Iron man

We all know that it's Dash's long-held ambition to be a metal-maker when he grows up, so that he can fashion jetpacks and Iron-Man-like suits to his heart's content. So when we visited a replica Elizabethan ship at Roanoke Island on our vacation, and then found it came complete with model settlement site with real people doing real jobs like, for example, a real live blacksmith, he was pretty thrilled.

He was fascinated to see the forge in action (while the rest of us wilted in the record-breaking midday heat), and overjoyed when the smith presented him with a newly hammered, bent, black, iron nail.

Dash (far right, dodging the camera) in the settlement village. The forge is that structure at the back.

The nail is his new most prized possession. If you asked him to chose between his blue light saber and the nail, he might be hard pressed to answer. But, just like the light saber, he keeps misplacing the nail, and at an inch and a half long, it's that much harder to find.

With a quarter, for scale

The first night, he took the nail to bed with him. So sweet.

Not so sweet at 4.15 when he appeared by our bed with a piercing, "Daddy! Daddy!" I took him on, since I was half-awake anyway (probably just recently back from Mabel's bed; Mabel's not sleeping well just now), and B clearly was not.

"Daddy's asleep. It's the middle of the night. Tell me."
"No, I have to tell him."
"No, tell me. What is it?"
"I can't find my naaaaaiiiil."
"Right."
"..."
"Okay, I'll tell Daddy, and in the morning we'll find the nail. I promise."
"Can I get into your bed?"
Sigh. "Up you come."

Shortly thereafter I was called away again, and left him snoring peacefully beside his insensible father. The nail was located in the morning. He's only lost it several million more times since then, but not, so far, in the middle of the night again. Today he got a small plastic pill box to keep it in, which will make it about 2% easier to find, perhaps.

In its box

Backpedal

I have to go back and tell you about the party.

What happened was this. I wrote a blog post, in which I talked myself into hosting some kind of Star-Wars party. Then I thought I'd better get my act together quickly before the madness wore off, so I sent some e-vites. I even came up with a witty title: Dash's Sith (I mean 6th) Birthday Party. Then I came back to look at my blog and found that a very lovely, clever, crafty, friend had offered some help with games and such.

So she sent me a page full of ideas, and I said thank you very much and followed her instructions to the letter. It worked out great, and I can take no credit for any of it.

In case you too want to have a low-effort Star Wars party, here are some of the things we did.

We made light sabers for everyone out of halved pool noodles with grey duct tape and blue electrical tape on the ends. (Here are some very detailed instructions.) I made sure they were all blue or green so everyone could be a Jedi.

Then we constructed a very simple obstacle course where the kids had to limbo under a pole (broom handle on top of stacked boxes), walk along a line of tape on the floor, crawl through a tunnel, grab a light saber, and finally give Darth Vader a good whack. (I picked up a 99c Vader mask at the party store and we put it on a balloon on top of a black raincoat and my long black skirt. Nobody doubted its authenticity.)

Next, they had to free Han Solo. I printed a picture of the lovely Han, laminated him with clear packing tape, and froze him in ice in a baking pan. (Don't forget to start this one a couple of days before the party. Freeze a layer of water first, then put in your laminated picture, then one or two more layers on top.) We could see him, but not too clearly, which I thought was just right.

Because it was raining, we started with spoons and little bowls of warm water, but it wasn't much fun. So we went outside anyway and propped Han up in the back of a handy kiddie car under the eaves of our front door. Then we raided our stash of water pistols and the real fun began.

 Sucess at last!

Then we stopped for cake and Yoda Soda. The Yoda Soda was an ice-cream float made of lime sherbet sorbet and Sprite. They also had cheese and crackers and strawberries and melon and chocolate cornflake buns and ice-cream cones.

Afterwards, it was time for fighting stormtroopers - everyone took turns to throw balled-up socks at these menacing little guys, and some lightsaber practice where you try to keep a balloon up in the air with your lightsaber. Mostly there was just bashing each other over the head with pool noodles, but that was okay too.

And then it was time to go home, with a certificate (you can get one here) and a pool noodle and a dollar-store Star Wars jigsaw for everyone; and Mabel, for one, slept until 3am before waking up. Apparently we need to have a Star Wars party every day.

Disappointment

The boy across the road, who is in second grade, said as he passed us on our way home from school today that he'd play light sabers with Dash. "As soon as I've done my homework," he told us.

Once we were home, after a quick milk-and-cookie (and can I just say that I'm thrilled to see my kids both drink a glass of milk and eat a homemade cookie, because so many things would have stopped Dash from doing that simple thing a while ago - he would only drink milk if it was chocolate; the walnuts I snuck into the cookies would have sent him running a mile), Dash hooked his light saber to his belt, donned his bike helmet for protection, and we all went out to wait for M to finish his homework. (Dash doesn't have homework on Fridays.) After twenty minutes, Dash was lying on the chilly grass, Mabel was climbing the rhodedendron, and I was getting cold. I suggested we go inside again and watch out the window to see when M would be ready to play. Dash reluctantly agreed.

After another half hour or so inside, with Dash bugging me to look out the window every minute (while I told him to go and look out the lower window in the other room, but he was afraid he'd be missing something if he didn't have the full range of views), Dash suddenly announced "He's coming out!"

Hooray. "...with his dad and his brother. His dad's getting into the car..." Dash continued. I looked out the window. There was no sign of anyone, except the kid's mother coming outside with something that the others had evidently forgotten, and deciding not to get into her car and drive after them with it. No sign of M.

"I think he's gone with his dad, Dash. I'm sorry."

Poor Dash was quietly crushed. I could tell because he didn't say anything. He didn't cry, but all the excitement had drained away and he was just a kindergartener who wasn't getting to play light sabers with a second-grader again today.

There's always tomorrow. I hope M comes out to play tomorrow.

Anchors

Yesterday evening I sent Dash upstairs to put on his sweatpants for karate. A couple of minutes later a shriek pierced the air, calling Daddy to help - the sort of shriek that normally indicates he can't find his socks, or that Mabel has broken some vital piece of lego. Daddy was in the bathroom. I was annoyed with Dash for being unable to complete even the most simple of tasks without needing parental intervention, and ignored him.

A couple of minutes later, B headed upstairs to see what the fuss was about. He found poor Dash standing, Atlas-like, under his tipping-over chest of drawers, wondering when he would be saved. He had pulled all four drawers out, and, just as I had envisioned a couple of weeks ago when I realised the chest was not anchored to the wall and cautioned him not to do that, the whole thing hadn't needed much more than a gentle tug to tip over. Luckily, Dash is, after all, a superhero, so he was not squashed like a bug as my imagination had had him.

The chest of drawers is now anchored to the wall. And I think we need to talk about safety words with Dash so that we can all tell the difference between "Aaaaaghh! My favourite jeans are not in the drawer!" and "Aaaaghhhh! This time it's serious!"

Introducing Dash, and some new superheroes

Monkey - no, I think it's time for an upgrade: Dash. His new name is Dash. Monkey isn't really "him" any more, and in my travels on the Internet I have noticed that far too many other bloggers, in a fit of originality, have dubbed their offspring Monkey. I will try not to make this too confusing for you.

Dash, then, has never shown any great artistic talent. This is not terribly surprising: I take more after my can't-draw-a-straight-line-with-a-ruler mother than my architect and sometime watercolourist father, and B will tell you that he reached the zenith of his artistic heights with a pencil drawing of a blue-tit at the age of ten. (That's a bird. Really. Stop looking at me like that.) So while it would be nice for my kids to take after their maternal grandfather, the odds are mostly against it. But sometimes, Dash surprises me. It's not that he can't draw, it's just that most of the time he's uninspired to put pencil to paper.

The other day the bigger boys on our road told Dash he could maybe, perhaps, be in their superhero club. These boys are second-graders, seven-year-olds, and Dash dearly wants to impress them. I think his superhero knowledge is standing to him in this respect, as he can discuss Wolverine and Iron-Man and the finer points of Thor's hammer-flinging abilities with the best of them. Immediately after the ensuing battle involving a light saber, a Captain America shield, and possibly some sticks - I didn't step in because at least everyone was still wearing their bike helmets, which I think is an excellent spin-off of all this safety-consciousness we have these days - Dash rushed indoors (dashed, even - see how good this name is?) and sat at the desk, demanding a clean piece of paper and rooting for a pencil.

In the next couple of minutes, and again later on, he came up with the following four new superheroes to show "The Boys". (I'll translate for you, because it's possible you can't read his writing.)

 Slick shot. He, um, shoots things. Slickly?

 Slurp Buzz. He has snakes' tongues coming out of his hands.

LightningBoltGrip. His hands are lightning bolts. Obviously.

And Blast-Four. You can probably read that yourself.

It's been a while since I subjected you to a sample of his artwork. You can really see how he's come along. Okay, so the humanoids aren't exactly DaVinci-esque, and I'm not sure why so many of them are cloven-hoofed, but what I really love about these are the names, and the fact that he sat down and so industriously and dedicatedly came up with them, and asked me how to spell the words and wrote them so well with very little input from me.

This is just one more of those times. The ones when your child acts like every other child, but because you've been there all along, seen him from the days when all he could do was suck and burp, watched him crawl and walk and stumble along the way and keep going - because you've been watching the whole time, it just seems amazing.

Mind games

I brought Mabel to bed tonight at 6.30, since she wasn't fit for human consumption. Or else she was all too fit for human consumption, and bed was the only way to avoid her ending up in neat joints in the freezer. B had taken Monkey to soccer, so there was nothing else going on, and she was pretty happy to just alternate nursing with chatting to me for 40 minutes or so. Every now and then I'd come down and make some vague gesture towards cleaning up the toys or boiling water for pasta, but mostly we just hung out.

By the time the boys were home, she was feeling better enough to be allowed back into general circulation, and I actually got to eat my dinner in relative peace, reading a book, molested only slightly by the complicated game of Superman versus Lex Luthor with a butterfly in there somewhere going on around me. (Monkey got a late birthday present today of a Superman costume, and there were a pair of butterfly wings for Mabel. Monkey was quite interested in the wings too, since they're a flying mechanism - the pink and sparkles and fluffy stuff didn't seem to put him off at all.)

But really. This here above-pictured be-yoo-ti-ful butterfly. Yesterday she was tired after a congested night, and she took it out on her friends - and distant acquaintances - at music class by bopping them on the head at will. They didn't even have to be looking at her funny - she'd seek them out just to do it. This evening she hit Monkey hard with a glockenspiel beater, for no good reason, as he always tells me (but this time it was true) - those things are hard, and boingy - and then scratched him for good measure. Then she dumped the water out and tried to dump the towels in - the two things guaranteed to enrage me at bathtime.

It occurred to me that if she had a new sibling about now, as so many 2.5-year-olds do, and her brother did before her, we'd be worrying that we'd ruined our erstwhile darling girl by bringing an alien being into the family. But no! Take comfort, parents of newly embiggened brothers and sisters: your darling children were going to go to the dogs anyway. At least for a while.

Monkey let slip earlier today that when he coaxes Mabel to hit him, it's because he wants me to be cross with her. I'm surprised (perhaps impressed) by how calculating this is. I'm definitely impressed by the self-awareness he shows in recognising that this is what he's doing. On the other hand, considering he told me without the least guile, he's not exactly going to get an A in parental manipulation just yet. I'm also glad I decided not to make too big a deal of it when she hurts him if he's literally asking for it, if this is his motivation.

And ... back to the grindstone. She'll be asleep in no time, I'm sure.

<...Crickets...>

Honey milk

"Honey milk. I want honey milk."
"You want honey milk what?"
"Now?"
Sigh.
"What's the magic word?"
"Abracadabra?"
"..."
"Please can I have some honey milk?"
"That's so much nicer. I will make you some honey milk."

The funny thing is, I thought I had invented honey milk, to placate the boy with something sweet and warm and milky that didn't emanate directly from me. It's not something I remember from my childhood, like mashed bananas, or French toast, or a big bowl of Bird's custard. Then I heard that my sister-in-law makes it for my nephews too. I suppose it's pretty obvious, but I wondered if it was some sort of biological knowledge all mothers carry deep in our genes.

We just had friends staying with us. Their son is two months younger than Monkey, and the boys spent the time beating each other up, chasing each other maniacally around the house and over the sofa, wailing for justice because one or other had inflicted a completely unexpected injury, or sitting quietly side by side on the sofa, mesmerised by the swift and judicious application of a Batman DVD by exasperated parents. It was a little tiring. I love having guests, but much like Douglas Adams - who loved to hear the whoosh of deadlines as they went past - I also love the restoration of silence and order when they leave, even though we still have two perfectly noisy and messy children of our own. There's nothing like some variety to make you appreciate the normal.

Almost a week ago, in a fit of productiveness, I strode purposefully towards a shelf to tidy something and smashed my toe forcefully into a chair leg on the way. As I hopped around gasping in agony and trying (as I do sometimes at moments like this) to gauge how much like or unlike the pain of labour and childbirth it was, I cast around in vain for someone else to blame. My children, for callously watching TV as I writhed? My husband for misaligning the chair leg? (It wasn't misaligned.) Sadly, only myself, for not paying attention and/or wearing shoes. But I never wear shoes in the house - I've never broken a toe before. It's not actually broken - Dr Google convinced me that it would be purple all over instead of just one place if that were the case, and I wouldn't be able to walk at all. It's improving slowly, but I've been limping, more or less depending on the recent-ness of follow-up injuries like Monkey jumping on my bare foot in his sandals, or bumping the same toe into the table leg as I stood up (will I never learn? no, apparently) ever since.

My little toes are ridiculous bumps of things, mere carbuncles on the rest of my peculiar little short, wide, high-arched, stumpy-toed feet, with no visible joints to them, just a curve leading leading to the tiniest toenail you've ever seen. On the rare occassions that I go for a pedicure, I always expect the girl to burst out laughing and ask me if I seriously expect her to put polish on that tiny expanse. Possibly she tells all her friends in Korean and all the other salon girls are surreptitiously mocking my tiny pinkie toes as they pass. But they're polite enough not to say anything directly to me, for which I must be grateful.

So here I am, languishing with my bruised foot up, guests gone, house a disaster - but I have no impetus left to clean it, so it can stay that way for a while - Monkey sporting his new, improved (because it actually fits him this time) Spider-Man costume. I like to think that he's less obsessive about it than he would have been if he'd got it, say, this time last year, which was probably about when he started to want one. I can actually get him out of the house in regular clothes still, which is a plus, even if he did leave the swimming-pool changing rooms all Spidey'd up the other day. He now wants us to make him red gloves out of cardboard, no matter how often we explain that cardboard just doesn't sew. He's not a child to take no for an answer; he just asks again. And again. And again, while I'm making dinner. And again, at bedtime. And again, first thing in the morning.

I have no idea where he gets such optimism from.

Obsessions

I may not have mentioned this, but we have a full-blown Spider-Man obsession going on over here. I think this is what three-year-old boys do. When he was two, he quite liked trains, but never developed the mania for wheeled objects, or construction vehicles, or farm animals that some toddlers get. Then, at two and three-quarters, he became obsessed with The Little Mermaid, which we had got for Christmas. Heavily invested. We all took on roles: I was Ariel, the baby was Flounder, Monkey himself was Prince Eric (of course), and most hilariously, B was known as Yucky Octopus, Monkey's name for Ursula the Sea Witch, the villain of the piece. I got quite used to answering to Ariel on the playground, but the culmination was when our Valentine's Day card came back from school dutifully transcribed with the loving message: "To Ariel and Yucky Octopus, love from Prince Eric." The teachers weren't quite sure how we'd take that.

It wore off, I went back to being Mummy some time before the summer, and he decided to call B by his first name instead of Daddy (we're still waiting for that phase to end). But Mermaidgate was quickly replaced by Spider-Man-itis. It all began, I think, with the underpants. In my enthusiasm to toilet train, I bought whatever nasty character-laden underpants excited Monkey's desires. We have Thomas the Tank Engine, Spongebob, Cars, and two sets of Spider-Man. (And some nice plain shorts-style ones that have been rejected out of hand.) This coincided with B finding a small Spidey action figure when out running one day. And then there was a t-shirt on the sale rack in Target, and as a special treat when we were in Germany the belt from H&M ... and thus the costume began to take shape.

Nowadays, full regalia consists of Spider-Man underpants, Spider-Man t-shirt, red long-sleeved top, blue jeans, Spider-Man belt, red-and-blue socks, blue stripey gloves, Spider-Man hat (suddenly H&M is all Spidey-ed up, as if it's not just my kid or something), mask (we caved and got him a mask and web shooter toy thingy after he didn't get to be Spider-Man for halloween), and Spider-Man watch (from Santa). At the moment he keeps his Spider-Man kit - hat, mask, gloves, cape (non-canon, and a bit risky considering what Edna Mode says about capes in The Incredibles) and zoo pen (um?) - in a clear plastic package with a zip that contained fridge-magnet letters or some such. This goes everywhere with Monkey, so that he can transform into Spider-Man at the drop of a hat/tall building. Depending on his mood, it can be very difficult to get him to dress in anything that's not red and/or blue, and the nice brown cords I got for this winter have gone totally unworn.

Until now, any time Monkey has put marker to paper, we've always ended up with an impatient scrawl, a (probably black) swirl of nothing, like as not going through the paper with the force of frustration. But the other day something great happened: he sat down with a piece of paper, took a little time, and found that he could make the pen do what he wanted. And lo, a picture formed, of a blue-and-red man with something extending from each hand...the amazing, astounding, mesmerising, all-powerful Spider-Man.



He is, in fact, going to get a Spider-Man costume for his birthday in April. It arrived the other day, though I haven't actually taken it out of the package yet. I think it's warranted; it's certainly been more than a passing fad. And if he wants to wear it out and about every day, I hope I can let him do that, at least for a while. But I have no illusions that he'll stop pulling out all my red and blue towels and piling them in the middle of the floor with his blue duvet cover and every other red and blue item he can find in the house in order to create the ultimate machine that will turn him into the real deal: Spider-Man in both looks and deeds. I just keep telling him that with great power comes great responsibility.