raising butterflies

We bought a butterfly house a few weeks ago and sent off for the butterflies. They finally came and now we are waiting for the magic to happen!

opposites

conversations between Jack and Jill in the car:

Jill -- Hey Jack, what's the opposite of go?
Jack (spelling it) -- "G" . . . "O". . .
Jill -- No, what's the opposite of go?
Jack --"O" . . . "G"


later, once they have established what Jill was going for:

Jill -- What's the opposite of up?
Jack -- Down!
Jill -- What's the opposite of fast?
Jack -- Slow!
Jill -- What's the opposite of quiet?
Jack (shouting) -- LOUD!
Jill -- What's the opposite of far?
Jack -- Not far!
Jill -- That's right, near!
. . .
Jill -- I don't know, Jack, I'm running out of things to think of opposites for. Can you think of anything?
Jack -- What's the opposite of tree?
Jill -- Um, I don't think there is an opposite of tree.
Jack -- . . . I'm thinking . . . tree . . . . no tree!

master manipulator

It feels like Jack is becoming more and more clingy, and it is starting to drive me batshit. He won't leave the room to go get a car or toy, or whatever, without me coming with him. Yesterday he wanted a car from the living room and we were in the kitchen. I told him to go get it himself, but he wanted me to come with him. Now, I can actually see the entire living room from our kitchen. There is no wall separating the two. He could go into the living room and get his car and never be out of my sight, but he won't do it. I got angry and nearly screamed at him, "WHY??? Why do I have to go in there with you? You are a big boy, I don't need to go into the living room. Why don't you just go in there yourself?!?!?!?" and he looks up at me all serious with his big blue eyes and says, "Because I don't want to go in there by myself and I love you."

picking peas

I hate peas. I kind of think that they shouldn't be considered a food. They should just be given to fish or something, but not people. They are gross. So I have no idea why I planted them except that they were cheap and next to the corn in the seed section at K-mart.
Luckily, Jackson loves peas. He eats them all the time. He chooses peas over apples or strawberries as his fruit or veggie for dinner. This blows my mind. Why would anyone choose to eat peas over strawberries? Seriously?
Anyway, the peas are ready to be picked and here are some pictures of the first harvest. They are pretty crappy because it was hard to hold down the fence (so that Jack could reach over) and take the picture at the same time, but you get the idea.

more cars

Jill made Jackson a coloring book for him to put all of his car drawings in. We also made him a dream picture folder. In the mornings sometimes he draws pictures for us of the dreams that he had the night before. The dream drawings were his idea. I think it came from something he saw on TV -- Sprout or Noggin, I am sure. Most of his dreams seem to be about animals. He has had a few about cats, and one about a dog.

Jack discovers watercolors

learning to draw

We started a drawing book for Jackson. He likes to put things down in front of his paper and draw them. Of course, when I say "things" I mean cars. He's pretty good for the first half of it. Once he starts coloring it in he loses patience and often the final product looks nothing like the car, but the process is pretty interesting.

my little boy loves pink

Jackson is three and a half years old -- and his favorite color is pink. He loves princesses, and he loves nail polish - pink nail polish, but he will settle for blue. He also loves cars and trucks and busses and playing in the yard and getting dirty, but those things don't cause a problem for people.
I have talked to him about the fact that in our culture, most people think that pink is a "girl" color and that only girls should wear it. He knows that boys don't usually wear nail polish (unless they are members of a band, or are in drag). I am pretty sure that he understands, but I know he doesn't care. He wants to wear it. He thinks it's pretty. He also wants to wear shirts with Hannah Montana, Cinderella, or Snow White on them. He has a pair of pink princess pajamas that he loves.
The problem with all of this, if you can call it that, is that I don't give a shit, and everyone else does. He is three and a half and he lives with two women who don't follow many gender rules. He sees us doing things that "men" do all the time. The gender boundaries in our house are a bit transparent, so it isn't surprising to me that he doesn't recognize "boy" and "girl" things in the same way that other kids do. We also haven't been the kind of parents who say, "no, honey, you can't have that because it is for girls." We bought him a princess vanity set for Christmas last year because he put it on his list for Santa. We haven't done those things because we believe that the "rules" about boy and girl things are arbitrary bullshit.

The problem, again, is that some people, some very close to us, seem to think that these rules mean something, like they are written somewhere in the universe and must not be changed, that I am doing something wrong and terrible by painting Jack's nails when he asks me to.

The thing that I wish that I could say to those "some people," the ones at the grocery store that look at us funny when he is wearing his Cinderella shirt, the ones who are close to us who say things like "that's not nice, what you are doing," as though I pull Jackson into a corner, tie him down and force him to stay still while I polish his fucking fingernails . . . what I really would like to say to them is this . . . . FUCK YOU.

First of all, he is three, and a lot of little boys like pink, and it doesn't mean anything. It's different. They don't make boy things in pink. Everything is blue or red or green. Nothing is pink, or glittery or shiny. It's a color for fuck's sake. And nail polish is paint. PAINT on FINGERNAILS. Fucking get over it.
Second of all, if it did mean something, like that he is (god forbid) GAY, so fucking what? I am not going to love him any less, or think any less of him, or the job that I did raising him, so fuck off.


----I should say here that there are a few rules that we have set up so as to avoid harassment or family fall-out. Those rules are that he cannot wear the nail polish or princess shirts to school or to an unnamed relative's house. The school thing is because he just isn't old enough or emotionally mature enough to know how to handle it when other boys make fun of him. He is still having a hard time making friends and talking to kids, and fun-making wouldn't help. The relative thing is out of respect for them. We know it bothers them and because we love and respect them we try not to upset them. We have also made it very clear that these issues are THEIR issues, not Jackson's. I am really conflicted about this, but I am basically just trying to avoid a stupid fight over nail-fucking-polish. If we are going any place else - the store, the bank, the park, he can wear whatever he wants.-----

My job is to love him and to help him be the very best Jackson that he can be. My job is to teach him self-acceptance, self-confidence, tolerance, and love. If he continues to love pink, then my job is to teach him how to be strong in that. If he continues to love princesses, then my job is to teach him how to stand in that and be who he wants to be. It is NOT my job to shame him, to guilt him, to embarrass him, to make him think that the things he likes are not good enough, are not the "right" things for him to like, that he should be somehow "other" or different from who he really is. It is not my job to beat the pink out of him. Unfortunately, society will do that soon enough. It is my job to teach him how to fight back.

Which one is the grown up?

We were eating dinner last night and Jackson got upset because the cheese on his plate got mixed up with the water from his snow peas.
Jill asks, "what's wrong with it, it's just pea water?"
Jack says, "But I don't like pea water."
Jill gets the giggles. . .
then asks, "Do you like poo water?"

Wildlife Lessons

We found a frog outside the other day. It looks to me like a frog, not a toad, so I don't know why it is this far away from water, but here it is.

So I caught it and Jackson and I built him a temporary home and kept in him the house for the day so that we could watch him and talk about frogs and where they come from. We looked up "frog life cycle" on google and talked about tadpoles. When Jill came home he was able to tell her all about it. I was really impressed at how much he remembered and how much he could repeat.

knock-knock jokes

Jill has been trying to teach Jackson knock-knock jokes. So far her efforts have been a pretty dismal failure. They go a lot like this:

Jill: knock-knock
Jack: who's there?
Jill: lettuce
Jack: lettuce who?
Jill: let us in, it's cold out here!

so then Jack tries to make up his own joke and it usually goes something like this:

Jack: knock-knock
Jill: who's there?
Jack: tomato
Jill: tomato who?
Jack: tomato let us in it's cold out here!

. . . .

but recently he made up a new one of his own and it went like this:

Jack: knock-knock
Jill: who's there
Jack: Jack
Jill: Jack who?
Jack: Jack, don't do that!

...

Kitty

Six Toes has asthma. She has to be an inside kitty for a while and it is driving her batshit crazy. She started coughing and sneezing about a week ago and I took her into the vet thinking she had a "cold," which is probably stupid because cats probably don't even get colds. The vet gave me a good scare at first because she said that Sixy probably either had heart disease, or swollen lymph glands (which would mean a host of other problems). It turns out that the x-ray just looked like an enlarged heart and swollen lymph glands because she is fat.

Backyard Camping

Since there is a heat warning this weekend, we decided that it would be a great time to set up the tent in the backyard and do a backyard campout! If that sentence doesn't make any sense to you, don't worry, it doesn't make any sense to me either. I have no idea why I suggested this weekend . . .

it turned out to not be so bad. It was about 70 overnight, so the heat was tolerable. Aside from Jackson's air mattress going flat and every bird in the state of NJ landing in our backyard and chirping at 6 o'fucking clock in the morning, everything was good. We toasted hot dogs and marshmallows . . . who doesn't love that?

ok - it's getting ridiculous

This is what the pumpkins used to look like.

This is what they look like now.

Notice that all of that is OUTSIDE the garden area? I had to cut holes through the fencing so that they could grow. Why did I plant six of them?
The watermelons are doing the same thing on the other side.
This is our first pumpkin.