Blessing in Disguise

Once again, the picture here has nothing to do with this post. I just love the picture. As you may be able to ascertain, bedtime is approaching. Sleepy clothes are on the floor just behind Kiernan, as is a container of wipes for changing diapers. Rather than pay attention to any of that, though, Kiernan has elected to take my boots for a spin. I don't know if it's the angle of this picture, or what, but his face looks so much older in this shot. Really gives me an idea of what he's going to look like as he matures.

Again, I'm not in any hurry for that.

This past summer we visited my parents in Virginia. During the visits to both sets--Kiernan's Nana & Pop, and his Pap-pap & Sandi--he experienced meals before which people ask the blessing. We do not do that in our household [sorry to break it to you, Mom], so he was a mite confused at first. This was not his first visit, nor his first experience with a meal preceeded by the blessing, but this summer was the first time he really took notice. Unfortunately, we had not prepared him for this eventuality. It had not occurred to either Wendy or myself that we should need to do so. So the first time someone asked the blessing before a meal, when everybody closed their eyes and my stepfather started to speak to God, Kiernan got this confused look on his face [yeah, you got me, I didn't have my eyes closed] and said, loudly, "Let's eat!"

In addition to seeming an entirely reasonable reaction to the situation, this was flat out hilarious to Wendy and me. Of course we couldn't show him that, as it would only egg him on, so we had to stifle our laughter and say, "Shhh!"

"Shhhh!", as it turns out, was a poor tool for keeping Kiernan quiet during the blessing. So we basically just said, "Okay, we're closing our eyes now!" before every other blessing, and for some reason this worked great. There he would sit, holding the hands of the people seated to his right and left, doing this very funny squinting thing while very obviously peeking at everyone around the table until they all opened their eyes. He thought this was a great game. It got us through the pre-meal blessings for the trip, so that was good, but I didn't give it any further thought once we left Virginia.

Until a couple weeks later when we were back home, all seated down to dinner, and Kiernan suddenly reached out for Wendy's hand, then my hand, then did his little squinty thing. Wendy and I looked at each other with a mixture of amusement and terror. What were we to do now? We had to decide immediately. So, on the fly, we just said what we were thankful for on the table, finishing with a hearty "Thanks!" This worked just fine for Kiernan.

A couple months later we had dinner guests--I think it was Kiernan's Gammy and Grance, along with his Nee-Nee--and Kiernan did it again. We were having some kind of pasta dish, and he was making liberal use of the parmesan cheese on the table. I mean, he was going to town on the stuff, putting huge heaping spoonfuls of it on his pasta. Midway through the meal he grabbed Gammy's hand, then Mommy's hand, and instructed the rest of us to follow his lead. We all grabbed hands and pretended to close our eyes. It was silent for a moment, then Kiernan burst out with, "Thanks for the cheese! And the pasta! And the cheeeeeeeese!"

We cracked up.

Fast forward a few months and Kiernan and I are at the table having lunch. It is after Easter, which means it is a new era for Kiernan. He has been given a Mickey Mouse Clubhouse dvd by his Nee-Nee, and now he is crazy about Mickey Mouse and all his friends. Basically life can now be divided into AMM (After Mickey Mouse) and BMM (Before Mickey Mouse, also known as The Dark Time). Barely a moment goes by during the day that he doesn't ask (translation: demand) I do Mickey's voice.

We're sitting at the table having lunch and Kiernan decides he wants all the Clubhouse friends to join us for lunch. Now, we don't have any of these characters as stuffed animals. He just wants them there. So he assigns Minnie the seat closest to him, the seat his mother usually occupies (Wendy is also cast as the voice talent for Minnie in our household), and asks me to move the chair as close to his chair as possible. Then he assigns Daisy the next chair. Donald is seated in the chair opposite him. Then Goofy. Then Mickey, where I'm sitting. A brief discussion of what everybody is eating follows.

Then he reaches out for my hand. "I want the friends to say blessing," he says. So we methodically go around the table, instructing Minnie to take Kiernan's hand, then Daisy's hand, and instructing Daisy to take Donald's hand, and so on. When all hands are held, Kiernan squints his eyes and says, "Thanks for the peanut butter. And the bread. And the plate. And the napkin. And the knife. And the jelly." The other characters then have to give their thanks--with me voicing them, of course [let me tell you, I do not envy the guy who does the voice for Donald Duck]--until everybody has been accounted for, and Kiernan proceeds with his lunch.

A little while later, as everybody is still happily chatting about lunch and our afternoon plans, Kiernan looks at me and says, "They're just pretend."

"What?" I say.

"They're not real. They're just pretend."

"Right," I respond, once more knocked out by the amazing creature that is my son.

Sadly, for my vocal chords, the fact that they are "just pretend" does not get me off the hook for doing their voices for the rest of the day. Oh well. It could be worse. He could be into the Teletubbies.

[The below picture is, again, unrelated. I just love his expression here. He has just sorted his magnetic alphabet into colors. I thought that was cool so I snapped a picture. This is the first expression he gives me. Why don't you guys come up with some captions?]

My Son is Better than I Am: Reason #478

The picture has nothing to do with this post, I just stumbled across it a few minutes ago and it made me laugh so I decided to post it. My brother Mason took it during our visit to Virginia last August. All of our digital pictures cycle through as widgets and screensavers and this one popped up today as I was tinkering with the wireless router during Kiernan's nap.

This post is just a short one about wearing clothes.

Last week Wendy was away on a trip to a conference in Kentucky. I was getting Kiernan ready for bed. We were at the point in our nighttime ritual where he gets to choose his sleepy clothes for the night. He was being difficult, albeit in an entirely charming way: after his bath he wanted to wear his towel--and only his towel--to go jumping on our bed. When he wears one of his bath towels (for those of you without children, they make little towels for kids that have hoods sewn into them to keep their little heads warm) nowadays he says he is a sea turtle. Clearly one of the characteristics of the species is post-bath bed jumping.

As cute as he was, however, I was feeling rather harried so I just ducked into his room and grabbed the sleepy clothes myself. I had to hurry because I didn't want him to beat me to our bedroom and start jumping on the bed without me there. [NOTE TO ALL OF YOU OUT THERE WHO KNOW BETTER: I realize we shouldn't let him jump the bed. I realize we should have never let him start jumping on the bed in the first place. But when he started doing it, well, it was just so precious. So much fun. It seemed like a rite of passage. Now that he's almost two and a half and can jump so forcefully that he could really hurt himself, it's hard to put the toothpaste back in the tube.]

As I opened his pajama drawer I realized I had forgotten to move his laundry from the washer to the drier that afternoon. The clock ticking, I shrugged and grabbed a dinosaur top and and a pair of bottoms that had basketballs all over them. They were both kind of blue, but the similarity ended there. They were not even remotely similar fabrics. But I figured, "Eh...what the heck. Wendy's not home. What's the harm?"

I reached our bedroom just as he scrambled onto the bed. I let him jump for awhile, standing at the end of the bed like a goalie in case he should jump to close to the edge. (I didn't get on the bed with him because, of late, he has taken to saying, "I need space!" if you get on the bed while he is trying to jump on it.)

After a bit I put his diaper on him and then the basketball pajama bottoms. I grabbed the dinosaur top and was about to slip it over his head when he exclaimed, "They don't match!"

I was surprised, but I forged ahead. "I know. That's okay." I tried again.

"THEY DON'T MATCH!" This time he was a mite more forceful, and I realized that I simply wasn't going to get away with it.

I guess he's tired of people being able to tell when his Daddy has dressed him in the morning. Oh well, at least one of us will be a snappy dresser.

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.