A Boy with a Bird's Eye View--and Two Moms That Were Chickens

Our pastor and his wife are having their house painted. This seems like a detail irrelevant to this blog until I tell you that they live only a few blocks from us AND that the walls and gingerbread of their three-story, nineteenth-century beauty require a hydraulic "man lift" to reach.

After dinner on Monday and per their invitation, we took a wagon ride to their house to inspect this piece of heavy equipment. The painter happened to be preparing to leave as we arrived, and he offered to take our boy for a ride in the bucket. Let's just say he didn't have to offer twice.

I figured the ride would be just a few feet straight up and back down. I was mistaken. After shifting course to avoid damaging the porch, the bucket's occupants checked out a tall pine tree and inspected the roof of the second story from well above it--all while the lady of the house and I looked on with a mixture of bemusement and terror.

He did make it safely down. And luckily for you, kind Mrs. M. was not too terrified to snap a photo or two to commemorate the occasion.

Overheard Before Church This Morning

Son and daughter were playing rescue in the living room while I cleaned up the kitchen after breakfast.

Son (warmly): Bye! See you next time you get in a car crash!

Daughter: OK!

Son (cheerily): Call 911!

It Should Have Been Obvious

The image above is a detail from one of two drawings I found lying in the hall on the second floor of our house. They've been lying there for a while, I must admit, but this evening, the kids and I (mostly I) tidied up impressively. So when I encountered the pictures this time, I was bound and determined to do something with them.

My M.O. when it comes to dispensation of art projects either to the Big Bin of Art Projects or to recycling involves studying the piece for either: (1) iconic images that depict something particularly emblematic of the artist at that point in his or her childhood or (2) the word "love" as it pertains to Mom or Dad (OK, mostly Mom). In the case of the two drawings in question, one was run of the mill, while the other contained some rescue-related sketches that might qualify it for archival storage.

After covertly disposing of the former, I approached the four-year-old artist about the latter. Pointing to the "don't" sign with the stick person inside it, I asked, "What does this symbol mean, honey?"

He walked over, looked at the picture for the briefest of moments, and said without missing a beat, "The letters mean 'Life Guard Rescue,' and that (pointing to the picture) means, 'No diving so hard on the diving board that (his arms started flapping here) you look like you have two arms on each side.' Because if you do that, you might hit your head on the bottom of the pool."

A guffaw was all I could summon in response.

The Pint-casso in our Family

I have never been much of an artist. All the sculptures I made in middle school, many of which my mom is still saving, were angular and geometric--and not that attractive. Most were painted in simple, primary colors or fired with a single hue of glaze. In kindergarten, when my classmates were going wild on their bonnets for our Easter parade, adorning them with basketfuls of Easter grass and tiny bunnies and chicks, I festooned my plain white woven hat with a single bright pink rose, ignoring my teacher's coaxing to get a little more creative. I guess I was a minimalist from birth.

That's why, despite my beloved's excellent eye for photography, I'm a little surprised by the tremendous attention our daughter, at nearly three, pays to art projects. I figured my inability would trump any artistic aptitude of his, genetically speaking. But it doesn't appear to have done so.

This girl once spent a focused hour painting My Little Pony pictures with one of those rectangular white plastic palettes. And she painted in the lines and with a wide range of colors.

In school, she's equally intense. She and her cohorts began a couple of weeks ago to create a series of animals to decorate their room. They started with paper-plate lions with construction paper-strip manes. The strips were naturally pre-cut, but the glueing was in the tots' hands following a demo by the teachers.

When I arrived to pick my cherub up that afternoon, I was escorted to the wall of felines by Miss A. and asked if I could guess which lion was my girl's. I scanned the menagerie, spotting quite a number of cats who looked like they could use a touch of Rogaine (Roar-gaine?). And then my eyes fell on a lion with a gloriously full and tastefully multi-hued mane which was carefully arranged around its face.

"Yes, that's the one," said Miss A. "She really surprises us with her art."

She really surprises me, too. The last couple of days, she's been into making "cards" for her papa. These consist of a sheet of drawing paper crowded with stickers. While working on one yesterday, she accidentally tore one of the stickers in half and went hunting in the art cupboard for some Elmer's glue to remedy the situation.

That glue provided the inspiration for a new media, I discovered this afternoon as I was summoning the troops for our walk to a neighbor's summer solstice celebration. When I found her, she was sitting on the dining room floor with the bottle of white, sticky stuff, adhering colored pencils (pointy at both ends from big brother's sharpening phase a couple of months ago) to the aforementioned drawing paper.

"I can't leave yet," she said. "I'm making another card for Daddy."

Look out, Jackson Pollack and Andy Warhol. We've got a budding modernist on our hands.

Once Bitten, Twice Wry

Even my most faithful readers have no doubt given up on me following my two-week post drought. I have an explanation, if you will humor me a moment, and then a real entry.

The thing is, I've been a bit terrified of blogging since I reentered the workaday world. I'm spending about 50% less time with my kids during the week since I started working in April, and I find that some of the stuff I'm wanting to write about focuses on ME rather than on THEM. This fact has been a slap in the face for a woman (every woman?) who returns to the workforce after being at home for a while and struggles with the "self"-ishness of this decision. 'If I'm thinking so much about myself,' I reason, 'that I can only come up with blog content that centers on MY experience, then I MUST be a greedy person and (yes, here it comes) a BAD MOTHER.'

And we all know there's no reasoning with the voice of irrational guilt. So all I can say is this: there it is.

Now on to the real content, which just so happens to be about one of my children. (Irrational Guilt 0, Lisa 1).

If you've been with Strandblog for a while, you'll recall a post entitled, "When Sarcasm Bites Back." This was written the day I realized that my four-year-old was beginning to grasp that most snarky of linguistic tools. Based on an exchange yesterday, it seems he has indeed been bitten by the sarcasm bug.

We had just dropped my beloved off for yet another business trip, and none of us were too happy about it. This was evident in the expressions I saw on our kids' faces as I stood outside the car at the terminal while Daddy, still in the passenger seat, bid them farewell...for the fifth time in two months. The corners of their mouths hung down, and they looked at their father from beneath lowered eyelids. (When I shortened my focal distance just a bit, my reflection in the car window revealed a similar sad pout on my own face.)

When we had slogged through the sweet sorrow of parting and were making our way out the airport driveway, I asked my son, "How do you feel about Daddy leaving again?"

He was silent, so I asked again. "How does Daddy going away again make you feel, honey?"

His response was deadpan. "Great," he said.

"Great?!" I exclaimed, my surprise evident. "You feel great about Daddy leaving?"

"Well," he said, not impatiently but kindly and by way of explanation, "not the regular great but that other kind of great. You know, the kind of great when you miss your favorite show on TV or something like that."

"Oh," I said. "Yeah, I know that kind of great."

And so does he. All too well.

Mobile Mispronunciation

For quite some time now, our little guy has called my mobile phone a "cellophone." I had interpreted this mispronunciation as a cross with cellophane (and have spelled it just now accordingly).

It was recently that it occurred to me that he likely has no idea what cellophane is and that he probably wasn't confusing those two words. I thought a little harder about it, and--pop!--I made what I think is the right connection.

It's a rhyming thing, and a different spelling will make it clear. He associates a "celephone" with the "telephone," as any intelligent person would.

So now I'm going to start a campaign to rename the technology. Want to sign on?