Mother's Day gifts

This impatiens plant was worse for wear after spending the weekend in my little guy's backpack, but shortly after the Sunday morning delivery, I repotted it, watered it, and put it in the sun.
Dash didn't want to spoil my Mother's Day surprise by delivering it early!

My second Mother's Day gift was this lovely painting, with Dash's little hand outlined, holding gorgeously colorful flowers! I also got a card from Rosie.

One more thing, does anyone remember this post? Well Dash does. We camped out in the backyard in August of 2008, almost three years ago. So, what makes the cut when he draws a picture of dear mommy? Him and me in sleeping bags, in a tent. I think his caption was meant to read: "I love my Mom because she slept with me in a tent." Honestly, he's been a bit nutty about sleeping bags lately! He was weeping and cranky on the way to school last week and the only way I was able to distract him was to talk about how if you have two sleeping bags, you can zip them together to make a HUGE sleeping bag and the considering the possibilities got him out of his funk. Cutie.

The Egg Hunt

I knew my darling readers are thirsting for more art, so quench yourselves on this lovely pen and ink drawing, composed by Rosie, titled "The Egg Hunt."


If you are having trouble with the penmanship or the narrative, I believe this is her characters' dialog:

Rosie: Hey, mom I found one!

Mom: Dear, there's some more up there. (pointing to impossible-to-reach-spot)

Rosie: Okay.

The Easter bunny, pictured amazingly close to our dear protagonist, is very nicely drawn, don't you think?

This movie is kakashka.

"Kakashka!" from Dash's review of Inception.

We were watching Inception at home, with the kids, knowing that they would in all likelihood not be able to understand what on earth was going on. To be clear, we weren't planning for this to be a family feature, but once the film started, our movie-loving kids just gravitated to the rec room. If you haven't seen Inception, you may have at least heard that it's a DENSE, multilayered movie. It takes brainpower to follow the plot, necessary to recall all the prior twists as the next ones occur, to know which dream or non-reality the players are experiencing.

From Roger Ebert's blog review:

"...the viewer of "Inception" is adrift in time and experience. We can never even be quite sure what the relationship between dream time and real time is. The hero explains that you can never remember the beginning of a dream, and that dreams that seem to cover hours may only last a short time. Yes, but you don't know that when you're dreaming. And what if you're inside another man's dream? How does your dream time-sync with his? What do you really know?"

While Rosie quietly took the movie in, maybe or perhaps not understanding the plot's obtuse angles, Dash had an opinion part-way through the film:

"Mommy, this movie is kakashka." 

I could have taken the word as imaginative, as Dash makes up words all the time, but there was something definite about his tone. So I asked, "Kakashka? What does that mean, Dash?"

"It's Russian for poop."

Before I even went to the place where I wondered how he knew this, I boggled. Inception was so unfollowable and impenetrable for five-year-old Dash that he had to describe how awful it was IN ANOTHER LANGUAGE.

(Back story on the Russian: Dash's table-mate at school, Katya, had just returned from a 3-week family trip to Russia. Katya's older brother, Andrei, had been sharing some slang he picked up, passing it on to Dash through Katya.)

We all sat through to the end—Monkeyrotica and I thoroughly enjoying the mental workouts in the screenplay, the excellent special effects, and the wonderful actors—but Dash didn't waver from his first impression: pure murky poop.

The importance of being cozy

Dash's favorite word, above all others at the moment, is COZY. He likes to be cozy, wear cozy clothes, and have fluffy, cozy stuffed animals with names like "puffy," "furry," and "fuzzy" around him. When he's "cozy," he becomes an adorable caricature of a happy little boy. He curls up into a ball, a sweet smile shows up on his face (pictured above), he might start bouncing around a bit, and emits giggles or what seems to him to be happy-baby noises, i.e., "hoo-hoo, hee-hee, aaaaah!"

If his big sister Rosie is nearby, this cozy activity will jump-start her maternal and dramatic instincts. She rushes over, announces, "Oh, what a cute little baby!" and gives him hugs or pretends to rock him to sleep; she might stage a baby-feeding session or cover him with more blankets or toys. Clearly, this is the type of attention he's looking for! They both soak it up and symbiotically enjoy the baby-play.

At five years old and a few days scant of eight, this is all pretend play, of course. Rosie has quite the flair for improvisational drama while Dash loves to channel memories of being a baby. Some days, I'll find him in a melancholy, nostalgic mood, pining for his "baby things." When I try to pin him down on what baby thing he misses, he won't really be able to specifically say. He just knows that he had "baby things" and that we gave them away. I'm pretty sure what he's missing is the Nuk. He was awfully attached to it, and while we weaned him off two years ago, he probably has retained faded memories of something he once had that made him feel comforted.

For now, he'll just have to stick with cozy.

Bill Jackson, super-criminal

Here's Bill Jackson's story, as dictated by my son Dash, age 4.5 years:

"Have you heard of Bill Jackson? Bill Jackson is a very famous car thief from California. Bill Jackson lost his legs in an explosion, and replaced them with rockets. He puts bombs inside of grapes and waits until people try to eat the grapes and blows them up and then steals their cars. He flies over to the car and uses his spear and axe to operate the pedals.

Bill Jackson stole my memory integrator, so we need to catch him. Here's the PLAN! [index finger pointed UP!] We need to call the President and send the Army and the Navy to California to blow up his house. First, we have to set a trap for Bill Jackson by drawing a life-size picture of his wife [named Jackie Jackson]. While he's distracted with his wife's picture, Rosie [Dash's older sister] and me can sneak into Bill Jackson's house to get my memory integrator back before his house gets blown up.

President Obama will get a phone call from Daddy and that will let him know it's time to blow up Bill Jackson's house."

Dash drew this picture of Bill Jackson, with rockets instead of legs.

Dash's (first!!) Family Drawing

While at the back-up daycare last Friday (the regular school was closed), Dash drew me this lovely representation of our family. This is the first time EVER that I've seen him draw something figurative that looks anything like he intended. His typical drawings tend to be, um, much more abstract (and are awesome!).

He told me that that's him on the far left, then Rosie, then ME (the biggest, and most important, I'd like to think, right?), and Monkeyrotica on the far right. I forgot to ask why his daddy had dots on his hands and feet, but he told me all about what I first assumed were some sort of dickey on our chests. They are our tongues. Explanation? He has been rather obsessed with his new Pokémon toy, Lickilicky.

How do you spell...?

Rosie and Dash are sitting quietly after breakfast this morning, writing in a notebook. Dash is just getting interested in writing, individual letters mostly, and Rosie, the experienced seven-year-old writer, is engaging his waxing curiosity about how they string together to make words.

I'm in the kitchen, chopping vegetables and am listening to Dash's sweet little four-year-old voice asking Rosie, "How do you spell 'dummy'?" and, "How do you spell 'snipe'?"

Then, I hear, "How do you spell, 'I love Rosie'?"

Replicants

Dash has been talking about his brain a lot. 

If we ask him, "where'd you get that idea?" or "who told you that you could do that?" his answer is either "my clever brain" or "my evil brain." Sometimes he'll tell us it's his "Evil Robot Fododi brain."

He was talking to me about his "Robot Fododi" brain during dropoff at daycare. I forget exactly what he was saying, something about his brain telling him good things and he was happy that Robot Fododi was not evil today.

Right when his teacher walked up, he told her, "I hope Mr. Deckard doesn't kill me, because I'm not an evil robot!"

Sheepishly, I shrugged and muttered, "Heh. Blade Runner."