Category: Alex

With this entry I’m posting at a (sub-domain of) a new domain. Previously this blog was at alexandtia.com/Ussins – now it is here at home.ussins.org – please update your bookmarks/feeds/what have you. I’ve been listing extended family blogs (for a blogroll) – I probably don’t have them all. (And many galleries and links here need fixing/updating.)

Again, I haven’t been doing justice to Nem-nem at this blog, and am guilty of 2nd Child Syndrome.

Last evening we hiked a little up Rock Canyon – at the Lake Bonnevile trail on the north – and passed a small cave off the trail. I made a monster sound, and Nem-nem looked toward the cave a bit fearfully and said “Ee-oo”. I’d never heard that, and Tia told me it means “Scary.”

Nem-nem rages when she doesn’t want to go to bed (which is most nights), stuck in her crib – screaming, blubbering, and calling after “Ma-ma” – or, if it’s been several hours and she’s past desperation, “Da-da”. (As second pick, I suppose I’m simultaneously flattered and jealous.)

She’s going to climb right over the rail any day (as Mago did around that age), and has climbed out several times by propping up on furniture just outside the bars (which furniture is no longer adjacent to the crib). When we’ve accidentally left the crib rail down, Nem-nem has slept on a mattress outside the crib, or on the recliner in the room. On a recent night at about two AM she opened our door, wandered across the room, and said simply and clearly, “Hi.” – and then climbed into our bed and quickly fell back asleep.

Several months ago – and I forgot to write it – I was lying on a couch reading, and Nem-nem decided I needed some company. She went and retrieved several plush toys and a doll, and arranged them around my head and put the doll in my arms.

Also, here’s a back-post (link) of a recording of Nem-nem and I which I’d made and readied, but hadn’t put up, in January.

The next two from Mago I’m slightly adapting from notes by Tia.

At his birthday party, before blowing out the candles on his cake, with all his neighborhood friends around him, Mago wished in a breathless voice: “I wish this day would last forever.”

A few nights ago at tucking in time, he asked Tia: “Is there too much cuddliness in the whole world?” He then talked about how he loved cuddly things.

This morning:

Mago: Did you know you can have as many pairs of arms as you want?
Me: How?
Mago: Ask Jesus! I want three pairs of arms!

This afternoon:

Me: I don’t want playing Pikmin to be the only thing I play with you today. I want to play something else.
Mago: We can play a game I made up.
Me: What’s that?
Mago: Bomb’s Up.
Me: How do you play that?
Mago: You put a bomb magnetic on a spring, and it goes up in a hole in the ceiling, and it devaporates into a food that you want.

(You can see how this is inspired by video games. Destroy something and it will turn into a reward.)

That’s a small sample. His imagination has explosively expanded. He’s become a big fan of Pokémon after Tia disclosed to him a Pokémon blanket I’d owned before we were married (yes, as an adult – you get the picture), which had been obscured by a heavy quilt covering. A poster of Pokémon I’d gotten from Electronic Gaming Monthly has also been adopted by him (now laminated, to prevent destruction by young children and toddlers). He learns their names, now watches Pokémon cartoons, plays Pokémon on my old Game Boy hand-held console (and begs both of us to find in-game stores etc. for him), has pretend battles, and does paper crafts (which means he compels his parents to create them).

About a year ago, maybe (or more), I first devised “Pirates and Wizards” as a game to play with him – which, though I had broader ambitions for the game, Mago strictly reduced to pretending to blast each other with pistols and/or fire and/or lighting. (And persisted at this over months and years until he forgot the origin, and would only pretend to blast you, often.) Now he plays it with Nem-nem, who does not necessarily know what guns, fire and lighting are – but if you point at her and make a blast sound, she’ll do a squealing scream, keeling over.

When Mago is very unruly or troublesome at bed-time, or in general if a standard “time out” isn’t really doing the job, he gets strapped into his baby seat in the car in the garage. He really hates it – but it does him no harm – so it works; I’m usually the only one who can pull it off because Tia hates the expense of wrestling him on the way. So when Nem-nem is in a bed-time fuss or rage Tia asks her if she wants the same. “Uh-huh”, always comes the eager reply – and out to the baby seat goes Nem – except that she likes it. Calms her right down and she goes to sleep. I guess she figures it’s what big brother does, so that’s her way to feel like a big girl.

(So rebellion is growing up. Well, that’s just great.)

Nem-nem for a while has been learning to walk, and has abandoned crawling and walks pretty well by now.

I took her for a walk recently down the same place where Mago used to visit the deer lawn ornaments (we still do sometimes) which I swear I’ve written about but can’t seem to find the entry.. hope it’s still there.. anyway I took her for a walk. On the walk she pointed to a tree and signed “bird”, and when we passed flowers, she scrunched her lips and nose together and exhaled sharply, to imitate sniffing: this is her own sign for “flower”. I set her on the sidewalk to examine some purple daisies in someone’s yard, and she batted them, and when they bounced on their stem she laughed. Then she noticed some ants and stooped down to examine them, and she did this short low sort of raspy grunt. It’s her word for “creature”: she does this for bugs, dogs, animals she sees on TV etc.

The other day she looked at me from her car seat while I was outside the car, and she called: “Dada”. I pointed at her and said “Baby”. She smiled and did the sign for baby: holding one hand on the other elbow and cradling her arms back and forth.

Tia tells me the other day when they went to a playground, Nem-nem said “play”, and the other day she said “doll” when handed a doll. This morning we read a muppet babies book, and seeing baby Kermit she made the sign for frog: hold the back of your hand on your chin and curl three fingers down and up several times.

Mago has amused us with more things he says in his sleep. Tia heard these ones:

In the way a child declares small facts like having visited Denver, importantly:

I’m someone’s brutha!..

Then in a sing-song sort of way going up on the second word, he continued:

Whatch’your name?

Recently I put his blanket back on him at night and he said:

You’re the nice fishy.

Another night I put his blanket back on him and he stirred and urgently whined in alarm:

You’re underwater!

The other night I just went and held him while he was asleep. In his sleep he instinctively tried to put his arm around my neck, but it just kind of flopped up to the side of my neck and he couldn’t get it far around. After I stayed there for a while he whined in his sleep:

I can’t reach you!

So I let his arm drop and I put his plush monkey (Millie) in his arms.

At the city carnival just over a week ago, I took Nem-nem on a ferris wheel and held her tight.

I didn’t know it was going to go around fast. She was terrified for her life, screaming, sobbing, squirming, and inconsolable. I felt terrible. I’d have never taken Mago on a ferris wheel when he was an infant – I was too protective. Maybe I’ve swung too far the other way.

(Although usually I’m.. very protective.)

Driving home from dinner at my dad’s this past Sunday (Father’s Day), I played favorites in the CD player that lulled Nemmy off to sleep. One of them was Time After Time as it appears on the album for STRICTLY BALLROOM (probably Tia’s favorite film – or she showed it to everyone in High School). I reached back and held Mago’s hand and sang to him in between treacherously brief glances back to the road (I can’t believe that either considering the last paragraph I wrote) and he lovingly smiled back at me. In a while he asked:

Daddy, does this song teach you to pick me up if I fall down?

That night around 10, about an hour and a half after I finally got him in bed (Tia was off late in another city taking someone’s family photograph), he came to the bathroom as I cleaned out his toilet. He held up a folded paper card he’d colored – I guess from Nursery at church – and said:

Daddy, I forgot to give this to you. This is yours.

It was a line drawing of a father holding up his kid, a boy about Mago’s size/age, the card colored with blue marker scribbles solidly clumped together roughly inside every shape. Inside was a note scrawled with a nursery worker’s help:

Daddy I love you too.

A simple thing like that from any little kid cuts any parent down into a burbling lump much smaller than the kid.

The other day I was holding Nem-nem and making her “jump” on a bed with Mago, and other general riotous fun, including making silly babbling monster sounds for her and chasing Mago around the room, all of which she laughed uproariously at and squealed and giggled. Then Mago said:

Let’s play Sambo-Wan.
Okay, how do you play that?
You go like this.

He stood, bending down to touch his foot with one arm, thrusting the other arm up in the air behind him, making a fist. Another way to play Sambo-Wan apparently is to “Do tricks and stuff”, including jumping off a bed and getting as many little kicks as you can in, midair and crouching before you land.

Nem-nem is really coming alive with babble. Also starting English (if her babble isn’t strictly English) words beyond “Ma-ma” and “Da-da”. When she sees a duck she’s sometimes said, several times in a row, “duck” with a kind of guttural scraping – German? – g sound, and signs “bird” as she says it. She also says “bird” (“bii”) and, starting yesterday at the pet store, “dog”, which she repeated later when shown pictures of dogs.

The other night Mago came from his bed a while after bed time and said to Tia:

Mom, I have a very important job to do. I have to feed you, and dad, and Nem-nem, and me.

And headed for upstairs, Tia then learned from him, to get cookies.

Mago sometimes talks in his sleep. It can be quite funny when he mumbles indecipherable things with great meaning (the babyhood exhibited in Nem-nem so well has never and will never escape him, I hope.) Last night he came and slept on a mattress in our room because Nem-nem was keeping him up. This morning he was stirring in his sleep and said

Mommy, I need..

She rushed to him and put the blanket back over him:

A blanket?

He went back into deeper sleep. Maybe fifteen minutes later when I was up, I put the blanket back on him again and put Dermitt (his plush dog toy named after a character in P.B. Bear) back in his arms, and I suppose he finished his sentence, whispering importantly, with a kind of awe:

.. treasure.