Enter Talking
Our little boy, Matthew, has been growing his linguistic prowess. Being able to talk is the liberating factor, and talk he does. Talk talk talk. You can’t really shut him up. Toward the end of the day, it’s a disjointed tumble of words, sentences, and half-remembered stories that bubble up unbidden, waiting in an unruly line to be expressed to half-listening ears. The mornings, though, are filled with measured statements and full sentences, with meaning and intent.
Matthew does not understand time at all; he simply can’t tell the difference between minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, and years. And thus we have a long-running discussion of when he will turn 5, when is his birthday, when will he start kindergarten, when can he see his Aunt Tina, and so on.
His single motivation, however, is the acquisition of toys. Every interaction with an adult is an opportunity to tell them about the toys he wants. He likes to watch videos, and every toy he sees there (whether in real life or in a cartoon) is a discussion point. “Papa, do you see this ray gun that makes you bigger or smaller? I want that. Can you buy it for me?” After the hundred millionth request, it gets old. Part of the negotiation—and trust me, every interaction is a negotiation—is that we need it now.
I am a softie, and I fall for his imprecations regularly. He sees every trip to the grocery store as an opportunity for more stuff. He wants to know what every brightly colored object is, and he weighs whether it’s worth having. It doesn’t matter if it’s a cheap plastic half-avocado holder or a set of straw-toppers or maybe a set of Hot Wheels cars. My strategy is that there can only be one gift, it must cost less than $10, and it should be the first thing he asks for. By acquiescing early in the shopping trip, I can shut down all other requests. “You already got that Halloween skull. That’s it for today.” He still asks, but he can’t deny that he already got something, and thus, the soulful requests for oversized stuffed animals or useless gingerbread houses or giant Valentine’s Day chocolate hearts can be easily shut down.
Lately, it’s the nonstop talking/singing/humming and/or screaming that gets to us. Daddy and I are both quiet people and while we know that kids are loud enterprises, it wears on us. For example, we have a new rule during bedtime preparations: “If you scream one more time, Papa is going to spank you.” Papa does not want to spank. Papa does not want to be harsh. But by 8 pm, Papa is a little tired of being at the beck and call of demanding, four-foot-tall hobbit-wannabes. Papa dreams of an ice-cold vesper martini at some fancy liquid entertainment emporium. Sadly, Papa doesn’t drink anymore, and the pre-bedtime screaming wears thin. Like Zathras, Papa is used to “…being a beast of burden to other people’s needs…very sad life…probably have very sad death…but, at least there is symmetry!”
I understand my own parents a little better.
Matthew also just wants to do more stuff together. I love that, and most weekend mornings we work on jigsaw puzzles together. That’s fun. He’s remarkably good at jigsaw puzzles; he has no real puzzle-solving strategy except for pattern-matching, so it’s not speedy, but we do it together. And he never stops talking during the puzzle activity.
Whenever he’s feeling playful (which is a lot of the time), he’ll ask incredulously, “What the…?” The implied f-word at the end of that is the second automatic spanking violation1. I expected to have f-word discussions in second grade, not at pre-kindergarten. He just smiles.
A few days ago, he got a little frustrated at me. He kept proposing new activities at 4 pm on a weekday, not realizing that I objected to the timing, not the activities. “Can we go to the toy store?” “Can we go to the zoo?” “Can we visit Uncle David and Layla?”
“Sweetheart, I’m sorry, but I have to make dinner. We can’t go out now.”
Frustrated, he declared, “Papa, you’re an old lady.”
Among gay men of my generation, there is a lot of humor around the playful misgendering (and mis-aging) of someone else, and I can certainly take it as well as dish it out. (Honestly, how are there no documentaries of the witty repartée of my peers and elders?) But he stopped me in my tracks. And now that he knows he surprised me, he says it all the time. Sigh.
The school recently celebrated one hundred days of instruction in the current school year. It’s a big deal: students work on projects and wear a paper crown boasting of 100 Days.
In one project, Matthew had to complete the sentence and draw a picture that expresses the idea, “If I had $100…”. He completed the sentence by saying, “If I had $100, I would buy toys.” (As you can see in the image, writing is hard.) But he changed his mind and made the picture of me (on the right), with all my luxurious long hair, having a large diamond (in the center). The left inverted triangle is, I believe, the first attempt at drawing a diamond. He wanted me to have a large jewel, since I don’t have any. (Do you think my husband is taking notice? He should be. A friend recently pointed out that Tiffany makes a gorgeous men’s bracelet for a mere $47K, and it practically goes without saying that I don’t have one.)
The Gorditos are on their way to becoming nonstop talk machines, too. They have smaller vocabularies, so it’s harder for them. But Max regularly sings the alphabet song with a mistake (“…H-I-K-K-L-M-N-O-P…”) that never fails to make me smile.
Max found some rose-colored heart-shaped glasses in the sand at our local park. He’s been sporting a look for a few days now, and occasionally Will borrows the glasses for his own sartorial statement.
In conclusion, our house is a very, very, very loud house.
The third violation that automatically results in a spanking is hurting an animal, like one of our dogs. People who hurt animals (whether by neglect or by intent) should be punished severely.
Life with littles is indeed very very loud! xxoo
You have a very full life! I hope to meet all of the kids some day! :)