Mercy Me

Hard to believe, but the boy's turned three. I'm considering changing his online name from Mowgli, though it still has its apt points, to Yossarian. He falls in love like a Yossarian.

And he is three. He is three all over the place. His way is always best, and he's a contrary little cuss much of the time. This would be fascinating if it were not so annoying and exhausting. He's such a little PERSON, which is funny for a little fellow who is determined to be a baby elephant when he grows up. His toys pretend to be other toys; he pretends to be Peso the Medic from the Octonauts; he goes hiking with me and is determined to climb up and down "rocky cliffs" of fully half his height.

As far as his eating habits go, his fondness for ice cream and donuts is balanced halfway decently by his fondness for avocado, dried apricots, and broccoli, that last because he can pretend he is a giraffe while he eats it. He's still not crazy for most meats, but we can make up for that with dairy things and peanut butter. Luckily that last is not a brand recently recalled!

He's interested in planets, bugs, and anything with wheels. He's interested in robots. He's interested in how the world looks through his magnifying glass. He is not interested in toilet training. He mostly shares his toys and he flirts with little girls in pink. Mommy is tired, but generally delighted. When we're not fighting.

Growing, talking, climbing

Imagine that, I'm the mother of a toddler and I haven't been blogging lately!

Mowgli occasionally makes a soft popping sound of displaced air and then doesn't fit into the legs of his trousers the same way. If I'm measuring right, he's back up to the 90th percentile after a bit of a lag. This despite the fact that he's still largely a fruitarian--we have reached the compromise position that pizza and noodles are also acceptable, and he'll go for yogurt or eggs now and again as well.

Or, as he would like to add at this point, "donut!" It's his best word. I try not to give in to this request too terribly often, but it's hard to deny a young beanpole the odd bit of junk food.

He has the habit of repeating a new word with a question mark, then solidly with an acceptance: "Ambulance," I say, and he echoes, "Am=lan? Ooooh, am-lan!" as though he should have known it all along but just couldn't recall. It's cute. It was particularly cute when we said we had to buy his new Percy toy, not just run out of the store with it, and he said, "Oh, buy!" and ran to the counter. Since there were already people at the counter (they were already grinning at this, too), we said, "No, we have to wait our turn." "Oh, tun!" he said, and grabbed his new toy off the counter to scoot back to his parents. We laughed. Total strangers laughed. And we told him he was doing very well. For his age he's really pretty patient. Of course, that makes it all the more astonishing when he actually acts two and isn't patient at all.

He also loves to go to the local bounce palace, Leapin' Lizards. He'll bounce for three hours solid, right through nap time, given the choice. He also likes to balance on the log in our yard, run races, chase the dogs and cat, and play the up-down game, the last of which is developing great little child abdominal muscles. Mama should be slimmer from chasing after him.

We're managing. He's Thomas-obsessed and Cars-fond, he's addicted to his bedtime books ("More! Read!"), and he's pretty good about washing his hands. In other words, for a twenty-seven month old boy, he's perfectly normal perhaps with a drift toward the well-behaved side. I remind myself of this when he drops food on the floor and then screeches at whistle-style pitches and volumes when a dog eats the droppage.

Watching the Kid Grow

Mowgli has experienced Star-Crossed First Love now. In the Wal-Mart yesterday, checking out balls and things with wheels, he found a Lightning McQueen and a Mater, just shy of shoe-box sized and rated for rather older children, and fell in love.

However, I'd been more in the frame of mind to spend maybe three bucks on a ball or a wheeled turtle, and furthermore it was time to go home for lunch and dog care. I insisted that he could have one minute, counted it down, and put away the Cars cars.

He was heartbroken, of course, and also hungry enough to really pitch a fit. Ah, first love, always the toughest. I told him I completely understood how he felt, but that it wasn't going to change anything. He pitched more fit. I did buy him a squeeze-pack of applesauce, which improved things somewhat. I did wash an apricot for him (he'd already given it a nip in the produce area) once it was paid for, and that too went a long way toward cheering him up.

I'm not sure how long a child's memory lasts at this age, but suspect we will find out very soon. I missed a couple of necessities at the store, and we'll have to go back.

Trips to the toy store

Classically, when parents go to a toy store, it's their job to say "No" a lot. We're far from classical, apparently.

Mowgli now has a toy drum because his father thought he needed it. He agrees with his father, as it happens, but it wasn't his idea. Neither were the wooden puzzles, though he loves them, or the new vocabulary-building board books which give him so many opportunities to announce "Wheel!" and "Door!" He did pick out the little football, though.

The funny part is, we were looking for an airplane. Nothing fancy, just the kind of airplane a small boy can run around the house with, holding it overhead and going "Vwoooosh!" It appears that these toys are simply not available. He seems to be perfectly happy to let his foam letter T perform the office. No doubt this is good for his imagination. We live near an airport, which has turned out to be an unexpected boon to raising a happy child. He loves that we can say, "Hey, let's go look for airplanes!" and generally get one within a few minutes. He loves chasing them across the yard.

Things I've Learned From Children's Television

People with small dogs didn't love their puppies as much as they could have. (Clifford)
8 plus 12 divided by 2 equals 10. (Crashbox)
If you are lost in the woods, follow a frog. (Wow Wow Wubbzy)
Nature and animals are all friendly. (nearly all of them)
No-one can do anything alone. (WonderPets)
The use-mention distinction is irrelevant. (Word World)
Unaccompanied monkeys can accomplish a lot. (Curious George)
Corollary: Adults don't know much.
You can influence what happens on the TV. (Most Nick JR programming)
Cockoos have family ties. (Go Diego Go)
Pigs are a lot like people. (Olivia, Peppa Pig, Toot and Puddle)
Gorillas have kings, lines of inheritance, and coronations. (Go Diego Go)
A map doesn't need to indicate direction, forks in the road, or distance. (Dora the Explorer)
Dogs, cats, and other common pets don't talk; other animals do. (Most)
The wind will change direction 180 degrees when your boat reaches the other end of the pond. (Little Bill)
Rivers may be found next to gorges. (Go Diego Go)
Fairy tales all have happy cooperative endings. (Super Why)

The State of Mathematics Education in the USA

I have the National Geographic channel on for the nifty astronomy and am thinking deep thoughts about humans' ability to consider powers of ten.

You see, the show is one of those terror-producing explorations of the impending doom of the Earth when the sun goes into its red-giant phase. It'll happen, and "sooner than we thought!" There is much emphasis on how one solution, pulling the Earth into a wider orbit, would take six thousand years to take effect and had to be accurate to within a billionth of a degree of arc. We could colonize Mars. We could travel to other suns.

Of course, when they do admit to a timeline, the events in question will occur in five billion years. That's billion, with a B. To astronomers, this is perhaps imminent. To geologists, that's the age of the Earth's crust. To biologists, this is 2 1/2 times as long as there's been identifiable life on earth of any kind whatsoever. The dinosaurs died out about 65 million years ago -- approximately 1/100 the scale of time we're talking about here.

I may not be able to say a lot about what life, if any, will be on the Earth when the sun expands, but I can say one thing for sure: the pronoun "us" is probably not going to have a lot to do with it. DNA just isn't that stable a molecule.

Likewise, I have to grin a little at the Congressional attempts to balance the budget of the USA. Trillion-dollar deficit, addressed with a proposed $61 billion in budget cuts. Most of these are on the order of scrapping the money for the Museum of Cowboy Poetry, a few thousands, which is almost certainly all wages for the employees. This is akin to breaking your kids' piggy banks to pay off your mortgage, and will be about as appreciated by the owners of the piggy banks. Seriously -- that's $61 billion in money that's employing people. By my math, at $50K per person, that's another 1.2 million unemployed people. Isn't that just exactly what our economy needs right now? Lately, we're happy if the economy gains that many new jobs in six months. There's gotta be another way.

Local Wildlife, Atlanta Suburbs

The little tyke is asleep at last, and I'm trying to get some writing done. Blogging sometimes gets the ideas flowing.

It's hard to switch gears to fantasy worlds from the grim gritty reality of trying to get the little one to eat ANYTHING other than fruit. Also from the grim gritty reality of grim gritty reality, where it's a fine and wonderful thing that the child is fond of the Swiffer and not so wonderful that he's scared by the vacuum cleaner. The dust wolves were getting scary, though, so he had to put up with at least some of the roar and whoosh this morning.

Speaking of dust wolves, we had a peculiar canid running around our neighborhood last week. We heard something that sounded like a dog in dire trouble in the wooded lot next door, and the creature ran away when my husband went out to check on it. A night or two later, I caught something sable-ish, pointy-eared, and long-tailed in my headlights near the elementary school a block away. I pulled into the lot to do the whistle-and-coax routine, got a better look, and instead said out my window, "You're not a dog, are you?"

Cheeky coyote looked back at me, not at my headlights, and said pretty plainly, "Nope."

"You don't need any help, do you?"

"Not a bit," said coyote, standing calmly at the edge of another wooded lot.

"All right then," I said, and turned the car around as the critter vanished into the woods.

It looked like a young one, and after one more yap-fest I haven't heard it around again, so it may have been passing through on a quest for territory, or it may have been shot. Sad to say, this suburban neighborhood has a fair amount of shooting going on now and again, and when our roof was checked recently for damage, a bullet turned out to by lying atop our den. That's the sort of thing that puts my sympathies with the coyote. Mowgli is never out alone, of course, and generally has an honor guard of dogs who weigh probably from five to forty-five pounds more than any coyote, never mind that young one. I doubt Master Coyote takes passes through our yard if he can go around, in fact.

Still, he's something to consider if we decide to get a few hens!