Stinky Diapers

Some Random Stuff

The H-Bomb is a funny, opinionated, talkative, perceptive little person lately, and he says and does things that crack me up on a regular basis. I feel like I should walk around with a notepad to try to remember them all, but instead I'm just going to jot them down here.

1. The other day we were driving home from preschool and there was an enormous sigh from the back seat. "What's the matter, kiddo?" I asked him. More sighing. "Life is SO. HARD." He even kind of flipped the back of hand up to his forehead, as if he were too fatigued to bear it for one. more. minute.  I didn't have the heart to tell him that hanging out with his friends, doing crafts and getting a hot meal and two snacks a day is pretty much as good as it gets.

2. On Super Bowl Sunday night we got the Bomber into bed right around his regular time and had him tucked in and lights out by 7:45 PM.  Larry had DVRed the game, so he was watching and I hung around with him in the living room until about 9:45, when I decided to head upstairs and fold laundry.  I was standing in the bedroom folding, when I heard noises that I thought were the cat, coming from the craft room (which is attached to the bedroom by a big walk-in closet). When I went in there, though, I found the Bomber, sitting on the floor with my super-sharp lefty scissors, my Xyron sticker maker, and several sheets of $1.00/page scrapbooking paper.  He was just a-hummin' and a-cuttin' and a-stickerin'.  Until he looked up and saw me standing the doorway. The look on his face when he realized he was busted was absolutely priceless.  Larry later asked him what on earth he'd been thinking... "I wasn't tired! And I wanted to craft!"

3. Two Fridays ago I took the day off work and went with the preschool on its annual field trip to the circus.  I took H out of school for the rest of the day, and we went McDonald's (which is a major treat for him, since we very rarely eat there) and got a Happy Meal, and then sat in the park and ate it. Then we headed to AC Moore, where H had a conversation with the cashier. 

Cashier: "So what have you been up to today?"
Bomber: "We went to McDonald's!" :displays Happy Meal toy:
Me: "And what else did we do today?"
Bomber: "Ate in the park!"
Me: "What about before McDonald's?" 
Bomber: "Um... went to school...."
Me: "What about after that?"
Bomber: "Um...um...went potty?"
Me: "What about between school and potty? Maybe something with elephants?"
:blank stare:
"Acrobats?"
:more blank stare:
"CLOWNS?!?!?"
Bomber: "OH. Yeah, we went to the circus."  

The cashier was hysterical that a four year old could possibly have forgotten the circus within three hours of going there.  Next year, I guess we'll save the $35 bucks for the circus tickets and overpriced popcorn and go straight for the Happy Meal.

4. This past Friday morning I got a call from the preschool that the kiddo was complaining that his throat hurt.  The teacher said I didn't need to come get him just yet, but she'd monitor him through naptime and let me know. Around 3:30, which coincidentally was just after the Valentine's Day social ended, she called back and said he was really complaining now, and could I come get him "to take him to the doctor." When I got there, he was having a great time playing with his friends, until he saw me, and then he put on his best woe-is-me face and stuck his lower lip out. "My throat hurts!"

He complained about his throat as we walked down the hall, until we got about 10 feet from the door. Then he stopped and said "when we get home, I think I should lay down on the couch and watch TV." I agreed. "Or maybe play a little Wii." When I explained that little boys who are sick do not play Wii, he told me "my throat only hurts a teeny teeny little bit. I think I could stil play Wii."  He was very disgruntled when I told him home sick from school=rest on the couch, not Wii playing. I don't think his brilliant "get Mommy to pick me up early on a Friday afternoon" plan worked out nearly as well as he was hoping.

How Children Make It To Adulthood

I hate to sound all sappy, but sometimes when I look at the H-Bomb, I feel a wave of love and awe that this smart, funny, loving and good-natured little person could possibly be my child. And these feelings seem to show up at completely unremarkable moments. This morning he was eating grapes and playing PBS Kids on the laptop, and I looked across the kitchen table at him and he looked over the computer screen and gave me his Bomber smile and went back to his game - and *poof* there it was - a feeling so overwhelming that for a moment I was breathless with joy.

I guess these moments are to make up for those times when we look at our children and wonder how on earth they (or we) are going to make it to their next birthday. It's like the world keeping everything in perspective for us.

The Who Have Nothing to Worry About

For the last year or so, I've noticed that the Bomber makes pretty much anything even remotely guitar-shaped into a guitar, which he then plays with great gusto, generally while singing a composition of his own invention. (Most of them go something like this "I'm playing this guitar, yeah yeah yeah. I'm not getting dressed for school, yeah yeah yeah.")  Even the Tennessee piece of his 50 states puzzle, which is not really guitar-shaped but has a guitar on it, gets strummed enthusiastically before being put into the puzzle.

In light of this, I thought it be would fun to get him a toy guitar for Christmas. I looked at bunch of toys aimed specifically at his age group, which mostly seemed like they wouldn't hold his attention for long. I also briefly considered getting him a (cheap) real guitar, but I was worried he'd find it too frustrating to to fun.  Then I came across this thing: 

It's a Paper Jamz guitar - basically a guitar made mostly of cardboard and some plastic, with some kind of electronics on the surface that makes it work somewhat like a real guitar. It has three modes - Perfect Play, Rhythm and Freestyle.  On the Perfect Play mode, you select one of three preset songs, and just strum on the picture of the strings, more or less at random, to play along. If you stop strumming, the guitar part stops, but the song continues.  Rhythm mode is pretty much the same, except you have to strum at the right right rhythm for the song, and on freestyle, you can allegedly play actual guitar chords, although I don't play the guitar, so I can't say for sure. 

The Bomber's guitar came preset with three 90s *ahem* classics.  His favorite by far is Two Princes, probably because it's the one that starts playing when you turn on the guitar. 

 

 

Here he is rocking out to it:

The Bomber Rocks Out from Stinky on Vimeo.

My favorite part is his look at the end, and the way he puts the guitar down when he's finished. The other songs are "It's the End of the World As We Know It" and "What I Like About You."  The former naturally prompted questions about precisely when that might be happening, while the latter revealed his excellent Pete Townshend style. I especially like his unplugged-coffeehouse stance at the beginning of the first one, and his idea of "old rocker face" in the second.

 

The End of the World As We Know It from Stinky on Vimeo.

What I Like About You! from Stinky on Vimeo.

 Watch them at your own risk, folks. And if anyone has the exact date of the end of the world, the Bomber would like to know.

 

 

 

 

I Think I've Made a Small Tactical Error

Last night after school, we took the Bomber to see Santa at the mall out in the suburbs. To get there, you basically have to take the one route out of the city, which we usually avoid at all costs from 5:00 PM to 6:30 PM, Monday - Friday.  So naturally we got stuck in traffic, and after a few moments of fielding "why are we stopping? when are we going to start moving? what if Santa leaves before we get there?" questions, I decided to distract him by telling him a knock-knock joke. Sadly, I chose this one:

Knock-knock.

Who's there?

Lemon.

Lemon who?

Knock-knock.

Who's there?

Lemon.

Lemon who?

Knock-knock.

Who's there?

Lemon.

Lemon who?

After you've repeated that a bunch of times, you say "orange" in response to "who's there."

Orange who?

Orange you glad I didn't say lemon again?

Now I realize this is as old, and as bad, as they come, but the Bomber thought it was aboslutely hilarious, and immediately wanted to say it back to me. Which he did, twice. Then, he decided to make up his own versions, which all went something like this:

Knock knock.

Who's there?

Lemon.

Lemon who?

Knock-knock.

Who's there?

Peach.

Peach who?

Knock-knock.

Who's there?

Apple.

Apple who?

Knock-knock.

Who's there?

Pear.

Pear who?

Knock-knock.

Who's there?

Orange.

Orange who?

Orange I didn't say pear again?

Followed by gales of laughter. Clearly, he did not get the point of the joke (especially since he left out the words "you glad" every time), but this didn't seem to bother him. By the end of the car trip (and for a good portion of the trip home) he was pretty much just spitting out the names of fruits and vegetables and cackling like a crazy person. I tried to distract him with the other knock-knock jokes I know (all one of them), but his train of produce could not be derailed. And by the time he got to "Orange potato I didn't say Mommy again?" I was cracking up myself, which only reinforced his own belief in his comedic genuis.

I have a terrible feeling I'm going to be listening to increasingly absurd versions of this knock-knock joke for a VERY long time. 

And orange you glad you don't have to listen, too?

 

Five Fat Turkeys Are WEEEEEEEEEE

Last night H-Bomb's preschool had its annual Thanksgiving dinner for the kids and their families. The food is always delish, and it's great to hang out with the other parents for longer than the two minutes it takes to get your kid's coat on and sign them out.  Entertainment is traditionally provided by the 4K class, and this year it was the Bomber's turn.   The 3K class was the opening act, and then the Bomber's class performed two Thanksgiving classics - "I'm Thankful For" and "Five Fat Turkeys."  At the end, we all waved our lighters and called for an encore, but they told us union rules prevented them from keeping the roadies too much longer. (Okay, that last part may not be entirely accurate.) I did manage to score bootleg video from inside the concert hall.

This was actually the second song, but I liked it better, so I'm putting it first:

Five Fat Turkeys on Vimeo.

  This song got off to a rocky start, but the teacher dragged them all back on track and they managed to finish big:

I'm Thankful For on Vimeo.

 

 

Another Milestone Reached Already

Our first parent-teacher conference. Frankly, it seems a little silly to be having a conference about my four year old's educational progress to date, but the preschool is big on this stuff, so we go along.

The Bomber has two teachers, both of whom are awesome, and one of whom he had last year as well, which is nice from a continuity standpoint, and also good because I like her, specifically.  It was a little serendipitous, actually, because he started the year with two other teachers, one of whom was a serious hottie - sort of a cross between Matthew McConaughey in Sahara and Josh Lucas in Sweet Home Alabama. He left to take a job in a public school helping special needs children, which I think is really selfish of him. What about my needs, huh?  But I digress....

Anyway,  the point is (yes, there's a point people, stay with me), the teacher he had last year, Ms. C, just happened to be coming back from maternity leave when all this resigning and leaving was going on in the Bomber's classroom, so it worked out nicely that she came back to a position she really wanted anyway, right at the time they needed her. 

So, as I was saying somewhere up there, we had our parent-teacher conference with Ms. C and she brought her baby, who started life as 32 week preemie and is now a snuggly, adorable, happy four month old.  She let me hold him during the conference. And he smelled good, and was all warm and lovey and cooing. And I gave him his bottle, and he did that cute thing with his tongue and made sweet little faces and waved his tiny arms and legs. mmm.... baby......

Wait, was I talking about something?  Oh yeah, the Bomber's conference... um... I think it was good, I don't know, you'll have to ask Larry - did I mention the snuggly-wuggly baby I got to hold?

Seriously, it was pretty much what I expected, though it's still nice to hear it from someone else.  The Bomber is a generally good, obedient, easy-going child, though he does have his "moments" and he is easily wound up by the bigger kids.  This, in my opinion, is the best you can hope for with a barely four year old boy in a class where the other boys are all five or about to turn five, and it's always going to be that way, so we might as well get used to dealing with that now. 

From an educational standpoint, his work is way ahead of where he should be, and ahead of most of the other kids. His writing is apparently excellent (I say apparently, because it's hard for me to judge what a four year old's handwriting is *supposed* to look like - his looks pretty rough to me), his word recognition and reading skills are out of control, and he's really really good with numbers, patterns and mathematics.  That last doesn't surprise me at all - my father and my nephew are both mathematically gifted, his paternal grandfather was an accountant, and he's been showing a definite mathematical bent since he was really little.

In short, he's no longer a teeny, snuggly little baby, but I still think he's pretty great.

Next Stop, NASCAR

Every year since the Bomber was a little over two years old, he's accompanied his preschool class to the South Carolina state fair.  The first year, they were so little, there wasn't a whole lot for them to do. We looked at some animals, and then they rode a few rides  that were small enough for two year olds.  There are, however, very few rides that are actually small enough for kids as little as he and some of his classmates were at two, so we put them on a few rides that were possibly a bit questionable.

One ride, the race cars, looked like it would be okay at first glance, but it turned out to have a short slow part followed by a quick turn around the end of the track.  The Bomber was not entirely impressed by the turn, although his classmate had a blast:

In fact, when he got off he told me he never wanted to go on that ride again.  A year, a few inches and a LOT of confidence later, though, he decided he wanted to try it again:

That's his "wheeeee" face. The car wasn't moving yet - he was just practising. He liked it much better the second time around.  His classmate (the same one as last year) was practising her "ho hum, this is old hat" face, I think.

This year, in the week or so leading up to the field trip, all he talked about were those race cars.  His classmate ditched him for another girl in their class, so he ended up with a random fair kid, but he didn't seem to mind. In fact, he was having such a good time, he actually took his hand off the bar to high-five Random Fair Kid:

It's fun to look at how he's changed over the last few years, but it's also a little sad to realize that in a few years he'll have outgrown the kiddie rides altogether, and be on to bigger and better things. But at least for now, he's still my little race car driver:

 

 

The Real Reason Dinosaurs Are Extinct

These days H-Bomb is really into dinosaurs.  He watches Dinosaur Train, has a multitude of books on dinosaurs, and has acquired a good-sized collection of toy dinosaurs. He can name  a huge number of different dinosaurs and their features, and can explain what those features are for. 

For example, tyrannosaurus rex had several rows of long teeth to help him eat his dinner, which is usually made up of other dinosaurs.  Ankylosaurus, on the other hand, had bony plates and a spiked tail to help him avoid his creditors.  When asked to describe the purpose of a triceratops frill, or give the reason that ornithomimus runs so fast, my child will invariably tell you it was to avoid their creditors. 

And then one day, some slick lawyer dinosaur probably came along and convinced them that a numbered account in the Caymans was a better bet, and before long they stopped swinging their spiked tails or using their camoflauge, and some giganotosaurus came along and ate them. And the slick lawyer dino, too. Then with nothing to eat and no way to access the off-shore account, the meat-eaters died out too.  And that, my friends, is what really happened to the dinosaurs. You heard it from the Bomber first.

Halloween, Part 5

Last year, right after Halloween (like four minutes after he got home from trick-or-treating) the Bomber declared his intention to be a ghost next Halloween.  This is a problem, because the kid goes to preschool at a Baptist church and Baptists do not, apparently, celebrate Halloween. They do, however, celebrate fall by putting on a festival on a day close to Halloween, at which the children dress up and are given candy. (Yeah, I know.) Anyway, costumes at this not-a-Halloween-celebration cannot be anything supernatural - among the list of the verboten: witches, ghouls, vampires and.... ghosts. But he was three, and I figured that by October 31, 2010, he'd have been through at least a few costume choices. 

Naturally, the child stuck to his guns for 11 months, until finally in September I had to break it to him that he couldn't be a ghost at school, and I wasn't assembling two different costumes for him. (I'm mean like that.) After much negotiation, we decided instead on pirate, since thanks to his Aunt Peg he already had a complete set of pirate accoutrements, including a sword, a hook, an eye patch, a hat, an earring, and some pirate booty.  (But not Pirate's Booty, which in my opinion would have been better.)  As it turned out, this was a fortuitious choice, since two of his buddies that we invited over for trick-or-treating in our neighborhood also decided to be pirates.

So here's my little pirate in a pensive moment:

Here's the merry band of pirates (they look like they're plotting something, don't they?)

The one with the big hat was apparently elected captain, but the sweet looking one with the cork-screw curls was really in charge.  

Pirates, meet princess:

Now they're ready for trick-or-treating, er... I mean, plundering:

The fourth member of their group was dressed as Scooby-Doo, which gave the whole evening the air of a bad 70s cartoon. I kept expecting one of them to say "And I would have gotten away with it, too,  if it wasn't for those meddling kids."

And as it turns out, they weren't the only ones dressed up as pirates. Little pirates? Meet BIG pirate:

 

A Tale of Two Tales

The Very Busy Caterpillar, as told by the H-Bomb

Once upon a time, there was a caterpillar who was very busy building his cocoon. He kept trying, but he didn't really know how, so his cocoon kept falling apart. One day he figured out how to build it, and it stayed up, and he was happy. The end.

The Very Hungry Spider, as told by the H-Bomb

Once there was a spider who lived on a web. She was very hungry, so every day she ate a strawberry, a blueberry and some vanilla ice cream. Then she ate something healthy, too. The end.

Yesterday after the fair, the Bomber and I were playing one of his favorite games - "I'll Be the Daddy (or sometimes Mommy) and You Be the Baby."  He had me lay down in his old toddler bed, which is currently living in the guest room, and he "read" me these two stories. When he told me he was going to read me The Very Busy Caterpillar, I said "don't you mean The Very Hungry Caterpillar?"  He got very huffy and asked me "Am I reading the story or are you?"  I wonder where he got THAT from?

The kid's no Eric Carle, that's for sure, but I really enjoyed them anyway. Maybe tonight he'll read me Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You Hear, or The Very Tired Firefly.