N:  (Upon receiving a snack:)  Daddy, what are Lifesaver Gummies?

J:  Gelatinized or pectinized fruit juice.  Juice and sugar in a hydrocolloidal substrate.

N:  (Pause)  Mommy, what are Lifesaver Gummies?

(Tadcu, cue Dave Lolliger story.)

Niall has been sick with a bad cold.  I took him to the doctor on Friday.  He was absolutely perfect, with tea party manners.

Dramatis Personae:
N: Niall
Dr: Pediatrician
J: Joshua

(Doctor enters)

N:  I am here today because I have a cold.  Is this the right doctor for a cold?

Dr:  Yes, this is the right doctor.  I’m Dr. Musavelar.

N:  My name is Niall.  That’s spelled N-I-A-L-L.  How is your name spelled?

Dr:  You can call me “Sadah” [ph].  That’s spelled S-A-D-A-T.  (Holds light up:)  Do you know what this is?

N: ???

J:  Remember, it’s to look in your ears.

Dr: May I look in your ears?

N: (Timidly) OK.  (Clenches face, squeezes eyes shut, and grits his teeth, but remains absolutely still.)

OK, precious enough?  On the ride home, he saw a sign that said “Dentistry” (he’s four.)

N:  Daddy, do you know what a dentist is?

J:  What is it?

N:  A dentist is a kind of doctor who counts your teeth.

He has signs of the early onset of pneumonia in his right lung, BTW.  If you post here, I’ll pass on your best wishes.

Sneaky way to get lots of good stuff into a four-year-old:  Juice together

* 4 carrots
* 1 orange, peeled
* 1 grapefruit, peeled
* 1 Fuji apple
* 1 orange bell pepper

Very sweet, very yummy, very orange, and gets the nutrients of a ripe bell pepper into his system, which otherwise would be very difficult.

Niall, to Jenn:  Do you like sweet gopher poop?

Jenn:  Er, no.

Joshua:  Mommy only likes sour gopher poop.

Niall, to Jenn:  Do you like sour gopher poop?

Jenn:  I really don’t like any gopher poop.

Niall:  Have you tried gopher poop?

Jenn:  Er, no.

Niall:  How do you know you don’t like gopher poop if you’ve never tried it?

N: Were you spraying ants?

J:  Yes.

N:  Why were there ants in the house?

J:  Because it rained.

N:  Why are there ants in the house when it rains?

J:  Do you like our roof?

N:  Yes.

J:  So do the ants.

N:  Why?

J:  Because a raindrop is very big for an ant.

N:  Why?

J:  Are ants big?

N:  Yes.

J:  They’re big?

N:  Yes.

J:  Really?

N:  Well — some ants, like Mommy and Daddy ants, are big.

I’m not entirely sure what he was imitating (I have guesses), but Niall laid out all of his toy foods and went grocery shopping.

“I need a hot dog,” he said.  He picked one up, and in sincere mock adult horror, he cried, “I can’t have this one!  This one is twenty dollars!”

He picked up another, identical toy hot dog.  “I can buy this one,” he says with relief.  “This one’s one dollar.”

Niall is getting very close to declaring his personal vegetarianism.  I’ve been wondering if he would, and kind of expecting that he would, but trying not to push him.  He is a very sensitive soul, and the recent business with the cats has exposed him to death for really the first time, and he can generalize pain now, so the layout is pretty straightforward from here.

He has told me before that he eats fish, but not real fish.  Then he told me that he doesn’t eat fish with faces (this is, I swear, completely unprompted.)  Last night I ordered dinner for him.  He was asking me what I had eaten before.  He asked me if I had eaten a ‘gator.

N:  A real ‘gator?!?

J:  Yes.

N:  A whole ‘gator?!?

J:  No.

N:  And have you eaten fish?

J:  Yes.  So have you.

N:  (Big pause.)  Real fish?

J:  Yes.  When you eat fish, you’re eating real fish.  Usually.

N:  Have you eaten really big fish?

J:  Sometimes.  But I try not to eat many big fish.

N:  Why?

J:  Because there aren’t very many of them, and if we eat them all, they’ll be gone.

N:  Gone?

J:  Yes.  If we eat them up.  But Mommy doesn’t eat any fish.

N:  Why?

J:  I think because she doesn’t want to hurt the fish.

N:  It hurts the fish?

J:  Well, yes.  But I don’t think fish hurt too much.  (Alan Rickman intones in the background, “The benefits of a Nirvana education.”)

N:  (Hard drive grinding, grinding, grinding away.  He’s far away.  Then the light comes back on.)  I don’t want to hurt ammamulls.

J:  Not cows?

N:  No.

J:  Not pigs?

N:  No.

J:  Not birds?

N:  No.

J:  Not fish?

N:  No!

J:  OK, then that’s being called a vegetarian.  You can tell people that, or just tell them that you don’t eat animals.

N:  (Trying it out.)  I don’t eat ammamulls.

J:  OK.

N:  (With determination.)  But I do eat things made from ammamulls.

J:  The animal has to die for you to make food from it.

N:  You have to die the animals?

J:  Yes.

N:  You have to die the animals?

J:  Yes.

N:  How do they die the animals?

J:  (OK, really didn’t want it to come to this.  So forgive me for this one, Jenn.)  Well, usually they shoot them in the head.

N:  They shoot them in the head?

J:  Yes.  Cows, anyway.

N:  I don’t want to hurt cows.

J:  OK.

N:  I don’t eat ammamulls.

J:  OK.

N:  (With determination.)  But I do eat things made from ammamulls.

J:  OK.

Niall has two sets of favorite music.  System of a Down — seriously, System of a Down — and the most banal set of children’s CDs that someone started calling “Children’s Music” to him.  The latter are insipid, major-key jaunts on a Casio and nylon-stringed guitar, with a bad tenor and a bunch of breathy children singing the most profoundly weird songs.

I loathe them.  I would have said, under other circumstances, that the producers should slip under a freight train for producing, distributing, and charging for these, but Niall really, really does like it, and sometimes likes the same song over and over again.  Annoying, but not quite as annoying as his screaming his head off in the car.  Usually.

One time, Jenn and I were driving along listening to one of these atrocious CDs, and I began questioning the surrealistic lyrics in progressively off-color but G-rated fashion.  Jenn was laughing for a while, then chuckling.  But the one that got her to snap was the following:

Song: Did you ever see a lassie, a lassie, a lassie?  Did you ever see a lassie go this way and that?

Me: Is this one about a girl who goes both ways?

Jenn: STOP!

I was watching Niall today.  A couple of cute stories:

We were talking, and to say a silly word, I said “Aardvark”.  He didn’t know what an aardvark is, which is reasonable.  I asked him, and he came up with a creative answer.  He held up a yellow rain boot, and explained that an aardvark is a kind of shoe, and described some of its characteristics.  I told him it was an animal and asked him if he’d like to see a picture.  He did, and he thought it was cool.

I asked him to guess what it ate.  I forget his guess, but I told him that it mostly ate ants and termites.  Our exchange follows:

N:  Can I eat ants and termites?

J:  Well, they’re really not the best food for little boys.

N:  Why?

J:  Well, some people do eat ants.  Sometimes they cover them in chocolate.  It’s just that they’re better food for aardvarks.

N:  Can I have chocoloate-covered ants?

J:  Maybe.

N:  Can I have chocolate-covered ants today?

J:  That may be beyond my powers of procurement.

N:  How about a chocolate-covered cookie?

—————————

Then, we were playing:

N:  Can you put you on your shoulders?

J:  Can I put me on my shoulders?

N:  No.  Can you put me on my shoulders.

J:  Can I put you on your shoulders?

N:  No!  Can you put me on your shoulders?

J:  Yes.

Pronouns are hard.

Jenn and I had just switched places, Jenn replacing me under Niall’s nylon pup-tent shaped like a locomotive.  Niall was the other occupant.  Jenn is claustrophobic.

“I’m kind of freaking out in here,” Jenn says to me.

“Why?” Niall overhears.

“Your mommy doesn’t like closed spaces.  Your daddy does.”  A pause.  “When daddy goes cave exploring, do you want to go with him?”

He looks at me and regards me carefully for fully ten seconds.  He doesn’t want to disappoint me.  “Ummm.  Ummm.  There might be bears.  I’m not sure if I want to go.”

Jenn and I exchange startled looks.

“That’s true,” she says.  “Sometimes bears do live in caves.”

Suddenly he’s not sure if we’re pulling his leg or not.

“Silly!” he accuses.  “Bears aren’t real!”

“Oh, yes, they’re quite real,” Jenn explains.  “In the sense that they are actual animals living on the planet.”

“Yes, bears aren’t monsters, they are real animals,” I elaborate.

A puzzled look.  “Why?”

I think about that for a second.  It’s a really good question.  Why are bears real?  Not, “Why did they evolve?” but “Why did humans allow carnivorous, predatory, terrestrial megafauna to survive into the 21st century?”  A fitting question for Jared Diamond.  Were bears just too ferocious, too tenacious, or too remote, maybe?

I was hanging out with Niall tonight (my son, aged three) and I was, with no particular purpose, singing, “Pop goes the weasel.”

Niall matches my inflection and tune, and sings, “Down goes the hooker.”

My head spins around.  “WHAT did you just say?”

“Down goes the hooker.”

So I adjust myself to see what he has in his hands.  He has a toy tractor with a winch and line, on the end of which is a hook.  He’s lowering it down.  The hooker.  Down it goes.  The hooker.

So here I go, passing it on to you, and getting my site blocked by family filters, because of a toy tractor and a semantically-confused three-year-old.

…so here is a link.

Niall and I were reading The Very Hungry Caterpillar, which leads up tensely to an exciting ending.  The ending is the protagonist’s metamorphosis.  I sound like a literary snob.  No, the protagonist doesn’t undergo an emotional restructuring (presumably).  The character literally metamorphoses.  It’s a caterpillar.  Hence the title.

We get to the last page and Niall, who has been building in excitement, shouts out “And a BUTTERFLY comes out of the raccoon!”

Another quick one.  Niall and I were in the car, stopped at a light.  He shouts impatiently from the back seat “The light is red!  Go!”

Niall climbed up on the coffee table today.

“What am I doing up on the table?” he asked, unprompted.

“That’s right, what are you doing on the coffee table?” countered Jenn.

“I’m on the table.  I need to get off the table,” he said.

Many popular male first names commonly thought of as being Irish, such as Patrick, Mick and Sean, actually originated with the English and the French-Danish-Norwegian Normans, who invaded Ireland in the 12th century…. Freya Verstraten, a doctoral postgraduate student of history at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland

“A name like Seán is usually thought of as typically Irish; however, it is an Irish adaptation of the Biblical name John, and this version of the name was used in Ireland only after the invasion,” [said Verstraten]. “There are many other names people consider to be Irish, although they are in fact Irish versions of Anglo-Norman names. Séamus, for example, is the Irish form of James.”

At around the time of the invasion, popular Irish male first names included Diarmaid, Donnchadh, Cormac, Cathal, Niall, Brian, and Aodh…. — Discovery Channel News

Niall, my boy who just turned one, was practicing spatial skills today. He likes to take objects and pack them in containers, and to unpack containers. There was an empty half-liter plastic water bottle on the coffee table and a large plastic iced tea glass, and he was holding on to the former and trying to fit it into the latter, but he was trying to put it in sideways. I worked with him on it for a while and showed him how to insert it so it fit. Then we turned it into a game. He would take the bottle out of the glass, turn it around 180 degrees, then reinsert it. Then we would clap together and I would praise him.

We did this probably twenty times, as I was calling to Jenn to come in and witness it. She did get to see it, and she started playing the game with him. He played successfully for a couple turns, then seemed to forget the trick and tried reinserting it sideways. One time he tried putting it in, then pressed really, really hard to get it to go in, then lost hold of it and it skittered across the table. He looked up at me expectantly and started clapping. It was the funniest thing, as it looked like he was trying to pull a fast one — “Now we clap, right?”

It was a lot of fun. For a while he was trying to hold both pieces to do the insertion, but his arms aren’t long enough to hold the glass away from his body sufficiently, so he looked at me and very clearly, through body language, asked me to hold the glass for him. It’s amazing how much can be communicated and learned without spoken language.

My wife and baby are back from twelve days’ vacation and they both remember me!

I’m thinking of writing a book called So Many Bunnies at the Scotch Whisky Distillery.  I’ve got the beginning worked out:

1 was named Ashton.  He slept in the mash tun.

2 was named Beryl.  She slept in a barrel.

3 was named Carol.  She slept in a barrel.

4 was named Darryl.  He slept in a barrel.

5 was named Errol.  He slept in a barrel.

There are a lot of barrels, you see.

OK, that’s a point-oh-one percenter.  The intersection of the set of scotch aficionados and the set of parents of infants.

We could go on. 16 could be Pete, who slept in the peat. 19 could be Sherry, whose butt slept in the sherry butt. And we could rewrite 4 to be “Daniel, who slept in the hogshead.”

OK, that’s a 1 x 10^-7 percenter.  I’ll stop now.

There are five new baby pictures, at the bottom of the list.

The new garden page isn’t ready yet, but I wanted to share with you the absurdity that is the kabocha squash plant. It now has seven squashes growing on it. Keep in mind that all the pictures are from a single plant, started outdoors from a single seed.

It’s interesting how people will get fixated on a specific and forget the general. In the evenings, I’ll go in to check to see if the baby’s still breathing, a reflex the parents out there will probably understand. I’ll usually leave the light off so that I won’t disturb him. Just now I went in to check, feeling for him in the relative dark, but he was tossing and turning. I thought, geez, I wish he’d stop moving so that I could tell if he was still breathing or not.

New pictures of him are available.

A new picture of Niall:

For my family members (who have graciously not been nagging), more baby pictures.

This is a joyous post.  On Friday, 03 October 2003, our son was born.

Named Niall Henry David McGee, he came into the world with a minimum of fuss in a quick and easy delivery after only ten hours of labor.  He was an alert, curious, quiet, 7 pound 6.4 ounce baby boy.  His favorite activities at present are sucking and farting, and to his credit he is quite good at both.

On Sunday they let us go home.  We were home for ten hours before we found he was running a fever, so back to the hospital it was.  It turns out he was dehydrated, and may have had a urinary tract infection (we are waiting on the results of the urine culture.)  Both are being quickly sorted out, through antibiotics and supplementation of his feeding with formula, once we found a nipple that he liked.

Jenn and I are happy but very tired.  I will keep you posted as things develop.  In the meantime, some pictures: