Playing Favorites

Arthur is playing favorites. Although he will answer questions like, "What does a cat say?" with "'ow'', when I ask them (and "aw aw" for crows and "wack wack" for ducks), he will not say (and sign) when he's "All Done" with a meal. Which he will for Mark. He also seems to be eating more for Mark in the evenings.

WIcked baby.

Arthur does like to wrestle with me, and continues to ask me to catch him as he falls backwards.

He's also expressing so much interest in the Macintosh that today we checked out the book, "Arthur's Computer Disaster" from the library. For a library encore, Arthur climbed three flights of stairs.

In the physical development department, we've started measuring him and he's grown about a half inch in the last week. I'll have official numbers for his height and weight after the next wellness doctor visit, which isn't for a month or so.

And the award goes to...

Help! I'm raising a thespian!

Today, my finger got caught in the gap between a table top and its hinged leaf. Since this is the table with the electric keyboard on it that Arthur can play with, I wanted to show him that he could pontentially pinch his fingers. I pointed to the gap, put my finger between the wood planks, and said, "ouch."

Arthur upstaged me. After copying me and saying ouch, he moved to placing his fingers in the space between the tabletop and the table leaf and then holding up his finger and wailing like it had really pinched him. At first, I thought it had (until he smiled a 'got you' smile).

I guess I should learn not to mime.

On the color front, Arthur managed to correctly identify a white and a red bunny toy at Scarey Reading Hour. I was throroughly surprised, because given yesterday's performance, I expected him to shrug 'jenne se qua.' I held up the plastic toys and said, "Arthur, this is the red one and this is the white one; this is the red one and this is the white one. Which one is the red one?" He managed to choose the correct color three times before he got bored and went over to play with the Library's network sockets. Choosing the correct colors counts double, because he did it in front of other parents of 1 to 2 year olds.

Arthur Update

I can see that I need to re-read the books I have on child development. I continue to be confounded at things like

• why Arthur can point to a picture of a cat in the middle of a bunch of other animals, but he shrugs his shoulders (the sign for "I don't know") when I ask him which of two blocks is the red one
• why Arthur's favorite key on the electronic keyboard is the one that turns the red power LED on and off (and on and off and on and off and on and off...)
• Why Arthur will got close to an electrical socket, say "no," shake his head, and then touch the socket anyway
• why lights, which presumably he's never touched, are 'hotch', which places them in the same category as stoves, fires, pictures of fires, and freshly prepared oatmeal.

Jenn, a Montessori teacher, explained to me that differentiating colors is an advanced concept. I had already used colors in the fractions flashcards I made for Arthur.

At least I understand why Arthur smacked the lap harp with a colored block from a musical toy -- the musical toy makes music when you smack blocks into it, so all musical instruments must be played that way. Luckily, Arthur hasn't smacked my Dad's baby grand piano with a colored block (yet).

I've also learned (a little too late) that I shouldn't have started a pushing game with Arthur. He'd stand, I'd have one arm behind him, and then I'd push him backwards. Then he'd arch his back and look at everything upside down. He thought this was the funniest thing ever and I think I must have initiated theatrical faints for about twenty minutes. Now when he comes up to us we have to be ready for him to collapse backwards.

Oh, and I guess it's time to start the therapy fund. At one point in our house's past, someone drilled small holes into the floor and snaked coaxial cable into the living room, probably for cable TV. For the past month, Arthur has gone over to where the cables were hidden, pushed aside the furniture hiding them, and stuck the cable terminal into his mouth. I'm pretty sure The Fearful Parent Magazine would have something to say about that. I usually say, "Not for Arthur" and make him put the furniture back.

Anyway, yesterday evening Mark, Arthur and I were arranging living room furniture so that it had less of that warehouse feel. Arthur started playing with the cables. I went to the toolbox, got some tin snips, and -- snip! -- no more cables. Just little empty holes in the floors. The look of betrayal wasn't quite as bad as the one last year when Arthur realized the fries on my plate were going to go over his head and into my mouth -- but it was close. This evening he was still looking for the missing cables.

Smit h an d Hawke n

Scene: The Back Patio. John and Arthur are taking a break from using trowels to dig out dirt for a step.

Arthur: Uhhn! (Points and reaches for garden shears that John has moved about three times already).

John: No, Arthur. Those aren't for you. (Thinks about ways to explain why that don't involve pantomiming a severed finger.) See? (picks up safety locked shears; squeezes handle so the blade wiggles impotently against the anvil; runs index finger over the side of the blade.) Ouch. See, this part can cut you. Ouch.

Arthur: (Eyes go wide and he giggles) Ouch! (Reaches for shears.)

John: (Mentally slapping forehead) Ugh. You're not supposed to like it.

-- L A T E R --

Mark: What have you been teaching the child? He keeps pointing at things and saying 'ouch ouch.'

Three is a Dish Washer

I've been watching the scrub jays in are yard for the last few months, and wishing that we had more crows visiting. We had a lot of crows around the old house, but I had no idea that scrub jays lived in Eugene until we moved to the new house.

So today, the day of the new moon and the autumnal equinox, there were three crows in our back yard. (Insert spooky "oooh" here.) It had taken them about a week to locate the bird feeder in the ornimental cherry tree. Arthur and I got a pretty good look at them while an installation guy installed a new dishwasher. So I guess we'll have to re-write that old crow rhyme to include kitchen appliances.

Yes. It's true. We have a dish washer. It's wonderful, and already I don't know how I lived without it. Really. (Thank you Mom and Dad.)

Equinox Eve

Happy Equinox; I can't beleive it's only been a quarter of a year since we signed the papers on our new house. We're mostly in and living out of boxes. Not all of the paint is done and we still have some trim to finish. The old place still has some minor things in it that we'll have to taxi over to the new house.

On the Arthur front...

Arthur can walk -- sort of -- have I mentioned that yet? The last three weeks are sort of a blur. In any case, Arthur and I have a game where I'll help him stand, and then I'll say, "Ready? Three, Two, One!" and let go. He'll take a few steps and then more or less fling himself forward for me to catch. Sometimes I don't always get there in time and he tumbles onto the grass.

We also take walks to the local stores. Arthur can push his stroller about the length of a block. He's also acting like a boy; he really likes trucks and today he was very excited to find a tether-ball. And while he likes birds, airplanes seem to be better. He's climbing everything he can get to -- like the chase lounge, and most recently, the kitchen table chairs.

He's also quite the computer geek. He really wanted to play with the computer at the doctor's examining room, and he was very happy when he got a chance to bang on the keys of a Eugene Library Computer. He was very dissapointed that a spare monitor that was on the bedroom floor wasn't plugged in.

Oh, yes. At fifteen and a half months, he's figured out that electrical appliances don't work unless you plug them in first -- we have a select comfort bed and Mark says that Arthur plugged in the little air pump so he could hear it wheeze as it inflates our bed to rock hardness.

The cat is here in the new house, and she's been using her powers of gravity control for evil. I don't know how an eight pound cat can sound like a herd of elephants at 3 AM, and I suspect that she's figured out where the most resonant spots of the house are. That, and she continues to take delight in stepping on our heads. I slept much better the week she was still at the old house, and I've come to the conclusion that a good half of the bumps in the night that used to wake me up in the old house convinced that raccoons, tramps or theives were trying to get into the house were in fact Muriell.

As if that wasn't enough, I'm pretty sure that she's been teaching Arthur how to whine. We've been working on that one. When Arthur points and grunts at something -- usually food -- instead of just giving it to him we ask him if he would like more of whatever it is and we use the sign language for it. I think we're having pretty good luck using Skinnerian opperant conditioning to reward him with what he wants when he signs for it.

When Arthur isn't whining, he's saying some words. Probably his favorite word is 'no.' When he's just saying no to say no, I do try to turn it into a game by saying 'yes', and it usually goes back and forth with no and yes for a few rounds and then we switch to 'Daaad' and 'Arthur.' Arthur also says the word 'hot', which he combines with 'ouch' -- so he sounds a little Scottish and says, 'hoouch'. I've been playing a lot of Rex Harrison singing 'Why Can't The English Teach Their Children How to Speak;' we'll see if that has any effect.

The latest word I've been trying to teach Arthur is 'Gollum'; he thinks it's about as funny as I do.

Finished -- I think

Almost everything is out of the old house and in the new one. Or at least the new garage.

Almost nothing is out of boxes except for Arthur's toys and some clothing.

And we still haven't finished with the paint job.

And our internet connection isn't up yet at the new house.

At least the weather has been decent -- not too much rain and a reasonable temperature.

The Plan (No Promises)

Here's the plan for this weekend as I understand it. Since none of this has been written down in the Book of Big Decisions, it could all change (except for the U-Hall rental).

• FRIDAY
• Pack (as Arthur allows)
• Construct Boxes
• Pack books, plates, toys, laundry, past issues of Dragon Magazine, and embarrassing items...
• Paint
  • Walls and cabinetry in Kitchen
  • Window trim in Dining Area
  • Window trim in Living Room
  • Floor trim everywhere
• SATURDAY -- at the new house
• Pack (as Arthur allows)
• Construct More Boxes
• Pack anything Arthur picks up and thrusts at us
• Paint
  • Walls and cabinetry in Kitchen
  • Window trim in Dining Area
  • Window trim in Living Room
  • Floor trim everywhere
• SUNDAY -- at the old house
• Pack (convince Arthur packing means putting things into boxes)
• Pack piles of paper, computer stuff, even more toys, dirty laundry, past issues of The Space Gamer, and eye the dumpsters...
• MONDAY -- U-Hall Day
• Move The Big Stuff

You Want a Different What?

Well... Mark decided that the colors in the bedroom are a little saturated. "It looks less like a New York apartment and sort of like... a cottage bakery," he said. "Arthur's room really looks like a kid's room," he added. "And this 'Raleigh Green' for the trim? As soon as I put it on I said to myself, I've seen that color before and it's 'baby-poop green.'"

I feel energized when I walk into that part of the house. It's almost a physical sensation. But then again, I like Jean-Micheal Jarre and Juno Reactor -- so maybe it's the limbic part of my brain that needs to be stimulated. Anyway, I gave Mark the go-ahead to get a lighter colored yellow (from the same paint chip as "Glorious Glow") for the living room. I figure I can always live in the bedrooms during the Dark Half Of The Year (dark, so very dark...)

We've been tag-team painting, so we haven't actually been in the living room at the same time. Last night I was painting until one in the morning; the other night Mark was the one painting until past midnight. We've seen so little of each other awake that Mark commented that this must be what couples with two jobs each must feel like.

Depending on what time of day (or night) it is, how many lights we turn on, and how much paint is applied, the color of the living room yellow goes anywhere from a kind of mustard brown to a pale yellow-green. I think part of this chameleon effect is due to the pale nature of the paint color -- it picks up what ever other colors are reflected on it (like from the blue painter's tape). I think it's such a light, unsaturated color that we'll need to apply two coats of it to get a consistent color.

So, I'm not sure, but I think I've been painting the living room a color I would have never have imagined: pale yellow beige. I'm not sure if this counts as a Judith Viorst poem or not.

The current theory is that we'll be moving into the house Labor Day. Really. It's. Going. To. Happen.

Are We There, Yet?

The house is progressing. My Dad came over and has been a great help. When he put on the white primer coat and made the old, icky colors go away I was about ready to leave the walls white. It was like a new morning had come into the house, filling the rooms with light. The old colors really did suck all the light out of the air.

Then he put on the base color: Dutch Boy Glorius Glow. The light from the primer had been a winter's day with snow reflecting a cold blue sky. The light from the top coat was from the heart of summer; it made the oak floor glow. Mark and I had done the right thing by making sure the paint chips harmonized with the short wood planks. I can only conclude that whoever painted the house before us was colorblind or enjoyed being depressed in the dreary Willamette Valley days of January and February, which are filled with moody and poetic drizzle and fog. The only thing that glows during these months are the moss and lichen on the trees (and that's only between the wan daylight hours of 9:30 AM to 4:30 PM).

So far the walls on one and a half bedrooms are complete. There's some minor undercoating that needs to happen in the square hall, and in part of the dining nook. No trim has been painted yet. Mark has been saying things like, "Boy, this sure is yellow -- but I like it. It's cheery," so I think he's hoping the darker trim colors will help to ground things out a little. I suppose that we could get a reproduction of Vincent van Gogh's sunflowers...

On the Arthur front: He can't walk, but he can climb. The other day, Arthur climbed up on top of the landladies' picnic table -- the collapsable one with the swivle top. Yesterday he found a ladder propped up against the deadly wisteria and scrambled up it (I was right there spotting him). And he's a little mad at us for not giving him a paintbrush so he can paint the house.

Mark continues to find (and buy) toys for Arther that are disturbing. He got a sprinkler a few days ago: it's plastic and in the shape of a Disney eyed puppy with floppy ears. Water comes out of the puppy's colar in about seven streams. When the water goes through it, it rocks its head from right to left. At first, it's cute; but after a while, the relentless and sometimes frantic rocking of the head seems like a metaphor for hyperactivity. The water rushing through the puppy represents raw, psychological and physiological force, but it can only be used to knod convulsviely; the puppy cannot not stand still. It's enough to make me want to get it some ritalin. Arthur loves it and will point at it until we turn it on and he can get soaked.

The most recent acquisition is some sort of 1996 musical blocks toy. It's a rectangular plastic box. A memory cartridge fits in the back slot. There arer five additional slots for five small cubes. The cubes are different colors and have different geometric shapes on them. If you arrange the cubes from left to right blue, green, yellow, organge, red, it will play a tune based on Motzart's Night Music. Different geometric shapes on the cube faces signify different voices. I think this would be cool if Arthur knew the sequence of A) colors and B) the tune. He doesn't; the result sounds like an experiment in rap music and percussion as he bangs one or more of the cubes onto toy. Even though it's not the Leapfrog Anti-Diva singing on it, I think I'll have to walk away when Arthur starts playing with it.

We've Reached A Milestone

We've reached a new milestone in home-ownership. It's the "I'm so tired of working on this house I just want this project to be done" milestone.

Or is that the, "Nobody'll notice milestone?"

I'm sure our contractor friend, Ed, will have a name for it that involves fire.

In any case, after about 11 days (and I'm going to guess 48 person-hours of work) we're finished scraping all the paint-like emolents off of the kitchen cabinets. So now we get to clean everything -- the walls, the ceilings, the floors, the cabinets, the mantle, the divider, the oven, the sink, the... say... well, maybe we haven't reached that milestone after all.

Mark has decided that our color scheme is going to make our house look like an unpretentious but upscale candy shop. As long as it's not "Old Lady" decor, I'm happy, and if I can get a purple top hat like WIlly Wonka out of it so much the better.

On the Arthur front: he's climbing everything. He's not walking, yet, but I think his climbing skills are making up for it. He can also stand without help for about five seconds.

As for talking... Well, every now and then I catch Arthur whsipering sibilent words in the corner. It's a little unnerving because it sounds like something like "Ash nazg durbatulûk, ash nazg gimbatul, ash nazg thrakatulûk, agh burzum-ishi krimpatul. Precious."

And then there was last night. Arthur's new molar woke him up in the middle of the night, so Mark put him in our bed. A little later I was thwacked out of a sound sleep by a flailing baby arm.

It was Arthur.

He was signing in his sleep.

Arm Photon Torpedos!

For a variety of reasons, our moving date has floated back a week... or even more. If we don't move Labor Day weekend, we'll have to wait until after Shrewsbury (Sept 8-10) to move two weeks later (Sept 15-16). This gives me two weeks to recover from moving and finish up the final draft of a story for the Writers of the Future contest (Sept 30).

I think the quote of the day for August 18 was, "Wow, it's a good thing John didn't have photon torpedoes or those people would be so dead." (Sometimes shouting 'Arm photon torpedos!' at the idiot driving in front of you helps to relieve stress.)

So I'm a man with a mission; finish up the house now so I can free up my will to focus on other projects (like writing, for one thing). It's become obvious to me that we'll be hinkle-pinkling around with various odd house jobs forever unless we hire a baby-sitter to watch Arthur while the both of us take on the tasks of new-home-ownership. So we've got one for next week.

This weekend we had lots of help... Scraping. The. Damn. Kitchen. Cabinets. Even if they are old, clear fir, I'm about ready to take them out and burn them. Even with (or possibly in spite of) using strippers on the cabinets, there's areas of decorative globs that gum up the sandpaper. I've discovered a new tool called a "sandstone" that is sort of like a cross between pumice and a sponge; with a little bit of pressure you can use it to get right down to the wood. At least in the parts where you can use the sandstone. It's a little ironic that the kitchen is what's holding us up because if we could afford it, the kitchen would be the second thing we'd gut and re-do. (The first would be the bathroom.)

Probably the funniest thing to happen this weekend (which I didn't see) was my Dad managed to cut through an extension cord with electrical hedge shears. I'm told it was very dramatic with lots of sparks. Good thing part of the house settlement was installing trip-fuse electrical sockets; my Dad's already had his heart medically rebooted twice.

This whole ordeal has been a learning experience, though; I've learned that Mark and I physically perceive colors differently. If you give us a source green, for example, and a variety of green paint chips, we'll choose different chips. I don't know if we're using different ways to evaluate color tone or color shade or some other color modality -- but it's different. The good news is that Mark and I have chosen three colors to paint the house, we wrote the color names down on a piece of paper and we both signed it. I think this will be the first page in what we'll call "The Book of Big Decisions." I'm very glad that we've irrevocably, finally, absolutely really and for true, nailed down the colors. Now, of course, we have to buy the paint. We've also agreed on drawer pulls for the house -- they're classy and round, and it's nice that we had a gift certificate from Jerry's because elegance and style aren't cheap. We would have gotten some cobalt glass pulls, but they were even more expensive.

In further good news, I've decided that I like the smell of Murphy's Wood Soap. Which is a darn good thing because there's paint dust and chips all over our hard wood floors.

Saturday at "Che Spectreeck"

OK.

Mark and I sat down and here's what we came up with. We still very much need any help people want to offer -- and I'm sure Arthur would be pleased to see anyone who wants to stop by.

There was still some substance on the kitchen cabinets that was gumming up the sandpaper, so the cabinets still need to be scraped a bit more and then sanded.

Once we're done sanding, then we can do a final wall and ceiling cleaning. OK, and the floors need to be mopped, too, because we've tracked some paint chip bit things all over.

Other tasks that need to be done are removing face and socket plates from the walls and filling in the drawer and cabinet pull holes (we're replacing the small, old, ugly, 50's style pulls with something a little nicer).

Once everything is clean, then we can begin the painting process. Just as soon as we buy the paint. I'm afraid to give any kind of progress report on color pallets because every time I think we've come to a decision, I'm wrong; I think we're still going with the elemental pallet reported on earlier (but we've had a serious discussion about a monochrome green pallet).

Don't ask me when I think we're going to move.

No Paint Yet...

We're (probably) going to by paint today. This would be good, because we're supposed to paint the house tommorrow. Most of the old paint is off; there's still some tricky parts in the kitchen.

Arthur is not allowed to touch the oven. So I'm not sure what I should do when, after being told a million times that the oven is "not for Arthur", he crawls off and crawls back with a spatula and starts whacking the oven with it.

I tried not to laugh.

Progress Report

Arthur is crawling on his feet and hands as if he were a gorilla. It is probably a matter of hours before he is walking and My Life Changes Forever (Again).

Today my folks came over; my Mom watched Arthur in the back yard while I, Mark, and my Dad scraped paint off of the walls. The bedrooms are all scraped and sanded and plastered. So is the hallway between them. The bathroom we're just going to live with. The living room is mostly scraped and needs to be sanded. The kitchen... needs to be scraped and sanded.

All this scraping makes me feel like I'm some kind of nano-dentist working on someone's tartar build-up.

The People Who Used Latex is beginning to become a theme in my mind. I can almost hear Leonard Nimoy now, "In Search of The Latex Painters." Who were these people and what were they thinking...?