Dante and I have turned his anti-nickname policy into a playful game, where when he protests against being called something, I rattle off a list of others, usually ending with, "just a Dante." This weekend, though, he had a couple of surprises for me:

ME: You're my little bean.
DANTE: I am not a bean.
ME: Are you a... dude?
DANTE: I am not a dude.
ME: Maybe a pumpkin?
DANTE: I am not a pumpkin.
ME: Sweetie-pie?
DANTE: I am not a pie.
ME: Sugar cookie?
DANTE: OK.
ME: [Surprised but pleased] Okay then, sugar cookie! I love you, sugar cookie!

Then, the next afternoon:

DANTE: I think I will have that sugar cookie now.

D'oh! Apparently, he thought I was offering. It was reminiscent of when Marge quizzes Homer to figure out if he's an alcoholic:

MARGE: [reading from a pamphlet entitled, "Is Your Spouse a Souse?"] Homey, do you ever drink alone?
HOMER: Does the Lord count as a person?
MARGE: No.
HOMER: Then yes.
MARGE: Do you need a beer to fall asleep?
HOMER: Thank you, that'd be nice.

Also, he's been moving into a more affectionate phase (possibly prompted by more feelings of insecurity, and that has included more verbal expressions of affection too. So when Laura says, "I love you", he very carefully answers, "I love you, too." And then there's me:

ME: I love you, Dante.
DANTE: I love Mama, too.

Dante has latched onto a new formulation: "Don't say [insert expression of any kind of excitement here]." A typical scene at our house:

LAURA: I gave Dante some of my quarters to play with.
PAUL: Wow, nice mama!
DANTE: Don't say "nice mama!"

We're almost guaranteed to get this response if we praise him. Any "great job!" (or equivalent) is very likely to be met with a "Don't say 'great job!'" It also extends to correction. An example from tonight: he's running towards some food to eat it, but his hands are filthy from digging through gravel, so I want him to wash his hands first.

PAUL: [As he's running towards the table] Waitwaitwaitwait! Wash your hands first, please.
DANTE: Don't say "waitwaitwaitwait!"

It can be a little frustrating -- it's like he's the emotion police. Laura's theory is that he gets easily overwhelmed when around expressions of feeling, and struggles to process them. So he tries to assert some control over the thing that's crashing in on his world. Now, this doesn't mean that he himself is averse to expressing emotion. Far from it. (I mean, come on, he's 3.) Also, under the right circumstances, Laura and I can express our feelings to each other, him, or whoever, especially if we do it calmly, or, conversely, if he's hyped right along with us. But any kind of animated speech expressed while he himself isn't feeling animated is quite likely to trigger the Little Censor.

He's also having a vexed relationship with attention. Even calmly phrased praise can be difficult for him to accept. Descriptive praise works best, but sometimes even a totally calm, totally factual piece of feedback is more attention than he wants on his achievements. Last night, we were reading a story together, in which some of the words were highlighted in red. The idea was that the kid would shout out the red words. So I told him this, and when we got to the first red word (which was "forest"), I pointed at it, and he said, "I don't know what that says." I suspected this was not true. So I said, "What if you said it in a very quiet voice?" I read the sentence again, and then pointed at the word. "Forest," he said, the barest whisper into my ear. We read through the whole story, and he whispered each red word, almost inaudibly. He knew them all -- he just didn't want the feeling of being expected to speak them, let alone shout them.

Even as he's attention-averse in certain ways, he's simultaneously become Mr. Separation Anxiety, finding it difficult to tolerate being away from Laura for more than a minute or two unless somebody else is directly paying attention to him. "I want mama," he says, all day long. He says it when she is standing right in front of him, sometimes even when she's holding him. "I want comfort," I think he means.

It makes sense that he'd be feeling a little insecure. He'll be going to preschool in the fall, and we've been slowly introducing the idea of school to him. It's fair to say he's freaked by the prospect. I think (I hope) it's mostly fear of the unknown, and that he'll be okay after a transition period. It might be a rough transition period, though. He's been insisting lately that he is not three, that he's only two and he won't get any bigger. Also, he's started wearing some plastic braces on his feet for part of the day to help correct a fairly severe pronation problem (walking on the insides of his feet, basically.) So he's going through an adjustment period with that too.

He's got a lot going on, and considering that, I think he's doing pretty well. But I won't say that too loudly around him.

I am NOT a man.

I am NOT a munchkin.

I am NOT a bean.

I am NOT a partner.

I am NOT a dude.

I am NOT a buddy.

I am NOT a policeman.

I am NOT a pie.

I am NOT a kiddo.

I am NOT a pumpkin.



I am just a Dante.

For his third birthday, Dante received a puzzle map of the USA, with one piece per state (except for some of the smaller northeastern states, which group together on a few pieces.) I got some video of the second time he'd put it together. Sorry for the shaky-cam bits. This video was long enough that it needed to be split up into two parts:


Part 1


Part 2

Tallahassee is a very long word!

Watching him put this map together made me realize that the states and their capitals are just brimming with unintuitive pronunciations. Really, take a look:

Arkansas
Connecticut
Hawaii
Juneau
Phoenix
Boise
Des Moines
Baton Rouge
Lincoln
Raleigh
Pierre
Montpelier
Cheyenne

Yet the ones that give him trouble are "Florida" and "Augusta." Go figure.

Dante's birthday is coming up on June 21, and he knows it, though he doesn't quite know what it means. Witness this recent exchange:

DANTE: On the twenty-oneth I am going to have a beer.

PAUL: What?

DANTE: My birthday is on 21, and I am going to have a beer.

PAUL: You're not having a beer on your birthday. You can have a beer when you turn 21, but you're going to be turning three. Not twenty-one.

DANTE: [Patiently] I am turning three on twenty-one.

PAUL: Your birthday is on the twenty-first, but you have to be twenty-one years old to have a beer. You'll only be three years old.

DANTE: I will have a beer another time.

PAUL: Well...

DANTE: Grandma told me that.

For the record, his grandma is not prepping him for beer consumption on his birthday, nor even when he turns 21. I have no idea where this beer thing came from, though it had me on my back in hysterics.

The "another time" formulation is really big right now, and I am loving it. Clearly, we have taught him that while gratification can often be achieved, it must sometimes be delayed. Thus, whenever I forbid something, he replies that he can do that thing "another time," which I think comforts him and prevents a lot of complaints. It's also mostly true, because very few of his suggestions involve something that I will never allow him to do. Though in some cases, he may have a looooong wait ahead of him...

Okay, remember when I said that Dante was recognizing words, but not actually reading?

Well, he's reading now.

Now, I feel certain that he is not actually comprehending all of what he's reading. But he's sounding out words in his head and then saying them out loud, often quite quickly. For instance: he sometimes likes to sit at my computer and type things into Notepad. Lately, he's discovered that there are some keys on the keyboard that can make other exciting things come up, like the Windows key. He brings up the Start menu, then hits Esc and says, "Escape!"

So a few nights ago, he's managed to open the Control Panel. I'm watching him carefully to make sure he doesn't hack into my registry or something. Instead, he starts rattling off words. "Power options," he says. "Mouse." "Display." "Faxes." "Witherless" ("Wireless," I explain.)

I'd like to point out here that this kid is NOT EVEN THREE YEARS OLD.

Then he asks for Google, and says, "Google. Maps. News. Shopping. Gamel." ("G-mail," I say for that last one, in between bouts of laughter and praise.)

Then, to top it all off, he says, "I'm Feeling Lucky!"

I think to myself: Me too.

Dante has gotten in the habit of pointing at anything he's not familiar with and saying, "That is something." I'm working on retraining him to ask, "What is that?" This quality of his came out hilariously yesterday.

So he and I are looking out the window last night, and I start to play the "I Spy" game with him, though not using that particular phrase. I would say "I see something that starts with an 'S'" and he would try to guess what it is. Then he'd take a turn. We've done this once before, with items in the living room. There's not quite as much variety looking out our window, though.

So I said "S" for sky.

Then he took a turn, and said "C" for cars.

Then I said "T" for tree.

Then he said "B" for bushes.

Then I said "D" for doors.

Then he said "S". I guessed the sidewalk -- he said no. I guessed stones -- he said no. I made sure it wasn't the sky again -- he said it wasn't. I said, "Saturn?" thinking there was an outside chance he'd read or remembered the make of my car -- he said no.

Finally, I said, "I give up. What is it?"

He said, "Something." Then a neighbor drove up and got out of his car. Dante pointed and said, "And someone!"

I said, "You win the game."

We've been working on hand-washing skills with Dante, so Laura bought him a little two-step staircase to help him reach the bathroom sink. He loves any opportunity to get taller, so these stairs felt like a great opportunity to him. Last night, he figured out how to turn the water on and off, as well as stop the drain. Let's go to the videotape:



Those are some clean hands!

Laura has been working with Dante on some of his "social aversion" things. When people say hi to him out in public, he generally says something like, "You don't want her talk to you!" (Frankly, I can hardly blame him -- I usually feel the same way when strangers talk to me in public.) So she's been telling him that it's okay if he doesn't talk to people, but she doesn't want him to say the "you don't want" thing.

Well, she just started telling him this a few days ago, and she's recently observed a new phenomenon: he has begun starting conversations with strangers! Three times now, according to her, he has addressed a stranger by saying, "Your name is Dante." Which I think is awesome, and also fairly hilarious. It reminds me of when we were in Mexico and Laura kept saying to people (in Spanish), "I'm sorry, you don't speak Spanish." Anyway, he actually had a conversation with one woman, who followed up his introduction by asking him how old he was. He said, "Right now, you are two and a half."

You have been getting very tired of your highchair. It is too small, and it is too tight, and you don't like the way the tray won't move. It pushes your stomach. You have been complaining about it more and more. Finally, this week, you decided to just refuse. You said, "you don't want to sit in the chair!" And when Mama asked if you were ready for lunch, you just kept saying no.

Then: Mama had an amazing idea! She moved your highchair, and then she got a table and a chair, cleaned them off, and put them where the highchair used to be. This table and chair are totally cool -- they are just your size. You sat down in the chair, and Mama put some food on the table, and you were so excited! You ate the food, and you kept saying, "You are eating at a table! You are sitting on a chair! You are like a grownup!"

Every so often, you would get up and do a little table-chair happy dance, where you would run around the table bouncing around with a big smile. You also decided: the blog people must see the awesome new table and chair!

( So here they are! )

Laura puts Dante down for a 30-minute "rest time" each day, and she takes the time to go rest! Then Dante rolls a saving throw against sleepiness, and if he wins, he babbles and chatters through the whole half hour. Sometimes he does this contentedly, sometimes less so. If he starts to get really stressed out, Laura goes in there and either gets him (if he's been in there for over 30 minutes) or tells him he needs to keep resting... quietly. He can have a book and/or a car to amuse himself during this time.

Dante is very hip to the fact that his rest time is supposed to be 30 minutes, so in his Jedi mind tricks way he tries to alter reality by shouting "It's 30 minutes!" when in fact it is anything but. Today he achieved a new level, as Laura walked in the room to address distressed cries:

LAURA: Honey, mama needs to keep resting. It's not 30 minutes yet.
DANTE: It's 29.

[It was actually more like seven.]

Dante is experiencing his very first pop culture obsession: Thomas The Tank Engine. We got a Thomas DVD at Christmastime, and started slipping it into the rotation last month. At some point, he decided he really likes it. We got our first clue about this when he began stomping around the house shouting, "Thomas! Edward! Gordon! James! Percy!"

So then Laura got some more DVDs in a "3 for the price of 2" deal, and we've been adding them slowly. The first one was a big hit, and added more trains to his repertoire. Then Laura found him some Thomas reusable stickers. These were a HUGE hit, and a ton of fun for us to play with. The first night he had them, he wanted to spread them all out and look at them. I hadn't watched the DVDs too much, so I was a bit ignorant about the world of Thomas; I talked about the stickers with Dante, and he totally schooled me.

PAUL: Oh look, here's Edward!
DANTE: (gently) That is Henry.
PAUL: Oh, whoops! Which one is Edward?
DANTE: He is the blue number 2.
PAUL: Aha. Thanks for setting me straight about that.

In fact, Dante has become a Thomas trivia king (at least, for the subdomain of Thomas to which he has been exposed.) You can formulate any question about the trains he knows, and he will nail it. Which one is number 5? (James.) Who are the green engines? (Percy and Henry. Also, Emily is dark green.) What does Gordon do? (He pulls the express.) Let me tell you, I couldn't be prouder.

Unfortunately, the second DVD from the 3 for 2 deal was a bit of a bump in the road. He watched it for the first time by himself, and something in there freaked him out. We won't be making that mistake again. (Of doing brand new ones unmediated, I mean.) Now he insists on only watching "the old Thomas", which gets rather monotonous. We just gave him the 3rd for Valentine's Day, and we've assured him that it's not scary. We'll ease him into it.

Overall, I'm pretty pleased that this is what he's glommed onto. The stories are calm and sweet, plus they're read by fun celebrity narrators -- Ringo Starr, Alec Baldwin, and George Carlin so far. His favorite is the Ringo one, which is great for me since it gives me a good opportunity to work on my Ringo voice. Also, the narration is full of entertaining Briticisms. "Sir Topham Hatt was very cross indeed!"

He came up to me today and rattled off what I believe to be his first pop culture quote: "The only engines keeping other engines awake are little engines with very bad manners." I love that. "May the Force be with you" can't be far away! :)

You have discovered a fun new thing to do: inventing words! It all started when one night you suddenly just started saying "Veebay!" You said it over and over again. "Veebay. Veebay. Veebay. Veebay!" Mommy and Daddy would say it too, though they never managed to have quite the right intonation and expression.

Since then, you have made up a wide variety of new words:

• Virga (pronounced "VEER-ga")
  
• Geekay
  
• Gurka
  
• Vurka
  
• Beebay

And so on.

New words are great because they are so fun to say, and they go along with almost any activity. Also, they let you be kind of mysterious, like this:

DANTE: [while walking or playing] Virga! Virga. Virga. Virga. Virga!
DADDY: Virga. What does that mean?
DANTE: Virga.
DADDY: Yes, I hear you, but what is virga?
DANTE: [sagely] Virga.

Dante has been polishing his negotiation skills lately as he tries to figure out just what the boundaries are.

The first traces of this behavior surfaced a few months ago, in relationship to the "3 little balls" rule. See, we have a little stash of Jelly Belly jellybeans, which he calls "little balls." Occasionally he's allowed to have a few (usually 3) for dessert after a meal. However, when he's had some other sugary stuff already that day, we turn down the request, which would result in exchanges like this:

DANTE: You want three little balls.
PAUL: No honey, you already had a popsicle. That was your dessert.
DANTE: [A long pause, and then...] You want ten little balls.

As you can see, in the initial stages he hadn't grasped the key concept of starting high and negotiating down. His attempts to do it the other way were spectacular and hilarious failures. Now he's got it down, as evidenced by his attempts to stretch out the bedtime ritual yesterday.

LAURA: Do you want me to sing you three lullabies?
DANTE: Dante wants fifty lullabies.
LAURA: OK, no, that's not going to happen, how about five?
DANTE: Want twenty lullabies.
LAURA: We can do ten lullabies, and that's all.
DANTE: [A long pause, and then...] Eleven.
LAURA: [Sighing] Okay, eleven.

The tactics aren't just restricted to numerical haggling, though. There's also the time-honored "You want three more minutes", "You want one more page", "You want more ice cream", etc. Better than this, though, are attempts to avoid waiting via reality manipulation:

DANTE: Want to paint with finger paints!
LAURA: Okay, give me about ten minutes, and then we can do that.
DANTE: 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10! [Looks at her expectantly.]

Or, even better:

DANTE: You want to go to Grandma's house.
PAUL: Well, we're going to go there in three days.
DANTE: It's three days.

Doesn't hurt to try, right? The best one I've seen so far was when we were coming back from an errand. As occasionally happens when we drive somewhere, Dante decided that he wanted to be the one to unlock the car door (yeah, no keyless entry for me.) So he put the key in and turned it, but this time when I opened the door, he climbed right into the driver's seat, and we had this dialogue:

PAUL: Oh, are you going to drive now?
DANTE: [Excited] DANTE is going to drive!
PAUL: Nope, sorry, you've got about fourteen years before you can do that.
DANTE: [Looking at me with his best "Jedi mind tricks" gaze] It's fourteen years.

You want to talk about some more of the fun things that happened this Christmas-time. Also, this time, you have pictures!

( Click here with the left button if you want to see them! )

You hope everybody else had a really great Christmas or holiday or whatever they did this week!

Yesterday, I was talking with my friend Trish about Dante, and she called him "a little mixed-up ball of genius."

I said: "His blog now has a new title."

Hey blog --

Daddy has been writing for the last few times, and now it is your turn. You want to talk about the Christmas thing. You are enjoying it a lot. Here are some of the things you like the best:

• The lights. You love looking at the lights on our tree, and outside on the bush in front of our house we have very pretty 1-5-0 lights. You call them 1-5-0 lights because there was a 150 on the box when Daddy got them. Also, the neighbors have very good lights too. Your favorites are these deer that have lights and move their heads.
  
• Charlie Brown Christmas. You want to watch this almost every day. The kids dance, and Snoopy carries a big box, and his doghouse gets lots of lights on it! There are lots of trees with funny colors, and one little tiny green tree, and the needles fall down. The ornament is too heavy! And the tree goes bloop and leans down. Then the kids sing a little song. It is great!
  
• The stories. Every night you and Mommy and Daddy read a Christmas book together. The best one is Sweet Smell of Christmas, but you need to make clear that you do not want to sniff the book! It is okay for Mommy and Daddy to sniff the book. Also, you like to scratch the book.
  
• The ornaments. The ones you like to look at the most are these butterflies. There is a yellow one and a blue one and a lovely green one and an orange one, which is Grandma Bertie's favorite because she loves orange.
  
• The advent calendar! This is the very best thing of all. First, it is a nice picture. Second, it has a bunch of numbers, which are awesome. Third, it's like a puzzle because you get to look for a new number every day. Sometimes you may need a hint. Then, when you find the number, you get to open a little tiny door and there is a picture behind the door. Then, at the end -- get this! -- there is a piece of chocolate behind the door! The chocolate also has a picture on it, which is cool, and those chocolates are so delicious! Wow, they are delicious.
  

Okay, those are some of the best things about Christmas. Happy holidays, blog!

Dante amazes me all the time with the things he's able to do, but today we reached a new level. I've known for a while that he's good with letters -- he's known his ABCs for many months now, and sometimes recites them spontaneously. Since the end of summer or so, he has also taken to identifying letters that he sees out in the world, especially when they're gigantic letters on big signs. "It says B-E-S-T-B-U-Y!" he'll say. He's also demonstrated that he has an excellent memory for strings of letters attached to a particular meaning. For instance, when he turns off a light he likes to say "O-F-F means off." He also knows what D-A-N-T-E spells, and conversely, can spell his name when asked.

( It gets better, though. )

Yesterday Dante and I were playing Notepad, and I had an idea for a new way to play with it. Dante knows that his name is spelled D-A-N-T-E, so I suggested that we try to find each letter so that we could write his name in Notepad. Well, it was laborious, but we finally found each letter in turn, and lo and behold, there was "dante" on the screen!

He then held down Backspace (another recent addition to our Notepad activities), erased the word, and then said, "Want to do it again." So once again, we hunted hunted hunted for the D, the A, the N. As we were looking for the T, he noticed it was very close to the E, and proceeded to type the latter before the former, giving us a Notepad reading:

danet

Well, at this point, the never-too-deeply-submerged Rocky Horror fan in me came out, and I had to sing a little song:

The river was deep but I swam it... Danet!
The future is ours so let's plan it... Danet!
So please, don't tell me to can it... Danet!
I've one thing to say and that's 'Danet! Danet! I love you!'

The road was long but I ran it... Danet!
There's a fire in my heart and you fan it... Danet!
If there's one fool for you then I am it... Danet!
I've one thing to say and that's 'Danet! Danet! I love you!'

Here's the ring to prove that I'm no joker
There's three ways that love can grow
That's good, bad, or mediocre
Oh D-A-N-E-T I love you so!

So let's go see the man who began it... Danet!
When we met in his science exam it... Danet!
Made me give you the eye and then panic... Danet!
I've one thing to say and that's 'Danet! Danet! I love you!'

Dante absolutely cracked up when I burst into song like that, and for the rest of the night (as well as today), he occasionally bursts out with "Danet!"