My Babies Are Boys!

Happy Halloween! It’s rather surreal, because Peter and I can’t figure out where September and October went. Without a doubt our boys are quickly turning into boy boys, with the tastes and opinions of stereotypical males. They can’t be coerced by their parents to wear adorable costumes such as the cards I made them all last year. I wanted them to be Peter Pan and Captain Hook with Nina and Jocleyn dressed as little Tinker Bells this year. A package deal, but they actually had an opinion on what they wanted to be, and were very adamant about it. Samuel, of course, wanted to be a dinosaur. I thought, “Great! We’ll have a little family of dinosaurs!” But Ethan, in the way that is so Ethan, decided to be Spiderman no matter how much we tried to convince him to be something else. Then when we tried to convince Samuel to be a superhero so we could match that direction, we had zero luck. So for Halloween, we have three dinosaurs (Nina and Jocelyn were easy to convince to dress up alongside Samuel), and Spiderman.

When I take a good look at Samuel, my heart fills with joy and it breaks a little. He's so big, uses such long words for a four-year-old, and all signs that he was ever a baby are gone. He just looks like a little boy now. The lines in his face are trim, the baby fat is gone, and the muscles flex and bend in his abdomen when he runs around shirtless. He has the words to express his feelings, whether they be joy, anger, sorrow, or frustration. He has also learned to roll his eyes. That never goes over well. Ethan is much the same. My saving grace with Ethan is that he still has a little roundness in his cheeks, and he still throws a championship tantrum when he's angry. He hasn't figured out that eye rolling is almost as good and irksome as a tantrum to his parents like Samuel has, however.

But what has become most astonishing is that they really are boys down to their very core. Sometimes I just don’t get it and certainly can’t relate to it, although I try. Last week, I walked out onto the back deck and discovered Ethan peeing in a sand bucket and then he proceeded to dump the pee into the sandbox. The entire time he was yanking down his pants and carrying out this mischief, I was yelling and running down the stairs, "Stop! Stop!" During his chewing out, Samuel confessed that he had done the whole act first and Ethan was merely copying. Shovels in hand, digging out their pee saturated sand that the babies were trying to crawl through, I gave them a good scolding describing that our babies and other people's children do not want to play in their toilet box. So we dug all the wet sand out of the box and dumped it into the corner of my garden. I generally don’t mind if they pee outside...but Nina and Jocelyn and every other baby that comes along eats the sand. Enough said.

Along with this foray into becoming real thoroughbred males, they have a complete fascination with all animals and have started begging Peter and I to buy a pet for them. I agreed that we’d start with worms, being a win-win for everyone, because worms are truly amazing in boy world and easy to take care of in mom world. Excellent boy-material because they are gross, require you to dig though dirt to acquire them, and they squiggle and freak many of the opposite sex out. I spent hours digging worms, researching worm farms, creating said worm farms, and explaining the life of worms to Samuel and Ethan. The two worm farms sat on my kitchen counter for nearly a month, but we made a discovery. Worms are rather boring once established. You only water them about once a week and rarely have to feed them. The worms were returned to my garden. So we decided to take another step into pet world and adopted fish.

We promised Samuel and Ethan that since dad is allergic to cats, since we so don’t want a dog right now with two babies in the house, and since I refuse to house anything that resembles a rodent, we would get fish. Deciding to start small, we settled on goldfish in a plain gallon goldfish bowl. While we were at Walmart picking out the fish, the Walmart employee explained to us how they have to take special courses in order to take care of the fish at Walmart. After this explanation of his fish expertise, we trust him when he says that without a doubt, we can buy 6 goldfish and they will be fine in a 1 gallon bowl. We buy all the goodies and head home with our tank. Following the directions as two educated people are capable of, we discover that you should give each 1-inch fish at least ½ gallon of space and each 2-inch fish at least a gallon of space. Considering the size of our purchased fish, we shouldn’t really be able to house more than 2 of these fish. Whatever. We throw them all in there. They are only 28 cents each after all. So much for fish experts at Walmart.

For the next week or so, about every other day, we had to announce to Samuel and Ethan that a fish had died. Thinking they might be devastated, we were surprised when they just shrugged. On about day three of having only two fish left, we realize that there is a small crack down the side of the bowl and it is leaking nasty, stinky fish water across my kitchen counter. Who knew goldfish could smell so bad? We have no idea how the crack occurred, perhaps when I cleaned the overcrowded fish bowl? For the next week, with two sad little fish left in our bowl, the goldfish sat on one side of our sink and did dishes with me every day. Why? Because despite the fact that every other week of my life I have to go to Walmart at least fifty times, that particular week I had absolutely no reason at all to enter Walmart. Finally after about a week, new fish bowl in hand, I created a new habitat for the two fish left swimming.

Two days later I announced, “Samuel and Ethan, another fish died.” As testament to the boys that they’ve become, instead of sobbing or asking for more fish, they exclaimed, “Cool! Can I hold it? Ooohh!! Look at his eyeball! Rub your finger on it! It fills mushy!” Ahh yes. There they are, my boys.