You are currently browsing the tag archive for the 'Jeffrey' tag.
For Family Home Evening this past Monday, we decided to sit down with the kids and plan out our garden for the upcoming year. Brian and I are quite excited — the yard behind our house is huge, and Utah, with its lack of mold spores, fine earth, and sunny weather, is ideal for gardening (that is, if you can get the water).
I was ecstatic because I managed to convince Brian that our garden should be surrounded by a cute white picket fence, in order to keep The Mysterious Case of the Disappearing Green Tomatoes from happening again. Hooray! It will be SO ADORABLE.
The kids, on the other hand, were a mite bit puzzled. If we were gardening, then why were we looking at pictures of plants, instead of heading out back to dig? They did, however, love looking through some seed catalogs and making requests. Eleanor, in particular, was excited about Shasta Daisies, and I look forward to planting some with her and then teaching her how to make daisy chains . . . while swinging in a hammock under a shady tree . . . with a mason jar of lemonade . . . sigh. Why can’t summer come a bit faster?
Jeffrey, meanwhile, was most excited about a double-page spread of bamboo varieties.
“Mom! We need to get bamboo and put it in our garden!”
“But Jeffrey,” I explained, “we don’t need bamboo. It would take up too much space.”
“But Mom, it would keep the panda bears away from our garden,” he replied patiently. He then went on to elaborate:
“See, we plant the bamboo in a circle around the garden, and that way when the panda bears come, they will want to eat the bamboo and get stuck in it and not want our vegetables!”
I nodded sagely at this advice, and Brian announced that it was time for treats.
Aftewards, I went back to clean up the catalogs, and Eleanor let out a squeal.
“No Mom!” she cried as I began to close up the catalog displaying the bamboo. “We need that plant! It will keep the panda bears out!”
“Is that what Jeffrey said?” I leaned in conspiratorially. “Don’t worry, Eleanor. I don’t think there are any panda bears in Utah.”
“That’s right,” called out Jeffrey, waltzing into the room. “Panda bears are only in China!”
Eleanor thought about this for a moment, and then her little face screwed up into a frown.
“But I thought we lived in China!” she wailed.
Ah, disillusionment. Of course, you do realize that when Jeffrey imagines China, he thinks of a nation whose gardeners are constantly beset by marauding panda bears. It just cracks me up.
For further reading (ah, yes! back by popular demand! And by “popular demand,” I mean that three whole people requested its return!):
Whose Garden Is It? by Mary Ann Hoberman, illustrated by Jane Dyer. I usually aren’t too keen on picture books with rhymed text — they are often a little too sing-songy — but Hoberman’s (also known for A House is a House for Me) verses about the “ownership” of a garden are top-notch. Who owns a garden? The gardener? The animals who live in it? The “tiny seeds and whistling weeds” who make up the garden itself? A clever book to get kids thinking about gardens, land, and ecosystems, perfectly accompanied by Dyer’s lush watercolors. Check it out!
“Mommy, look! It looks like a candy house!”
“Look at the sparkles, Mommy!”
My neighborhood is resplendent with Christmas lights, wreaths and garlands. Even the lamposts are decorated with red ribbons, lights, and a sprig of plastic pine. It’s a nice change from our neighborhood in Pittsburgh, where few of our neighbors put up any lights — a habit I presume is formed not from a lack of Yuletide spirit (although, granted, there were some Jewish families on the block) but simply because our 1930s cottages simply lacked good outdoor access to electricity.
Now we live in Twinkletown. However, given that we are on the East Bench, it’s an austere, tasteful Twinkletown. There are no blow-up nylon balloon Santas, animatronic reindeer, or hard plastic snowmen. There’s one — just one — house on the block with a row of electric candy canes, but it’s very small. Nothing blinks.
Therefore, I didn’t feel bad at all about investing in only three little strings of white lights to run along the roof of our porch. No muss, no fuss. The hooks were already there, we just had to hang the lights on them. In my theory, Christmas light displays shouldn’t take more than twenty minutes to set up. But I was concerned that my kids wouldn’t feel the same way.
I grew up on Army posts, where there were rules about how many lights could be put on residential quarters. No lawn ornaments, and only a few strings of lights. There’s no room for the Electric Light Parade in the Army. But as a little kid, I always kind of longed for something more — something rainbowy to drape over our trees and bushes, to transform our practical-yet-mundane quarters into a fairyland.
So I was worried that my kids would be disappointed with our tiny amount of twink. But I needn’t have worried.
“Mommm! Come see the lights that Daddy put up!” Eleanor cheered and twirled as Jeffrey proudly displayed Brian’s work. William clapped his little hands. And I remembered that any amount of twinkle is special, no matter how small. It’s our house; it’s special to our kids.
Last night I drove Jeffrey home from a Christmas party, and I pointed out lights from the windows. We passed the candy cane house.
“Jeffrey, look! Does that house look like it’s made out of candy?”
“Yeah, Mom! It looks yummy!”
Then we turned the corner to our home, and I noticed that a third of the lights had somehow gone out. I winced as I pulled into the driveway.
“Mommy, do you know what our house looks like?”
“No, Jeffrey. What?”
“I think it looks like the way it did on Christmas night.”
I puzzled over this for a moment. Does he realize that our house didn’t exist in ancient Bethlehem?
“Jeffrey, do you mean that our house looks like a stable?”
“No Mom,” he whispered. “I think it looks like the sky full of stars on Christmas night.”
He fluttered his fingers in the air to demonstrate, and I think my heart fluttered, too.
And I expect it will continue to do so for the next three weeks, or until we drop dead from exhaustion, whichever comes first.
Was Thanksgiving weekend just a week ago? It seems much farther away, I suppose mainly becauJse we took down our few Thanksgiving decorations and put up the Christmas stuff so quickly. My theory is: get the tree done as soon as possible, or it doesn’t happen at all.
Jeffrey was most interested in our creches — for the past several years, we have gone down to Ten Thousand Villages and picked out a nativity set from a different country. So far, we have creches from Peru, Indonesia, Maylasia, and Germany (uh . . . we found that at a thrift store). This year, we picked out a lovely one made of Kishi stone from Kenya.
All of this extra color and diversity must have inspired Jeffrey, because he immediately went to his room for a while before reemerging with a creche made of Legos. Joseph is a little Lego person inside, but he couldn’t find any more Lego people for Mary and Joseph, so they are represented by a flower topped with a yellow brick.
A flower — I am especially fond of this detail, since one of my favorite Christmas carols is “Lo, How A Rose is Blooming.”
Speaking of which, Eleanor is delighting in dancing around to the various carols and yuletide melodies I plunk out at the piano after dinner most evenings. When she isn’t dancing, she likes to sit on my lap and watch.
Funny thing is, no matter what I play — from the Nutcracker Suite to “Go Tell It on the Mountain” — she points at the music and says, “When I was a little girl, I learned how to sing this song in Spanish at my preschool!”
Oh, when she was a little girl, indeed!
William has a new nickname.
Jack Norris!
Yes, it’s a little bizarre. Here’s the story:
Jeffrey gave it to him on Memorial Day. We in the car with the windows rolled down, on the way to a picnic. The wind was blowing William’s hair around, and he was gurgling and cooing in his lovable Wimmy-way.
“Mom,” said Jeffrey, “when the wind is in Wimmy’s hair, he looks just like Jack Norris.”
Who?
“Jack Norris,” he repeated. “He’s a guy who looks just like Wimmy.”
Brian and I were puzzled by this. Who in the world is Jack Norris? How on earth did Jeffrey learn about him? We immediately thought of Chuck Norris, but Jeffrey has never seen any of his films (and hopefully, he never will).
“Jeffrey, can you tell me what Jack Norris does?” I ask.
“He’s a guy who runs around really fast,” he replies. “And he’s a dwarf.”
Uh-huuuuuuh.
This was ALL we’ve been able to get out of Jeffrey about who this Jack Norris person is. He looks like William. He runs fast. And he’s a dwarf. Once Jeffrey even sang a song about it.
Jack Norris runs around,
He saves the people all around
And he’s a dwarf!
He’s a dwarf, he’s a dwarf, he’s a dwaaaaaaaarf!
Nowadays, it’s become a family running gag. Whenever William is being especially, ah, intrepid — say, stuffing styrofoam peanuts in his mouth, or tipping a bowl of freshly folded clothes over on himself — we punch our fists in the air and say, “Jack Norris is on the case!”
Especially if the wind is in his hair.
Little kids seem so much more receptive to the little changes. Sometimes this can be trying, such as when I use the –gasp!– wrong cup for Eleanor’s milk, or layer on Jeffrey’s blankets in the incorrect order at bedtime. (For the record, it is: cow blanket, polka-dot blanket, and then the blue pinwheel patchwork quilt. Which he then promptly kicks off as soon as I leave the room.)
But there are other times that my kids pick up on the best details in life. There’s a passage in Louisa May Alcott’s Eight Cousins in which young Rose walks into her bedroom and immediately notices how the sunset is coloring the room, “with a child’s quick instinct.” That quick instinct — that uninhibited reaction to nature — is something I love in kids, especially when it helps me experience seasonal changes, like this burgeoning spring, through their eyes. (Oh, that old cliché. But it’s true.)
The wind is blowing briskly, and Jeffrey wants to go outside. “I like to play in the breeze,” he says. “Because it keeps me fresh.” He is always wanting to report on the weather at his preschool. “I felt a breeze today, Megan,” he reports proudly. “It must sign up for the weather report and say that it’s windy!”
Our first few flowering bulbs have come up, and our kids are enraptured with them, shining out like rainbow-colored coins scattered in our grey backyard. Poor little blossoms — they don’t stand a chance against my kids’ chubby fingers. Jeffrey made short work of the crocus, while Eleanor is slowly plucking the hyacinths apart. The realities of wilted flowers are hard, however. “Mommy, my flowers are melting,” says Eleanor sadly, tumbling a wrinkly, rubbery pink nub into my hand. “The flower melted, Mommy!”
A few mornings ago Jeffrey was quietly staring out the window over his breakfast bagel, his hand softly cupping his cheek. “Mommy, why is it pink all over?” I asked him what he saw outside that was pink, and he wrinkled his brow in thought. “Everything. Everything is pink,” he said, sweeping his hand across the window in a grand, yet vague, gesture. I looked, and it was all grey to me, but after gazing for moment, I could see it — how the sunlight slanted across the tips of the trees foresting the hillside, and if you didn’t look too closely at one in particular, you could see streaks of pink, like a gauze hung over the spindly, bare branches. It was the budding leaves, the raw pink tone they have just before bursting, the color of baby’s tongue. Birthing is hard, renewal is hard, the struggle to produce something new and gorgeous out of what essentially seems like a bunch of sticks in the mud. I love that Jeffrey can see it, this secret way of looking that he can show me, that we can share.
One of my favorite springtime books:
Rabbit’s Good News by Ruth Bornstein — There’s a big ol’ rainbow of pastels at work in these illustrations, although they aren’t showy by any account. Little rabbit uses all of his senses, from sniffing the air to listening for birdsong, to see if spring has really arrived. Then he bounds out of his den to share the news. Little kids enjoy the simplicity of this tale, and like being able to match up Rabbit’s senses with his body parts (“he hears with his . . . EARS!”). Sweet ‘n’ simple.
Jeffrey and Eleanor were on spring break this week, and I thought we’d take advantage of the spare time to see the always-gorgeous spring flower show at the Phipps Conservatory. I always try to take some good photos of the kids with the flowers; this is the third year in a row that I’ve done such portraits.
So many memories of this place! It was one of the places I visited on my first trip to Pittsburgh, back in May 2001. Brian and I were absolutely enchanted with the butterfly forest.
Over the years, I’ve learned a few hints about visits — go as early as possible to get a good parking spot, watch out for puddles, and never never never pay them a visit on Good Friday. The crowds are horrid on that day.
Just before Eleanor was born, I took Jeffrey for a visit on that fated day, and it was so stressful. He kept dashing ahead of me (he was only 2 1/2 then) and with my huge tummy, I could barely keep up. There were a large number of senior citizens there, and I was afraid that he was going to knock somebody over. We were attracting curious looks, stares, and a few not-so-quiet “Humph!”s all through the gardens.
Worst of all, there were two particular ladies that we kept running into over and over again. Every time I had to beg their pardon, I could feel my face getting redder.
I decided to cut the visit short and get out of there, when Jeff decided to run into the gift shop to take a look at the toys and — aaa! — expensive glass objets d’art. Lo and behold, who should be there at the botanical soap display other than those two same ladies again.
But before I could apologize once more for Jeffrey’s behavior, they both smiled and shook their heads.
“Such a good baby you have,” one of them said. “Most babies wouldn’t want to walk that far without being carried. He went the whole way through without crying to be picked up once.”
Oh!
I’m sure I wasn’t able to mumble much more than a thank-you before running off to catch Jeffrey once again. If only those ladies knew how much their kind words meant to me!
Jeffrey’s behavior has improved much since then. He and Eleanor were a couple of clowns for these photos. Whenever I sat them down and raised the camera, they immediately began to tickle, hug, and make silly faces at me and each other. They are such good buddies!
William, on the other hand, had a bad cold, so he didn’t get photographed much beyond this:
But he’s still awfully cute, wouldn’t you say?
We’re still watching old movies around here. Today a DVD of The Adventures of Robin Hood arrived in the mail, and Jeffrey and watched it together while the other kids napped.
This is the old one with Erroll Flynn, and is considered by many to be the best version of the story. I have to say that I was a bit apprehensive, because every time I’ve tried to watch this before, I’ve found it a snore. But now I realize that that was due mainly to the fact that I had only watched blurry VHS versions before, with horrid muffled sound.
The restored DVD is sooo gorgeous — it looks like the old N.C. Wyeth illustrations springing to full Technicolor life. The pacing didn’t drag a bit. Olivia de Hamilland wears a differently-colored lamé dress in each of her scenes. Erroll Flynn takes out about seven baddies with a deer carcass. A deer carcass. What’s not to love? And really, I consider a film like this to be essential for cultural literacy. This movie has all the original action film clichés, before they were clichés:
- The footmen with such bad aim they couldn’t hit the sidewalk with a can of paint!
- Cutting the rope of the portcullis and then riding the rope as it goes up!
- Ambushing the bad guys’ wagon train while swinging down on handy forest vines!
- Swordfighting insults! (“You’d best say your prayers, Robin Hood!” “I’ll say a prayer for YOU, Sir Guy!”)
- Bad guys who get hit with arrows under the arm, roll their eyes upwards, and clutch their chests while drooping slowly to the ground!
- Characters whose clever disguise consists entirely of a heavy cloak that doesn’t conceal their faces in the least!
- “Guards! Guards! After him!”
- A duel that features shadows on the wall, candles being cut in half, and the villain’s secret spare knife!
- DRAMATIC CAAAAAPES!
I was a little worried that Jeffrey might find all of this a bit boring, but whoa, was I wrong. He got into it even more than he got into Star Wars, and that’s really saying something. The excitement was up to the extent that we had to take occasional intermissions so he could use the bathroom more often.
The best part, though, was watching Jeffrey play “Robin Hood” with Eleanor for a good while just before bed. Armed with his foam pirate sword, he embarked on a lengthy duel with Daddy (who was able to conduct his swordfighting while lounging on a cushion). Later, he asked Daddy to hold a green blanket “vine” so he could “swing” off of it — and immediately after, he aimed a few more blows at him. (Said Brian, “What? I’m the scenery and the bad guy?”)
Jeffrey insisted on sheathing his sword inside of his pants. Eleanor, of course, tried to follow suit, despite the fact that her toy sword was twice her height. I’ll just let you imagine what that looked like.
Just before bed, Eleanor (who insisted that she was not Little John or Maid Marian but just Eleanor) was using building blocks to “play the violin” and was busy singing a song about Little Red Riding Hood.
Jeffrey, who was sitting on my lap, immediately began to whisper in my ear.
“Mommy, I think she’s singing a song about me.”
Oh, right — Little Red Robin Hood. Ha!
Jeffrey keeps asking a certain question:
“Mommy, are you running for President?”
This was at dinner a few days ago, and Brian reported hearing the same question during Jeffrey’s bath last week. “Is Mommy running for President?”
I suppose that Jeffrey’s been hearing enough election talk that it’s beginning to seep into his daily thoughts. Also, he keeps requesting that we read So, You Want to Be President every now and then, so he understands the basic concept of Being President. Oh, I love this kind of kid-flattery — when they honestly believe that you are capable of doing something like a Presidential campaign on-the-side. Just something I work on during, say, naptime. It was a little sad to set him straight. Looking at him across the dinging room table, I say:
“No, Jeffrey. I’m not running for President.”
“Why?” Hmm. No idea how to answer this truthfully — “I’d be really bad at it” — without leading to a score of other questions that need increasingly abstract, detailed answers. So, I bounced back at him with another question.
“Jeffrey, do you think I should be President?”
“Yeah.”
“Why do you think I would be a good President?”
“Because,” he says solemnly, “you’re good at talking to people and things.”
Heh. Talking to people — strangers, anyway — is one of the things I’m notoriously bad at . . . er, well. I’m not that bad at it. Let’s just say I’m one who loathes small talk. (LOOOOOOATHES.) But Jeff’s a little young to figure that out yet. I suppose that, to him, his mother is VERY good at navigating that Mysterious World of Adults and their Frightfully Dull Talk.
“Hmm,” chimes in Brian at this point. “Jeffrey, maybe you should be on Mom’s exploratory committee.”
“Yeah,” I say, tickled with this idea. “Can you find out if I should be President?”
“Yes,” Jeff replies, all seriousness as we leave the dinner table and begin trundling upstairs. “The first thing I’ll do is find out what George Washington does.”
Righto, Jeff. Remind me to look for that report in 2012.
Oh, and here’s the book I mentioned above:
So, You Want to Be President by Judith St. George, illus. David Small. George’s text is an entertaining account of traits that our nation’s presidents have had over the years — the oldest, the pets, who really was born in a log cabin, as opposed to just saying they were — but what really shines here are Small’s masterful caricatures of them all. From a twinkly-eyed Lincoln to a Taft with a tummy bigger than Rhode Island, it’s a glorious tongue-in-cheek yet loving tribute to the Chiefs. Oh, and the pictures won a Caldecott. Yada, yada, yada.
Tonight we went out to eat, and Jeffrey and Eleanor were given balloons at the restaurant.
Eleanor’s balloon popped about ten minutes after we arrived back at home — she sat on it (and then cried inconsolably) — but Jeffrey spent quite a few minutes lying on his back in his bedroom, quietly gazing at it while occasionally tugging on its string. What was he doing?
“I’m just fishing for clouds in the sky, Mommy.”
Can’t help but think of this book:
The Blue Balloon by Mick Inkpen. Yeah, it’s by the same guy who gave us the Kipper books, which I’ve always been kind of meh about. But I really adore The Blue Balloon — basically, it tells the story of a boy who finds a balloon on the street, which turns out to have all kinds of “strange and wonderful” properties. It’s unbreakable, can change shape, and even carries the boy into outer space. Inkpen’s ink-and-watercolor illustrations are simple yet expressive; best of all, he uses the occasional fold-out or pop-up device to show how wonderful a balloon really can be. A storytime read-aloud staple for pretty much every child librarian I know.
Oh, and I HAVE to mention this one. How could I forget it?
Emily’s Balloon by Komako Sakai. This Japanese import has a quiet magic very different from The Blue Balloon. Little Emily is given a balloon while out with her mother. She returns home to play with it, and it slowly becomes a friend — weighted down by one of Emily’s spoons, it bobs along right at her eye-level. Emily makes a flower crown for the balloon, and talks to it in the backyard. But then a gust of wind blows the balloon into a tree, and Emily is distraught. She tearfully describes how she had planned to help the balloon get ready for bed — but then sees the balloon outside her window, is struck by how it reminds her of the moon, and goes to sleep content. Soft yellow-and-grey charcoal illustrations are placed gracefully on the page; not a single stroke is wasted. This was probably my favorite picture book of 2006. Read it to your toddler, and it might become your favorite, too.
This afternoon, while sitting in the front seats of the (parked) car and gazing in the mirror, Jeffrey fiddled with the radio dials and said this:
“Good morning, listeners! The forecast for today is that Jeffrey and Mommy will look in the mirror!”
I’m guessing that he hasn’t figured out that a “forecast” refers to things that are going to happen.
Later, at bedtime:
“Mommy! I can’t go to sleep without Bat Tiger! I need him close to him so he can get snuggles and kisses!”
Here I should explain that Bat Tiger is just that — a stuffed tiger wearing a Batman outfit, the product of a Grandma-sponsored trip to the Build-A-Bear Workshop. I fished Bat Tiger out of the nest of blankets Jeff habitually keeps on his top bunk and placed him on Jeffrey’s pillow.
“Is Bat Tiger a superhero?” I asked.
“No, he’s my assistant,” he replied matter-of-factly. “He helps me build forts, except for one time when he got sick because he didn’t have his goggles.” Jeffrey traces circles around his eyes with his fingers, to show what he meant. Goggles. Goggles?
“Yeah. See, I needed to shave some wood for the fort, and sand and polish it, and Bat Tiger didn’t have his goggles on and his eyes got hurt.”
I love that my son is safety-conscious in his fantasy play. Good old Bat Tiger.
