Decisions, decisions

The garbagemen came at exactly the same time that Steve on Blue's Clues starting singing "The Itsy Bitsy Spider" this morning. You've never seen such a conflicted 16-month-old in your life.

He was standing on our bed by the window and trying to angle his little body so that half of him could watch Steve while the other half watched the men crush our garbage in the big, green truck. I think he pulled it off.

"Spider" is his favorite song, and he not only sings it, but he also does a variation of the gestures that go along with it. For some reason, he's most likely to break out into this song when he's in his high-chair, so we get a kind of seated interpretive dance version of "The Itsy Bitsy Spider" with our meals.

The best part, however, and he's been doing this for months now, is that at the end he claps. Whether he sings it, you sing it, or it's on the radio, at the song's conclusion, Samson applauds.

I have no idea where this comes from, and it's the only song he does it for [although he occasionally claps at the end of "Happy Birthday"], but I can remember singing him to sleep over the summer with the spider song. He was totally wiped out, head on my shoulder, barely awake, but as I finished singing, his little head popped up, and I heard the faintest of claps from over my shoulder. Then he put his head back down and fell asleep.

Speaking of kids' songs, Slate had a good article on Friday about children's music. When Samson was first born, and Vicki would have kids' music on, I always noticed and was sure to turn it off as soon as young Samson went for a nap or a bath or whatever.

I have now come to terms with the fact that more often than not, I don't even notice this new soundtrack to our lives --- unless it's something really egregious like the Wiggles singing Copacabana or something. I just can't get into those guys...

Sam can cook

Don't tell Samson, but I've been having just as much fun with his new kitchen as he has. (He's probably already figured it out...)

Not quite Maxwell's silver hammer

File under: do not try this at home. Samson has a little toy hammer, which makes silly "bonk" and "woop" noises when you hit the head of the hammer against an object.

Last weekend, in what can be charitably described as a lapse of judgment, I took the hammer and gently tapped my head with it, eliciting the "bonks" and "woops" from said hammer and a gale of giggles from young Samson. Unfortunately, he has taken to trying this on me (eliciting more cries of "gentle, gentle" than "bonks" or "woops"), and this morning I caught him hammering his own head. Even sadder, the hammer noises were turned off, so I found him sitting in the living room hitting himself and accompanied by only the sound of semi-hard plastic on his head. So much for me and my Buster Keaton routines...

In somewhat related news, the night before last I juggled some tennis balls for him [I know, is there no end to my skills?] and then invited him to try. Can you guess what happened next?

I can't wait to try this in the produce section the next time we go grocery shopping.

The karmic wheel spins

I don't think my parents are Buddhists, but I know they get some kind of vicarious karmic pleasure from seeing me tell Samson not to do something and then seeing him give me this look.

In this instance, I was reminding him, yet again, to use both hands when climbing the stairs. He's obsessed with keeping a truck with him at all times --- it's like he expects a tiny construction project to break out somewhere in the house. [Which actually would be kind of cool if all of a sudden there was a tiny site with a bunch of tiny guys in hard hats building something and waiting for Samson to bring the front-loader. There'd be a tiny coffee cart pulled alongside them, and you'd hear tiny whistles every time Vicki walked by...]

Anyway, I've now lost count of how many times I've said: "Don't give me that face. I invented that face!"

Honestly, could you give that little face a time-out?

What would Sir Edmund Hillary do?

The weekend weather made it feel more like early March than mid-January. We promised ourselves that we'd spend as much time as we could outside, enjoying the spring-like weather. Unfortunately, the exigencies of Saturday errands and the vagaries of Samson's nap schedule left us with less time than we planned. Also, there was a grand opening at a bookstore at the market in our neighborhood. But we did have lunch outside. Under an awning, but still.

[And Vicki did find time to put on her dirndl and rock out Alpine-style in celebration of the good weather. Amazing how much she looks like a young Julie Andrews isn't it?]

But this left me on Sunday feeling like it was some kind of moral imperative that we get outside. I didn't quite reach Clark-Griswold-at-the-gates-of-Wally-World status, but I was close.

Accordingly, I thought we could go hiking. It's been a while, however, since Sam has been in the backpack, so I figured we could do a trial run in the house. [Sidenote: I hate being the guy at the trailhead trying to mollify the screaming toddler in his backpack while acknowledging the various concerned/horrified looks of other trail users. It makes me feel all Mile Zero. And I'm pretty sure that Samson actually enjoys being out in the woods in the pack; it's just getting him into it that he's not crazy about.]

Anyway, I had Vicki help me get Samson situated in the backpack, but, for some reason, I decided to lift it differently than I usually do.

Bad idea.

The metal legs that support the pack when not in use moved in as I picked the pack up --- which they are supposed to do --- but I hadn't tightened my shoulder strap enough and Samson slid back fast. I caught him before he hit the floor, but I imagine the experience of being trapped in a falling object and hearing your parents simultaneously yelling "whoa, whoa, whoa!" is fairly stressful. Mind you, I was kneeling at this point, so he was only about six inches off the ground.

Even so, he cried. A lot.

To be fair, he probably needed a nap anyway. He'd been up early and had yet to submit to our entreaties to get him in his crib. But I felt like a heel. What made it worse was that he kept looking at the pack, shaking his head, and saying "no, no, bye-bye, bye-bye."

In any event, we ended up bagging the whole hiking idea. He never did nap, but we hit the playground later, where we played with some trucks in the sandbox and shared (mostly) with a few other Tonka enthusiasts. So the day wasn't a total wash.

Hopefully, I haven't instilled in him a mortal fear of the backpack. Or created some kind of rosebud fixation that he'll carry with him for decades to come. Citizen Samson, indeed.

I mean, it's not like I'm this guy (rest his soul) or that I'm going to get all Great Santini on Samson to turn him into one of these guys. But it would be nice when spring finally does arrive to be able to hit the trail without a) terrifying my son or b) giving him an object lesson in physics.

Part of me thinks that by now he's probably forgotten all about it. The other part of me (the part which has yet to put the pack away) watched him give it a wide berth tonight as he made his way from the living room to the kitchen.

Stay tuned...

Ducks + pins = awesome.

For those unfamiliar with duckpin bowling, click here. The rest of you already know how much fun it is. We went bowling on Sunday, and while Aunt Mo "won," [see below], a good time was had by all.


Note Vicki's form (with a babe in arms, no less); clearly somebody took lessons as a child...

Sam in a box

Two photos from the weekend. Samson got a beanbag for Christmas from Aunt Mo and Uncle Greg, and while he likes it, I think he really likes the box. I'll post some bowling pics tomorrow...

Vicki the ninja

Aunt Mo and Uncle G spent the weekend with us, and we had two full days of good times --- eating cheeseburgers, playing with trucks, bowling, playing with trucks, going to church and playing with trucks [this was more me than Samson].

Anyway, it was a great weekend (photos to follow), but yesterday, with just Vicki and I, was kind of a letdown for young Samson. Aside from looking for "Mo" and "Kah" [let's hope for Greg's sake that this is not one of those baby-invented names that sticks into later years; I have relatives in the south who referred, as grown adults, to their grandparents as Mamoo and Papoo], he was just kind of cranky.

At one point he eyed up a would-be gangsta teen who was clearly just a local Catholic college student trying to look tough and said "Listen, Brendan, you're not fooling anybody. Least of all that girl from your Intro to Western Lit class. Ease up, wouldja?"

You don't want to be around Samson when he's cranky. He gets like this guy.

Anyway, a somewhat restless day gave way to a night of fitful sleep. Which may or may not have had anything to do with the fact that we'd forgotten to do his laundry and so tripled him up on light cotton pajamas (two with feet) instead of our usual pj layer and then fleece feety sleeper.

We could hear him stirring on the monitor, and I went up to check on him. He was fine, but it just seemed like he wasn't falling into a deep sleep. So when his laundry finished (and before the second hour of "24" started), we formed a strike team to go up and change Samson. Our mission: switch the pjs and sleeper while keeping the target asleep. Or at least not wide awake and screaming.

I opened the door and waved Vicki in when I thought the coast was clear.

From there, I played so little a role in the actual maneuver that if this was a movie, I'd be listed in the credits as "Tall Man in Hat."

She not only managed to change him without incident, but all the while she was rubbing his back and singing "You are my sunshine." In Portugese.

Ok that last part isn't true. She sang in English. But this in no way diminishes the achievement. Seriously.

He awoke this morning after a sound eight hours of sleep and with less of an idea of what had happened than the Manchurian candidate.

Ben Stein, philosopher

I'm not normally given to quoting Ben Stein (although I remember being 15 and thinking I was hilarious in imitating his deadpan "Bueller, Bueller, Bueller..." when a teacher would be taking attendance and someone was absent but not immediately noted as such). Anyway, this column --- from the NYT business section, of all places --- really moved me.

Sure, he kind of shoehorns some economic forecasting into the piece (it is a business column after all), and free registration may be required to access the article, but it's well worth the effort. Let me know what you think.

The poor man's zoo

Vicki was getting her hair done tonight, so I picked Samson up after work at his friend Jake's house. And since we needed cat food and litter, I figured we'd go do some shopping at Petsmart. He was thrilled with the wall of fishes that is their aquarium section. He's started saying "cool" when he sees things he likes, and these fish were definitely cool.

Not so cool was our next stop: the birds. Now I love to see birds in the wild, and nothing makes me happier than waking up in the morning and seeing a Cardinal on our deck or hearing the birds in the tree outside our window. But the satisfaction to be derived from birds as pets seems to fall somewhere between snakes (at least you can watch the big ones digesting things) and sea-monkeys. I just don't get the appeal.

In any event, we were watching the birds when one of the parakeets came right up to the bars on the cage and squawked and flapped his wings. For some reason this scared Samson, but he stopped himself from crying. It was weird. He had the bottom lip sticking out, and the eyes were starting to squint, but no tears. I took this as a cue to move on to get what we had actually come for and then go see the cats at the adoption center.

He showed way more interest in these cats, who were behind a plate glass window, than he ever shows in ours. Maybe we need to put a big Plexiglas screen between the two of them, and then Samson will take notice. It's not that he doesn't like Ishmael, it's just that, at times, it's almost as if he doesn't see him. He walked right over him yesterday. And as for the cat, while it's true that he had seven years of uninterrupted lolling around, you'd think the presence of an unsteady 20-pound, close-to-the ground walker would engender some kind of behavior modification. Not so; he remains as fixed (and inscrutable) as the Sphinx.

Somehow, among all this errand running and animal kingdom excitement, I didn't notice that Samson was only wearing one shoe. I realized this when I saw the other one on his carseat as we were headed home. Which was fine, since it wasn't lost, and it was warm tonight. Plus he had socks on.

But I'm sure more than one person saw me walking around, still in my suit from work, with my one-shoed son and thought: "typical oblivious dad." [They might actually be right because I put him down at one point to pick up this big container of litter and wondered why he was walking sort of funny.]

Sentencing

Samson has started putting two words together to form mini sentences. Which is cool not only because it's another milestone, but because he says them with an almost Charlton-Heston-as-Moses-like conviction.

When I got home from work Tuesday night, I walked into the dining room, where he was sitting in his high-chair, not eating his dinner. When he saw me, he looked at Vicki with a smile and said, "dada home." I wonder if he'll ever know the joy he brings us.

In another developmental milestone, I have been trying to teach Samson to beatbox. If you don't know what this is, you are old. Oh, I mean click here.

You can imagine how funny it is 1) for me to do this and 2) to see him try to do it.

I started this the other day when trying to distract him while Vicki cajoled him into eating dinner. For some reason this meal is a struggle; breakfast and lunch he's fine with --- usually --- but come dinner time, he gets all Bobby Sands on us (sorry Dad).

He not only thought the whole beatbox thing was funny, but right away he started to imitate me.

I can't wait until the next time we're on line at the grocery store and Sam E. Fresh busts out some Slick Rick rhythms. You're never too young to be old school.

Down at the station...

The B&O Railroad Museum offered dollar admission this weekend, so we took Samson to see some cool old trains on Sunday. For those of you who don't know, this is a child who loves trains. Also buses, trucks, and lately, bicycles. But he really loves trains. And while he no longer has any interest in singing "Down at the Station" --- indeed, just singing the opening lines gets you a firm "no" and then a dismissive "buh-bye" --- he still insists on calling the trains puff-puffs. Needless to say, in a museum situated on the site where the famed Baltimore & Ohio railroad was built in the 1820s, he spent a lot of time looking around, pointing excitedly, and alerting us to yet another puff-puff.

It was crowded and a little cold for some of the outside exhibits, but we had a great time. The museum is a really interesting place for non-Lionel aficionados --- people like me who, while not anti-train, have probably only thought about trains when riding them (if then).


That said, this is also a place for those guys who have rooms in their homes devoted to model railroad routes and all the bells and whistles (pun intended) that come with them.

It's also a really interesting place to people watch. There were more than a few couples where one (usually the man) was a train enthusiast and was painstakingly explaining to his wife/girlfriend/blind date(!) the significance of this or that piece of equipment and eyeing the trains with a kind of familiarity and respect. There was even one guy, who I'm pretty sure was not an employee or volunteer, in overalls and an engineer's cap.

Part of me wanted to go up and thank him for helping me learn an important part of speech when I was a kid. But I thought better of it.

Attack of the clones

Linus had his blanket; Calvin his tiger. Samson has lovey lamb. It's kind of a small white blanket with a lamb's head, which sounds weird and vaguely pagan, but it's the one thing needful to settle young Samson down.

Known in our house as "LL" or "La-La" (Samson's preferred term), this little lamb is the sine qua non of bedtime, naptime, and times of stress.

In good times, La-La gets ditched like yesterday's paper in favor of trucks, cars, cookies, the cat, and just about anything else that moves, rolls, crunches, or purrs.

But when the chips are down, it's La-La time.

At the recommendation of several friends, we realized that having only one La-La brought forth the very real possibility of a crisis should said lamb go missing. Unfortunately, the store we bought La-La in was out of stock. Not to fear, however, because Vicki is a champion web researcher and promptly had not one but two La-Las en route to our house.

And not a moment too soon, because La-La number 1 is looking pretty rough. It's actually crunchy in parts, and while it seems like it would be easy to remember to simply throw it into the wash, we only seem to remember its general nastiness just as he's reaching for it for comfort.

In any event, La-Las 2 and 3 arrived the other day, and I expected a scene similar to what his friend Oliver experienced upon seeing his ducky in duplicate. It was, as his Dad (official legal counsel of dada and all-around good guy) explained, nothing less than a rending in the time-space continuum.

Samson was far less Philip K. Dick about it; he grabbed all three in some kind of La-La bacchanal, but then segregated the clones from the original and went on his merry way.

That Vicki and I actually had a conversation last night about a plot to integrate one of the new La-Las into the rotation should give anyone without children some small insight into how things change with their arrival. Which is not to say that before Samson we would have been discussing the relative merits of European-style progressive socialism over the more market-oriented U.S. system of governance, but we would probably would not have had a 20-minute confab about cloth lamb clones while doing the dishes.

The ladies' man

Just got a call from Vicki, who is in the car with young Samson running errands. They were stopped at a light, when Vicki noticed a teenaged girl in the car next to them waving somewhat frantically.

Did she know this girl?

A neighbor? No.

A former student?

She ran through the list of white students she'd had from when she was a school counselor (roughly equivalent to the number of NHL players with all their own teeth).

No again.

She then began to scan the rearview mirror for signs of a door ajar or something that might be hanging out of the trunk.

Nothing.

At that point, and just before the light changed, she heard a "hiiiii" from behind her, and realized that the girl was waving at Sam, who was waving, smiling, and generally flirting from his little rear-facing throne.

The Ocean

We got a chance to take Samson to the beach a few days before Christmas. He had never seen the ocean before, and I would have given anything to know what he was thinking as he looked out across the water.

Having just that day finished my annual reading of Moby-Dick [a yearly Christmas gift I give myself], I guess I was feeling particularly philosophical. But there was an almost perfect Melvillean apposition of the blind, vast ocean --- rolling on as it has for millennia --- and the wondrous eyes of our 15-month-old squinting into the sun as the white caps stretched away to the horizon.

This nifty little reverie lasted all of a minute as young Samson put his hand to the ground, felt the cold, wet sand, and then proceeded to frantically try and rid his hands of this new (and unwelcome) substance. A moment later, we chased a seagull that had landed nearby and all was right with the world again.



Meditation and water are wedded for ever --- Herman Melville

Happy New Year!

Ok, so I'm a few days late. We spent New Year's Eve at our friends' house. In what was surely the last miracle of 2005, Samson managed to stay asleep until after the ball dropped and we woke him to head home.



This was not the case with his buddy, Jacob, who hung out until the bitter end. He was smiling and running around in circles and getting the most out of every last minute of 2005. (Note the time on the clock behind him and his mom).



Now before you start feeling badly for his parents, I should note that we got a call on New Year's Day that Jake slept until 10:30. Samson, for all his goodness about sleeping in a strange room, gifted us with an extra 45 minutes. Which meant we weren't up until 7:15 instead of his usual. Not that it wasn't appreciated, but I don't think he'd sleep an extra three hours even if we moved to Brazil.

We spent the extra day I had off cleaning/reorganizing the basement. Most of the work was done while Samson was in his little jail, alternately watching us and TV. It was not necessarily our proudest moment as parents, but it allowed us to clean up the laundry room area and get rid of enough stuff that the garbagemen probably wondered if we'd been evicted as they carted it all away this morning.

In any event, happy new year. Here's to health, happiness, and peace in 2006.