Cue the Mice

Seamus awoke howling in the early morning hours this past Thursday, but not for the usual reason. Usually it is because Mini Tooper has fallen from his clutches in his sleep. This time it was because his cracking toes were throbbing painfully. He had been wearing his green, frog-face rainboots most of the previous week (see Suburban Cowboys, below), usually without socks. He insisted, we caved. They are the only footwear he can get on and keep on by himself. Like so many things about parenting, it seemed like a good idea at the time—or at least a reasonable way to avoid hysteria. By Wednesday this haphazard cobbling had taken its toll. The poor boy had taken up lame, and uncomfortably so. Only when Mary took him to the doctor on Saturday did we discover—to our chagrin but not to our surprise—that this was not merely chafing, but raging athlete’s foot.

Not that she took him to the doctor because his toes hurt. No, that was for the double-ear infection. Earlier in the week, a different doctor had confirmed for us that Seamus is allergic to cats and dust mites. And so it was that following Saturday’s doctor’s visit, Mary reported to the pharmacy for a shopping spree, coming home with unguents, potions and vapors to treat him head to toe. It is fair to say that Seamus is a mess.

The mystery is how a boy can appear so robust and yet suffer so many maladies, or perhaps it is how he can require so many prescriptions despite his evident vigor . We are chalking it up to false spring—several times in the past six weeks we have had a day or two of warmth followed by a week of cold rain. It raises bodily expectations subsequently thwarted.

Booker has held up relatively well. If it weren’t for the faint clownish rash around his mouth—the result of a recently acquired nervous habit of licking his chops—you wouldn’t know he has been sniffling all winter.

In any case, the cherry blossoms have blossomed, so maybe the real thing is upon us, and we are on the road to Wellville at last.

As for Junie, she is gone. Jussara picked her up yesterday and carted her away to her new home in distant Crofton. So long, kitty. We’ll miss you. Exit cat. Cue the mice, stage left.

Suburban Cowboys

Kid Blondie rides into town....

The Sheriff in these here parts.

Guess you ride pretty good, Kid, but you’ll have to shake the dust off them boots to catch my shadow....

The Posse rides again.

Saddle up, pardner. Our work here is done.

Tomorrows, Yesterdays and Todays

For a long time, Booker could not remember the word yesterday, and so always used tomorrow instead, whether he was speaking of the recent future or the recent past. Confusion was compounded by his inability to distinguish the day after today from the day after tomorrow, or five days after tomorrow, for that matter. In addition to using tomorrow for mundane questions of schedule—tomorrow I go to school, I went swimming tomorrow—it was thus his wont to use it for grander and less precise hopes and memories—as in, the sun will come out tomorrow, betcher bottom dollar that tomorrow, there’ll be sun. But also as in, tomorrow, love was such an easy game to play. There were, after all, many tomorrows for him, and few yesterdays.

This has now changed. On Friday, looking forward to the weekend, he said, “Yesterday I have capoeira.” Then he caught himself and said, laughing, “I spent so much time trying to remember yesterday I remembered it too much!” Suddenly, he has a past that weighs on his future, like his elders.

The photo shows Booker and Seamus on a recent tomorrow, running madly through the sunbeams that filter into Copley Lounge. Seamus remains caught in the undefined glowing present of the age of unreason, just beyond the reach of time and memory. Booker has now seen his shadow and crossed over.

Pink Cake

It was a week of momentous events, or what pass for momentous events within the foreshortened horizons of suburban parenthood. Seamus turned three, Booker graduated from “The Twinkles” in Suzuki violin. We could not be happier with each of these milestones, hoping they signal smoother traveling on roads ahead.

Above is infant Seamus with Grams in Brazil, many moons ago, already defiant, pudgy and besmirched. None of this has changed significantly.

And here is Seamus as we know him now, a tad leaner but with the same gleam in his eye, always ready for mischief.

For the past month, whenever anyone mentioned his birthday he reminded us that he wanted a pink cake. He expressed no other desire, just pink cake. I am sure we will never have it this easy again. He got his wish.

Here Booker and Seamus compete to see who can singe their eyebrows first, while Finn looks on. And below is Seamus, shirtless and eyebrowless, still licking the pink frosting from his rosy cheeks. Moments later all the assembled ruffians were tackling one another on the slide. Miraculously, we reached the end of the day with no torts.

Booker’s Twinkle graduation was just as thrilling. As a typical overscheduled Montgomery County five-year old, he had difficulty squeezing the big event into his busy agenda. I whisked him from capoeira straight to Ingleside Retirement Home at Rock Creek, arriving towards the tail end of the program. This meant that he had missed his chance to lead off the show with the other five-year olds, and had to be inserted amidst the most advanced students. A visible pall fell over the room, and not merely over the faces of the full-time residents, when it became clear that Booker’s “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” variations would be levered in between Monti’s “Czardas” and the Bach double violin concerto. When Booker stepped forward and announced that he would be playing all the Twinkle variations, from my privileged post backstage I could see the furrowed brows and downward stretched-mouths that accompanied the audibly sharp collective intake of breath. Fears were greatly eased when he corrected himself: “Well, not all of them. Just some of them.” He limited himself to three, played with gusto and greeted with relief. For the rest of the afternoon, he proudly displayed the blue ribbon awarded for graduation. Oddly enough, Mary was not given a ribbon.

A Case of Magics

B: Say “knock, knock”

S: Knock, knock

B: Who’s there?

S: Seamus.

B: Seamus Who?

S: Seamus!

B: No, it can’t be just Seamus. Say “Knock, knock.”

S: Knock, Knock.

B: Who’s there?

S: Seamus.

B: Seamus Who?

S: Seamus, A boy!

B: Noooo! Something funny!

B: Ok, say “knock, knock.”

S: Knock, knock.

B: Who’s there?

S: A boy.

B: A boy who?

S: A boy Seamus!

Booker might be more effective at teaching the concept of knock, knock jokes if he fully mastered it himself. The best he has been able to come up with so far is something on the order of, who’s there, when, when who, when are you going to give me a cookie? He has not completely grasped that the who has to mean something different the second time around. But he is intrigued by the idea of a pun, whereas Seamus remains pure slapstick.

The photos show Booker earning M ’n’ Ms by practicing violin, and Seamus failing to earn M ’n’ Ms by not being able to sit down for three minutes while Booker practices violin. He starts planted in the chair, is on his feet by bar four of “Lightly Row,” and crawling into the violin case by bar six. Then again, one can’t fault the boy, by bar six many members of the audience might be looking for someplace small and cozy to hide.

The last photo is more like it: Booker and Seamus play capoeira. Booker is doing a passable version of meia-lua de frente (although he really should have that left heel planted), and Seamus is in a surprisingly close approximation of cocorinha--surprising because his understanding of capoeira is mostly limited to flopping onto his hands and mule-kicking backwards, and does not exclude moves such as the face-slap and the hair-pull, considered unorthodox in most versions of the jogo bonito. But he loves his “capoeira pants,” a pair of satin pajamas, now split neatly up the backside after too many mule-kicks, but no less adored.

Perhaps it is not surprising that Booker has begun to fantasize about being magically transported to another realm. In a tone of hope fighting against doubt, he states that the next time he loses a tooth, the tooth fairy is going to give him magic. Lying in bed last night, just before sleep, he got more specific: the tooth fairy will deliver a case of magics to him, and he will use one to go into the tv, and travel to all the places inside the tv, starting with Dora the Explorer’s island. We asked how the tooth fairy would keep all the magics from running together, and he replied that she would put them in different slots, of course. But then he worried: when I open the case, will all the magics fall out?

I wish I could say no. Maybe we’ll stick with the quarter under the pillow.