Hobie One Sings!

So I’m listening to my iPod on random shuffle today and the love song duet from Moulin Rouge comes on. Just to see what he’d think, I pointed out to Harrison that the boy singing—Ewan McGregor—was Obi-Wan Kenobi. He got real quiet and listened intently. When the girl—Nicole Kidman—starts singing, Harrison looks at me and says, “Now Padme Amidala is singing!” I didn’t have the heart to tell him the truth, especially when, later in the song Ewan McGregor comes back in to sing, Harrison asked if that was Anakin singing. Why ruin it for him?

Harrison’s Song*

Baby Laura wants to play.

Baby Laura doesn’t want to poo-poo because she cries.

Then she wanted to drink some milk.

Then she likes to read Challenge of the Superfriends.

Then she wants to play with me.

Then she likes to color with me.

She wants to play Legos with me.[1]

And Laura and Harrison likes our family.

Me and Laura like to play with the pirate ship and the castle[2] and the costumes. Laura dresses as Wonder Woman and I dress as Optimus Prime.[3]

Then Mommy and Daddy want to have a party with a Bumblebee cake.

Harrison will have an Optimus Prime toy and Mommy will have a grey Transformer toy and Daddy will have a Bumblebee toy and Laura will have a purple Transformer toy.[4]

Then she wants to do some Pincredibles papers.[5]

Harrison has the Lego Star Wars game and Laura has the Indiana Jones Lego game.

Then she wants to play some guitar with me.

The End

---

* This began as song lyrics, but somewhere around the mention of Legos, he decided it would be better as a story. I’ve retained much of the grammar and the cadence of the sentences. The footnotes, although in Harrison’s first person voice, are my own notes.

[1] Although Mommy and Daddy won’t let her because she would choke on the pieces.

[2] Again, not allowed.

[3] I don’t have an Optimus Prime costume.

[4] Presumably because she’s a girl and that’s what color Transformer girls get.

[5] The Incredibles coloring sheets.

1 week...

Laura is already a week old. I know it sounds silly, but it seems like she's already growing up too fast.

Logic, Pure and Simple

My son wants another blue lightsaber. We got him the red and blue ones while in New York City last summer. His first words to his Nana upon disembarking the plane were not, “I love you!” or “I missed you!” or “I went to New York City!” but “I got a blue lightsaber!” We didn’t get him the green lightsaber, which typically denotes Jedi Knight status because he wanted the same weapon as Padawan-ranked ‘Hobie-One’ from Episode One. The red saber, obviously, is for bad guys.

So he tells me yesterday that he needs another blue lightsaber. I’m pretty sure it’s because he wants to be able to act out the climactic battle between Hobie-One and Anakin in Episode Three, in which Anakin becomes badly wounded and completes his transition over to the Dark Side. Now, he’s four, so he’s never seen Episode Three. I’m not a perfect parent by far, but I’m not about to show a four-year-old the darkest chapter in the Star Wars saga. I get enough trouble with him trying to play Jedi Battle at school—I can only imagine the notes that would be sent home if he were to re-enact the Anakin-to-Darth Vader transition for his classmates.

This of course, makes Episode Three all the more enticing to him. He stares at pictures from the movie hungrily, desperate to see them in action. He plays the Episode Three level of Lego Star Wars and watches the brick people fight, asking questions, trying to understand how Anakin could possibly want to become evil. He’s got a kid’s book, kind of an encyclopedia of people and places in Star Wars, that he carries around with him to the point that I’m not sure it’s binding is going to withstand the year. There’s a picture in it from the climactic battle in which both Hobie-One and Anakin have blue lightsabers and they’re locked in a heated dual. He stares at this picture for what seems like hours, desperately trying to will it to action so he can watch it (maybe using the Force?).

“Mom, I need a new blue lightsaber.”

“You already have a blue lightsaber. We need to get you the green one, though.”

“But Mom, I need a blue lightsaber.”

“Why do you need another blue lightsaber?”

“Because I need it.”

“But why? Why do you need it?”

“Because I need it.”

“Buy why? Explain to me why you need another blue lightsaber when the one you have is perfectly fine and you’re missing a green one.”

“Okay, I’m going to ‘splain it to you.” He looks at me to make sure I’m paying full attention, so as not to miss his brilliant argument. Dramatic gesturing of hands. “I need it."

How do I argue with that logic?

Laura’s Baby

We finally got home from the hospital Wednesday afternoon and spent the better part of the day just piddling around. The next day, Robert got up, took Harrison to school and we repeated the lazy day of sleeping when Laura slept, eating and not really doing much else. (In a way, we were kind of newborns ourselves.)

At some point on Thursday afternoon, we found ourselves in Laura’s room with her wide awake so we started showing her the stuff in there. She was taking it all in with silent, wide-eyed wonder; I can only imagine the internal dialogue going on in there at seeing purple, lavender and pink camouflage walls. In her crib, we have a baby-safe mirror attached to the rails that has all kinds of rattles and toys around it. When he was a baby, Harrison loved playing with this thing.

Anyhoo, we decided to set Laura down next to the mirror so she could see herself and all the toys. She took one look at that baby in the mirror, looked over at us and pooted (it just seems vulgar to call a baby poot a ‘fart’) her surprise.

She’s been wary of that corner of the crib ever since.

The Harrison and Laura Files

Harrison is now four and a half. I've forgotten much of the cute stuff that he has done over the course of his life and that makes me kind of sad. Laura, on the other hand, is five days old. She's already doing stuff that makes my incision staples hurt from laughter, so I'm feeling kind of a sense of urgency with her. I don't want to lose all the great memories from both of my kids.
I'm not so much planning on documenting every second of their lives--I've got too much going on in my own life to be doing that--but I just wanted a place to tell their stories. That's what people keep telling us--when I'll relate some funny thing Harrison did, they'll say, "You should be writing this stuff down somewhere."
This is my 'somewhere.'