BlogHer ‘06. It’s in San Jose. It’s on my birthday. It would cost over a thousand dollars just in travel, assuming I went alone.
Ah well, a midwinter campervan holiday around the North Island will make up for it.
And to cheer me and everyone else up (assuming you haven’t seen this already, since everyone reads LiveJournal): here’s William Shatner playing all the main roles in the final scene of Se7en.
I have to say that if a male is so into a video game that even flashing breasts in his face doesn’t distract him, it’s time to pull out the heavy artillery. Of course, I thought that was the heavy artillery.
Damn.
Oh, the next part is actually parent-safe: I got a call at 7pm (!!) from the kindergarten down the road. (For those Americans reading, kindergarten here is government-subsidised preschool.) Sheila, an elderly and brisk-sounding lady, wanted to invite Ethan to start attending kindy starting TOMORROW. Oh. My. I mean, he only turned three last week, and here they are telling me that it’s time to send him into the world.
Since he attends daycare for one full Tuesday every week — and gets so much out of it socially and educationamally — he’ll only be at kindy on Monday and Thursday afternoons. The afternoon sessions are for the younger kids, from about 3.5 to four years, and when they get to around age four they move up to morning kindy, every day of the week (afternoons are Mon/Tues/Thurs only). Then it’s a fairly easy transition to real school, in theory. In reality the local kindergarten is run by the same kindly but octogenarian ladies that ran it when my next-door neighbours’ kids were that age (and they are my age now), so activities are fairly free-ranging with no schedule aside from MAT TIME.
MAT TIME is the sole structured section of the day, from my second-hand knowledge, and is primarily a way for the blue-haired-teaching-brigade to corral the children long enough to make sure all the heads they counted coming in the gates are the same heads about to go out the gate. They may or may not read a story, they may or may not sing songs, they DO NOT dance, stand, wriggle, roll around, shout, whisper, or otherwise disrupt the hive mind.
I’m sure it’s not really that bad. But I’m petrified of sending Ethan away for two afternoons a week on top of his daycare. It’s a disturbing sign of his growing independence. I’m about 75% excited for him — I said to Mike that I wanted to wake him up as soon as I heard to tell him the news — and 25% wanting to cry.
It’s a stinky hot day here in kiwilandia, and I am in hiding in my secret bat cave living room. Ethan is asleep in the car in the nice shady garage, having conked out on a drive home. Last night went something like this:
12:45am
Ethan: OMFG MOTHER YOUR NEGLECT IS LIKE A THOUSAND RAZORS PIERCING MY LITTLE HEART!! I CAN’T BELIEVE YOU DIDN’T MAKE SURE MY NIGHTLIGHT WAS ON!!
3:15am
Ethan: OMFGWTFBBQ MOTHER MY SIPPY CUP HAS FALLEN FROM THE BED AND I CANNOT REACH MY TINY STUBBY ARMS TO THE FLOOR TO GET IT!! WAKE UP AND PLACE IT ONCE MORE BETWEEN MY PARCHED LIPS FOR ME!!
4:15am
Amy: WAAAAAAAAAH FEED ME FOR I AM DYYYYYING!!!
6:30am
Ethan: *thud thud thudthudthud THUD*
So you can imagine the amazingly superfast rate at which he miraculously went to sleep in a hot day during a short car trip after spending the morning running around a hardware/gardening store with his grandparents and aunty and uncle in tow.
Yes. That fast.
1. Toys that you have not pre-played with to check efficacy. Example: the faux-movie projector that produces an image on the wall approximately the same size as the pictures in the book it comes with;
2. Toys with small and easy-to-lose but critical parts, like the trendy screw-together-yourself plastic vehicles with real removable plastic screws. Lots of them. (The Thomas the train gadget Ethan received today had screws that don’t come out of the parts they belong with. Really brilliant. Seriously.)
3. TOYS WITH SIX BATTERIES REQUIRED. We own about a dozen rechargable batteries, and still we have to keep a screwdriver handy to swap them from one toy to the next on Ethan’s whim;
4. Weapons;
5. A six-pack;
6. The Art of War;
7. Shoes. They won’t fit. Trust me.
8. Fishhooks. Ethan got some hooks and sinkers his first Christmas. That’s why he only has one eye. (Okay, so he wasn’t given them directly. But the warning stands.)
9. Subscriptions to Greenpeace or the World Wildlife Fund. What toddler is going to understand that? Before Ethan was born I considered getting him memberships in groups like that to start him out right, but instead I spend that money on visits to
the local wildlife park, where he can see the same endangered animals in person and understand a little better. Plus I think Greenpeace have turned into PETA-style extremist whackjobs.
10. Anything with the words: AS SEEN ON TV!! on the front.
Today my boy peed standing up. I’m holding back a wee tear.
Okay I’m not, but I was fair bursting with pride, even as I wiped the drips off the toilet seat.
Ethan has performed approximately four toy dissections today. I could be all proud and smugly report that he’ll obviously be an engineer when he grows up, like his daddy, but mostly I’m a little pissed off.
First he pulled out a thank-you card that his three-year-old girlfriend in the making had given him, painstakingly stickered and glued and glittered and with her name carefully written inside, all by herself. He peeled off the stickers and started tearing strips off the card when I stopped him.
Next he tried to rip apart a Mr Incredible toy that his favourite non-related Aunty Rachel had given him just two days ago, pulling Mr Incredible’s plastic feet from their plastic base. Fortunately the superglue thwarted his dastardly supervillainesque plan to incapacitate our hero.
Plus, you know, a bunch of other stuff including drawing pretty pictures of sharks in cages all over a letter I had just finished writing, eating day-old pasta out of the compost bucket, and opening the blender-in-a-box that we’re supposed to be giving to Mike’s brother.
But today is Tuesday, my designated Sanity Day. Ethan is at daycare until 5pm, at which time he’ll be home long enough to eat dinner, have a shower and a story and a cup of milk, and go to bed. I look forward to Tuesdays. And I know this doesn’t make me a bad mother, because I’d be a bad mother if I kept him at home all day every day until the frustration and irritation and need for personal space got me to a point of permanent tension and even anger. I’m a good mother because I have the sense to give in, just for one day a week, and let someone else take him off my hands so I can take a breath.
I don’t feel like I’ve missed any crucial elements of Ethan’s childhood, either, by doing that. Ethan was already crawling when I started him at daycare. He started walking at home, he was talking already and I still remember the sense of complete and absurd pride I felt when one of his teachers said one day, “I was changing him on the table and sneezed, and he said, ‘Bless you’!” when he was about 11 months old. I love having him at home, all to myself, for the rest of the week because he is a great kid, smart and affectionate. But on days where he decides, on a whim, to pull the household to pieces, I can’t wait to get him out the door.
Ethan will be three years old in a week.
Now, it has come to my attention, although I never read it in any of the parenting books I read obsessively while pregnant for the first (and second) time, that three-year-old boys are obsessed with their boybits.
Example the first: Ethan went to his friend’s house a couple of weeks ago on a very hot day and the kids all stripped naked and ran under the sprinkler. One little boy ran around shaking his little penis at the lone girl and saying, “Do you like my penis? It’s NAKED!”
The second: A little boy up the street who said to a kindy teacher, “YOU have a BABINA. I have a PENIS. It’s sad that you don’t have a penis.”
And last (for now): Ethan put a long plastic rod — one of those ones you use to open and close window-blinds — between his legs, pointed to it and told me, “This is my new penis. The wees come out there.” Already he’s suffering penis envy, it seems.
Yesterday morning Ethan decided he was going to pee standing up for the first time. I walked into the bathroom to find him clutching his willy like he was trying to either save it from a fate worse than death or pull it off. I told him to ease up his grip a bit and he switched to pinching it between finger and thumb. And it just wasn’t working, and even as a female I’m guessing you’re not supposed to handle your delicate bits that way. He soon gave up and sat.
Amy on the other hand has a busy day if she manages to swipe my glasses off my nose. When she does it, she raises her chubby arms and grins with her stumpy teeth like a baby Stallone.
(Of course I know Stallone was never a baby — failed genetic experiments just appear full-grown in Rambo flicks.)
It’s a pretty good indication how much you love your significant other when you spend two hours ironing their shirts. I’ve spent the last three years sending my husband to work in wrinkled clothes, looking like I’ve forced him to sleep on the couch every night of our marriage, with nary a blanket to keep him warm so he has to sleep in his clothes. But! I have resolved to make Wednesday my Ironing Day.
Or use the dryer more, I’m not sure yet.
At the same time, I’m trying to go for a walk every day, if it’s not raining. (And trust me, it rains a lot in Christchurch.) Mike and I got Ethan a trike for Christmas and I’ll be damned if I can keep up with him when he’s riding it. He pedals that thing like he’s on his way to the fish and chip shop to pick up his regular Friday order (battered sausage and chips), and we all have to maintain a steady trot to keep up. Amy is enjoying the whole exercise-Mum’s-wobbly-thighs-away process because she gets to sit in the stroller, suck her fingers and observe nature from a safe place. Meanwhile Ethan speeds along, hogging the footpath, leaving me reeling in a wake of shin-slapping tree branches.
But after two days I feel like I’ve lost a brazilian kilos, so I love Ethan a little bit more for it. Today our walk was to the local primary school to throw ourselves at the playground for a while. The weather was a superb 21C, not too breezy, and the sun was shining and the birds singing and look Ethan! A cicada! See how educational this walking thing can be!
But by the time I’d had enough (which was about ten minutes before Ethan was even contemplating having enough), the wind had made a quick rotation to the south and was blowing small trees and children along the road like tumbleweed. Ethan was getting tired so I bribed him with the promise of a DVD if it rained. As always, it worked like a charm: we sprinted the kilometre or so to our house, parked his trike and dashed inside, where we celebrated our fantastic fitness regime with Lilo and Stitch.
Yesterday Ethan came back from a walk to the park with his aunty. He climbed up the barstool, settled himself comfortably, and looked up at me mischievously while I made him a sandwich.
“Shit,” he said, eyes a-twinkle.
I looked at my sister. She looked at Ethan. Ethan looked at me. We had a Mexican standoff of staring for a few seconds, and I resumed my sandwich-making.
“Yes,” I said, smiling in a matronly and saintly way, “A ship is a big boat. It goes on the ocean.”
Ethan looked very disappointed.
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