The sounds of naptime

Naptime has been going on for about 90 minutes now, and from the bedroom I can hear long, mournful harmonica notes. I wonder what he's trying to tell me.

Overheard

"Casey, are you hungry?  Are you ready for lunch?"

"No, I'm not hungry!"

"OK, well let me know when you're ready for some chicken nuggets."

"I want some chicken nuggets!"

No one puts one over on my boy

Mommy took the family out to dinner last night -- haven't been to the Olive Garden in at least a year, and we just wanted to get out.  Casey skipped his nap and apparently spent the afternoon giggling.  I'm not sure what he thought was so funny, but after the first 20 minutes I'd been home, I started to think that maybe it was the oxygen deprivation.  That stuff's hilarious.  So yeah, let's take the Joker here to a restaurant, great idea.

As it turned out, he was well behaved once we were there.  Except for the moment when he decided to try his crayons on a soup bowl instead of his paper placemat, I didn't feel any discipline was required, and that's a smashing success for a restaurant outing these days.

But we weren't pushing our luck either, so we weren't about to linger once his considerable appetite for breadsticks ran out.  We asked the waitress to box up our food to go.  Casey was back to coloring happily when she started removing plates, and as soon as she lifted mommy's ravioli from the table, Casey stopped coloring, whipped his head up, and shouted, "Hey, give that back!"

Where'd THAT come from?

Anyway, lessons on politeness can come later.  Today I'm proud he's standing up for himself, protecting his family's food, and speaking in surprisingly well-formed sentences while he does it.  Gold star, Casey.

Neurosis revealed!

Steve pointed out that I've been more open about my neuroses lately.  Can't explain that, but I can substantiate it.

Here's my nightmare scenario:  I'm stranded on a tropical island, and the only abundant source of food is coconuts.  Starve to death or subsist on coconuts?  I just don't know.

How hungry would I have to be to eat coconut?  If I reached that point, would I still hate the coconut?  Or could I actually achieve such a level of hunger and delirium that I could mitigate the awfulness of coconut?  As I ate and satisfied hunger, would I then reach a point at which my coconut hatred would return, and I would be unable to eat further?  I mean, then my life becomes a balancing act where I manage two levels of acute suffering, only eating enough coconut to reach that point again where coconut aversion exceeds my desperation.  See what I mean?  Maybe it's better just to starve to death.

And if it's pickles, I will never be hungry enough.  Never.

Darn it, Casey

This morning I prepared for work as usual and was about to leave the house -- all I needed was my ID badge, which I'd left on the nightstand over the weekend.  But it was gone.

Probably fell on the floor, I thought, so I scoured the area around the bed.  But I still couldn't find it.  I turned some lights on -- the ability to get into the office is kind of important, so I wasn't about to leave without the badge.  I didn't want to disturb Erika, who needs all the sleep the kids let her get, but I had to find that badge.  She's a light sleeper and already knew what was going on and asked if I was looking for the badge.  She said she hadn't seen it in the laundry or anything, to which I told her everything I already knew:  it wouldn't be in the laundry, because I left it on this table, and I know that for certain, and I know you wouldn't move it, and I know I didn't move it, and that means that a child has moved it, and that means that it could be anywhere.

When I hadn't turned it up myself within another minute, she got up to help me look.  I started checking the floor and the toy bins in the living room and was starting to think about whether Casey might have dropped it down the laundry chute when Erika called from the bedroom:  "I got it!"  She emerged, handed me the badge, and smiled at me.  "You have to think like a child," she explained.  "It was in the CD player."

Building nightmares

This hasn't been a good week for my instincts as a father.  First I subjected Casey to the horrors of Young Frankenstein, and then I took him out to the store on Saturday. Actually, that was a pretty good trip -- Casey always seems really good for me when we're out in the world, and I don't know what his mother's problem is.

But on the way home, I suggested we stop at the car wash so Casey could touch Mommy's car again without coming away with gray hands. "Car wash broken!" Casey told me. Wow, he remembers that? Two weeks ago we were going to stop at the car wash, but I wasn't given the option at the gas station, so we went home without one. He was pretty upset about it; he'd really had his heart set on going through the car wash. So I told him it was broken, and as far as he knew, that was still the case.

But I picked a different gas station this time, fueled up the car, and got us in line for the car wash. Casey seemed pretty eager about it, until the thing actually started. Even the start of the wash wasn't so bad, when it was just dumping soap on the car. But when the high-pressure spray started and swept past his windows, it got a little too loud for him. I did my best to keep him from bursting into tears, and except for a few panicky squalls, he held it together pretty well. Still ... he wasn't happy and kept telling me in that quavery voice that the car wash was "all done" -- long before it was over.

And then he got home and ran inside the house, threw his arms around Mommy, and started to tell her all about it. You had to know what he was saying, but with a little help from me, we got it translated, and the thrust of it was simple enough: "Car wash scary!" He spent the rest of the weekend randomly exclaiming about car washes. "No car wash!" he'd tell us at dinner. "Car wash over!" he'd tell me as he got up from his nap.

I mean well, but I just keep inflicting mental scars on this poor kid.

No spilled soup! Noooo!

Casey's getting more sophisticated every day. In this context, we're talking about what he sees on TV. He's a big Pixar fan by necessity because it's what I let him watch, but there are some frightening moments even in stuff like "Finding Nemo" -- and it's been interesting watching him grow up and gradually realize when a character's in peril.

He particularly hates the first dentist's office scene -- near as I can tell, it's because they introduce the location by showing a guy strapped into a chair while the dentist pokes strange equipment into his mouth.  For the sake of humor, there's some pain and yelling and thrashing around -- hardly Marathon Man material, but I suppose that for Casey it's a little scary. The fish he can mostly handle, but I think it's easier to identify with something like a dentist's office -- he's been to the doctor before, and he gets that.

Then there's last night. I was in charge of the remote, and Casey was playing with trains on the coffee table, so I wasn't looking for a "Thomas the Train" episode. I avoid violence and language when Casey's in the room, but that's easy enough. I don't worry too much about him, particularly when he's not even paying attention. But last night I picked something I thought was safe, and it turned out ... well, time will tell how scarring it really was, but he wasn't happy at the time.

So anyway, I switched to Young Frankenstein.

It had been on for a little while, and every now and then it caught his attention, but mostly he ignored it and did his own thing. But then came the moment where the monster meets Gene Hackman -- I don't know why, but that grabbed him, watching the monster settle into the blind priest's hut for soup. And once Gene Hackman started ladling hot soup into Peter Boyle's lap, and the monster started roaring, that was all Casey could handle.

"Oh no! [somethingsomething] spill soup!" Casey exclaimed.

"Oh no," I agreed. I didn't quite get how freaked out he was yet. "Did the monster spill the soup?"

"Yes!" Casey cried. He turned to watch again -- and Gene Hackman's still ladling soup into the monster's lap. "No spilled soup! No!" And that's when he latched on to me.

A moment later, Mommy arrived with pajamas. "Time for pajamas, Casey!"

And then he REALLY latched on. "No! [extended passage of mystery sounds]"

"Wow," I told Erika. "He's really got a death grip going here."

We tried to talk him into sitting down for pajamas, but apparently that would mean lying down in front of the TV, where for all Casey knew, soup would be spilled on roaring monsters with wild abandon. Eventually we figured it out. It took a little while, because in his distress, he became a little difficult to understand. "Casey, is the monster scary?" "YES!" So we turned the TV off, and he finally released me, and that was the end of the problem. Or so I thought.

Later it was bedtime, and shortly after we got Casey down for the night, I disappeared downstairs for half an hour or so. When I got back, Erika was glaring at me. Apparently he kept calling for her, and every time she went into his room, he spent the time earnestly telling her all about monsters and spilled soup. "I blame you," she tells me. Yeah, no kidding.

It's remarkable to me how much he remembers. I'll say something or he'll see something, and I won't think much of it, but months later he'll bring it up again. There are a lot of little things that make bigger impressions on him than I thought they did. So time will tell what the repercussions will be after irresponsibly exposing Casey to the terrifying soup scene from Young Frankenstein.

What was I thinking?