Who can talk?

"Animals: they don't talk. Bugs: they don't talk. Insects: they don't talk," Ulysses pronounced between spoonfuls of blueberry yogurt.


"What about fish?" I asked.


"Oh," he answered sternly. "Fish are animals. So I didn't have to say that."


"What about birds? They're animals, I guess," I said, thinking I'd be chastised again for even mentioning them.


"Birds? They can still sing. And whales sing low."


"Yes, that's true."


"Killer whales are evil whales," he added.


A few moments later: "Sometimes aliens come to earth. And dinosaurs" -- he raised his arms above his head -- "They're these gigankik animals."


"Do they talk?"


"Mm-mm,"he responded in the negative.


"What about aliens?"


"Yes. They're animals from out of space. But they can talk. They talk like they're broken. They talk like breakdancers. There are lots of different aliens. Aliens can be good or evil. Aliens can have a plasma gun, only. An alien's favorite rocket ship is a flying saucer. Aliens can be brave."


"When they talk, what do they say?"


"I don't know. Aliens are only in out of space."

Ulysses' Nutrition Facts

Image via Wikipedia

U: Nutrition is eating good food. Like vegetables. That's nutrition. Good guys like to eat good food.

V: So what do bad guys eat?

U: Oh! Bad guys don't want good people to eat good food.


V: What do they want them to eat?


U: Bad guys just want everyone to eat fructose.

Ulysses' Science Facts: The octopus

Image via Wikipedia

U: Do you know what an octopus is? An octopus is an animal with a whole lot of legs. Lots and lots of legs.

V: How many?

U: Oh! Thousands and thousands of legs.
 
V: I thought they just had eight.

U: Eight? No! They have a lot more than that.
Thousands. Do you know what an octopus eats?

V: What?

U: An octopus eats birds. And do you know why an octopus eats birds?

V: Why?

U: Because they're soooo delicious! It goes up into the air and gets the bird and eats it.

V:  Do octopuses fly?

U: Octopuses? Of course not.

Related articles

• Thinking Like An Octopus (pbs.org)
• Motherhood a killer for octopus that laid eggs at Sidney aquarium (theprovince.com)
• Octopus Cake (dashpunk.com)
• How do we test how smart an octopus is? (greenanswers.com)

Plus, it's the only one with avocados

"Earth is my favorite planet," Ulysses announced.

"What do you like about best about it?" I asked.

I try not to ask why anyone likes what they like. I try instead to invite them to tell me about what they like.

Years ago, in California, I learned that asking "Why do you like x?" can put people on the defensive and shut them down. "Why do you like avocado ice cream?" is really sort of aggressive -- it puts a person in the position of defending the fact that they like what they like. Hence responses along the lines of, "Because I do."

Instead of asking "why," then, we might ask "what." "What do you like best about avocado ice cream?" is more likely to help a person feel more comfortable about sharing. And it's more likely to trigger specifics to come to mind.

In my own thought experiment as I write this, my internal response to "Why do you like avocado ice cream?" was "I just like it. It's good." And I felt a little silly for liking avocado ice cream as I thought it. When I asked myself "What do you like about avocado ice cream?" my answer came as "It's rich and creamy and tasty."

Then I asked myself "What do you like best about avocado ice cream?" Interestingly, this question had the most comfortable feel of all. Somehow it triggered the most specific details immediately. I thought, "Such a pretty shade of deep green. Such a velvety mouthfeel. Such a luscious, silky, aroma. Such a delicate flavor." I could see and feel the scoop digging into the tub. Also I like it that the flavor of avocado goes so nicely with sweet. I never would have thought it!

Back to Earth.

Ulysses answered, without hesitation, "It has green grass and blue water."

.

Your brain on dreams

The Disney Channel's perky PSA showed an assortment of animals and people deep in slumber. The energetic voiceover: "Sleep is how your body rests!" followed by an exhortation to get proper rest.

I was folding clothes nearby when this caught my attention. "Hm," I thought out loud, "I would have said, 'Sleep is how your brain rests.'" I was about to go on that it's perfectly possible to lie down and rest your body without being asleep; that the change in brain state is what makes the difference between sleep and wakefulness.

"No!" said Ulysses, forcefully. "Sleep is how your body rests."

"Sleep is how your brain rests," I repeated, "because your brain waves..."

Ulysses cut me off. "Sleep is how your body rests."

"Sleep is how your brain rests," I said, unhelpfully.

"Sleep is how your body rests."

"Sleep is how your brain rests."

"Sleep is how your body rests."

"OK, OK, whatever," I said.

* * *

At bedtime, I tucked Ulysses in and said, "Now it's sleep time. Shut your eyes and go to sleep."

"Sleep is how your body rests," he reminded me.

"Sleep is how your brain rests," I said.

"No! Your brain has to stay awake."

"Why do you say that?" I asked.

"Your brain has to stay awake, so it can dream."

He kinda had me there.

So safe

"Good guys save the world," Ulysses said.

I looked up from the bamboo cutting board where I was using my favorite carbon-steel knife to dice fine an onion for the mountain of paprikash I was preparing for supper. Inches away, several pounds of chicken crackled vehemently against the intense heat of the flat, shallow sauteuse and of one of our biggest skillets. To save time, I had filled up multiple pans for the pre-browning. The over-the-stove vent was turned on, and it pulled lustily, if not all that effectively, at the fine oil mist that escaped up through the mesh of the spatter guards covering the pans.

"What's that?" I asked.

Ulysses was only a few yards from me, but on the other side of the noisy vortex of Maillard, and so not easy to hear. He was at the play table, a sturdy 6'-square cedar job Donald built him years ago, playing with his medieval knights, which he'd long ago divided into good guys and bad. His two castles -- one good and one bad, as he had instantly and irrevocably deemed each one as it came into the household -- were locked in combat. Cannon from the good guy side pummeled the bad castle, and when the bad guys tumbled from their crenolated turrets, U piled them up and slammed them away into their own dungeons.

"Good guys save the world." That was what I thought he'd said.

I took a breath.

"That's the idea," I said, finally.

"The world is so safe!" he exclaimed. "So safe."

To this I could not muster a response.

Ends with a "k"

Yesterday Ulysses had off from kindergarten for Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Birthday. A day off for him means a day on for us, of course, but I'm always glad to be around him.

Last night I asked him, "Are you looking forward to going back to school tomorrow?"

"Mm-hmm," he hummed with enthusiasm. "It's fantaskick!"

"Fantaskick?" I said.

"Yes!" he replied. "Fantaskick ends with the letter 'k'!"

Princess Leia: Where's the crown?

For over a year, one of U's favorite video games has been Lego Star Wars II: The Original Adventures. This is, of course, the interactive-play retelling of the original movies (the ones I think of as "the real ones") starting with the 1977 release that Changed Everything. His favorite character: Princess Leia.

"Princess Leia is a princess," Ulysses observed many times last summer. "But Princess Leia doesn't have a crown."

By gum, he's right. How did I never notice that?

"She's sooo beautiful!" he says, and has been saying frequently for several months now. Remember, he's not talking about Carrie Fisher, the human. He's talking about the cartoon video game character based on the blocky Lego toy based on an idealized, simplified construct of a fictional inhabitant of a fantasy universe last played by a flesh-and-blood actor over a quarter of a century ago.

He's seen the three 1970s-1980s movies several times, but he always goes back to the Playstation II as the lodestone. I'm pretty sure he thinks they're some sort of live-action adaption of the game. A novelty, perhaps.

So I always have to wonder when he says, with some heat, "Princess Leia is so beautiful!"

Meanwhile.

In kindergarten, his class has been learning about rhyming words. I was impressed when I heard Ulysses singing this song, to the tune of "The Wheels On the Bus": "Mouse and house are rhyming words, rhyming words, rhyming words. Mouse and house are rhyming words; they sound a lot of like." (I'm assuming the teacher sang "alike," but I'm not going to correct him; those cute little-kid linguistic quirks will be gone forever soon enough.) "Wall and ball are rhyming words..."; "Cat and hat are rhyming words..."

Wow! I thought, he understands what rhyming words are! I tried to introduce him to the concept a few months ago, but had gotten nowhere. Great, he's got it, I thought.

Until.

"Princess Leia and Amidala are rhyming words, rhyming words, rhyming words. Princess Leia and Amidala are rhyming words; they sound a lot of like."

U's first day of school

Click on the picture with the arrow to see more pictures and two short videos of U's first day of school.

Ulysses was so excited to go to "big boy school." This summer he attended a six-week K-ready program that the school system provided. This, though, is the real thing! As it happens, his teacher, Ms. Ward (white cardigan) is the same teacher who evaluated him in March and recommend the summer school. They had instant rapport.
Ulysses wore jeans that Amma (Don's mother, Janice) sent earlier and a green checked shirt and white sneakers that we bought with funds she sent for school clothes. The backpack is a one-dollar find from a yard sale Don and Amma went to. For years Amma has been saying she will come and help Ulysses with the start of kindergarten. This year, it all came true. We went shopping for school supplies a week or so ago and had them all assembled to bring in to class. Nowadays they give you a list of what to get, including some classroom supplies.

The tables were set with an apple nametag for each child. Ulysses said, "I love my nametag!"

They hate the taste of mint

Ulysses ran to the bathroom and shut both doors.

When I had called, "Bedtime!" he had sprung from his computer without a word. Now he waited for me to slip inside and reach up for the toothbrushes and toothpaste. One hand covered his mouth.

One night in June, I had been going through the excruciating nightly routine of coaxing Ulysses into the bathroom for tooth brushing. He was already in the bed, and did not intend to get back out. "Do you want me to brush your teeth for you, or do you want to brush your teeth yourself?"

"No. No tooth brushing tonight."

"That's not one of the choices. I will hold you down and brush your teeth. Is that what you choose?"

"Me, I'll brush."

"All right."

Pause.

"Come on."

Silence. Ulysses dug himself more deeply under the covers.

I was steeling myself to drag him out of the bed and carry him bodily into the bathroom when Donald spoke up.

"At bedtime, monsters come and take your teeth. But they don't take teeth that are clean and brushed. They only take dirty teeth. And they hate the taste of mint."

Ulysses sat up. Without a sound, he bolted into the bathroom and slammed both doors. I came in to find him with his hand covering his mouth. He quickly shut the door behind me.

We brushed our teeth together. He watched carefully, mimicking my every move with his own Spongebob Squarepants toothbrush. It was the lengthiest cleaning his teeth had ever had.

* * *

Since then, the nightly trial of getting to bed and brushing teeth has evaporated into this: "Bedtime!" and a dash for the bathroom, followed by a thorough application of dentifrice. I don't believe I've ever brushed my own teeth this well and this consistently, come to think of it.

He no longer shuts the doors and covers his mouth with his hand, of which I'm glad. I want him in bed and I want his teeth clean, but I don't want him traumatized, after all. After we brush our teeth every morning and night now, he likes to exhale with a proud puff and say, "I smell like mint! Monsters hate the taste of mint!"

* * *

About a month in, though, there was a wisp of rebellion. We were in the bathroom, but he wouldn't take the toothbrush.

"There are no monsters," he said. "They don't really come for your teeth."

"Oh, yes, there are," I replied. "They're so tiny that you can't see them. They're called 'germs.' Have you seen people with teeth missing? The germs ate their teeth. The germs grow in your mouth, but they can only stick to dirty teeth. That's why we scrub our teeth clean and rinse our mouths to wash the germs out and spit them down the sink."

I thought about showing him some of my own fillings, but he took his brush, convinced. Semmelweis should have had it so easy.

.

Who's wiping whose bottom?

I was wiping Ulysses's bottom when he said to me, "Mama, I don't want to be a little boy."

"What do you want to be?" I asked.

"A big boy."

I was silent for a moment. Then I said, "You're getting bigger every day."

"Bigger than you!" he said.

"You say you're bigger than me?" I asked.

"Yes, I am!"

I thought about that. "You know, big boys wipe their own bottoms."

.

Girl suit

Yesterday was a perfect summer solstice day. It was warm and bright, with puffy white clouds. By midday, the sun had burned off the humidity from the heavy rains of the late afternoon and night before, leaving a clean, clear, sky-blue heat that called us out into the yard until evening.

In the morning, when the air was still thick, redolent of chorophyll and moist earth, we all went yard sale-ing. We came home with good loot, including plenty of outdoor toys for U: a toy sting ray that can be filled with water and squeezed to deliver a far-reaching stream; a ball tee that instantly transformed Don's cousin Neil's gift of a ball and bat into one of the most played-with toys in U's pantheon (instead of a source of frustration for U, because it's darn hard to hit a ball that's in the air!); a play fountain with changeable heads that express a variety of showers; a set of plastic horseshoes that we would much rather have 5-year-old U play with than our real, toe-breakable ones.

In no time, Ulysses was stripped down and jumping from wading pool to gooey sandbox to fountain or sprinkler or the newly rediscovered frog-shaped sprinkler from another yard sale outing years ago (he changed them out frequently over the course of the day).

Whenever he carried the frog to the hose end, he turned it over and pointed out the frog's four feet, telling me with excitement, "Frog prints. Look! There are the frog prints! Do you know about frog prints?"

It was hours before I realized he had reinterpreted the phrase Frog Prince.

* * *

"I need my baby suit," said Ulysses, and he ran inside to search for his swim trunks.

"Here's your bathing suit," I said, finding it in the lowest drawer of the high boy dresser Don restored years ago, in hopes of a child to give it to.

"Not bathing suit, Mama," he corrected. "Baby suit."

"Bathing suit," I repeated.

"Baby suit," he insisted. So I dropped it.

Later, when we were splashing together under the hot sun, Ulysses saw my clothes were starting to get wet. "Take off your clothes, Mama!" he shouted, gleefully.

"I can't take off my clothes out here; I'm a grownup."

He looked puzzled at this, then said, "Then go inside and put on your girl suit."

What kind of cake? Birthday.

Ulysses is into knights and castles these days, so I got the idea to make him a cake shaped like a castle, with crenolated turrets made from flat-bottomed ice cream cones, and spires of inverted pointy cones. I was going to bake in a big, rectangular pan, cut out the center for a courtyard, and build up the corner towers with the material I had cut out from the center. Graham cracker drawbridge and door. Licorice ropes.

"Ulysses, your birthday is coming," I told him a couple of weeks ago. "How would you like a cake shaped like a castle?"

"A castle cake? No," he said.

"For your birthday cake," I said. "With towers and a gate and a courtyard."

"No!" he said.

Obviously he didn't understand what I meant, I thought. I showed him some pictures of castle cakes on the Internet. "No," he said to all of them. "No cake castle."

What's with this kid? I thought. Doesn't he realize how fabulous this cake will be? I started up the conversation a few more times over the following week. It always went the same way.

Then I had a brainstorm. "Ulysses," I said, "Your birthday is coming up. I will make you any kind of cake you want, in any shape. What kind of cake would you like for your birthday?"

He answered without hesitation. "A mountain."

I was embarrassed at how silly I'd been. Whose birthday was it, anyway?

"A mountain!" I said, "Do you want your mountain to be a volcano?"

"No."

It was such a great idea, I assumed he'd misunderstood the question. I asked him a few more times, describing how the cake would look, with lava and all.

"No."

So I supposed I wasn't completely cured of whatever led me to try to feist the castle idea on him. I dropped the volcano idea and thought I'd draw out some more details.

"Do you want the mountain to have a tunnel going through it?"

"Mmmmm.... yes," he said, decisively.

Uh-oh. How on earth was I going to put a tunnel in a cake? Well, I'd walked myself right into that one. I got on the Internet and found a cake that looked promising. It even had a Thomas the Tank Engine track running through it, with trains going round and round! Perfect -- we've got all that. Donald looked at the picture and description and explained to me how it was made (he's genius at that sort of thing, unlike me). Great! I could do that!

I showed Ulysses. "Is this what you want for your birthday cake, something like this?"

He looked pleased. "Yes," he said, like a happy client to an architect who had finally figured out the assignment.

I spent some time figuring out how to put the track together on the board I'd be building the cake on. Took some pictures to guide me in reconstructing it later. Over the week, I gathered materials, and thought about how to build this thing. Emptied and cleaned a big tomato can for the tunnel (it would be slit down one side and then stretched open).

* * *

Yesterday evening, Ulysses and I were at the grocery store. I was shopping for the candies to make into jelly bean boulders, peanut cluster rocks, pretzels for logs and so forth.

I thought I'd better do a reality check. I squatted down to Ulysses, who was in the little car in front of the shopping cart, and said, "Ulysses. You know your birthday is coming." He looked at me. "I will make you any kind of cake you want for your birthday party. What kind of cake do you want?"

"A birthday cake," he said. "Round birthday cake."

"Do you want it to look like a mountain?"

He looked at me as if I had just turned purple. "No."

"Do you want a cake shaped like a mountain with a tunnel in it?'

"No."

"Do you want a mountain cake with a tunnel and a train going through it, like the picture we looked at and you said that was what you wanted for your birthday cake?"

"No! No!" His voice began to rise in panic.

"Okay, okay, you want a round birthday cake," I said, switching tracks. "Do you want it to be chocolate?"

"Yes!"

"Do you want it to be chocolate on the outside and chocolate on the inside, or yellow on the inside?"

"Chocolate outside and yellow inside," he said.

After a bit we went to the baking aisle and I showed him a cake mix with a picture on the box of a yellow cake with chocolate frosting. "Does this look like the kind of cake you want for your birthday cake?"

"Yes!" he said with excitement. I saw a flash of confusion cross his face when I put the box back on the shelf, but it was gone quickly when he heard me say, "OK. That's the kind of cake I'll make for your party."

"Yes! Birthday cake! Round! Chocolate outside, yellow inside!" he said.

So that is the current plan for the Sunday party. Meantime I already have a double batch of frosting (half is chocolate), enough for the enormous mountain, which would have used two cake recipes.

Maybe I'll make a small mountain cake for my own amusement.

Christmas Eve evening 2008: Santa burnout

In the evening, I pulled out some sugar-cookie dough I'd made a month ago and defrosted today. The Cook's Country recipe using yolks only, no whites. They tout that it can be rerolled a zillion times without toughening, thanks to leaving out the tough protein of the egg whites. They're right.

"Ulysses, I'm going to make some cookies for Santa. Do you want to make cookies with me?"

"Yes!" He jumped off the couch, where he was watching The Nightmare Before Christmas, or maybe it was Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer by that point. He found his miniature rolling pin in his toy kitchen and ran to the kitchen. He ran to the dough on the counter and held up the pin. I invited him to pick out some cookie cutters from the pile on the kitchen table. He went to the table and looked at them.

Then I saw something in his eyes retreat, disengage.

"I gotta watch Cars," he said.

I stopped myself from saying that Cars is not a Christmas movie. I put it in the player, but by the time the menu had come up, he was playing a video game at his computer. "Do you want to make cookies with me?"

"No," he said.

He never did watch Cars that evening, but neither did he respond again, after that, when we reminded him that Santa was coming tonight. All day, he'd bounced and bounded at the mention of it. By now, it seemed, his emotions had been so thoroughly stimulated, they had just gone into overload.

He was withdrawing, for emotional safety, I thought. The obvious corollary of that, I realized later that night, was that his emotions were vulnerable and raw. They could now be readily abraded, inflamed.

* * *

I made sugar cookies in holiday shapes and colors: green wreaths and trees with little balls of many colors and with royal icing bows and garlands; red Santas with icing for the fur at his wrists, cap and ankles; reindeer with red noses; stars with turbinado sugar sparkles. I assembled a plate, including one of the trees, for Santa's visit later that night, and set it on the dining table.

Ulysses plucked a green Christmas tree from the cooling rack. "I'm eating Santa's cookie," he said, happily. How cute, I thought.

Several minutes later, he came over from his video play again and took another tree cookie.

Several minutes after that, I noticed that Ulysses had picked up the fourth and final tree. Earlier, I had asked Don if he had any requests for cookie shapes. He had told me, "I want a Christmas tree."

"Oops! Sorry," I told Ulysses. "You can't have that one. That's Tata's tree." I plucked it from his hand. "Sorry, we need to leave that one for him. Here are the other cookies. Which one would you like?"

"No! No! I want the tree!" he cried, making a grab for the cookie in my hand.

Uh-oh.

"How about this flower?"

"No! Not a blue cookie."

"A heart?"

"Not a red one!"

"All right. How about this wreath? It's green."

"No! It's broken!" It had a scalloped center cut out of it. Much like the blown glass ornaments that had offended his aesthetic sensibilities earlier that day. "I want a tree!"

"I'm sorry, this is the last one. It's for Tata. He'll be said if it's gone." I couldn't back off now. I'd established a cookie ownership and I had to follow through. The ownership of this item had to stand. The person whose cookie it was had to be respected.

"Where are the another tree cookies?"

"You ate yours. You ate mine, too," I added dryly, and only for my own amusement. "But that's OK, I let you have mine," I said, to soften the last remark, before continuing with my lesson: "This last one is for Tata and we need to leave it for him."

Don came out of the back computer room. "What's going on?" I filled him in. He said, "It's OK, Ulysses, you can have my tree cookie. I'm giving you my tree cookie." Don tried to hand it to him.

"No, no!" said Ulysses, in tears. "It's your cookie. I can't eat it, I can't. And I ate Mama's cookie!" He collapsed into sobs, falling onto the floor.

I suddenly realized that he grasped the situation far more deeply than I had imagined.

"Ulysses," I said, "Would you like me to make some more tree cookies?"

He fell silent. He looked up at me.

"Would you like me to make more tree cookies for everyone?"

"Yes!" he said, and sprang up.

"You can help me if you like," I said. "You don't have to, though."

He ran to his computer and plunged back into his game.

Fortunately, I still had some dough. Half an hour later, there were six perfect, bedecked Christmas trees on the cooling rack. "Ulysses!" I called.

Ulysses walked over, quietly, and surveyed the little green trees. He picked up three of them.

He ran to the bedroom, where Don was watching TV.

"Here, Tata, this is for you."

He ran back to me and handed me a tree. "This is for you, Mama."

With the third cookie in his hand, he sat down at his video game.

* * *

It wasn't until much later that I considered the tree cookie that had been on Santa's plate all through the conflict.

I could have let Ulysses have the tree cookie that he picked up from the cooling rack, without ever saying a word about whose cookie was whose. There would have been no issue if the trees were simply gone the next time he came grazing. Meantime, I could have taken the tree cookie off Santa's plate and put it out of sight for Don, for later.

I didn't.

I didn't even dream of disturbing the plate I'd prepared for Santa. Because ... because those were Santa's cookies. It wouldn't be right to take away his tree. I had made four trees. One for each of us.

I'd hypnotized myself into respecting the rights of a fictional character.

Christmas Eve 2008

I just reread this blog entry from last Christmas Eve – http://vesnavuynovich.blogspot.com/2007/12/adorable-christmas-anecdotes.html – and was struck by the magnitude of difference in Ulysses today: his comprehension, the abstraction of his thoughts, his articulation of them. Last year he was in the moment in such a way – there was no use describing to him a distant future.

This year he's been anticipating Santa's visit for weeks, announcing regularly that tonight was the night. We pointed to the day on the calendar as it approached, showing him, "We're here, this is today. Santa's coming on this day." It was hard to see his scope of comprehension, but probably a safe guess that it wasn't total. I should have told him it was a map of time, because he understands maps. (Thanks, Dora.)

On the morning of Christmas Eve, we told him that this was the big day -- that Santa was in fact coming tonight, that we had a lot to do to get ready. He was elated. We drove out to storage to pick up the tree and decorations, then to the supermarket for figgy pudding ingredients. Would you believe Copps, giant as it is, doesn't carry suet, while our neighborhood market does? It's in the same chaotically, gloriously mixed case of ethnic speciality animal parts as the chitterlings, necks, feet and other tidbits for the adventerous. Or the traditional. Depending on your point of view.

I set White Christmas to play on the DVD. Don got out the battery-powered Christmas train while I prepped the tree area. We stood the 5-foot square cedar play table (built by Don in 2006) on its side against the bookshelf to clear the living room corner. The toy bins that live under the table went into Ulysses' room. I remembered the white vinyl that been discarded at my workplace that I'd brought home for another project, and Don brought it in. We cut parts of it and made a tree skirt about 8-foot square, large enough for the train to run on its extended length track for the first time. We discovered that the other side had been printed on -- it was the color of winter sky, with a field of irregularly placed soft white dots. Snowfall! How fortuitous was that? Or maybe the dots were the printing error that caused the banner to be jettisoned. Either way, it worked for us. We draped the play table with the blue side out, a much better backdrop for the tree than bare wood.

Throughout, Ulysses played on, under and within the enormous length and width of vinyl. As soon as the snow pattern was revealed, he jumped on it with his bare feet. "Cold! It's so cold! Ouch, ouch!" he shouted, gleefully jumping from foot to foot. "Brrr, snow," he said. Next he made an "igloo" of the cavernous mounds, pulling me under with him, insisting that I also complain of the cold. It was hot under that vinyl.

There was a bit of a snag when we eventually cut up his ice fields and igloos for tree skirting and background draping, and then folding up the rest to put away. "My igloo!" he said, horrified. "You broke it!" Then I pulled out the box containing the Christmas tree. I showed him the label, with a photograph of the contents.

"Mama!" he said, excited, "We have to make the Christmas tree beautiful."

Ulysses enthusiastically pitched in to help string the lights, hang the delicate glass ornaments and unpack and set out the trees and buildings and people of the miniature village. Consider this word, "help," with circumspection. For instance, he tended to hang the ornaments not on the branches, but the needles thereon. Matching ornaments, he believed, should properly all hang on the same branch tip.

I moved into high parenting gear to prevent electrocutions, injury and excessive breakage. Don split for the far end of the house and shut the door.

An hour later, the tree was done and only one ornament, a green glass ball, had paid the price. Ulysses had been batting it around on its branch, not heeding my warnings: "Ulysses! Be gentle with that. It's fragile. This breaks very easily. It can cut you."

"No, this is not fragile," he insisted. He gripped at it, and it collapsed into shards between his fingers. A moment of shock, then howling tears. "I cut my hand! The orn'ment broke! My green orn'ment!"

His hand was not cut. Whew.

After a few moments, he was ready to be consoled with a different, identical green ornament that he hung on the same branch. He moved on, but not before he batted at it – gently – to, fro and to again, announcing, "Be careful. This breaks very easily!"

Then there were the fancy glass ornaments,the kind with the deeply indented, faceted centers. Ulysess saw one and declared it broken.

"It's not broken," I said. "It's fine. This is the design. It looks this way on purpose."

"It is broken," he insisted.

"Look, there's nothing wrong with it," I said, angling it so we could see directly into the indented pattern.

It was broken. During storage, the wire for hanging had punched through the thin wall of indented glass from within.

Oops.

After I'd thrown out the broken pieces, I brought out another ornament of the same type.

"No," said Ulysses. "It's broken."

This one was not broken. But he was having no truck with any of the tray of center-dented ornaments that seemed to splinter dramatically in upon themselves. "These are broken," he insisted.

I replaced their lid and put them back in the ornament box for the season.

Ulysses regarded the half-dressed tree. "That's not beautiful," he said, and looked on the verge of tears.

"We're not done yet."

"But it's not beautiful, Mama!" He whimpered.

"Then let's keep trying. Look at this one!"

"It's a egg!" he said.

"Yes! This is a goose egg from our friend Cindy and our friend Troy. They brought it to us from ..." I couldn't remember the country they'd visited. "... Eastern Europe!"

"A egg, a egg! Two eggs!" Happy again, he set to work trying to hang the elaborately painted goose eggs on the same needle of a single branch, and didn't mind when I helped him pick out two different branches instead. Peace had been restored.

Later: "Mama! The Christmas tree is beautiful! We made it beautiful! Together!"

Santa Claus is coming

I never meant to raise my child to believe in Santa Claus. A fictional supernatural being who gets the credit for staging the gift-giving festivity when everyone knows perfectly well it's the parents who did the work. That it's the parents' love that makes it happen.

But it turns out my usual approach to teaching him about the world -- which might be summed up as a threefold exposing him to situations, things and opportunities, keeping him safe and staying out of the way of his process -- doesn't work the same with Santa Claus as it does with say, gravity or sharing.

The world of physics, his developing body, his energy and his inborn drive for self-preservation provided everything he needed to learn to climb the steps to the slide and come down it. It was easy to learn what leads to stumbling and a skinned knee. The world of interacting humans likewise provides plenty of feedback about what happens when two children covet a single toy. Eventually each toddler learns that snatching and running leads not to an unhampered relationship with the object of desire, but only to weeping, screeching and unhappiness all around.

Not so with Santa Claus. His image is all around all year -- you notice this when you have a young charge -- and especially as the autumn deepens into winter. He's featured on episodes of otherwise non-Christmassy TV shows. Often the plot of these episodes turns on the nullification of one character's disbelief. Or he's simply there, as real as any other fictional being in the show. He's around. He's iconic.

He's the guy who brings presents to children. And children do get presents, after all. For a four-year-old, this is not a controversial syllogism.

Anyway, I thought we shouldn't tell Ulysses that Santa Claus exists. Donald thought we should. As it turned out, it wasn't our decision to make. There was no point at which we would bestow or withhold this piece of information. (Technically, misinformation.) The world has taught Ulysses about the person of Santa Claus. The only real choice is between going with the flow and convincing him that it's all made up. That there's not really any such guy.

In other words, to be really, really mean.

So I'm going with the flow.

Santa Claus is about as real as Spongebob. But how real is Spongebob, for Ulysses? Does Ulysses realize that there is no pineapple under the sea? I want him to know that Steven Hillenberg's imagination is the true wonder of Spongebob. That Tom Kenny, Patrick Warburton, Clancy Brown -- to name just a few of that show's marvelous voice actors -- are among the legions of artists who create this pulsingly alive semblance. There's nothing to gain from trying to explain this to him now. Soon enough he'll know that these guys are made up of lots of little drawings shown in succession, synched with audio recordings made elsewhere. What does he understand now? I'm not sure. But I'm sure it would be futile, not to say hurtful, to dog him with the notion that "Spongebob is not real." Well, there he is. Interacting with a whole world of characters and things. Uttering quotable quotes that we quote in this household. Learning life lessons that we cite.

Every night for the past week or so, Ulysses has told me, in the dark of the evening and often as we're turning out the lights, "Santa Claus is coming tonight."

Each night, I say, "Santa Claus is coming soon. But not tonight."

And Ulysses answers, matching my tone in an exaggerated singsong: "Yes, tonight."

Glad we got that straight

Apropos of nothing I could identify, Ulysses spoke up with this:

"Mama. Did you know there's a tooth fairy?"

"Why, yes," I answered, after the moment it took to gather my thoughts. "I did know that."

That was the conversation.

Number One!

Ulysses still hasn't quite gotten the hang of that classic form of adult-child interaction, the "How old are you?" conversation. And I think I finally got a clue as to why: it turned on his interpretation of what the whole conversation is about.

Adults used to ask me how old he was, and I would answer. Then, as he got a little bigger, they began to ask him, instead. Knowing he wouldn't, I would answer for him: "Two," and later, "Three." I began waiting for him, giving him a chance to respond for himself, but eventually I would be the one to supply the answer.

I've been trying to teach him, or at least to rehearse it enough that the answer will come automatically, but always, he either ignores me or looks at me skeptically.

"How old are you, Ulysses? You're four! When someone asks you how old you are, you can say, 'Four." Say, 'I'm four.' 'I'm four.' How old are you, Ulysses?"

Silence.

"How old are you?"

"No."

Sigh.

So earlier this week at a reception -- it was the campaign victory party for Kelda Helen Roys on the evening of the election for State Assembly, held at a local restaurant -- when we struck up a conversation with a woman there, I wasn't surprised when Ulysses answered her, "How old are you?" with his usual friendly, smiling silence.

"How old are you?" she repeated, adding helpfully, "Are you four? Or five?"

"No," he said, firmly. Then, raising aloft his index finger so that his chest puffed out a little, he announced, "I'm Number One!"

More on Multatuli

Branshea's comment to my last post piqued my interest in Multatuli even more.

I found this site devoted to him:

http://www.multatuli-museum.nl/en/

To read it in Dutch, take the /en/ off the end of the URL. And then of course there's always the Wikipedia entry.

I found the duck eggs quote here:
http://books.google.com/books?id=tnZTYuvdijsC&printsec=frontcover&dq=oyster+eagle&ei=y5B-SLX3GYLGjgHc0KC_CA&sig=ACfU3U0hutAr0gapygsroUQVth6Ald2zmw#PPA21,M1
in a "limited preview" online of "The Oyster and the Eagle: Selected Aphorisms and Parables of Multatuli" by E.M. Beekman, 1974.

It can be found on page 102, listed as No. 852.

Presumably Beekman selected the quote from some other Multatuli source material, but I can't identify it from the online preview.

Reading through the pages available for preview on the Google Books site, I was instantly fascinated and drawn to this figure. He's irreverent, forthright, dry, darkly humorous. A writer who belongs in the company of Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, H.L. Mencken.

Right away I found another comment about parenting, although the aphorisms are mostly about all sorts of other things. This is on Page 49.

A mother who does not have nourishing milk is to be pitied.

A mother who does have nourishing milk and forces it back into her disappointed glands, robbing her child, is criminal.

Wow. That sure beats the heck out of the modern pussyfooting so common around this issue. I get angry every time I hear or read the suggestion that "this decision is a very personal one," cast as an answer to the question of whether or not to breastfeed.

I hate that "personal decision" garbage. Well, of course it's personal. Very personal. No duh. What do I need anyone to tell me that for? It's as if the writer, or organization, putting forth the statement imagines they're bequeathing on me the right to think through and ultimately make that decision for myself. I have that right already; I already know about that right; to suggest otherwise is downright insulting.

Beyond that, the statement is devoid of useful content. It's really just a cop-out, a way for parenting-related books and articles to sound wise and encompassing, while backing away from taking a stand.

In effect, "it's a very personal decision" translates to, "It doesn't matter either way." But it does matter. It's a huge deal, for nutrition, for normal human development: emotional, social, psychological. Sure, many babies can grow up happy and healthy enough without mother's milk and the comfort of mother's breast. But why should they have to?

Eggs in the water

I came across this fantastic quote this morning. It was in my A.Word.A.Day e-mail.

One does not advance the swimming abilities of ducks by throwing the eggs in the water.

-Multatuli (pen name of Eduard Douwes Dekker), novelist (1820-1887)

I never heard of this guy, but now I have to look him up.

This expresses beautifully my quarrel with those who say that infants should sleep alone in their own rooms with the door shut so that they can learn independence. That they should be left to "cry it out" so that they can develop self-reliance. That every child should be steeped daily in an environment of toxic peers and authority figures (instead of, say, homeschooling for individuals better suited to that) so that they can learn resilience and other advanced social skills.

And a hundred other different ways that people push babies and children into overwhelming situations they aren't prepared to manage, on the theory that this itself will give them that preparation. That waiting until a child is strong and ready is no more than unhealthy, effetizing coddling.