Mood Enhancer

I used to color with crayons all the time. In college, David and I exchanged letters and pictures we drew with crayons (back when people exchanged most of their correspondence via paper and stamps and such...), and David even wrote me a poem that compared me to a box of crayons. (The big kind, with lots of colors...it was cute. He wrote it in crayon on the back of a packet of poetry from a class of his...)
I played around a lot with crayons and watercolor paints--decorating most of my apartments with my own cheaply procured artwork...crayons on freezer paper and such.

I can still remember the first time Jabber drew with crayons; I was kind of crazily thrilled by it, to be honest. I remember watching him stand there with a crayon in his fist, standing there barely able to pull himself up on that blue foot locker that served as our coffee table. I remember watching him select a certain color, draw on a certain part of the page, and I thought, "Oh my god, my child just made an artistic choice. He just looked at the page and made a choice and created art."

I know, it's not really all that magical. He picked up a crayon and scribbled with it. But watching him make the connection in his mind between moving his hand and making colors appear on the page...and deciding between different colors and making those choices...it was just an amazing reminder that he was this whole person--an individual with his own will, his own ability to create beauty. It was so cool!

So tonight the Monkey, Jabberwock, and I all spent about an hour coloring. We spend a lot of time drawing, a process which is sort of stressful at times for Jabber, as he is a perfectionist. But coloring in pictures from a coloring book--how can you go wrong?

All of my stress from the day is gone. Crayon therapy.




Here are the space pictures Jabber and I colored, and below are the boys coloring and cutting out their pictures.

Teacher of the Year, Foiled Again!

Jabberwock is full of questions. Some of them are annoying, some of them are completely bizarre, and a good deal of them are about trying to figure out the way things work in this world. I try to answer him.

The last couple of weeks, we have been going for short hikes at a river near our home, and the questions have tended toward the scientific. In just the last week, we have had pretty in-depth conversations about evaporation/condensation (and the three states of matter), erosion, and then yesterday it was all about animal classification. Now I have always enjoyed biology--from the microscopic level right up to the cat dissection we did in advanced bio in high school. But this was the subject that stumped me, that made me say, "Gosh, Jabber, I just don't know. I guess we'll have to look that up."

OK, so from an educational standpoint, I know it's actually better for us to explore resources and learn the answers together, rather than a sort of Biology 101 lecture from the voice of Mom. Still, it irks me that I couldn't pull the answer out of my brain.

So we're sitting in the sandbox, and he asks me, "Mom, humans are mammals, right? So what makes us mammals?"

Yes! Easy question! I rattle off a bunch of characteristics of mammals, excited beyond all normal parameters that just yesterday we had been talking about animals being warm or cold-blooded. We chat for a while about animals giving birth to live young and then move on to discuss how mammals all feed their babies "nummies." Monkey joins the discussion at this point, lifting two sandy hands from his mud pie to caress my breasts.

"Nummie-nummie-nummie-num," he says solemnly. My shirt will never be the same.

"So, Jabber, can you think of any animals besides humans that would fit those characteristics? What other mammals are there?" I must be getting ready for school after all, hopping into Bloom's Taxonomy Mode while hanging out in the sandbox with a four-year-old.

He thinks for a minute. "A polar bear!" he shouts. "And a deer!"

We all applaud. It is quite exciting, let me tell you. I feel like science teacher of the year. And then.

"Are worms mammals?"

No. No, they are not. I am sure of that. He doesn't ask the next question: well, then, what ARE they? But I do. Come on, Science Teacher of the Freaking Year, what is a worm? My brain starts throwing words around, like Kingdom Phylum Class Order, or...damn, was it Order Class? Yeah, yeah. I dredge up an idea about five different groups of animals, but my brain can't fit worms into any of them.

Even though I don't have any idea how to fit a worm into my classification system, I start talking, trusting my Intro to Bio knowledge to show up when it really counts. "There are other groups of animals, too, besides Mammals," I say. "Like reptiles." Yeah, I am absolutely sure that's one of the groups. Is it a Kingdom? A Phylum? A Class, no Order?

"Dinosaurs were reptiles," says Jabber, full of wisdom.

"Yes, they were, but there are other animals that are reptiles, too, like turtles and snakes." Oh, I can feel that Best Teacher Tiara settling back onto my head now.

"Snakes?" asks Jabber.

"Nakes?" asks Monkey.

"Well, that's kind of like a worm," says Jabberwock. "So is a worm a reptile?"

Damn! "What is with you and worms?" No, I don't think I actually said that. "Well, there's Birds," I continue. I'm sure of birds. Mammals, Reptiles, Birds, and..."And amphibians, like frogs, that live on both water and land." Yep, I know that's one. I search through my brain for the fifth category. I know there's five; that number is clear in my memory, although I still can't remember what level of the taxonomy I am babbling about. I mean, one category can't include insects, worms, fish, and oh! there's a category that's like things with shells...crustaceans! Shit, this is too many categories. Suddenly, in my head, two Latin words compete: Annelida and Arthropoda. Annelids? Worms are Annelids! But...what about fish? What about the five categories?

"What is a worm?" He is pretty insistent at this point.

"Wom?" asks Monkey.

I sigh. "I don't know." I am defeated, vanquished by the natural sciences.

Come on, kid, ask me about poetry, plot structure, a vocabulary word?

All about Dinosaurs

Jabberwock's Story Time

"Do you want to hear all about dinosaurs? I’ll read to you. OK, the first thing you need to know. People did not get eaten by dinosaurs. That’s because they got extremely lucky, and all the dinosaurs died. Millions of years ago they got stinked. Scientists digged up their bones with a bulldozer, and there were a bunch of school chairs, but the dinosaurs ate them all up because they are functionary. That means dangerous, according to this book.

"Dinosaurs lived. Dinosaurs lived. Dinosaurs lived. (giggles) I'll tell you a joke about dinosaurs. How did dinosaurs eat, and eat, and eat, when they had none hands? Mom? They just...got their face dirty! (brief interlude of nonsensical jokes about animals that eat despite having "none hands")

"I would read some more, but my breath won’t let me."

The Toilet Mystery

Not much time tonight to write, but I had a couple of silly things happen this morning while getting ready for work, and I thought perhaps I'd start an occasional series here--things I never anticipated about motherhood. Nothing so profound, you understand, just the strange and goofy things that I didn't know would ever be a part of my life, like the fact that any time I open one of the doors on my minivan, I leave a small sprinkling of stale Cheerios behind. For the birds, I tell Jabberwock. Or like the fact that I'm driving a minivan, for that matter.

So this morning when I got out of bed I really had to use the bathroom. Monkey was nursing like some kind of addict all night, including straight through about three snoozes, and by the time he was ready to back off and let me have my boobs back, I had to pee like crazy. So I run into the bathroom, only to find that the toilet is...full. This was not yellow, nor was it mellow. I was puzzled and irritated by this uncharacteristic act of my husband, and I impatiently pulled down the handle to flush, only to find that nothing was going down, but more water was pouring in. The level of the contents of my toilet was rising alarmingly! Simultaneously gagging, wiggling, and panicking, I reached behind the toilet for the plunger, and soon the problem was solved. Not even a single splash. It wasn't until I had relieved myself and was scrubbing the skin off of my hands that I remembered the sound of Monkey playing in the bathroom last night as I was getting Jabber ready for bed. Sounds like the lid of the toilet slamming. And I wonder...what exactly did he flush? When will I discover its absence? What are the odds that it has now passed safely through the plumbing, never to bother us again? The Toilet Mystery--one thing I did not anticipate about motherhood.