My new favorite book

"So," I say one day last week after lunch. "I feel like drawing a picture of a gnome."

"Great idea, Mommy," says Henry, leaping up. I bring in a basket of crayons and paper, and he gets busy.

By the time I am ready to sit down, he has produced a picture of a one-legged gnome with googly eyes, a tripartite beard, and a properly pointy hat. I am delighted. Henry's usual subjects when he sits down to draw are monster trucks and Army tanks, produced by the score, and I will admit that to my eye they lack the human interest that reels me in.

I propose to color Henry's picture in, while he works on more gnomes.

"Now you make one," he says, offering suggestions for my composition as I work. "How about another gnome there? How about a gnome family?"

"Mommy! I know!" he says after a bit. "Let's make a book!" He runs out of the room and comes back with a stapler. We assemble our pages, and he staples them together.

"Let's call it Gnomes Book," he says. I tell him the letters, and he writes them down.

"Now we need letters for each page." I suggest he tell me what he wants each page to say, and I will write it down. We disagree slightly about the humor and interest of nonsense words, but once we're done, I have to admit that he was right. He suggests that I come up with my own words to go with the picture I drew, and I think we can all agree that this is where the story really flags. Still, Henry is so pleased with the idea of a tree stump house that he doesn't mind the dullness.

When we're done writing, he decides the plain back cover is wasted space, so with a practiced hand he sketches a gnome car. To avoid confusing the reader between the two covers, he also suggests adding "FRONT" where indicated. Finally, he wants the authors to sign their names.

"Mommy, I am so so proud of myself!" he says. We dance around the living room, and read the book three times in a row. James wakes up from his nap and comes to see what the fuss is all about. We read the book to him, and he laughs most gratifyingly at the right parts.

***

In other news, during my long blog silence, we have bought a house, and Henry has started preschool. And now I think we are all caught up.

The sweetest of sweet things

Although it hasn't been a nice week, I realized this evening that Henry and James each said things to me that are surpassingly, maybe superlatively sweet during it, so that at least is worth remembering.

Henry:
I was showing the boys baby pictures of themselves in knitwear. We looked through quite a number, including several in which I was holding one or the other of them. In a very offhand manner, which is what made it so dear, Henry said, "I like what you look like, Mommy."

James:
I was crying. Both boys hate it when I cry, and I usually try not to do it around them. (Not that I cry all the time! But it was a bad week, as I said.) James reacts by trying out his battery of winning ways. We play a game sometimes where he says "Bad Mama!" and I pretend to cry and when he doesn't like that anymore he says "Good Mama!" and I grin fatuously. So he will say "Good Mama!" or kiss me or say "I yuv you," all of which is of course exceedingly sweet and devastating. But this week he said something I say to him when he cries, and it just about overset me. "I here, Mama," he said, patting my hair awkwardly, "I with you."

Tales from the apiary

I am engaged in a half-hearted campaign lately to ensure that Henry is dressed before he goes outside, at least in the front yard. Our back yard is insulated from the street by the fenced in area for the dogs, which is waist high in dock and surrounded by scrubby trees, so is quite private, but in the front there's no hiding. I'm torn, because I don't want to offend against community standards, nor or course do I want him to catch anybody's creepy eye, but on the other hand nudity is the natural next step now that I have fully embraced barefootery. Also, there are so many other more important questions to put my foot down about, and I really love our easy indoor-outdoor life at home in warm weather and do not want to take on monitress duty at the door.

Nor do I know quite what to say to justify the rule. I have been telling Henry that now that he's four and a half, he needs to wear pants in the front yard, which makes no sense at all, of course, but he has been surprisingly accepting.

So I was a little surprised today to catch him heading out the front door in the altogether. I was on the sofa. He was hovering behind the sofa's high arm.

"Henry!" I said. "You need to put on some pants!"

"I really, really don't want to," he said.

"I'm sorry," I said. "But you do. You're just too old now to go out without your pants."

"No, Mommy!"

"Why don't you want to wear pants?" I asked.

"Because I am pretending I am a bee." His face flushed with delight at his game. "And this is my stinger!"

He turned around, revealing a lacquered yellow chopstick, business end out (thankfully), protruding from his bottom.

June days

Watching Henry

Monster-walking

Mulberrying in the rain

Heavy

Henry is in the bathroom. I hear a murmuring and think he might need me.

"What is it?" I call out.

"Oh, nothing, Mommy," he says. "I'm just sitting here talking to myself about gravity."

Gnomes on a car

I am always curious about how families develop their distinct family cultures. At the moment, I'm thinking more of the trivial things--the catchphrases, the inside jokes, the family rituals--than of the deep questions of values and roles.

Why of all the cultural and literary references of the mid-1970s was it "Have a popover, Froggy?" that stuck with Mom? Why was it so super-duper important to Dad not to eat dinner before 7? Why did the Rosenfelds not really celebrate birthdays? Why did the Arkushes always pronounce vulgar as "wulgar"? When did the Gleesons start singing their skol song, and did they plan for it to become an institution?

I like how all of these little ways become artifacts for everyday use, like heirloom china that can't be chipped. But mainly I just like them, in the same way I like old furniture, books annotated by other people, and words with very specific and limited meanings, like petrichor and oxter; often, when Henry finds an interesting object--a speckled rock, say, or a broken mechanical gewgaw--he holds it up and cries triumphantly "Aha! A clue!" which is close to how I feel about these things, although I don't know what mystery is to be solved.

In our family, we seem to have developed a gnome tradition. I guess I married into it; it can be traced to Peter's mother, who called him a zwergl when he was small, and to Susan, who had given Peter several garden gnomes. Being both small and odd, Peter naturally draws comparisons himself, and the children are only smaller and odder, as well as constantly pursuing such gnomish work as digging and delving. When Peter built the kitchen cabinets, he filled in an odd space with a gnome niche, and I have contributed with a series of pointy knitted hats over several years. I didn't put it all together, however, until a couple of weeks ago, when Henry and James decided to assemble all the scattered garden gnomes in the kitchen. There are four, which gave rise to a lively discussion about which one represented which member of the family. After arranging and rearranging, naming and renaming them for a spell, James did a little flat-footed dance around the grouping and cried out, "It's Gnome Time!"

Which is, obviously, pretty much our new family motto.

Wait, what? Did that actually work?

For about a year now, James has taken charge faithfully, of his own accord, of one daily household task: bringing in the newspaper. About as soon as he could toddle, he began toddling out in the mornings to hunt it down. For the last two weeks, for no obvious reason, Henry has been contesting James's ownership of the job, although he never thinks of it until James has already started outside. James is understandably aggrieved.

Sometime last week, probably the day after our very bad morning, I started using one of the child-rearing  strategies I have been reading about for god knows how long without adopting. Instead of trying to adjudicate--a lose-lose approach that all former children, at least ones with siblings, know won't work, yet one that has proven incredibly difficult to drop, because it's so bloody obvious to me what justice demands--or ignore the skirmish, which has a lot of superficial attractions right up until the moment I'm daubing bloody wounds with hydrogen peroxide, I asked each boy in turn questions to help figure out what he actually wanted to say, then encouraged him to address his brother directly.

Because of their different personalities and ages, this most frequently plays out like this: Henry snatches something away from James, James howls, I say, "Henry, you want the car. James, you don't like it when Henry grabs the car. Henry, can you ask James for what you want," at which point Henry says, "Give it to me!" and I say, "Can you ask him nicely?" and Henry, in dulcet tones, says, "James, may I please have the car?" and James says, "OK, Henny," and hands it over. Then Henry is overcome with emotion and says, "James is so cute! James, I love you," and embraces him so hard it makes him cry.

It's been harder to make it work the other way. James manfully repeats "No like that, Henny!" when Henry mugs him or thumps him, at which Henry screams with simulated outrage, "I don't like you saying that! No fair!"

For reasons I might want to interrogate my own heart about one day, I have been incredibly pessimistic about the chances that I can intervene usefully--but not abusively--to change any of my children's habits that annoy or trouble me. So it was with considerable amazement, almost incredulity, that I listened the other day as James opened the door to get the paper and wailed, as usual, when Henry pushed him aside and ran out ahead of him. I paused in the kitchen, nerving myself to go deal with it without yelling or taking sides, when I realized that the tone of their conversation had changed.

"Do you want the paper, Jamie?" Henry was asking.

"'Kay," James sobbed. (What he says instead of "yes.")

"How about this?" Henry proposed. "I will put the paper down again, then I will get it again, and I'll give it to you, and you can give it to Mama."

"'Kay," James agreed again, happily this time.

And that was that! I almost thought I heard angels sing! Of course, nine times out of ten, we continue in our usual way, but it makes such a difference to know that what sometimes sounds even in my own ears like the rote utterance of a shibboleth might actually be teaching Henry and James (and me) that they truly can solve their own problems.