o'side daddy

That’s the quote of the day from Ollie today.

The boys are convinced that tomorrow is someone’s birthday; so:  I told them that it is America’s birthday.

In other news, I took Ollie for a quick trip up and down the block tonight in his red wagon.  He loves it, we should do it more often.

Also, for the first time, the boys played what I called “500″ when I was in high-school, which is a game played with an American football, in which the ball is tossed high into the air and the other players (not the one who threw it) try to catch it or win the scrum for it.  I figured they’d like it based on their basketball playing style — which I’ll try to blog about soon.

This is a story the boys’ mom relayed to me just now:

Recently, the boys have been discussing the concept of adoption.  They have books about it, and a movie they’ve recently become a bit obsessed with (Stuart Little) has adoption as a heavy theme.

In discussions with mommy this morning, Reid and Ollie were asking about adopted people.  They both are adopted.  Their uncle Kyle is adopted.  I am adopted.  So, naturally, they asked if their mommy was adopted.  She replied that, no, she was not.

A few minutes later, Reid comes up with the following remarkably astute deduction: “Mommy: you’re not adopted because you’re a girl.”

Yesterday, Ollie and Reid had pee-wee basketball.  Ollie even participated!  He ran up and down the court a few times and then wrestled with me for a while.  In the meantime, Reid picked up every possible rebound (shots by both teams), and every possible assist (passes — really, hand-offs — to both teams), and at least five or six baskets.  It was amazing!  He’s turning into one of those crazy kids that as a parent for the other team, you secretly despise…  except he’s also REALLY good at sharing (thus, the passes to both teams)!  It was really amazing watching him play yesterday.

After that we went to the Discovery Science Center (the Cube) to see bubblefest.  We’re members of the Cube, and I figured the bubbles part would be free to members.  I was mistaken, we didn’t see a single bubble.  But we did play with the gravity table for hours (Reid), and run through Clifford’s neighborhood delivering mail about 4,000 times (Ollie).  With twenty kids crowded around it, the atmosphere around the gravity table seems strangly like a Las Vegas roullette wheel, it’s pretty hilarious.

Ollie and Reid and I went to the pool today.  I could swear Ollie had seen a bikini before, but he’s never been quite so smitten.  “She wearin’ underwear!” was the quote.  Luckily, she and her significant other laughed.

Reid scored three goals in his pee-wee soccer game this morning.  Now I know why parents turn maniacal and force their kids into sports, and scream and yell at them to succeed.  It’s quite rewarding to watch your son do something like that.  He had fun, too.  Hopefully I’m not totally addicted to that sensation.

The boys went to Disneyland with their mom and their Aunt Nicholle today.  I think it was a challenging day; Ollie is definitely testing his mom and I.  He is very clearly trying to learn the boundaries of our respective houses, and so he pushes to the limit whenever he can, as evidenced by my last couple of posts.

One of the great things about the boys is their fearlessness about asking questions.  Perhaps all kids this age have that same fearlessness.  I hope they don’t lose it — though I wouldn’t mind them learning to save some questions for more appropriate times.  One of their other great assets is the ability to ruminate on a subject over several days.  Maybe that’s more like OCD, and they really just obsess over things.  I think I wrote in a previous post about teaching them (against their mom’s wishes) how to say “I have OCD”.  Anyway, tonight, Reid was asking more about the situation I blogged the other day: how to deal the other kids in his school, when they’re not fun to play with.

Tonight, he decided that some of his friends are “angry … sometimes” and that when they are, he can play with someone else.  Yay!  Hopefully this means he’s feeling a little more empowered to make decisions about this sort of stuff for himself.

For the first time today, I addressed my son as Mr. Crowder.  Ollie, Reid and I were playing “school” today, with Ollie as the teacher.  Ollie taught us about the “kicking the baby into the net” (a nearby soccer-ball became a baby, I have no idea what the net was represented by), the “special star” (an old Christmas-tree topper, Mickey Mouse climbing up to a star) and how it should never be hit because it’s special and brand-new, and about kicking fire-engines into the couch.  Our teacher was Mr. Crowder.

The boys have the following weekly (or more) engagements:

• Swimming (Monday and Wednesday)
• School (Tuesday and Thursday)
• Gymnastics (Friday Morning)
• Skateboarding (Friday Afternoons)

Today, we added

• Pee-Wee Golf

They’re busy.  They have more going on in their lives than I do!

Golf was interesting; Reid likes it and is good at it.  As usual, he seems to have a natural instinct for things like how to grip the club and posture.  He also suffers from his usual weakness at anything even vaguely competitive: he hates the idea of not being good at it.  Failing to hit the ball frustrates him.  Being given guidance on improving his grip or his stance or his swing frustrates him.  Being asked to help clean up golf-balls frustrates him.  Not for the reason you may think, though…  he wouldn’t mind the clean-up part.  What makes him collapse to the ground in tears is the idea of having to try to race some other kid to pick up the ball.  He can’t stand that another child might get a ball before him.  If the one ball he’s picked gets picked up by another kid, he freaks.

Ollie on the other hand has a great attitude, but struggles with the mechanics.  I think as much as he loves to build things, he still struggles with his fine-motor skills.  His grip on a golf-club devolves from hot-dogs and buns (the coach’s nickname for a proper grip) to some sort of horrible spaghetti nightmare.  He goes limp when you try to adjust his feet, he bends WAY over trying to mimic the posture of an adult holding a child’s club instead of adjusting for his own height.  Instead of an arcing swing from pizza (an “L”-shaped primary arm in a tall posture, as if carrying a box of pizza one-handed) to bubble-gum (toe pointed, as if displaying the bottom of ones shoe for a bubble-gum check), Ollie hoists his club straight over his head, ready to split wooden logs, or pound his tiny plastic golf-ball into the astro-turf.

They both seemed to have a good time, overall, but a tired post-practice Reid denied finding any enjoyment in golf.  Next week will be interesting.

Ollie apologized to me the other day.  It went like this:  “I’m sooooo sorry my bum is itchy!”

In other news, Reid has always attracted aggressive attention from other little boys; it’s a weird thing.  He’s so ready to laugh, and to be anybody’s friend, I think, that he submits to abuse.  I think he genuinely thinks the other boy is simply trying to play, and that it’s not personal and not intended to be abusive or bullying, and so he allows it.  He’s a tough kid.  He hit his head on a cement bench when he was about one-and-a-half, and was done crying about it within thirty seconds or less.  They’ve both always been tough like that.  In Ollie’s case, it usually leads to utter fearlessness and lack of regard for his own safety.  In Reid’s case it leads to this sort of naive tolerance that leads other kids to pick on him.  He’s so sweet and so generally happy that, as a parent (or maybe as any innocent bystander watching from the sidelines), it breaks your heart.  The other day, he told his mommy that his friends at school like to play a game with him at lunchtime called “kick Reid”.  It came up because he was kicking under the table, and his mom asked him where he learned that.  He explained the game: the name of the game says everything.  Mommy asked him how the game made him feel, and he eventually said it hurt his feelings.  I wonder if it hurt his feelings in the moment or only on reflection (perhaps upon reading his mom’s reaction in her own eyes and expression).  Mommy talked to his teachers about it and there’s been some indication of similar “play” from another boy — perhaps a ringleader of sorts, and they’re keeping an eye on it.  I’m sure that will be that.

It does break my heart, though.  And what should a parent hope for?  That their kid will see the world with more suspicion and mistrust?  I love that Reid laughs when an older boy “plays” with him by throwing a large rubber ball at him as hard as possible — unless the laughter is nervous or fearful…  it doesn’t seem so, but who knows?  (That did happen, once, by the way, maybe a year or so ago.)  You want your son to be strong and tough and self-assertive, but you also want him to be joyful and happy.  How much do you teach them about the world at three?  It will be interesting to see how Reid’s nature develops as he ages, with respect to this sort of tolerance.