All this is to say, my house is a disaster, and I don’t want any shame over it. I’ve got a full-on kid at home. The living room is a chaos of cardboard. Blue electrical tape holds up scraps of construction paper all over my walls with my son’s interpretive “weather reports.” I’m trying my damndest to teach him to put his things away, because I think it will make not only my life easier but his as well (how many mornings screech to a halt when we must search for The Other Croc before leaving the house), yet there are still Legos on every surface, in every corner of the house--both Duplo-sized and “Big Boy” sized (as we confusingly call the impossibly tiny ones, to which Mads has graduated this Spring).
The state of my home is partly my fault. I’m an enabler. I bring cardboard boxes home from work and store cracker boxes, egg cartons, and the paper grocery bags my grandmother sends home with me in a corner of our dining room designated, loosely, for “art supplies”. And, I encourage my little boy to bring home odd scraps of plastic and paper he finds when we’re out and about, more things to reuse; since reading Lois Elhert’s Rain Fish (an instant favorite, which Mads and I refer to as Garbage Fish), we’re constantly on the look-out for, well, garbage.
I suppose a mechanic’s workshop or an artists studio is also constantly in a state of muddlement and flux--it’s part of the process. With a nearly five-year-old boy, our home is both workshop and studio, as well as discotheque, test kitchen, laboratory, and about a hundred other things, depending on the day.
As far as the cleaning goes, Wolfman and I are doing the best we can.
About Mads, 4 Years & 10 Months Old:
- Mads is finally beginning to share my love of Labyrinth. He recognizes David Bowie as "The Goblin King," and his favorite part of the movie is the Fireys. However, Mads has also begun wailing, "That's not fair!" whenever he doesn't immediately get his way.
- One evening, while we sit in the back yard eating grilled pineapple and the juices run down Martigan's naked chest, I light a stick of citronella incense, and Mads uses it to invoke Odin and cast spells for health and longevity. He announces he is a wizard, and he runs around the yard naked in a cloud of perfumed smoke. (He repeated the same indoors only once--we had to put a kibosh on the baby shamanism after he pressed the red tip of the incense into the covers of his bed and burnt a little hole in his duvet.)
- Wolfman and Mads often utilize our community center's open gym hours, especially on hot days or rainy days; Wolfman reports that though he's tried to teach the basics of basketball and volleyball as he remembers them, Mads prefers to invent his own games (and he is rather bossy about it).
- Wolfman and Mads also spend many an evening in the community center game room playing air hockey, and Mads is legitimately, without any parental stacking of the odds, pretty good at it (and getting better).
- Mads uses my tablet to scroll The Dogist Instagram feed.
- Mads loves seaweed salad and Bubbies sauerkraut.
- When I'm feeling cranky one morning, Mads makes the effort to soothe me by requesting I read him a book, which he knows I love, and choosing a particularly dreamy one (Kim Krans' 1,2,3 Dream).
- When Wolfman has The Classical Station on in the car, Mads informs him, "Daddy, I don't like this music. I only like Rock n' Roll."
- Preparing to read Curious George to Mads and Ella one night, the one where George gets on the wrong subway train, (one of Mads' favorites), Mads informs his cousin in preamble, "The subway is a train that goes underground in New York City. That's far away from North Carolina."
- Mads went through an entire box of Paw Patrol bandages, wrapping them around his fingers when he should have been brushing his teeth. Now all bandages in our house are plain and kept in the parents' bathroom.
- As I tuck him into bed each night, Mads gets squirrely and wild, fighting sleep, and tells me, "I want to hug you with my legs!"
- Mads writes his name--M.A.D.S. (in all caps, and the 's' is almost always backwards). He asks us how to spell words (words like "octopus," "zebra," "berry," or "bear") so that he can write them or construct them on the refrigerator with magnet letters. He spells "Mama" completely on his own, without help, much like the first word he spoke was "Mama."
- Mads calls fudge and brownies "smudge," though he knows that's incorrect. He always shakes his head and asks, "Wait. What's that stuff called?" Maybe it's because I giggle when he says it, though I try hard not to. His baby words are dwindling--"cunchtable" for comfortable, "titar" for guitar, and smudge.
- Mads says, "Mom, you know, every once in a while I get a spit storm in my mouth."
- As I tease Atalanta one morning, nuzzling my face into her neck and asking, "When are you going to learn you're not the boss; I'm the boss." Mads pipes up and says, "You're not the boss, Mommy. Daddy's the boss." I ask, "Oh? Why do you say that?" He answers without pause, "Because Daddy's the grumpiest."
- Martigan attended a pre-k class in the Spring. He was smart and social and a natural leader, and Wolfman and I often arrived early to pick him up so we could watch him from the door window of his classroom, in awe of his ease.
- In May, after watching several of his cousin's ballet classes, Mads requested to join her. He took to the class immediately, as if he'd always been there. He wears all black, like a ninja. After his first performance this month, he informed us that he wants to do that again, and soon.
- Martigan's favorite books lately: Shark Detective by Jessica Olien; Chicks and Salsa by Aaron Reynolds and Paulette Bogan; Creepy Pair of Underwear by Aaron Reynolds and Peter Brown; Here Comes Destructosaurus by Aaron Reynolds and Jeremy Tankard
- Martigan's favorite shows and movies lately: PJ Masks, Transformers: Rescue Bots, Super Wings, all things Power Rangers, all things Scooby Doo
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