My Living Room Divers

So much has been going on lately, both good and bad, entertaining and infuriating, funny and outlandish. An example of something bad-- I had a seizure a couple weekends ago. I'll probably write about it here sooner or later. An example of something entertaining from this morning absolutely had to be documented before the pictures got lost in the August picture file and I forgot about it.

Prompted by safety glasses in a chemistry set, Clark decided this morning that he wanted to dress up like a diver. He put on his astronaut suit, a pair of his underwear on his head, a straw in his mouth, and when he insisted he needed something as an oxygen tank I rolled up a couple pieces of foam board for him. Since the boys were highly influenced by Nemo (it's still one of the only full-length movies they've had the patience and interest to watch, and they're still afraid of Darla), Clark was a diver looking for fish to put in a fish tank. He found some little toy fish and had me hide them (at floor level since he'd be "swimming" on the carpet) in the living room so he could find them and put them in his plastic bag.

During the middle of the saga, Calvin, dismayed that there was only one set of safety glasses and that his goggles didn't feel right over the underwear and his glasses didn't look right over anything or under the catcher's mask, had a major meltdown and swore off being a diver ever for the rest of his life. Can't say my heart was broken over that.

The funniest thing about these moods Cal and Clark get in when they're dressing up is that they are so serious about it. It's hard not to laugh and not to act like wearing underwear on heads is completely normal.

Anyway, here are the pictures of my living room divers.

Divers suiting up

Testing the water

Perfect for carpet swimming

Oxygen tanks applied

And unsuspecting fish captured

P.S. I'm doing a handmade soap giveaway this week...enter here

Finally Cool with the Pool

The last couple summers the boys have been terrified of the pool. I wrote about their escapades here. They screamed at even the idea of us taking them to the pool. It was ridiculous and the only way I could cope with it without going crazy was to write about it and then laugh at what I wrote. Finally last fall I forced them to take a swim class at the community center. They screamed the entire first lesson, including the 20 minutes before class, since we were accidentally early. The old ladies in the early morning water aerobics class were mostly sympathetic... but probably also annoyed by the shrieks echoing off the sterile white walls. The second class was only a little better. I summed up their hatred and tiny tolerance for the water here.

The boys, terrified of a half-full wading pool when they were two...
even when I was in with them.

But since then they've had another round of swim classes this spring and will start another round this summer. They've made strides. I wouldn't call them giant strides, but they're still much better than the days of the Pool Wars.

One of the cool things about living in Reston is that there are 16 public swimming pools in town! It seems that they each have cool features- one even has a covered sandbox area. We've met some fabulous new friends through Blastball who are big fans of the pools. Jackson is about six months older than Cal and Clark and they are in love with him. Jackson's mom Carey is actually due to have her baby any day now too, so we take our combined three boys, ourselves, our ginormous bellies, and our bulging swim bags of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and squirt guns to the pool. We get looks. One guy said to us, "Did you two come here to deliver?" Which isn't a bad idea, actually...water births are totally in right now... ha.

Yes, we're here to deliver.

Now that they have Jackson to go to the pool with and are more comfortable around water, the boys love to go to the pool. We also have a pool at our condo clubhouse that they love to go to. Cal especially is into it. He'll even jump off the sides, as long as someone catches him and his head doesn't quite go underwater. He'll plug his nose and go under with help, but I'm pretty sure he doesn't at all understand the concept of holding his breath, so hopefully his swim teacher will help with that soon. Today at the pool the boys were racing around the kids' pool as if the four corners were bases and they were diving headfirst into each base. It was great. They got their heads wet more than they ever have, all in the name of baseball.

The pool is also a great place for me, being a pregnant whale at the moment. I can sit motionless on a chair while the boys play in the kiddie pools, and I'm virtually weightless in the water where I can hold the boys up right to my face, which I can't do out of the water right now. I can cool off instantly. I don't have to wear real clothes. It is glorious. I'm so happy that the boys are finally excited about the pool! Maybe I should root for Peapod to take his time so I can enjoy a few more weeks at the pool. Nah. I need this child out of me.

Pool hunks

Discovering goggles

Fountains in the kiddie area at one pool!

Pizza break!

How the Weird-toed Frenchman Was Right

Monday was the boys' first swim class. It was actually even worse than I imagined it would be, even considering their watery past. Cal was brave until Clark's screaming got out of control. Then his lip started to quiver and he started in on the crying. Of course this was the only time in my life that I was punctual. We sat on a pool chair for 20 minutes waiting for class to start. Those shrieks reverberating around the pool walls were downright obnoxious, and I felt bad for anyone who had to listen. I didn't notice any angry faces on the old women in the water aerobics class, only looks of understanding/ sadness/ sympathy, so they must have all had small children at some point.

The boys' teacher might be pushing 21 years old. I was skeptical at first, but he handled the situation better than I expected he would-- what with his sculpted fauxhawk and all. They ended up finally sitting on the ramp with the water up a little higher than their belly buttons, kicking with straight legs. They finally decided they liked the teacher, just when the next two kids got there for their lesson. So then they clung to him, asking him questions about the different floaty doo-woppers he has, and saying goodbye to him. Then I let them kick on the side of the pool for about 15 minutes. They didn't want to leave.

On the bus ride home an older man boarded the bus by a French restaurant, were he was clearly finishing a shift. He brought a cup of coffee for the bus driver (cute) and they started pounding shoulders and talking. (I didn't notice in time to see if the coffee was in exchange for the bus fare, which could present some interesting bartering ideas in my future.)

He sat down and immediately started talking to the boys in French. Which of course confused them. I couldn't help but notice that he had remarkably weird and dirty toes. They looked dead but they were also all different sizes and the nails were all bendy. I kept trying to look away from them. Anyway, he stopped talking in French and starting talking in English and they starting talking to him a little about the fountain that they love more than anything except maybe ceiling fans.

At one point he asked me which one was the artist and which one liked to run around and throw and break things. My first in-head reaction was, “Jerk! You don’t know my kids.” But then I actually thought about it. I don't know that Clark likes to break things per se, but he does like to run around and hit balls with bats and golf clubs and sticks. And it is becoming increasingly clearer which one of them likes art more. Calvin loves creating. Call anything art and he's all over it. He sees beauty in everything. We finally signed him up for art class because one day he mixed all the play-doh colors together and wouldn’t stop talking about how beautiful the mound was. That mound was mostly just making me mad, since I enjoy organizing by color.

The other day Cal worked for at least an hour on his balcony fountain. It started out as a canning jar with acorns and a funnel in it and ended up with things like a wipes box, my belt, a doorframe chin-up bar, blocks, a cup, garden tomato stakes, and a wad of yarn. He only wanted certain things in it—my suggestions were not always welcome. He had a vision.

After the addition of the ball-like acorns, Clark had no real interest in the found-object fountain and went back to reenacting Bryce Harper Clark’s amazing plays in the living room. For Clark, every square, rectangular, or diamond-shaped anything is a baseball field that needs to have home plate, first, second, and third base locations pointed out and then ran on regardless of how small or big said shape is. And he throws. He throws everything like a baseball. And I am not kidding people, the kid can throw a baseball better than many adults I know. You know who you are.

The apartments right next to us are being torn down right now and so the boys are obsessed with construction sites and knocking buildings and “buildings” down. Yesterday it was the TV trays that were buildings. Meanwhile, amongst the rubble, Cal started building a new apartment. A beautiful new apartment building. An unbelievable new apartment building. It was built of the same chin-up bar and garden stakes. He had a place for everyone to sleep. He cried when Clark knocked it over while sliding into home plate. (He was safe.)

Turns out the weird-toed Frenchman was right. We have an artist and a breaker.

Cal's fountain

Construction/destruction site

Cal builds his beautiful apartment.

 

The Often-Imaginary Lives of Two Poetic, Color-Mixer Robonauts

When the boys say things like, “Look at the sunset! It’s so pretty and purple!” and “It’s such a beautiful day out!” A little part of me dances inside. I have an inner poet that used to be more outward but the past few years has expressed itself mostly in poetic prose when I’m writing in my novel (R.I.P) or pokes its nose out now and then here on my blog, so hearing them delight in the colors of flowers and sunsets makes me a little swoony. Between that and all their pretending, they just might be the drama club brooding poet types. (I don’t think that’s exactly what Brian had in mind when he found out he was having twin boys.) 

Cal especially comes up with the most creative similes. Everything is like something else. Example: yesterday he said a mark on the floor where the sun was shining through looked like a space shuttle. Then they both spent the next few minutes pretending to be inside the shuttle and come out on the land like the robonaut they discovered in National Geographic Kids and whom we’ve been stalking on YouTube ever since. They pretend to control each other—one is the robonaut while the other one pushes buttons on a remote control nearby. The routine is always the same: they get out of the shuttle, move their fingers around, step out onto the moon, leave a footprint, and point to their eyes and then to Earth. And before this routine they pretend to get dressed in their yellow suits and want me to hold a big book against their back to be their backpacks.

It's rather narrow, but I can see the space shuttle shape.

Coming out of the shuttle and onto the moon...

This morning while Cal was sleeping in, because he’s still sick, Clark informed me that he wanted to “just hang out without any clothes on.” So he did. And then he started pretending to swim around on the floor, since he had only his diaper on—like a swimsuit. He then dragged out a blue blanket, made it his pool, and kept jumping, diving, and swimming in his pool for around 45 minutes. He did set some rules. I swam and jumped with him, but we could only swim when the (imaginary) red light turned to a green light and it was also okay to play the guitar in the pool. And we had to be careful of the crocodiles, dinosaurs, and pigs, and horses that were also swimming in the pool.

Diving in

Anyway, this weekend they were sick, but not too sick to do some experimenting with colors. They love colors, like the colors in the sunsets and flowers. They also love to stir things, like Daddy’s blue sauce. (Ranch dressing with blue food coloring that only Daddy can make correctly)

I recently discovered The Artful Parent and I feel myself already becoming addicted. I found a couple ideas I wanted to try. The first thing we did was stir food coloring into a mixture of water, corn starch, and sugar, and then I put two colors in one ziplock bag for them to squish together (without getting their fingers icky! Yay). They discovered much to their delight that blue and red make purple, yellow and blue make green, and Cal was so excited that yellow and red made orange that some of the orange excitement squirted out onto the carpet. Oh well. Our carpet is disgusting. Also it came up easily. And I use the word “up” loosely.

After we put all six colors in ziplocks we held them up to the window. They liked them so much I taped them up and they had fun making handprints in them and squishing them around. They’re still there and every morning since they’ve exclaimed, “The colors are still on the window!” 

(To make this, heat up 4 cups of water, 1 cup cornstarch, and 1/3 cup sugar. Stir constantly until it thickens, remove from heat and stir a little more. Don't eat it.)

Yesterday I attempted a color craft that was a bit beyond them, I admit in retrospect. The boys picked out green crayons, I grated them, they dispersed the shavings onto wax paper, and I ironed them. And I traced shamrocks on them. And I cut them out. And I hung them up in the windows on white thread. And I cleaned the mess up. Maybe in a few years we’ll try it again. They do like to look at them hanging in the windows and talk about them spinning and how pretty they are, but I can’t say it was worth it exactly. I’m looking at the green and yellow shamrocks now in the afternoon sunlight and they actually do look pretty darn magnificent. Who knows, maybe one day one of the boys will write a poem about the spinning shamrock crayon craft and I’ll feel validated. Ha.  

Mom and Dad: At Our House and In Our Car

There’s nothing quite like my mom and my dad in my house. A mom and a dad bustling around in my kitchen, dressing the boys, playing with the boys, reading to the boys, fixing, cleaning, watching baseball, you name it. What a nice two weeks we had with my parents! Now that my dad retired my parents can stay longer when they come to visit so this was their first two week trip and it was a smashing success. We took two weekend trips, one to my in-laws’ lake house and the second one to a beach house in Ocean City, New Jersey to connect with my Dad’s sisters and their families. Other than those weekend trips we spent quality time pushing the stroller around (okay, mostly Dad pushed the stroller) our neighborhood and laughing a lot. We even got away without Mom and Dad renting a car, thanks to Aaron and Brian swapping cars for road trips and Mom and Dad’s courageous agility on the metro and bus system.

The boys get some quality Papa time.

I’m not sure if there’s an age where this stops happening, but I kind of feel like I just revert to Young Dawn when I’m around my parents. The first few days I had meals all planned out. I made them with little help. They were good. The floor was clean. The bathroom was clean. I had a handle on the laundry. And then it all kind of blurred. We figured it out as we went, and everything turned out fine, but I felt more like Young Dawn—content to let things happen around me and not be involved. Not that I’m complaining—it was fantastic. There are places clean in my kitchen now that I didn’t even know existed thanks to Mom’s dexterous scrubbing moves. And man, was it ever nice not to have to push those growing, squirming boys all over in the stroller. I’m so much lighter when I’m not pushing 60 pounds of boy, 10 pounds of stroller, and several pounds of groceries or snacks or wipes! Astounding! Such a nice break. The day before Mom and Dad left I woke up after 8am to find the boys fully dressed, their beds made, and breakfast started. 

Grandma and Clark at the lake

A few of the days Mom and Dad spent in DC in an apartment that my aunt and uncle have, because they were out of town. They did some touristy things in the city and spent a little time sleeping NOT on our couch. Granted, those of you who know our luxurious couch know that it is actually a privilege and honor to sleep on it, however, since there are no private walls around our couch, it is therein that the occasional inconveniences might occur for those people accustomed to privacy in their sleeping quarters. My parents were troopers. I suppose after having four kids in a small house they aren't used to much privacy either.

And now about those two long road trips with two year-olds that we took for two consecutive weekends. They were long. The one to southern Virginia was on smaller roads with more traffic lights and thus a longer trip overall. The one north to New Jersey was all on big highways (read $47 in tolls) and seemed easier in part because we left at bedtime on a Friday night and drove home at naptime on Sunday. Clark and Cal did a good job of not going crazy in their carseats. Sometimes I try to imagine what it must be like to have to be in a kids’ carseat all strapped to the plastic and heavy fabric and not exactly understanding why and it makes me almost claustrophobic and I have to claw for air. I know. I have such a talented imagination. I get that a lot. 

The lake trip was nice and we made it a long weekend, driving down Friday morning and coming back Monday evening. But the New Jersey one was insanely short and left us all sleep deprived. We got there at about 11:30pm to Ocean City and were greeted by dearly loved relatives, some of whom we hadn’t seen for a long time. The boys had only met a couple of them, so they were a little frightened, plus it was late at night and they had just woken up, plus it was a new house. They screamed like little shrews (do shrews scream?) for the first five minutes they were there. In order to calm them down, my well-meaning aunts and cousins offered them ice cream (refer back to time of night) and cookies, which of course the little pajama-ed screamers greedily accepted. Soon they were in Great Aunt Jane and Great Uncle Jeff’s arms looking for ceiling fans, but settling for turning on and off some unusual light fixtures. Finally around 2am we settled down in a room with two bunk beds and a trundle bed. Cal must not have eaten as much sugar as Clark did because it was clear pretty quickly that he was ready to sleep. Not Clark. He was SO EXCITED to be sleeping sitting on the bottom bunk! He was in that mood where he was cheery about everything and on top of that he wanted to repeat everything I said. I explained to him that everyone else in the house wanted to sleep. Everyone was so tired! It was not nice to be loud and keep other people awake when they wanted to sleep! In fact, it was mean. These types of things I whisper-spit to him in my hot, exhausted rage, from the bottom of the other bunk bed as he sat up and lay down and called his Scratchy Cat his little sister and told me he had eaten ice cream with chocolate (no, really?) and that he liked the blue lights and that we were at the beach and that tomorrow it would be light and we would see the ocean. Then I would whisper-yell at him. “Clark! You are being mean! Everyone here wants to sleep and you are talking loudly. You need to lie down! You need to go to sleep. Calvin wants to sleep and I want to sleep too, but you are being too loud!” To that he would cheerily and loudly respond, “I am being mean! Everyone here wants to sleep and I’m talking loudly. I need to sleep! Calvin wants to sleep but I’m being too loud.”

Finally sometime around 3am he stopped talking and my boiling rage died down enough to fall asleep as well…until 8am when the ocean sun poked in the blinds and somehow Clark was up in a flash to see the cool light fixtures, oh, and the beach.

Since I forgot buckets and shovels the boys played with cups and spoons...

...until the cup blew away and Uncle A was called on to sprint to the rescue.

And Uncle A did not disappoint.

Despite the ocean part of our trip being so short, it went (with the exception of the early-morning whisper-spitting match)well and it was nice to see our relatives. The boys enjoyed the beach, specifically the salt water taffy and sand, and a specific jewelry store they found on the boardwalk. The jewelry store had all the expected jewelry store paraphernalia: jewelry, glass display cases, and middle-aged women covered in makeup and jewelry. What the bejeweled women had that they didn’t realize the value of, however, was their ceiling fans. They were unusual—without lights—and their blades looked like palm leaves. Cal did not want to leave. He went in and started talking to Lois about her fans. She was in love with him immediately and called over Nancy and Brenda and Wilma in their various shades of bright lipstick and dangling bracelets and popping chewing gum to fawn over Cal as he fawned over the fans. Eventually I mentioned to Cal that we needed to keep going and find his brother, which is when Nancy swooned that he had a twin brother and so some of us combined to herd Clark into the jewelry store and we all stayed there for quite some time. We had to promise to visit the women on the way back down the boardwalk and say goodbye and about an hour later we did, much to their relief. They were afraid we had forgotten. The boys yelled out, “Goodbye Fans!” as they left the store. The women were lined up in front madly waving back. Yep, they were fans. 

Finally leaving the jewelry store...Ocean City boardwalk at dusk

After our beach trip we got back home soon enough to celebrate Brian's birthday at his parents' house complete with a lot of important, post-carseat, pre-bedtime backyard playing. 

So, overall it’s been a successful and fun past two weeks. My parents are now gone, which means I have to do annoying grown-up things like make meals and change diapers again, but the trip was a great break in many ways and a wonderful chance for the boys to spend time with their grandparents whom they normally only get to interact with via Skype. We had fun with them at our house and in our car and everywhere in between. I'm currently trying to decide what next to look forward to in my life. I think it might be to the Halloween costumes I'm making for the boys. 

Water Wars: The Season Finale

All smiles, ready for the boat ride

What began the swimming season as a huge water meltdown for a pilot episode (as told in my post Pool Wars I and II), fizzled down and became more of a manageable dislike of large bodies (natural or man-made) of water. We never took the boys back to the pool or the ocean (read about the ocean here) but they have had several encounters at the lake (read about it here and see pictures here) where I believe small victories have been won. Their desire to stay in the sand on the beach and to do no more than barely poke their toes into the water made it extremely easy to watch them at the lake on our last lake trip of the summer. I remember last year that it took constant vigilance by two people to keep them from toddling into the lake water. I'm a list-maker, so let me break it down for you: 

Water encounters they enjoy:

Hitting golf balls into the water and retrieving them from shore
Washing sand off their hands in the shallowest water possible
Jet skiing
“Steering” the paddle boat
Kayaking
Puddle-stomping
Talking about going to the pool
Talking about when Clark fell off the dock
Throwing pinecorns (acorns) into the lake
Splashing other people with water
Bathing in the tub, but only their tub, not Gammy’s
Drinking water in a cup

Water encounters they still cannot handle without screaming maniacally like crazed monkeys: 

Going into a BBOW (Big Body Of Water) past their shins
Watching Mom jump off the dock
Bathing in someone else’s tub on the first try
Putting a single toe in a kiddie pool
Being splashed by a sprinkler or any other form of water

Overall as you can see, they enjoy more water encounters than they hate. We hope to get them to the indoor pool regularly this winter and start them in swim lessons next summer when they’re three. Baby steps, right? Our Labor Day lake trip was a pretty good season finale after the disastrous pilot episode in June.

Clark beach-golfing

Boat ice cream faces

Calvin went in this far all by himself!

Pool Wars I and II

This summer there have been two pool wars.

The first one was so horrendous, so heinous, so traumatic, that no photographers were able to capture a single picture of the incident. According to alleged eyewitness accounts, the timeline of events went something like this:

POOL WAR I

1.    Happy, excited parents get ready to take 2 year-olds, who liked the pool last year, for their first swim of the season.

2.       Parents load said 2 year-olds into the stroller and stroll over to their clubhouse.

3.       Children are chatting, talking about the pool and swimming.

4.       Children are divided up, one per parent, and ushered into separate dressing rooms.

5.       Parent 2 hears shrieks and screams coming from other dressing room as Parent 1 attempts to wrangle Child 1 into his one-piece floaty swimsuit doo-whopper.

6.       Parent 2 tries to wrangle Child 2 into the other one-piece floaty swimsuit doo-whopper and hears eerily similar shrieks and screams in the process.

7.       Flustered parents make their way out to the pool, dragging tear-stained Children.

8.       The scene: A father and his two happy sons frolic in the perfectly blue water and two willowy women of leisure recline with chunky sunglasses, discussing yoga and wine-tastings.

9.       Parents, thinking the children will calm when they enter the water, quickly enter the water, Parent 1 by way of jumping in and taking Child 1 in his arms, Parent 2 by carefully walking into the water from the shallow end.

10.   Childrens' bodies stiffen.

11.   High pitch shrieks of terror reverberate off the white pool deck.

12.   Parents talk calmly, exchanging panicked glances with each other, trying to comfort and soothe the monstrous creatures writhing in their arms.

13.   Foreign exchange student lifeguard shifts uneasily in her chair.

14.   Happy young boy swimmers offer Screamers their kickboards, hiding their shock at the sound level reached.

15.   Women raise waxed eyebrows.

16.   Parents return Screaming Monsters to the deck.

17.   Parent 1 jumps in the water, showing Screamers that he is fine, that he is having fun, that nothing bad is happening to him.

18.   Screamers start gagging they are crying so hard, “Daddy get out!”

19.   Daddy gets out.

20.   Screamers huddle together for comfort, still shrieking, but calming slowly.

21.   Parents agree they cannot continue to torture their fellow swimmers and must leave.

22.   Parent 2 points out a spider on the edge of the pool on the way out.

23.   Both Children stop fussing and bend over to see the spider.

24.   Spider goes into water.

25.   Children don’t want to leave the spider and start screaming again.

26.   Parents haul Screamers out.

27.   Lifeguard chuckles awkwardly in Polish.

28.    Parents exit clubhouse and stuff children, now calm, into the stroller, still in their one-piece floaty swimsuit doo-whoppers.

29.   Children look at each other and say, “Fun pool.”

30.   War ends, Children having defeated Parents.

POOL WAR II

For Pool War II, which was a good solid month and a half after Pool War I, the parents were much more prepared for possible reactions and sought to minimize all reactions beforehand.

Children were shown a slideshow of pictures of themselves enjoying the water last summer as little 1 year-olds. This time the destination was a backyard and the pool was a blow-up pool with water maybe a foot and a half deep. There was temperature control. There was a lot of talking about the pool being a big bathtub. There were several toys to play with in the pool. The stage was set.

Upon time to enter the screaming began anew. Just as loud. Just as dramatic. Just as violent. It was neighborhood noise pollution in its most natural form. This time we did have a photographer on hand and so it is with pleasure that I present to you Pool War II, as a photo story.

Children watch slideshow of water fun last year

Brilliantly fun little pool

Drama increases as Children pace, wailing

After shrieking does not subside, Parent 2 enters pool fully clothed

Agony!

WHY?

I do not deserve this.

Okay, this actually feels kind of good.

Child 2 humors Parent 1 with shark face

Fun toys!

Can I slide down the tail?

No, but the car can!

I'm still not sure, but I think the Parents won Pool War II. Only time will tell. Meanwhile, those of you whose kids are normal like the pool, count yourselves blessed.