Definition

On the car trip home from East Towne Mall this afternoon:

Logan: Hey, Mom. Do you know what a lung is?

Me: What's a lung, Logan?

Logan: A lung is a kind of crab.

News to me.

The Roy-Lewis Fire Brigade

Photos from May 31, 2009
A new firetruck and fire-fighter raincoat = fun!

Disco Fever

Shay is a disco ball. She is bright and shiny with thousands of little mirrors that reflect everything around her. She swirls and twirls around, sparkling her myriad lights onto everyone she encounters, mesmerizing and glowing. Her blue eyes rival the ocean with their multiple shades and hues, her lashes are long, thick and spiky, her skin is pink cream, and her grin displays two large, perfectly white and square front teeth.

Her hair is a bit of a debacle. It is straggly, sparse and flyaway, with a tendency to frizz in the back. I cut it myself a few months ago in the back because some of the strands had actually gotten matted together. But it curls in random directions, flips up here and there, fuzzy and wavy, doing its own thing without much care for conformity. Rather like its owner.

Shay chortles. She doesn't giggle. Never has. When she is amused or happy, she emits a series of low, long chortles - heh, heh, heh - that inevitably prompt others to do whatever necessary (tickling, nuzzling, teasing) to keep the chortles coming. Her chortles are frequent and loud, evidence of both a sunny disposition and an extroverted, curious and affectionate personality that makes her approach babies with a loud "Hi!" while waving her pudgy little hand in their faces.

While cautious around strangers, once you have passed her inner acceptance test, she bestows upon you an unlimited amount of warmth and enthusiasm, which sometimes translates to squeezing your face between her hands and issuing a squeaking, "Ohhhh," much as one would do with a newborn. She craves being held by people she trusts the way a fish craves water. She is relentless with her dispersal of hugs and kisses to her friends and family. She loves to hold your hand - or grip your finger tightly, as the case may be, as she holds up her hand and demands, "Walk!"

She's a talker. At her age, Logan was quieter with a less extensive vocabulary, but he had a far longer attention span than she does. (I know, they say not to compare your children, but frankly I can't compare them to anyone else). Any comparison I make is always followed by an implied, "Interesting, huh?" - with no intention of purporting that one trait is somehow better than the other. It's just...interesting. Like comparing clouds.

Shay has a lot of very intelligible words. Book, bed, nap, nurse, hi, bye, park, car, shoes, diaper, walk, man, dog, truck, bus, etc. She also has several Shay-words that are starting to disappear slowly into "proper" pronunciation, which, as with Logan, is a very bittersweet thing.

It took Shay awhile to make an effort at saying Logan's name, and when she finally did it came out as "Long" (as in, "Hi, Long!")

Sass = Shay. When she falls down, she emits a yelp and a "Sass!", though whether she's saying her name to comfort herself or chastise herself for being clumsy, I have no idea.

pink oak = pink yogurt. Usually strawberry. This morning she asked for "Gurt." I was a little sad. I will miss pink oak.

fuff = flower. Yesterday when I was putting on her clothes, she pointed to a flower on her pants and said, "Fower."

onch = lunch. I love this one. "Onch, onch!"

sim = swing. When going to the park, she points at the swing and yells, "Sim! Sim!"

yak = jacket. Or "pink yak" when she wants to be specific.

stoom = spoon

wish = fish ("Hi, wish! Bye, wish!")

When in agreement with something she used to nod and give a long, drawn-out, "Yyyyyyyeah!" which within the last week has become a still drawn-out, "Yeeessssss."

She appears to be somewhat girly. She likes the color pink. She loves to look at herself in the full-length mirror in the bedroom, putting her hands on it and pressing her button nose up to her reflection as she squeals, "Hi. Hi! Sass!"

She's kind of prissy. If she gets yogurt on her hands, she whines and extends her hand while saying, "Yuck, yuck!" and expects you to wipe it off before she continues with her meal. If there's a leaf or piece of dirt on the slide before she goes down, she announces, "Yuck!" and points at it accusingly with her little forefinger until you sweep it away. Only then does she proceed to go down the slide.

Once she saw a thin piece of bark that had somehow made its way on to our kitchen floor. She pointed at it and started saying, "Bug! Bug!" while stamping her feet and shrieking until I threw it away.

Will's nickname for her is "baby." Mine has been "Shay May," and "Shay Shay," and currently is "Shaylie," which Logan used to call her. Sometimes I mix it up with "Shaylie Ukulele." To Logan, she is "little baby" or "little cutie." She doesn't seem to mind what we call her.

Like her big brother, she is developing a love for books. She occasionally sits through a whole story, especially if it's short, like Where the Wild Things Are, but more often she wants to just look at the pictures and point out various things - and point she does, tapping her forefinger repeatedly on a picture while either asking, "Whazzat?" or stating what it is -- dog, cow, cat, baby.

She is attempting to start singing. One of her favorite songs is "Rum Sum Sum," and she loves doing the accompanying hand-motions. The first line of our standard lullaby "Hush, little Shay..." comes out sweet and melodic in her little voice. She sometimes dances with her whole body and sometimes prefers to stand and sway, cocking her head in time to the music and pumping her arms up and down.

She's our disco ball. And we love living amidst her swirling, multi-colored lights.

Logan Update

So I haven't forgotten about blogging. Life is good. Life is great, in fact. I am writing my millionth historical romance without a contract, except for the one in my head that contains the clause "publisher agrees to kow-tow endlessly to author, to inundate her with massive advances and royalties and marketing campaigns" -- but all is very, very good.

Logan has just completed his first year in the Preschool of the Arts Copper Room, which started out a little rocky considering the transition from the utterly fabulous and aptly named Rainbow Room. The Copper Room is a mixed-age room of 3 and 4 year olds who stay for two years. Logan ended up being the only 3 year old boy and therefore the youngest amidst older boys who had also been together the previous year. So it took him time to assimilate, not being naturally gregarious and extroverted, which I actually think will serve him well -- but he made especially good friends with an older boy named Micah whom he still plays with every day, according to his after-school recap.

The Copper Room teachers, Paula and Joyce, are natural teachers, and Logan has responded well to them, and gets along well with the other kids. They've done a ton of horse-related projects this year stemming from their classroom "museum" constructed in a corner of the room -- which formerly was the Copper Room Art Museum and this year has become the Copper Room Greatest Horse Museum. They've visited Madison's Museum of Modern Art to look at temporary exhibitions and a horse sculpture, they've seen shows at the Overture Center and gone to a farm for pumpkin-picking. They've celebrated birthdays, started personal journals, had sing-alongs with other classrooms, worked on art projects, learned new games and studied letters and numbers. Despite the shaky start, it's been good for all of us -- for all of us to learn to deal with a new situation and forge new relationships.

So he'll be there again next year -- his FINAL year of preschool before kindergarten. The question of exactly where he will attend kindergarten (ie, if we stay in the same apartment or move) is still up in the air, but I'm trying not to worry too much about it. So far he's done well in every new situation he's encountered, and kindergarten should be no exception.

Logan is growing up. He's learning about peer pressure and making friends (for the past nine months he has been obsessed with Thomas the Tank Engine and everything related to the Island of Sodor, but suddenly within the last week he has stopped playing with his trains, no longer wants to watch Thomas videos on YouTube - which we allowed every so often - and won't wear his new Thomas t-shirt to the Copper Room. He also doesn't want to bring his Thomas swimming trunks to the Copper Room for the summer slip-and-slides and sprinkler play. Although I suspect an older boy said something about Thomas being for babies, Logan hasn't yet divulged exactly what was said or by whom.

Funny how by age four all the 'kiddy' things have already become passe - like Thomas and Sesame Street. Now the boys all seem to be into Spiderman, Batman, Star Wars and the Transformers, while the girls can't get enough of every single princess in the entire kingdom.

Because I am oddly neurotic about letting my children watch television (I have no idea why, really, I was allowed to watch reasonable amounts of TV and to this day have a rather embarrassing fondess for reality shows -- uh, that might be the source of my neurosis right there).

Anyway, so Logan has never watched much Sesame Street and certainly no Spiderman (even though I can still sing the ENTIRE Spiderman theme song by heart -- Spiderman, Spiderman does whatever a spider can. Spins a web any size, catches thieves just like flies. LOOK OUT! Here comes the Spiderman....)

As I was saying, Logan is rather clueless about all that, through no fault of his own. So I started him in a kid's Spanish class to get him started with another language, and now I let him watch learning Spanish videos or things like Clifford dubbed in Spanish. At first, he was all into it, but now he's realizing that these videos actually have English versions that he can fully UNDERSTAND, so now he's resisting the Spanish -- "But Mommy, English is the best language EVER. I don't need to learn anymore Spanish."

Uh huh. I'm standing firm. We're continuing Spanish classes and his video choices will be heavily leaning towards Spanish. Logan, you will thank me for this one day. I promise. Maybe not today, maybe not tommorrow, but soon and for the rest of your life. (Okay, by the time you're old enough to watch Casablanca, you can pick the language of your choice).

Speaking of languages, Logan has lost virtually all of his toddler-isms -- he no longer says "cuzzin" for "because", which he was doing up until last fall. I don't even remember when he stopped saying that, it just sort of faded into "because." Kind of bittersweet, I always thought that was so endearing.

And overall (with an occasional misstep) he is a great big brother to Shay. He still calls her "my baby" or says beyond adorable things like "Mommy, Shay is the cutest baby ever." He squeaks at her a lot (his version of "cootchie cootchie coo"), sometimes to her yelp of protest and is starting to understand that he can teach her things. He says words to her in Spanish and tells her to repeat them ("Shay, say agua. Say queso. Say leche" -- and when she repeats them in her sweet little voice, he gives her an encouraging, "Good, Shay!")

He reads her books when he's in the mood, though still gets irritated when she plays with his toys, and often whatever SHE'S playing with becomes the most fascinating thing in the world to him. And while he still has the (increasingly rare) unpleasant habit of knocking her over when he wants to establish his authority, he also sometimes tells her outright what he thinks of her. When she was trying to push him off his stepstool one afternoon (because she wanted "a turn") and was screeching and grabbing his legs, he responded with a calm, "You're not a very good baby anymore, Shay." Of course, they both forget the conflict within seconds.

He's good. He whines and fusses and wants his way like any four-year-old the world over, but he also listens and generally does what we ask, especially if the warning "Uh Oh" is employed with a stern look. That little phrase has been known to work when nothing else has.

Logan continues to love books -- Richard Scarry, Dr. Seuss, Thomas books, a very wide-range of classics and new books I've gotten at the CCBC sale. He's never really been much into drawing or coloring, although he does enjoy it when I bring out the art box and he does a lot of art in the Copper Room, but his biggest joy is still the athletic stuff -- running, climbing, doing the monkey bars (which he worked incredibly hard at for WEEKS before he could finally get all the way across, and now he wants to do nothing else at the park). He loves swimming, though even after five sessions of lessons he still can't get very far unless he's got his floatie-thing on. But he's fearless when it comes to learning different strokes, jumping into the water, and doing sit-dives. He's fearless when it comes to anything athletic.

Rather sadly, his interest in music has waned considerably, though I'm not sure what to attribute this to except that his interests are changing and evolving all the time, just like he is. I do hope his love of music will return and am considering ways we can better encourage it.

Likewise, he's become a bit of a picky eater, but I can't complain -- he eats virtually any fruit I put in front of him, chicken salad, ham or turkey sandwiches, broccoli, avocados, carrot sticks, hummus, cottage cheese, applesauce, nuts, green beans (that last one is with encouragement). He'd eat strawberries every day if he could and while he usually exhibits an extreme lack of interest in whatever we're having for dinner ("Mommy, this isn't the kind of supper I want") , his complaints are short-lived and he eats what he wants and then is done.

And every day, he amazes me. Every day I remind myself how fortunate we are to have been entrusted with his care and hope that we are proving ourselves worthy of him.

Quotable Kids

Some recently overheard dialogue from Logan and Shay (I'll leave YOU to guess who said what, given that Logan is almost 4 and Shay is just a little past 1):

"This booger looks like macaroni and cheese."

"Wazzat?"

"If you take butter outside it will melt and get in your eyes."

"Oh."

"Daddy, you aren't a good driver. You don't look where you're going. Mommy is a good driver."

"Maaaa!"

Logan: Spokesman for the ADA

This morning I was trying to get Logan to brush his teeth after breakfast.

"No, first I want to play with my trains" (the trains in question are really one train -- Thomas -- and an assortment of other toys chosen by color to represent the other trains on the island of Sodor, but that's another story for another time).

"Logan," I said, raising my voice. "Logan, you HAVE to brush your teeth, or they'll fall out. You don't want that to happen, do you? If they fall out, you won't be able to eat any yummy food like french toast or bacon." I was confident this would get him. He loves french toast and bacon.

But, being Logan, he thought about it a moment and said. "I'll just keep my mouth closed."

"What?" I asked.

"Yeah, I'll keep my mouth closed and then my teeth can't fall out."

Well, problem solved, I guess! (But he still had to brush his teeth.)

Hiatus

So I haven't posted in quite a while -- certainly not from lack of things to write about but because I've been trying hard to direct all my writing energy towards fiction (which also explains why I am so lousy about replying to emails). Logan and Shay are respectively in preschool and daycare MWF, which means I drop them off, get home by 8:30 and spend the day writing writing and writing some more. Discipline rules those three days. Chaos rules the other four days, but I suppose that's par for the course (I have no idea exactly what that even means).

Anyway, it's been both bittersweet and wonderful watching Shay grow and change. She walks fast, runs faster, jabbers endlessly ("Hi!" being her only really distinguishable word, which was also Logan's first word), and has an extraordinary facility for pointing at things with her index finger. She points to the window ("Sky!" we say with enthusiasm. "Bird! Tree! Yes, those are leaves!"), to the buttons on the elevator, to her mouth when we ask "Eat? Eat?", and to pretty much anything else to which she wishes to draw our attention. It's actually quite an elegant little gesture, and it will serve her well for "shushing" purposes should she choose to become a librarian one day. Or a mother. Ahem.

As for Logan, he is crazy about her. He follows her around, copies her when she crawls, runs, jabbers, points, and drops her food on the floor. We are not thrilled with that last one. I actually had a tough time with Logan over the summer since for at least five months, he was downright mean with Shay -- hitting her, kicking her and knocking her over so frequently that my blood was in serious boil mode. It was kind of a weird response -- I was SO angry every time he bullied her, and my anger sprang from the undeniable fact that I will let no one hurt my baby, not even my other baby. I'm not entirely sure I handled that whole period very well considering I did a lot of snapping and time-out-ing at Logan. I read some parenting books and tried a few different techniques, but I wasn't consistent and my frustration always came to the surface. I was also so upset because it was hard to see Logan -- who has always been a good, non-confrontational type of kid -- all of a sudden turn around and start bulling.

The good thing is that as Shay got older and more interact-able, Logan outgrew the bullying phase and their relationship now is far more one of brother and sister rather than bully and victim. He still sometimes "accidentally" knocks her over (an event followed by a wholly insincere "Sorry, Shay!"), but she also knows that a loud screech will garner her some attention. So the pattern is -- Logan knocks Shay over, she screeches and looks imploringly at either me or Will, Logan apologizes and we go on our way. It's typical sibling behavior (unlike what occured this summer), and for the most part anticipated and even somewhat acceptable.

Beyond Shay, Logan is thriving in his own multiple ways. He loves to rhyme, even if the rhymes make no sense ("Hey Mommy! Ban shran. Post jost!") and especially when they do ("Hey Mommy! Pan can! Shoe true!"). My personal favorite is "Taught apricot!" I don't think even I could've come up with that one.

He also continues to love music and plays the guitar and piano with a preschooler's aplomb. Neil Young's "Sugar Mountain" is a new favorite, though we can't convince him that the words are "Oh, to live on Sugar Mountain with the barkers and the colored balloons." He continues to sing "Oh, to live on Sugar Mountain with the barkers and the colored bloogs!" Never let it be said he doesn't know how to make a song his own.

He loves to "do art," which at home consists of pasting stickers onto colored paper and then coloring the stickers black. He remains as athletic and active as ever, waking up at 5am on full throttle and staying there for the rest of the day. He's taking swimming lessons and can swim about 10 feet, jump into the pool and swim back to the edge, and he's learning to dive for rings on the bottom of the pool.

He's enjoying the game "Zingo" at preschool (a Bingo variation) and especially likes to "do the machine" that spits out the Zingo markers. His love of books is never-ending -- recent favorites include the Berenstain Bears and Clorinda the cow. He tells Shay what to do ("Shay, we don't throw our food on the floor. No, no, no!" "Shay, you can only have books with pages you can't tear.")

In addition to "Little Wild," Logan calls Shay "Little Baby" -- as in, "I want to see Little Baby." Or after they've had baths and I'm getting Shay dressed, he says, "She's Little Naked and I'm Big Clean." That one cracks me up. My favorite is "my baby." "My baby's name is Shay," he tells people, or "My baby is one year old."

Melts my heart. Every time. They both do. Every day.

the future medical capitalist

This past weekend we had a "playdate" for Logan at the home of one of his friends, and one of the favored sets of toys was a rather complete set of surgical and dignostic apparatus. Syringes (plastic with blunt needles, of course), Scalpels (dull), tongue depressors (not so depressing to look at, really) and even a sphygnomanomometer. The latter is known to most of us as a blood-pressure taker thingy. Logan decided he needed to take my blood pressure. He tried to wrap it around my upper arm but found it wouldn't fit, tried to wrap it around my wrist but couldn't get it to fasten, so at last I had to hold the ends together while he pushed on the bulb and made the little needle whir round and round. He did this for maybe five seconds. Then said nothing. "That's not being a very good doctor," I said. "You have to tell me what my blood pressure is." Still nothing. "What's my blood pressure?" I asked more directly. He considered his response carefully, staring into space for emphasis, then looked me straight in the eyes: "Fifty cents!"

your election wrap-up with correspondent Logan

Here we are at the scene of last night's amazing, astounding, never-to-be-believed election result. Change is coming. Change we can believe in. Change we need. We have a new president. You can believe that, can't you? By constitutional amendment, a president is limited to to two full terms, so we needed to choose a new one. You can believe that, too, yes? Well then, Obama has thus fulfilled his promises! In order to celebrate, I give you a selection of Logan's election thoughts from the past few days.

At dinner the night before the election:

Logan said "Is 'rack Obama nice?"
I said "I don't know, I never met him."
Logan said "Is John McCain nice?"
I said "I don't know, I never met him."
Logan said "Oh" and resumed eating.

The morning of the election, at the polling station:

Someone said (referring to Logan) "He's too young to vote!"
I said "We're taking him down to Chicago for that."
I heard a few laughs and felt a few cold, silent stares.
Logan said "What are we doing here?"
Nina said "We're hear to vote for president."
Logan said "Maybe it's 'rack Obama and John McCain! Where are 'rack Obama and John McCain?"

The night of the election, watching returns on TV:

Logan said "That's 'rack Obama, and that's John McCain."
I said "Yep."
Logan said "First John McCain is going to win, and then 'rack Obama is going to win."
I said "Somehow I don't think that's going to happen. Though this is 2008 and most anything is possible."

The morning after the election:

Logan said "We're going to visit the president."
I said "Do you know where the president lives?"
Logan said "No, but we're going to take an airplane."
I said "The president lives in Washington DC."
Logan said "That's far away."
I said "Never far enough."
Logan said "I like fire engines!"