Mine mine mine, all mine

Drew the Dragon Slayer

Today we journeyed northwards to the Charlotte area of North Carolina, where we attended the annual Carolina Renaissance Festival. We go to the Ren Fest every year, but usually we go in October when it's still warm. Today it was quite breezy and chilly, although it felt nice when you were out in the sun.

First we stopped by our friend Nancy's tent - the Hounds of East Fairhaven.

Drew didn't really care that much about the greyhounds, since we have one at home that he sees every day. No, what he cared about were the gold-wrapped candy coins they had set out as treats for visitors - he absconded with quite a few.

Then we met the love of Drew's life - Twig the Fairy.

He flirted unabashedly with her, giving her sidelong glances and batting his eyes and everything.

Yeah, it was quite a display. After we left her, he kept asking about "seeing the fairy again"...over and over and over.

We distracted him with a butterfly ride...

And then we found the sword and shield store and he was in little boy heaven.

He ran around the store pointing this wooden sword at anybody who would stand still, while yelling, "En guarde!"

Then he told Charles to "be a dragon", and when Charles growled, Drew brandished the sword at him and yelled, "Go 'way, dragon!"

Isn't he fierce?

Yeah, we bought the overpriced wooden sword.
"We're total suckers," said Charles.
"Yeah," I said. "At least we got out without buying the shield, too."

as if...

In the car on the way home last night, Drew announced that he was Mama and I was Drew.

So, being the former drama geek that I am, I got into character and immediately started clamoring to be told a story, provided with "strawberry chocolate milk" and to have various items picked up off the floor where I had dropped them.

Drew, in turn, said the following, "Not right now. When we get home. Ow, my neck hurts."

"Man, he's got you pegged," Charles said.

Halloween 07

Here they are - the long-awaited Halloween pictures.
We took Drew out to our friends Kelly and Jeff's neighborhood so he could go trick-or-treating with Alex, since we live way out in the country and our only choices for local trick-or-treating would be my in-laws or, well, possibly a meth lab or two.
Our friend Amy and her husband Chris and their two kids, Connor and Peyton, also joined the crew.

We met up at Kelly and Jeff's house right after work to eat some pizza and change the kids into their costumes.

Here's Drew the Dragon and Peyton the Kitty. Drew felt the need to tell us, and anyone who acted frightened of him, that he was "a nice da-gon, not a tary da-gon."

Drew and Alex, pre-trick-or-treating.

Drew, Alex, Kelly and Jeff, setting off on our Trick-or-Treat Tour 2007.

What would you think if you saw this crew standing at your door, screaming for candy? I'd want to adopt them all. At least for an hour or two.

We continually exhorted our charges to say, "Trick or Treat!" (which Drew pronounced "lick or leet!") when someone answered the door. However, usually they would get so excited they'd forget, and just get straight to the point..."We want candy!" they would cry.
Drew sometimes took it a step further, demanding certain types of candy, such as lollipops or chocolate.
I had to explain that these were not drive-through windows....

And that you should simply take what was offered, say "thank you" and move on. We also found ourselves explaining, many times, that ringing the doorbell ONE TIME was generally sufficient and preferred over holding one's finger on the doorbell for 20 seconds or pressing it over and over until someone arrived at the door.

Here's an action shot of me chasing Drew. Not an especially unusual occurrence that night, unfortunately.

Drew loved this house, which, in addition to the spooky archway shown here, also featured fog, creepy music and light-up window-ghosts. When we finished our trick-or-treating here, he said, "I want to do it again!", as if it were a carnival ride or some such.

By the end of the evening, Charles and I were trading off carrying our tired dragon around from house to house. If we insisted that he walk on his own, he would simply sit down right in the middle of someone's yard and sigh heavily, sometimes actually laying down and making snoring noises.

Of course, when we finished up, he broke down into tears and demanded to do it all again. Oh, and guess what we heard when he woke up the next morning?
"Mama, let's have candy for breakfast!"

Happy Halloween!

animal, vegetable or mineral

I haven't felt a lot like posting lately - I think I suffer from a mild form of seasonal affective disorder or something. When I leave work and it's dark and I come home and it's dark, it does something to me. Something not good. All I really want to do is curl up in bed with a cup of coffee and a book and take catnaps and not have anybody bother me.

But, since I'm married with a three-year-old child and a cat and a greyhound, somebody is always bothering me for something. I think I'll just have to self-medicate with chocolate and move on.

First, let me talk with you about the Halloween costume drama. Yes, I do realize that it's October 25th and no, we do not yet have a Halloween costume for Drew.

I started about a month ago asking him, now that he's old enough to have opinions (and many of them) about various topics that directly affect him, what he wanted to dress up as for Halloween. I apparently opened some sort of floodgate, and have now learned that we do not ask open-ended questions of dictatorial and intransigent three-year-olds. We give them choice A and choice B and we tell them to pick one.

Otherwise, what you end up with is a preschooler who demands a different costume  every day. One day he wants to be a racecar driver. The next day he wants to be an actual racecar, specifically Lightning McQueen, his new best friend. Then he wants to be a spider, a witch, a lion and Bob the Builder.

At the moment that he is having these costume ideas, whatever particular costume has caught his fancy is the ONLY costume that he will wear, and alternative suggestions are not only unwelcome, but greeted with sobs and screams. Furthermore, reminders of what he chose the day previously are met with either hostile resistance or outright denial of ever having chosen that costume in the first place.

"Nooooooo, Mama, I do NOT want to be a 'pider! I want to be BOB the BUILDER! BOB! THE! BUILDER!"

So. Nana and I are taking him shopping together on Saturday. We will be coming home with a costume of some type, and he will be wearing it on October 31 and that's just the end of the story.

Now. Last night in the car on the way home from work, we were discussing various types of animals. I don't remember how we got on the subject and it doesn't matter because that's not really the point. At one point, bats were mentioned, probably in connection with Halloween, and Drew informed me that a bat was not an animal.

"A bat is an animal, " says I.

"A bat is an animal?" queried Drew, just to be sure, I guess.

"Yep."

"An owl is an animal, too?" asked Drew.

"Yes, an owl is a type of animal called a bird."

"Specifically, a noctural bird of prey known as a raptor," chimed in his daddy.

In the silence emanating from the backseat, I whispered, "Maybe a little too much information, hun."

"A booger is an animal," replied Drew, confidently.

"Um..." I started...

"No," interrupted Drew. "No. A booger is a vegetable."

Yes, folks, that's my child. A booger is a vegetable.

Drew turns 3

Yes, Drew is officially 3. He will proudly tell anybody who asks. "I'm tree!" he'll exclaim.

Last Saturday, we had a party at the house. He had, months before, specifically requested a "Mickey Mouse" birthday party, so we got Mickey Mouse balloons and Mickey Mouse cake and Mickey Mouse plates.

For entertainment, because I wasn't about to try to amuse six to eight preschoolers all by my lonesome, we hired a Kindermusik teacher to come out and have a private music/dancing class with the kids. Then we ate pizza, opened presents, ate cake and let the kids run off the sugar high on our backyard playset.

And now, some pictures of the festivities:

Here are the kids in the playroom participating in dancing and singing with Miss Carol from Kindermusik.

Drew with his Mickey cake. If you look closely, you'll notice something...um...unusual about the "candles" on the cake. See, in our frantic preparations for the party that morning (yes, we'd been planning it for a month or so, but do you really think we cleaned our house that far in advance? no, we did what any self-respecting parent does and we woke up early the morning of the party and started shoving stuff in closets)...well...I sort of accidentally threw away the birthday candles. And then Charles sort of took the trash to the dump before the guests arrived.

So, there we were, candle-less. And we had been promising Drew for weeks that he would get to "make a wish" and blow out some candles. So, Charles dug some matches out of a drawer, and voila! Something for Drew to blow out. Shut up. He never noticed the difference. By the time he's old enough to know, we'll have done something much worse and more emotionally scarring and he'll forget all about this.

Here's Drew opening some of his presents. If you're ever bored and feel you need a challenge, dump a big pile of brightly wrapped gifts into a mob of three, four and five-year-olds, and then tell them only one person can open the presents.

Yeah. It was kind of like watching Wild Kingdom.

Here's Drew's present from me and Charles - a train table for all of his Thomas trains. Charles found a great deal on it on Ebay.

After the party, Drew got to have a sleepover with Alex.

First, we tossed them into the bathtub, to wash off all the sand from the sandbox and cake frosting and whatnot. They found the whole experience quite novel. Alex's mom, Kelly, and I think these will be great blackmail pictures later on.

Then we read bedtime stories together. Yes, Alex chose the Dora Potty Book, which, to be fair, is one of Drew's favorite books. Too bad neither of them will actually use a potty, but they sure do like to read about them.

We put Alex to bed in a pack-and-play in Drew's room, where the two of them proceeded to stay up until 10:30 or so laughing and giggling like two teenage girls having a slumber party.

The next morning we had pancakes for breakfast, and before Alex and Kelly left, they helped Charles put together one of Drew's gifts - a desk/easel combination.

Well, OK. Alex helped by handing Charles some plastic hammers, and a plastic saw. Kelly and I sat on the couch and watched cartoons.

As you can see, Drew also watched cartoons, although he looked like he was helping by standing around holding tools. This is the same technique used by the South Carolina Highway Department during road construction projects.

Happy 3rd Birthday Drew!

imagine this

We are coming to the realization that our child has a pretty decent imagination - which can be both a good and a bad thing. Good, obviously, because it promotes creativity and enables him to entertain himself easily. Bad, because sometimes the imagination seeps out around the edges in his sleep, resulting in nightmares.

A couple of nights ago, Charles and I entertained Drew by making up stories for him, featuring him as a valiant hero coming to the rescue of a town beset by a big bully dragon, who kept stealing everyone's blocks.

Drew was thrilled to be the starring player in this drama - and later that evening we caught him building a "castle" with his Legos, and muttering about "dragons" and "superheroes" and the like, obviously adding to the story that we'd begun.

About two hours after he went to bed that night, he woke up crying. I went into his room and asked him what was wrong.

"Mama!" he sobbed. "There's a dragon in here! It's gonna get me!"

"Drew, there's no dragon in here. You told the dragon to go away, remember? In the story?"

Drew considered that for a moment, and then, in same tone of horror he used to tell us about the dragon, exclaimed, "Mama! There's a booger in my nose!"

"I don't know which he found more frightening..." Charles said later, "the dragon or the booger."

And, in the spirit of reporting cute things Drew says: this morning, on the way to work, Drew started fussing and rubbing at his eyes. When Charles asked him what was wrong, he responded frantically, "Dada - the sun's poking me in the eye!"

Trucks, and the many faces of Drew

Charles bought himself a truck last week. As homeowners, he explained to me, we were remiss in not owning a pickup truck.  A pickup truck can be used for many things, such as picking up mulch for the flowerbeds, hauling trash to the dump and buying ladders long enough to reach the roof of our two-story house.

And if it should happen to just look really cool and manly, well, that's just a bonus, right?

I'm really thinking that Charles might actually divorce me and marry this truck. And the sad thing is, I think Drew would choose to live with the truck.

I put him in my car - my boring, sedate, sedanly Mercury - yesterday to take him to school, and he immediately burst out with, "No! I wanna ride in Dada truck! Dada TRUCK!"

Earlier this week, while riding in the truck, I asked Drew to demonstrate his grasp of different emotions.

We started out with basic ones, like mad...

And then we moved on to happy...

I'm not sure what the balled-up fist is all about - maybe he's thinking, "I'm so happy I could punch someone in the face!" I've been that happy before, yes I have. I'm that happy right now, as a matter of fact.

Then I challenged him, and asked him to show me 'surprised'. This is what he came up with...

Not bad, huh? Then I asked him to show me "bored face."

Bored face looks more like what I would consider mad face, but then again, I'm usually mad when I'm bored too, as in, I'm so pissed that I have to fold laundry right now, this is so boring, why can't these clothes just fold themselves?

And finally, apropos of nothing much, allow me to demonstrate how well we've taught Drew table manners...

Notice, if you will, the delicate and manageable bites that he takes, and the way he chews with his mouth closed. And how he enjoys a little bit of popcorn shrimp with his ketchup.

just a few quick notes

I found this really neat blog today - it's called Greenville Daily Photo and, as the name implies, it features photos taken daily in and around downtown Greenville.  Some very cool shots, and I really like the way the photos are broken down into categories on the side, including by time-of-day.

I especially loved the section on fountains. I can't figure out if that's just because Greenville has such beautiful and interesting fountains or because it's topping 100 degrees today and looking at fountains makes me feel cooler. Probably a combination of the two.

Last night in the car on the way home from work, Charles and I had a little squabble about the temperature in the vehicle. See, my office is always way too hot, whereas his office is frigid enough to store meat. So, naturally, when I get into the car to go home, I want to crank up the air conditioning, while he wants to bake in the heat.

We don't own one of those cars with the his-and-hers temperature systems; it's one-temp-fits-all. So we're bickering good-naturedly about the direction of the vents and the level of the fan and so forth, when Drew pipes up from the backseat, in a commanding tone,  "Mama! Make Dada happy."

"Yeeesss!" cries Charles,  pumping a fist in the air. "That's my boy! Make Dada happy!"

OK, I know Charles was gone for six weeks, and Drew really missed him and all, but really...that's going a little overboard, don't you think?

apples and berries

So, we're sitting at the dinner table last night, Drew and I. I have served Drew a gourmet, carefully hand-crafted meal of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and applesauce.

Drew is munching away when he turns to me and says, contemplatively, "Applesauce. That's a funny word."

"Um, yes, it is sort of funny," I say, trying not to laugh.

"Yes, Mama," he responds seriously. Then he tells me that his applesauce has "turned yucky." Completely out of the blue! One second it's perfectly delicious, albeit amusingly labeled, and then, suddenly, it's inedible.

I add a sprinkle of cinnamon to the top of it, which apparently makes it palatable again.

"It not yucky now!" Drew says, excitedly.

Saturday morning, we drove a few miles down the road to The Happy Berry farm, where we picked blueberries.

Charles, who grew up in this area, said actually paying for the berries we picked was a new experience for him, since, as a child, he and his friends simply snuck through the woods and stuffed their faces for free.

"I'll thank you not to expose our innocent young son to your outlaw past," said I.

Drew took his berry picking very seriously. The farm owners will tell you that a certain amount of "grazing" from the bushes is expected, even encouraged, during picking. But Drew was having none of it.

"Berries go in the basket. IN THE BASKET!" he would say when we tried to entice him to try one. Obviously, he will not be following in the thieving steps of his father.

 

Also, despite the almost-100-degree weather, Drew declined to be picked up and carried, nor would he allow us to carry the basket for him for longer than a minute or two.

"I walk by MYSELF. I carry basket MYSELF."

We finally convinced him to sit in the shade and rest, although he continued to pick berries even while sitting.

 

When we returned to the farmhouse to weigh in our berries, it was a struggle to get him to sit down and drink some water.

After his nap, we let him help us make blueberry muffins and blueberry-lemon bread. The bread turned out quite yummy. The muffins, however, did not, although our greyhound Simon quite enjoyed them. Who knew that white corn meal would taste so different from yellow corn meal? The recipe called for yellow, but I didn't have yellow. I had white. It's only a minor color difference, right?

Basically I ended up with blueberry cornbread, shaped like muffins. They look great. I mean, seriously great. Fluffy, oozing with plump blue fruit, lightly browned on top...they should have tasted divine.  But they tasted like cornbread, which, while not a bad taste, is not a sweet, soft, delicate, melt-in-your-mouth taste. Cornbread tastes like roughage - like practical, stick-to-your-ribs breakfast food. Muffins taste like buttery sin on a plate.

But did I mention the bread was good?

my very own drill sergeant

For those of you who don't know, I've been playing single mom for six weeks. I didn't post too much about it, because I thought it unwise to tell the whole Internet that my husband was out of town, but now that he's back, I can whine and gripe tell you all about it.

Now, don't get me wrong - he wasn't on vacation exactly. He's been having the crap kicked out of him daily at Fort Jackson's Drill Sergeant school. I, on the other hand, got to have the crap kicked out of me daily by a preschooler. I'm not sure which one is worse, actually.

See, it really takes two people to do most things with Drew, like get him to eat and get him to put his pajamas on and get him to brush his teeth. It's not that he doesn't enjoy doing these things, he would just much rather make me chase him around the room several times before giving in. It's much easier chasing a preschooler around the room when your husband can flank him and head him off at the pass.

Last night, while attempting to get Drew into his pajamas, Charles had hold of both of his arms and was gamely attempting to keep him from swinging from side to side while I grasped for his feet - and Charles said, "Man, I don't see how you did this every night."

Music to my ears.

So, onward to the pictures! Last weekend, my family journeyed with me to Fort Jackson, where we got to see Charles graduate and get his cool drill sergeant hat. Upon seeing Charles for the first time, Drew yelled, "I got my daddy back! I got my daddy back!"

Drew found daddy's new hat quite intriguing. I believe his exact words were, "Dat a big hat, daddy."

Here's Charles marching all stern-faced back to his seat after receiving his badge and hat.

Watching the ceremony. Drew almost fell asleep until they started singing cadences. He found that fascinating.

My family: mom and dad, my sister Jennifer and brother-in-law Paul and my other sister Laura and future brother-in-law Eric.

After graduation - we're so glad to have Charles back. I have a to-do list approximately four pages long, including replacing the shutters that blew off the top story windows and mowing the back yard.  Oh, and ironing all my clothes from now on, because man, I'm just not good at that. And if there's one thing a military man can do great, it's press a pair of pants.