Nate Nate

When Asthma Attacks

Boo, my friends.  Poor Jonah landed himself in the ER in a fit of wheezing and subpar breathing this morning.  I don't recommend it.  We had the nebulizer, we responded unsatisfactorily, we had an x-ray, we said "CHEESE!" (that part was pretty cute, as was the fact that he refused to wear the hospital gown and so had his x-ray wearing jeans and cool sneakers and no shirt, looking a little like a Calvin Klein model), we nebulized again, we met expectations, and after approximately 600 hours of back to back PBS Kids and Disney Channel shows, we were honorably discharged with instructions to follow up at home with a treatment every four hours.  Since then, we've already hit up my friend Dr. Sarah for a "go back to the ER or no?" checkup at home (no, hooray!), and now we're on Jonahwatch for the evening.  If all goes well, we'll sleep the night away and head off for our follow-up visit in the morning.

Again, I don't recommend it.  But Jonah is, at least, a dream patient.  He put up with an inordinate amount of unpleasantness with nary a complaint, and he managed to make jokes throughout the entire visit.

Of course, he is now milking this for all it's worth, and so I must leave the blogging to go "just be in my bed with me for one second, Mommy."  It's pretty hard to say no on a good day, but today?  Pretty much non-stop Whatever Jonah Wants.  Will update tomorrow; send us good, non-asthmay thoughts.

Inauguration Day

Well now that was an exciting day.  Nate watched the festivities with the entire Lower School, in the 5th grade classroom, on the third floor.  He learned that the White House has 132 rooms and 35 bathrooms, and he was very excited to learn that Malia and Sasha Obama can play real bowling and tennis, of the non-Wii variety, in their house.  His class also read a Weekly Reader-type pamphlet about our new President, and Nate got to read the section about how Barack Obama used to be a teacher, since Barack Obama was actually the teacher of Nate's parents.  He actually had a lot more facts to impart, but I am not going to list them all here.  Suffice it to say he learned a lot today and was very! excited! about it!

Jonah also enjoyed the festivities.  Riding home from the doctor in Daddy's car, he was listening to the inauguration speech on NPR, when he commented, "I listened to this in your car this morning, Mommy!"  "Oh, did you listen to it on the way to school with Obdulia?" I asked, impressed that he recognized the speech.  "Yeah!" he exclaimed.  "Barack Obama talked about the sun and wind!"  "?" I thought.  And about two minutes later, in the middle of his speech, President Obama said, "We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil..."

Everyone's a pundit.  Also, ahem.  YAY!!!!!!!

But let's back up a minute.  Why were we coming back from the doctor's in the middle of a Tuesday afternoon?  Because Jonah fell off a play structure, landed on his shoulder, and popped his little arm out of its socket.  Damn you, nursemaid's elbow!  Savvy nanny Obdulia called to tell me that he wasn't using his arm as much as usual, and off we went.  Luckily, Jonah's buddy Mina's mommy is a doctor in our practice, and she came out to greet us in the waiting room.  She took one look at him, diagnosed him instantaeously, and popped the little armie back into place in no time.  Before we knew it, he was back to his old self again, happily playing Wii golf and Jonah Basketball (it involves imaginary hoops and a lot of scoring) for the rest of the night.

Last item about Inauguration Day: Nate's homework included writing three sentences about our new President.  Sentence number one: "Barack Obama was Mommy's teacher."  Daddy, who took two classes with the POTUS, including an 18 person seminar, is still grumbling.

A Born Salesman

Apparently, signing your kid up for a fancy private school does not save you from having to hawk items door-to-door to raise funds for the school.  So this morning, before we set out to ask our neighbors to buy some See's candy (it could be worse), Nate and I went over a few ground rules.

"Ok," I said.  "We're going to go knock and Jean and John's door.  Just like Halloween, we're not going to go inside, but we're going to say, very nicely, 'Would you like to buy some candy to support my school, please?'  Then we're going to let them look at the order form and pick out what they want.  They might not want to buy anything, and that's totally fine, but we'll just see if they do."

"Ok," Nate agreed.  He humored me by practicing his routine a few times, and I felt like we were ready to go.

We rang Jean and John's doorbell.  John answered.  Nate made a beeline past him, straight into the living room.  Strike one!  "EXCUSE ME BUT WHAT CANDY DO YOU WANT TO BUY?" Nate shouted at the ceiling.

Oy.

With some coaxing, Nate remembered to backtrack out of the house and run through his little song and dance.  We sold a box, and Nate cutely filled out the form, thanked his customer, and headed off to the next house.  Where he again forgot all the rules the instant the door opened.

In the end, we visited 5 houses and made sales at each, coming closer and closer to our rehearsed act with each house.  So I guess that's good.  At the last house, our neighbor, a fellow elementary school mom who will now be hitting me up to buy double from her twins at their next raffle, told Nate that she would like to buy two boxes.  "No, you can't," Nate informed her.  "You have to pick one."

And with that, I crossed "salesman" off his list of potential careers.

Two Second Humor

I'm all for invented spelling.  But for the love of mike, can someone please tell Nate that what we conceal his gifts in is not called raping paper?

Self-Reliance

In a family where the kids have not eactly been eager to lift any fingers of their own that Mommy can be convinced to lift for them (literally; three year old, 35 pound Jonah would never let a foot touch the ground if I were physically capable of carrying him all day), it's been very exciting to see the kids finally doing some things for themselves lately.  Over the past few weeks, Nate has gone from a guy who I had to chase around the house, wildly attempting to thrust a t shirt over his head, to a guy who will happily trot off to his room, pick out some reasonably complementary items (this is pretty easy when you are a boy and thus do not own any pants with flowers on them), and, in what feels like a total miracle, dress himself.  I realize that many, many, many five year olds have probably been doing this for a while, but it's pretty much the greatest thing ever in our house.  And, since this was legitimately hard for him for a long time, I'm very proud of the little guy.  And psyched to knock one task off my own morning to-do list.

Nate has also gotten very good at satisfying his own electronic needs.  As soon as I give them the green light, the guys will run down to the family room, turn on Wii by themselves, and commence playing.  Even Jonah can point his remote at the screen and click through enough set-up pages to start a bowling game.  If this were the 50s instead of the 00s, I could sit in the living room and drink highballs all afternoon. 

Unfortunately, not all of the tech stuff has gone quite as well.  Nate is now something of an iTunes pro, to the point where he can, quite annoyingly, hook my iPod up to the computer and upload a bunch of stuff that I don't like.  So that later, when I'm driving and trying to listen to it on shuffle, I might get to a ten song session where I don't even recognize what my iPod is playing.  Even worse, today Jonah somehow managed to delete iTunes from the computer while Nate was in the middle of an uploading frenzy.  He was completely inconsolable, and I was pretty mad too.  "That's it, Jonah," I said sternly.  "No more ABCs on the computer for you today."

Which leads me to my next topic: Jonah's independent study.  He left the office, sufficiently chastised, and headed off to the kitchen.  When I found him five minutes later, he had located a bag of penne in the cupboard, opened it, and started making his ABCs on the floor, in the medium of pasta.  He had already made a beautiful A and B.  And I don't have the heart to dismantle and, you know, eat them.

Thanks to the awesome recommendation of Lisa, mom of Sophie, Tess and Maisie, we are also the proud owners of a set of teeny tiny books for little beginners, called the Bob books, that Jonah can read all by himself.  The stories are 3 letter words and 3 word sentences.  "Mat sat," reads Jonah.  "Sam sat.  Mat sat on Sam.  Sam sat on Mat."  Ha!! 

If only we could teach them to enjoy any of these wonderful solo activities during those 5:30-8 am weekend hours...

A Cat Among Kitties

Some months ago, Jonah decided that, part time, he'd be a cat.  We've talked about that here before -- one good way to try to get him to do something, say buckling his seat belt or brushing his teeth, became to just say, "here, kitty, let's buckle your kitty seat belt/brush your kitty teeth."  With increasing frequency, he answers questions with a "meow."  "Jonah, would you like some syrup with your pancakes?" "Meow."  "Jonah, is it time to be quiet and go to sleep?" "Meow."  It's all in the (subtle) inflection, I guess.

A few weeks ago, we started hearing of pre-school friends of Jonah's who were also testing the feline waters.  The tipping point, I think, was when Kate, who previously had insisted upon being called "Ariel," ditched the whole mermaid motif and committed to full-time cathood. 

Today we received an email about the pre-school curriculum.  According to Jonah's teachers:

We have noticed that the kids have been so interested in kitty play that we are now doing a whole curriculum on Cats!! We have been having a lot of fun doing face paint, making kitty ears and decorating cat shapes with paint and collage things! We’ve also been doing kitty yoga.

So there you have it. Jonah has converted an entire class of three-year-olds to neo-felinism.

More Spelling With Jonah

Ok, at some point soon I will stop posting constantly about Jonah's spelling, because I realize that it's possible that not everyone on earth finds it as hilarious as I do, but yesterday, in the middle of making dinner, I went to check on Jonah and discovered him in the office, all set up on Microsoft Word, typing the following:

OKDAPUS HAT.

"Octopus hat?" I asked.

"Octopus!  Hat!" he beamed.

This, coming on the heels of CIDEEKAT(Jonah's animal alter ego), just about sent me over the edge.  As Jonah himself would say, "Dude!"

Right Idea, Wrong Track

Along the freeway on our way to the Charles Schulz Museum today (recommended!), we noticed a large group of cows on the side of the road and, naturally, started mooing at them.  Jonah looked thoughtfully at the dozens of cows roaming free.  "It must be a cowtown!" he concluded.  "And look!  There's a fence so no people can get in!"

Nate had his own journey to the land of mistake tonight.  We were having a lovely bathtub chat about the future, and I was explaining that when he is all grown up, he will be a daddy, and he will get to make all the rules for his little boy or girl.  "Will there be a mommy too?" he asked.  "Of course!" I exclaimed.  "Of course there will be a mommy, and you'll be the daddy!"  "Well," he offered, "there could also be two daddies instead of a daddy and a mommy."  "That's very true," I agreed.  "That's something that you'll decide when you're all grown up."  Nate considered the possibilities.  "Or there could be two daddies AND a mommy!"  "No," I said.  "There will not be two daddies and a mommy.  One or the other, you have to pick." 

Phonics In Real Time

This just in from Jonah: a paper with the following word written (again, maddeningly, in yellow highlighter that I can barely read without giving myself a blinding headache):

CALUFORNYAH

Sounded out and written entirely by himself.  My favorite part is how he gave it an "H" at the end...just like Jonah!

...and, in the time since I started posting this:

NABASKU (Nebraska); and

NAHVADAH (where you go to gamble).

And:

OHIO (that one's just regular);

CODORDO ("Where Sophie and Tessie [and Maisie] live," said Jonah); and

ITHO (this one's admittedly trickier to decipher, but hint hint, potatoes).

...and, apparently he is going for the complete set.  He has just brought me "MAN" (northern state known for lobsters and saying "ayuh"), and "ROD ILIN" -- a shoutout to Mommy! 

If I seem a little loopy about this, it's because I am sitting here, trying to write a brief, and being inundated with pages and pages of paper with the names of states written phonetically by a newly-minted three year old.  I defy you to remain unmoved in the face of such utter ... absurdity?  hilarity?  craziness?  Are we the weirdest family ever, or just the weirdest that I know?

Ah, he's back.  We now have MASUCHOOSIS, KANSIS, TEXIS, ILUNOY, and UOOTO (all self-explanatory except that last one, but it's our only "U" state).  In case you're wondering, they are not written in a straight line from left to right; the letters tend to travel in zig-zag or spiral patterns across the page, but I am giving him a sticker nonetheless.