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Building to Something
Avey’s spring break was full of relaxing and arguments with Carver, and a few moments of joy. Easily the biggest success of the week was when she finally, after offers of incentives (i.e., renting Hotel Transylvania 2), cleaned her room. It’s entirely changed the ambiance of the house, and easily increased the property value of every home on the block.
Hakan has really exploded with speaking even more lately. He is working his way into full sentences, and mimics almost every word he hears, for better or for worse. One of the awkward consequences of that is that he recently copied a little insult game that Carver and I play. Carver and I sometimes exchange juvenile name-calling, and laugh at ourselves. Hakan has picked up on this, and recently began telling me, with an enormous smile, that my “head is dumb.” I can’t help but laugh at the sound of his soprano unwittingly jabbing me with an insult that barely makes sense anyway, so I may be inadvertently reinforcing his behavior. Luckily, Carver knows that this game is just to play with Daddy, and just when we both know it’s just to be silly. Hakan should get there too, eventually.
Carver has been working hard to master doing buttons by himself. This interest was sparked mostly by his need to undo and redo his button before and after using the big boy potty, and also because his pajama shirts have buttons. Combine these facts with his intrinsic drive for independence, and voilà, an obsessive compulsive boy is created. It still takes him some time, but he is getting better at it.
Kira tried to take the two older kids to an Easter egg hunt that our township put on yesterday morning, but apparently they were supposed to arrive even earlier than they did. It was scheduled to begin at 10:00 a.m. They arrived at 9:59, and it was already over. The other children must have swarmed the field much like piranhas amass upon and devour a wounded animal.
Fortunately, we have our own plastic eggs, and Kira was prepared with candy. She and the kids colored some eggs, filled the plastic eggs and the homemade ones, and then we had our own egg hunt in our yard this morning. Hakan had a fun time opening one of the eggs he found and then hiding the candy in the yard for some reason.
Yesterday was a day of outings. I work at our campus in Schaumburg, IL on Mondays this semester, and the campus is right near some wonderful places, including an Ikea. We have been in dire need of some new kitchen chairs for many years. Our old ones had either already fallen apart or were on their way. The rest of those at the table were mismatched from various sources. It was not a huge problem unless anybody wanted to visit us. We then had to debate who would sit on the old stool I used to use as a night stand, and who would sit on the chair that could fall apart if you looked at it strangely.
We visited Ikea with high hopes to find and purchase some decent kitchen chairs, and succeed we did. We are slowly resembling white trash less and less.
The children were sort of patient with the long drive and such because I had also noticed a Lego store on my trips to and from there, so we promised them that we could check it out. It was a lot of fun, and included a life-size giraffe made of the interlocking bricks, and a much larger-than-life head of Albert Einstein.
I’m sure the builders of his image wish that Albert had had shorter hair, and maybe saved them a few hours.