pier.

San Clemente is this great little seaside town just south of Los Angeles. Wendy and I stayed there a few years ago; ever since we have both dreamed of going back. A friend back then suggested a hotel/resort that was right down near the beach and we had a great time. I held onto the brochure from the place--because I save everything--and dug it out for this trip. I'm so glad I did. The place we stayed, The Sea Horse Resort, was great for us. It was not the most fancy place in the world, which is to say the amenities were few. But when you're staying across the street from the ocean, with a view of the pier, and can open the sliding glass door and hear the waves crashing all night long, who needs amenities?

We had a great time down in San Clemente doing what I like to do best on vacations: nothing. We got there and Kiernan and I almost immediately went across the street to play on the beach. There was a crepe place just a few steps down the sidewalk from where we were staying. We ate breakfast there all three mornings we were in San Clemente, both because Wendy is nuts about crepes and because the coffee at the place was excellent. I've never really understood the whole crepe thing, though Wendy makes a mean crepe. To me it's like eating whatever you're eating on a thing that would like to be a tortilla but hasn't quite made it and instead tastes like soggy, slightly eggy, paper. But the crepes at this place were good, and the coffee kept me coming back. And one morning there I had some of the best brie I've ever had in my life.

Plus it was within walking distance of our hotel and the beach. That's hard to beat.

All in all the dining was pretty good in San Clemente due in no small part to the fact that we walked to almost every meal. There was a fish restaurant across the street at the pier. We had appetizers there the first night (a great cajun ahi tuna for me) and a great dinner the last night (a fantastic wild striped sea bass for me). The only dinner that disappointed was at a Swiss/German place called The Swiss Chalet. I had remembered eating there during our previous visit, years ago, and thought it might be a nice place to try again. The food was actually pretty good, but it took forever to get to us. Seriously, the salads did not go down until forty-five minutes after we ordered them, and we didn't order appetizers. There was a time when I would have considered this type of wait a "leisurely meal"...that was the time before I had a two-year 0ld. Considering how long it took, Kiernan was remarkably well-behaved though. He also helped us make friends with the people sitting near us, most notably the table of four great-grandmothers. One of them was a neighbor of the chef/owner of the restaurant who was put off by the wait for food as well. So it wasn't just us. She told us the place hadn't been the same since the wife stopped working there, and that sounded just ominous enough that I didn't ask her to elaborate.

Good food though. Not that German food is that hard to do. That's the only thing that puts me off about going to a German place. Most of the stuff is so easy I can do it myself at home, and when I go out I want to get stuff I don't necessarily know how to do myself. Many German restaurants in America are full of simple things, like sausages and pork chops and little else. Maybe the odd rolled meat dish. A couple of schnitzels. The menus are often exceedingly short. I did like the food in Germany when we went a couple years ago, but I was crazy for the food of Switzerland, mainly because in my memory we had cheese fondue at every meal (which is probably why I came back to the states weighing about fifteen pounds more than I did when we left). This place in San Clemente had cheese fondue, but you could only have it if two people were ordering it, and Wendy doesn't eat cheese.

Why Swiss places cannot figure out how to make a batch of cheese fondue for one person is completely beyond me. Oh well.

I'll throw one last picture onto this post. This is a picture of the three of us in front of the crepe place on our final morning in San Clemente.

G-I-N-S-B-U-R-G Spells "Dog"

Kiernan read his first word the other day!

Allow me to set the table.

The kid is just nuts about letters. He loves numbers too, but he is absolutely nuts about his letters. He's got the magnetic ones that he plays with on the refrigerator, or on various sheet pans around the house (below is a picture of him doing that with his Pap-Pap and his Uncle Mason at their house in January). He's got a couple sets of foam letters too, some big, uppercase ones that pop out of foam squares that you can link together to form a mat. He also has some smaller ones that are really for the bathtub, as they can stick to the tile walls, but he insists on carting them all over the house and playing with them.

A couple of months ago Kiernan got interested in spelling out every word he saw. In fact, one day in particular, on our way to the airport, he got upset with me because I wouldn't keep the car still enough for him to spell out the signs we were passing. A little while after that Wendy started teaching him how to sound out the letters, and shortly after that he started to sound them out for himself, trying to put together words. He would put a line of letters up on the fridge, sound out the letters one by one--correctly--then make up a totally unrelated word like "blibberflimp" or something.

This seemed totally natural to me until we were at school one day and one of the teachers was playing with him, with some foam letters there. I was hanging back, letting him have some space. She turned to me, sitting a bit away from them, her eyes wide, and said, "He's sounding out the letters." I just shrugged. I mean, I've been able to sound out letters for years. Nobody ever makes a fuss.

At dinner a short while later he tried sounding out some of the words on one of the cool placemats his Aunt Amy made for him. She makes these collage placemats for him sometimes for birthday gifts and he just loves them. One of them has the word "Ginsburg" on it, written vertically. For some reason Wendy's family says the word "Ginsburg" at the start of every meal. Apparently it's German for "We don't believe in saying the blessing"...or something like that. They've explained what it actually means about fifty-three times to me, but I think I was concentrating on saying something pithy about the wine all those times.

So anyway, Kiernan spelled out the word "Ginsburg" on his placemat. He did this very quickly, and Wendy and I looked at each other, holding our breath. Was he going to read this word? Was this the moment?

He then said, "Dog!" and started laughing maniacally.

So...no.

But then on this last Saturday, Kiernan's Née-Née was over at the house to see him. Wendy broke out the finger paints and she, Renée, and Kiernan sat around making hand prints on butcher paper. I sat at the dining room table, writing in my journal. On a whim Wendy painted the following letters on the paper: C-A-T.

Kiernan moved around to her side of the paper, pointed at the letters, sounded them out without prompting, and said, "Cat."

Our three mouths simultaneously fell open. He read a word! Woo-Hoo! Wendy spelled out a few more three-letter words, and he carefully sounded out and read them all. It was a watershed moment, and I'm so pleased we were all there to see it.

I'm glad he picked the word "cat" as the first thing he's really read. It's a good word, and we have a cat. Plus, I think he was genuinely surprised with how the word ended.

Of course, by the time I got the video camera out to record the moment for posterity Kiernan had decided that every word we spelled out was "Guinea pig", so I don't think we have to worry about him getting ahead of himself.

Mom Possible

Hello everyone, from this side of 2007. Now that all of our holiday stuff, our family traveling, and my Oscar ballots are in the mail, I can get back to my routines. Back to work on the final rewrite of my latest novel. Back to submitting for acting jobs. And back to updating The Creeping Kid. It is easy to see which of these is the most important.

Before I get into catching you all up on Kiernan's doings during the holidays and in the early new year, I must first do a Vocabulary Update.

As many of you know, Kiernan turned two years old on November 29--Holy Cow! As I look at the previous post it appears I have not updated this since well before that on November 16...oof. Sorry about that. At any rate, he is developing by leaps and bounds, and the way his vocabulary is developing is a constant source of amazement to us both. Not just his vocabulary, though. I don't just mean he's using big words, though he is. I mean the way he processes concepts and expresses them. From the simple--"I want juice instead of milk!"--to the more complex--"Sit down on the blanket, Daddy...it's more comfortable."--he is just exploding in his ability to convey what he wants, thinks, and feels.

The other night at dinner Wendy did something that was silly. I can't remember what it was. What I do remember is that I said, to Kiernan, "Boy, your mom's a piece of work."

Without skipping a beat he replied, "She's impossible!"

I laughed for about half an hour.

He may be a momma's boy now, and for the foreseeable future. He's got her looks (thank goodness), her smarts (ditto), and based on his persistence in getting me to do just about anything he wants, her drive...but I think we all know who he's getting his sense of humor from.

I just hope he forgives me for ending that last sentence with a preposition.

Pictures: The top picture is him at the home of Gammy and Grance, playing with his activity/craft table. The second picture is him preparing for said trip. It's a companion picture to an earlier one of him hanging out in a suitcase (from June 2005, which I will include here as a blast from the past):

Chair Enough

Wendy's folks were in town for her sister JoAnne's baby shower. Sadly Kiernan did not get any attention for the whole weekend.

Picass-Oh!

I may be the only one who finds this interesting and cool, but Kiernan can draw circles now. Circles. O's. Balls. Whatever. He can draw a circle.

He is motivated to do this because he got tired of getting us to draw baseballs and basketballs for him. Now he can draw them himself. Sort of. He draws a circle and makes some marks inside of it that are supposed to be the seams. Sometimes instead of a ball he will draw a picture of one of us. It looks like the same picture, unless he's making some kind of comment about my head. Recently the O's (circles, whatever) have become pictures of the sun. His sun pictures are really very good.

Also, no matter what anybody draws--including him--more often than not he will come along and draw a line coming off of it and declare that, henceforth, it is a balloon. You may think you just drew a cat. Nope. What you drew was a cat balloon.

Pumpkin Patch Family

A Monkey's Godfather

Kiernan and his godfather, Daniel. Darren--Kiernan's other godfather--was kind enough to loan him to us for the week so he could build both of our costumes.

Oh, and here's another shot of those cool, cool monkey feet:

And what the heck, one more shot of trick-or-treating. I love the way Kiernan looks carrying his little Jack-o-Lantern as he follows Sam to the next door.

The Curious Incident of the Monkey in the Nighttime

Here's a couple of pictures from Kiernan's second Halloween. As many of you may remember, Kiernan's godfather Daniel is a costume artist. He takes it upon himself to create Kiernan's Halloween costumes, which is really quite cool. This year he created a Curious George costume for Kiernan.


I am to blame for the almost universal poor quality of these pictures. I have no excuse, except to say that I may have been distracted by the enormous yellow hat I had been wearing all day. This is a cute shot, but I have not fixed the eyes yet. I think I took this one right before we went out trick-or-treating. I like this shot because it shows the very cool monkey feet that Daniel made for the costume.

As was the case last year, Kiernan's companion for trick-or-treating was his friend Sam. It's hard to tell in this picture, but Sam was a train for Halloween. From what I understand he is pretty much obsessed with trains, so he went as Thomas the Tank Engine and his mother, Heather, went as an engineer. Why some people feel the need to dress up as part of a theme with their child is beyond me...but whatever.

The boys were a great trick-or-treating team. It was funny to contrast this year with last year, because this time they would just march right up to the door, knock, and say "Trick or Treat!" Kiernan would also do the "smell my feet" chant at some of the houses. I should note that his mother taught him that. I'm very proud of both of them.


I've been trying to avoid this, but I suppose I should include a picture of all three of us.

In case it's not clear from the photo, I am the Man in the Yellow Hat from the Curious George books, and Wendy is a tree. She figured she would spend a significant part of the time while Kiernan was in costume holding him, so she decided to be Momma Tree. I have to say, she makes a darn cute tree. My costume is another of Daniel's brilliant creations. It is hard to get a toddler to carry around props that enhance his costume, so Daniel made a walking prop for him...me! This worked like a charm. We went to school that morning wearing our costumes and the kids just went nuts when they saw us.

Incidentally, I should note that if it seems that Kiernan is less than his normal, ebullient self in these pictures, that is because he was coming down with what would become a pretty good cold. At the time we just thought he was tired from what had been a very full day, even before trick-or-treating. So if he looks a little blank in these pictures, that's why.

This last picture is of Kiernan eating a tortilla after trick-or-treating. I'm including it just because I think he looks so adorable in that costume. I'm also including it because during our walk around the neighborhood we ran into a lot of other trick-0r-treaters. One pair of women stopped us in a driveway, laughed, pointed at Kiernan and said, "Curious Jorge!" They also pointed at me and said some things that I didn't quite catch since basically the word "Jorge" is the extent of my knowledge of Spanish. It's possible they said the word "queso" when they pointed to me, but I can't be sure.

I felt it was fitting to post a picture of our Curious Jorge eating a tortilla on Halloween. This is, after all, Southern California.

Blogga Culpa

First off...apologies. I've been bogged down with a couple of projects, and thus have been neglecting my blogging duties. Furthermore, I apologize but I won't be writing a whole lot for the next couple of entries. I just can't right now. I'll go into why another time, or when I talk to you individually.

Skirting the specifics of the issue for now, suffice to say I got some news yesterday that made me realize I really needed to post some pictures of Kiernan, at the very least. You all need to see more of Kiernan. He is amazing, just amazing, and I need to share that with you all more often. Life is precious and fleeting...and it moves so fast.

So...enjoy the pictures to come. I'll put in what commentary I can, provided I can get my mind to work through all of this and do so.

Love to you all.
Oh, and here's a picture of Kiernan wearing my shoes.