Absurd Conversation #7,439

Conversation between the boy and myself as shoes were going on everyone to head out to the Truck Playground this beautiful morning:

Boy: The shoe goes on my "foot" [pronounced like "food"]
Daddy: On your what?
Boy: J [our nanny] says "foot" [again like "food" and pointing this time for emphasis]
Daddy: She says it like that because she speaks Polish as her first language. We speak English. And Momma speaks Vietnamese, too.
Boy: I speak Firetruck!
Daddy: Firetruck? What do you say in Firetruck?
Boy: WooOOOOOoooo. WoooOOOOOoooo. [other siren sounds]
Daddy: What does that mean?
Boy: It means we’re going to the Truck Playground. [brief pause] I don’t know what it means.
Daddy: Okay. What language does Q [little sister] speak?
Boy: She doesn’t speak anything. She’s just a baby.

Can't argue with that.

City Nature

When rummaging through the laundry yesterday, a cricket leapt out of the socks and sweatpants. I called the boy over right away to have a look. We’re unaccustomed to bugs in and around the house, so he didn't quite know what to make of it. My own childhood was full of things like crickets and skunks and snakes and the fascination that goes along with them. When I was a bit older than he is now, I checked out the same spider book from the public library at least twelve times in a row. I spent hours understanding the ant lions that waited in their little craters around my babysitter’s porch.

“It’s a real cricket,” he said, taking a few steps back.

A few months ago, a (different?) cricket began chirping in our bathroom just before the boy was to brush his teeth. I ushered him slowly in since we have to go far away to hear such things. He insisted on touching me the whole time, and we talked through the what and the why. He managed to convince himself that the cricket was friendly and the sound was pleasant, and I think he actually missed it when it finally went quiet. He even held his breath to listen.

But the real, live cricket heading for his room required a bigger backstory to tame. My wife, as always, was ready.

Momma: What’s his name?
Boy: Cricket.
Momma: Does the cricket have a little sister?
Boy: Yes!
Momma: What’s her name?
Boy: “Little Cricket.”
Momma: Does he have a daddy?
Boy: Yes!
Momma: What’s his name?
Boy: His name is cricket, too.
Momma: What’s his mommy’s name?
Boy: Her name is cricket, too. And he’s got a brown balloon. Q [our daughter] doesn't want to eat him.

[For the record: We went for balloons earlier that day; the boy’s was orange and Q’s was green. And Q most likely did want to eat him.]

We agreed that Cricket’s parents were probably worried, so we herded him uneasily into a plastic cup to take outside.


Out back in the park, the cold wind working against us, the boy and I found a suitably leafy spot to make the drop. It felt, just for a moment, oddly like a funeral. The feeling obviously wasn’t mutual, though--he quickly popped off the lid and turned over the cup, sending the bug kicking into the brown grass. I could see it head deep.

Heading in, we talked about seeing him again when the weather warmed and what he will have for breakfast when he gets home. Turns out that crickets like french toast, too.

"I hope the scoops are working today"

We're all basically still coming back from a stomach bug that ran through our house quickly but meanly. My wife has managed to avoid actually getting sick, but she has had to play nurse to the rest of us--first my son throwing up into her lap, then me (not on her, thankfully), then the girl (on her again). Even our nanny can't avoid it, and she has to take a day off. The food stays down after about two days, but during that time eating still feels like a dare.

Once we're feeling up to it, the boy and I head outside just to be outside, to exchange the old air around us with some fresher stuff. The air certainly is brisk; winter has returned with a vengeance after a teasing shock of spring melted the record snow in a couple of days. He wears his new blue coat that keeps him "toasty," and we walk along the empty playground with nowhere in particular to go.

We end up in the Irish Hunger Memorial, an interesting exhibit (for lack of a better word) that sits right across from the Mercantile Exchange and the Embassy Suites. It consists of a ramp up into a roofless replica of an Irish farmhouse and then up further still to an overlook where you can see the Hudson, wide and probably a little salty from the close ocean, stretch in both directions. The ramp into the memorial is more like a tunnel, with glowing quotes on the wall and voices telling stories about famine and death. It's a bit of a mystery to me why he likes it so much (particularly this tunnel), but it's close and has a nice view, so we're regulars.

When the cold starts to make us forget our fingers, I suggest that we go into the local movie theater building and watch the construction of yet another luxury high rise. He's been into trains for some time now, but big machines that dig and haul and lift still capture his wonder, and we can ride the escalators up (which he's extremely good at now by himself) to the big window and the heater where we can stay as long as we want. He likes this idea (we've done it quite a bit these cold days), and says, "I hope the big excavator scoops are working today."

I know a little about child development, and his response catches me a bit. There's this big cognitive leap that happens around age three and a half or four when kids grasp that other people can have their own beliefs--and in particular can have false beliefs. Prior to that leap, children fail what's often called the false belief task. A common test goes like this: A kid sees mommy and daddy put, say, candy in a drawer. After daddy leaves, the kid then sees mommy move the candy to a cupboard. When daddy returns, the kid will almost always say that daddy believes the candy is in the cupboard. Around age four, though, the kid will almost always say (correctly) that daddy mistakenly believes the candy is in the drawer. The change really is profound--it's the point at which kids become their own thinkers and when they begin to recognize the faults that we're all prone to.

But back to hoping. At not quite three, the boy hasn't yet made this leap, of course, but he's on his way. He's been using the word 'hope' a lot these days, and as a parent it makes me a little nervous. To hope for something is to want something to happen, to anticipate that the world will be wonderful when the right time or place arrives. Adults know all too well, though, that hopes have a way of going unfulfilled--we even tend to say that they've been "dashed," a rather violent end to something so powerfully happy. I worry, then, now that he's hoping, about my son's running into this blunt fact.

We're lucky. At the top of the escalators we find a big wheel loader scooping dirt into a dumptruck, and the tall red crane pulls a towering steel beam up into place while a bunch of men guide its base with a thick rope. This is the other side of hope that I want him to know, that hopes can be met. Transfixed and smiling, he watches the work below until it's time for lunch, and we bundle back up for the windy walk home. I carry him part of the way because I still can (he still wants me to), and I think to myself that I have to tell my wife about this when we get home. I wonder also what he's thinking, and though I'm not sure, I hope that it's of good things to come.

Record Snow Day

The record-breaking snow begins for us when the boy notices a garbage truck wearing a plow.

When the snow actually comes hard and fast, the garbage men get their revenge by burying the trash cans on every New York City street corner in lumpy piles of snow. And the snow certainly does come--the storm dropped the most snow on us since whoever does it started keeping records (about 1847, I think they said on the news), which is to say around 27 inches. At one point, it falls at 5 inches an hour, about as fast as snow can fall. I know as much as I do about this because the television is awash with this story where everyone knows the plot and few if anyone gets hurt.

We have these big windows in our living/dining room looking out on a park behind our building, and both the boy and the girl love to press their faces to the glass, waiting for something to catch their attention. (Grandpa and grandma seem to rather like just looking out, too, whenever they visit.) On Saturday morning before the storm, the possibility of snow is too abstract to be distracting, and so they content themselves with passing birds or the dogs pulling their owners along the pavers. But by the time we go up for dinner at our friends on the 14th floor that afternoon, we can't see across the Hudson river. And by the time we get home that evening, before baths and books and stories, the park below has become a fuzzy memory.

They both get up pretty early Sunday, and nobody is immune from the wonder of the footprintless snow. The Parks Department has fenced off the grass for the winter, turning the park into a luscious tray of cupcakes. The boy can't wait to get outside so that he can throw snowballs at me (so he tells me), and we pile on the layers and head out, including momma and the girl. The wind is brisk and the girl is tired, so my wife takes her in after big flakes get caught in her long eyelashes for the first time.

Some of the sidewalks have been scooped but some haven't. It's too cold to pack for throwing, and the boy instead leaps into the fresh piles, coming up with a smile and a face full of snow. Everywhere I turn I can step knee-deep into the stuff. He gets me to sit down in a tall drift to make a chair, and I'm right there in his joy. We soon go around to the front of the building and cross the street to the playground. It's inundated, but that doesn't stop us from going down all the slides and across the bridges. The concrete elephant that will spray him in May is now only a hint of trunk poking out of a cloud. Slogging up the stairs to go down the yellow slide, my son tells me, "Take a big step, daddy. You can do it, daddy."

And he's right.

When the cold insinuates its way past all our layers, we go inside. It's a struggle to get him in, despite his having mittens filling up with snow. I'm able, somehow, to convince him that it will all still be around later and that we can come back outside to make more "prints." Inside we drink hot cocoa and talk with momma and the girl about our pink cheeks and our artic adventures. He says, while gazing tiredly out the large window, "I hope that it's winter for a long time."

By the end of the week, the weather will warm and the snow will disappear rather quickly--so warm and so quickly, in fact, that even he will be dreaming instead of the possibilities of spring.

Happy "Tet"!

We wake up this morning to a gray sky and wet sidewalks running through the park. Wonderfully, it's after 7 a.m., now that the girl has settled into sleeping right up until--or even past--sunrise. This development is rather new, and I'm beginning to look forward to the day when my eyes no longer burn when I blink.

Today is "Tet" or New Year, probably the most important holiday in Vietnam. The year is new (roughly) according to the Chinese calendar, which begins with the second new moon after the winter solstice. It's a pretty loud day across Asia--fireworks for days and much, much eating--but we intend to observe it with the usual amount of house noise. The girl, now nine months, has learned to make this sound where she sings a note and then wobbles the back of her hand in her mouth to make it go up and down. She gets a kick out of it, and it does trigger smiles around the room. The boy has his own chorus of sounds, though most of them are quirky statements and performances. Yesterday, he looked out our big windows and sighed, "I don't see Poland." This is completely understandable, of course; Poland is rather far away. We can't even see Brooklyn, in fact, what with all the recent apartment buildings being thrown up around our neighborhood. Oh, yes, and his babysitter is Polish.

This Tet brings in the year of the dog--my year. Supposedly dogs embody loyalty, stubbornness, and honesty, and they're known to keep secrets. Tradition has it (I think) that when a year of your sign arrives your year reverses--that is, if you've just come off a bad year, you're due for success. I consider this good news since we've just come through a hard year, an unfair year, a year seemingly eager to teach us the surprisingly many ways in which we can't quite have what we want. That said, our girl did arrive all big and true in 2005, breaking through what my family (and especially the women who have married into it) call "The Curse of Boys." Child after child, all male--my brother and his wife have three--but somehow our little one made it through.

We head out for a walk and eventually to the grocery store. My wife makes pho for the Big Events such as Tet and the Fall of Saigon, and the boy loves it. Not long after he left the jar and the bottle behind, he would eat as much pho as you would put in front of him. He still goes through two bowls, even on the days when he decides that eating really is optional and realizes what kind of rise he can get out of daddy when he leaves his plate full. Anyway, we have this double stroller called a Phil & Ted, and the kids ride together bunk-bed style. The girl usually rides on the bottom, but these days the boy wants to walk, which means she gets to ride up top, all smiles and kicking legs. The groceries have to go below.

Back home, we realize that somehow the sliver of ginger didn't make it, so the boy and I decide to head back out to a small local grocery. We need ginger, and now the boy informs us that we need Tet treats as well. He's been interested in this book about Tet that we gave him for Christmas (ironic, I suppose), in which mice go to the market for good things to eat during the fireworks. He's decided that this day's treat should be a "Thomas the Tank Engine Cake," but I tell him that however wonderful that might be, we'll be lucky to find one of those delicious but pre-packaged cakes in the cardboard box with the little teasing cellophane window. We put on his yellow slicker and his boots, anticipating some swell puddles. Outside, the water hasn't pooled like we thought it would, but the walk still does us both some good. I open the door for him, and he gives me a "Thank you, daddy." He shows me the tomatoes ("you squeeze, squeeze, squeeze them to make pizza pie"), wants me to smell the limes. They have ginger but no cakes to speak of, so we settle for a soft mango.

Back home, the warm house itself smells good enough to eat. The girl is already working through some rice noodles, my wife is busy over the broth steaming on the stove. She ladles it over the glassy white noodles flecked with cilantro and onion. We all sit. We each work to the bottom of a bowl, then another, the girl can't get enough of the noodles she picks up herself. The soup loosens me, and the year ahead begins to seem like it might have room for us. This will be a year of change--the girl will walk and talk, the boy will likely start school, and our careers, such as they are, may take on radically new shapes. The year, if only for a meal, truly seems new.

Happy Tet!