Cute things Spencer Did

Kids say (and do) the darndest things...

But this isn't news.
Here are cute things my kid(s) did

Spencer was born 8/28/92. He had done cute things all his life (gasp!), but it was when I got a personal e-mail account that the cute things started getting recorded in a more permanent way. Usually I e-mail these things to grandma, but just clip the cute parts to here as well.

7/7/95: Spencer is singing things this evening. One of his more recent acquisitions is the hokey pokey, which he does actions and all. This evening he decided to do the hokey pokey with a chicken, but when it came time to "turn yourself around," he paused, looked a bit puzzled, and then passed the chicken around his waist.
8/8/95: Spencer and potty training: now he comes to me with his dirty diaper and tells me, "Now I'm going to getting a time-out." This says to me that he knows the rule and just isn't willing to follow it. Sigh.
Halloween 1995: Well, we dressed Spencer up to take out...he cried and screeched about being dressed up, didn't want to do it at all. However, once he got to a house or two, he decided this wasn't such a bad idea after all. He looked very cute. He initially refused to put his candy in his bag. Just tried to hold it all. But once he started having trouble holding so many, he went with the bag. He went as Superman.
3/28/96: Spencer has now informed me that he will now be rooting for the Blue Jays like dad, because now Graham can help me root for the Mariners. His new improved title for "Return of the Jedi" is "Number three Star Wars, with Darth Vader all wet when he throws the bad guy in the hole" Accurate, if a bit unwieldy. (The first two are "Star Wars with Luke shooting at the target" and "Star Wars with Luke in the snow")
4/2/96: Funny Spencer story (one where my words come out of his mouth): he tries to make a bridge out of his Brio train tracks. Unfortunately, he hasn't yet mastered the gravity concept, and is failing to provide support for this bridge, so it keeps falling. "NO. No NO no," he says. "Track, you stay up. It's not open to negotiation!"
5/18/96: Spencer is drawing traffic lights, of all things, all over everything. He draws the red-yellow-green lights across the page, and the streetlight up above, and sometimes the cars and people in the street below, and every once in a while the stores at the intersection of 29th and Willamette.
7/23/96: "Wendy" the Pooh. Nuff said.
8/6/96: He got Quasimodo shoes, except he insists it's "fasimodo," which for me causes an interesting henson-disney merged hero concept: Fozzy bear with hump.
8/21/96: He also has been tracing words I made him on paper--traces, the writes for himself down below. I notice he has started using lower-case letters, too, although he understandably hasn't got the distinction between d,b,p,q quite down. I write, say "map" in all lower case letters. (I also draw a map next to it, putting map, mat, cap, trap, cat, rat on one page). He traces the letters and remarkably recognizes my drawing as a map. He then writes the word for himself but does it with maybe a lower-case m, a bubble-letter A, and a p that he then doodles all around, like medieval illumination a la 3-year-old. New case/font for each letter.
9/13/96, after I cut 2 feet off my hair: He told the people at school that my hair all fell off in the shower (!). I hope he didn't frighten any little kids out of bathing.
9/19/96: We had to get some new Wendy the Pooh underwear, since some of his size 4 underwear was just too pinchy. I love this word he came up with: pinchy. This is also how he describes needing to pee: my tummy is pinchy, or, not needing to: my tummy didn't get pinchy yet.
Halloween 1996: He had things to say to everyone. Did actually say the words "trick or treat" to the people in the doors this year, and then notified them as to the status of their pumpkins:
He was just sure that everyone had to receive appropriate pumpkin notification.
5/7/97: Spencer has evidently been watching too much TV again. Every time I tell/ask him to do something (eat his dinner, clean up his toys, put on his shoes...), he puts his hands on his hips, adopts a severe expression, and announces, "This looks like a job for Superman!"
8/21/97: Preparing him for the concept of getting up Monday morning (next Monday, has to have the school physical) and peeing in a container (yes, they told me to bring it with us) before going to the doctor, well, he just didn't think it sounded very funny at all. Didn't sound like a good idea or an idea he would claim if he were me. I have mentioned several times that he will be going just for a checkup--he doesn't remember going any time he wasn't actually sick, so this makes no sense to him and I think he has some unformed and shadowy notion that going there will make him sick so there is a reason to be there--and each time he tries to talk me out of it. He starts with, "Here. How about we don't go?" Which cracks me up, because it sounds like he is about to suggest a compromise but then he doesn't.
9/23/97: I am consistently amazed with his use of the computer. The mouse is totally native for him, and his control of it is better than mine (different skill; I consistently try to use my fingers for fine control as I would with a pencil, but the mouse requires more shoulder or something). He also just completely "gets" the whole idea of directory structures and such, and how programs work inside each other, in ways that I had to learn on purpose. Not that he could probably explain it, but he does know. He sends Grandma e-mail often. He turns on the computer, brings up the CyberIS window and dials, passwords in, clicks on the e-mail icon, passwords into _there_, writes and sends the mail, logs off an shuts down, and turns off the computer. He is five.
10/16/97: he knew they were having open house at school tonight and some other kid messed up the display of patterns. So he picked them up and then made another one with the teacher's name on it (which he spelled right, which she liked), and told her that he did this "because he knew she would be disappointed" if it didn't look pretty for tonight.
11/18/97: In his homework, he is to practice letters and draw pictures with their sounds. B B B B b b b b Draws a BABY then decides he needs to also draw BOTTLE for B. Narrates as he draws. Here is the bottle, and the bag with the milk, and the lid to hold it together, and here is the "nibble."
02/11/98: At the supermarket, Spencer and Graham have both just had brownies in the car; Spencer ate his with some attention to getting it in his mouth; however, Graham has chocolate everywhere. An older grandfatherly type comes up and is engaging the kids in conversation:
- Man: I see you have a beard and mustache there, young man!
- Sp: No, he has chocolate on him.
- Man: Oh, Is that what that is. Well, maybe I should just lick that chocolate off his face.
- Sp: Well, I don;t think that would be a good idea.
- Man: Oh? Well why not?
- Sp, after a moment's thought: Well, I think you and Graham probably have different germs, and it wouldn't be a good thing to share them.
)4/29/98. I bought Spencer an alarm clock, because he said he wanted one. We disussed setting it, turning it on and off, etc. The first morning it went off, and then he turned it off but when I went in was snuggled back under the covers. "Spencer," I said, "Did your alarm go off?" "Yeees," He groaned, "But it went off at the wrong time, because I'm still tired." I didn't have the heart to tell him he might as well get used to this.
05/22/98. Why Spencer can't take a nap, in his own words: I can't keep my eyes closed because when skin stays next to other skin for a long time it gets sweaty, so when my eyes are closed they will get sweaty inside, and I don't like that.
05/28/98. Losing teeth: "Guess what? I certainly seem to have noticed that I was eating a golden delicious apple because it had a sticker that said Golden, Delicious, and I was feeling my tooth and I was wiggling it, and guess what? It wiggled out. But I lost it in the hall when I was going to show dad." Mom's note: I doubt he actually "lost" it--the first two teeth that came out, the first he refused to pull and eventually I guess he swallowed it. The second was pulled by a dentist because he had an abcess. In both cases we left the tooth fairy a note. The first note was a single short sentence, and he got 50 cents. The second note was longer and he got 75 cents. His immediately derived and since-unshakable hypothesis: the longer the note, the bigger the bucks. A tooth by itself can't be worth as much as a nice long note!
06/10/98: I asked Spencer tonight while I made dinner to write me a story.
He chose to tell me the story of Hercules, which movie we got last weekend, in his own words, which were:
Ouns opon a tim thare was a baby names Hercules. Then oun (took?) the Baby then Soos wok up and the Baby was gon. Thae wer sad. Mene years went bie but no sins. Zoos was sad & sad & sad & sad. Herc got strongr ech day. Soon he so his fathr wen he was still in love. The End.
According to the Disney movie, this is accurate, if incomplete...
06/25/98: I had Spencer come help/watch while I changed the oil in the car. I narrated as I worked, explaining that the old oil was not working so well any more and so were going to take that out and put in new oil. I got down on the ground with my wrench, spead out my hair behind me, and set to work. Spencer watched me wrench then turn the bolt and, as I warned him would happen, saw the oil suddenly start to pour out. He noted immediately that it was very black and gross. I explained it was dirty. He was puzzled by how it got dirty all sealed up in there, but allowed eventually that it could be. So we waited, since I was not changing the filter at this time, and suddenly Spencer noticed the very end of my hair was about to be traversed by an ant. You have to understand that Spencer is not real into dirt, bugs, worms, and other such things we think of "boy" things. He just about died on the spot. He was very glad when the ant moved off my hair so he could stomp it and thereby remove the fearsome menace from our neighborhood. Then we plugged up the oil pan again, and got up to put in the new oil. Spencer helped hold the funnel, and as I began to pour, was delighted to find that this oil, as he put it, was "a lovely goldenish."
06/30/98 Spencer was running around the house in his Bananas in Pajamas underpants recently, and they have bananas on the bottom. I referred to him an "banana butt." (as in, hey banana butt). He retorted, "I am NOT banana butt. I am nothing but."
08/11/98 Spencer has begun a new campaign to inform everyone what the new refrigerator's hours are. It opens at 4:00 am and closes at 8:00 pm unless Graham is still up. After that we aren't supposed to open it because it's closed. I have no clue where this came from, but that's what he tells me. I break the rules frequently to get soda pop. He also gets up in the morning and changes the sign he has magnetted up to say it is open, lamenting the fact that he didn't wake up at 4:00 to do it on time, and then at some point after 8pm leaps up and says, "oh, no. it's after 8" and changes to the closed sign. ?!
09/02/98. In the car on the way to Grandma's, Spencer and I are playing math games. I ask him, "if Mary has 3 apples and Jane has 7, how many will Jane have to give Mary so they will have the same number?"

He thinks a moment, and says, "two!"
"Wanna know how I know?"

"Sure." I'm thinking he discovered this by trial and error.

"Well, 7 and 3 together is 10, and they would each have half to have the same number, so half of 10 is 5 and 5 is 2 more than 3 and also 5 is 2 littler than 7."

!! Averaging for a 6 year old. And in plain English, too!
01/20/99: State Capitals. So, "we" are reading Charlotte's web. He reads a chapter, then I ask him a couple of questions to make sure he's comprehending and all and we chat about what went on in this chapter.
In one of the early chapters, young Fern is at school daydreaming about her new baby piglet, and when she is asked the capital of Pennsylvania she says the pig's name instead and everyone laughs at her.
So I was asking Spencer what was going on there, but he misunderstood the question. Pete, trying to rephrase for him, and having not heard the the question completely in the first place, just asked, what is the capital of Pennsylvania?

Before I could re-ask the actual question, Spencer promptly said "P."
02/01/99: and then, still in Charlotte's Web, a character says that maybe Fern has ears sharper than the rest of us. I asked Spencer what the character said, and he said "Fern has ears pointier than the rest of us."
02/11/99: Making valentines: since we couldn't find his class list, to make sure we got a valentine for everyone, we used the class photo, which is in order by _last_ name. I explain it would be easiest to go in order so as not to miss any.
So I go over to check on him and notice him making the cards not in the order of the picture (it's one of those with everyone's individual picture, and names, yay). I explain again how it might be easier to go in order to make sure we don't miss anyone. He said, "But I _am_: April, Brandon, Brittany, Caleb..."
05/12/99 When I told Spencer there were crazy folks camped out in tents to buy Star Wars tickets, he gave me this funny look and asked if the tickets were being sold in the woods.
06/99 Spencer's teacher has been giving him the math packets at his own pace, and he had finished grade 2 and was a couple packets into grade 3. Then she evidently found a grade 2 they missed or something. So when Spencer came home to report he had another new math packet, since I've been trying to be low-key about his working ahead so much, I said, "Oh, is it fun?" He explained that what had happened, and then said, "It's back in the *second* grade! Do you know how *humiliating* that is for me?!"
07/99 What Spencer remembers from the last time he flew on an airplane, which was when he was 2½: We went to D.C., saw monuments, visited relatives, etc. This is not what he remembers. We are about to fly back east again, and I tell him he must consider what to take for entertainment on the 5 hour plane ride. He considers a moment and chooses legos as one thing, because, "when you turn the knob and pull down the table from the seat, the table that you can use for different things, which they also put your snack or lunch on, that would be good for building with legos on." He remembers that.
09/09/99. Spencer tells me he needs a blender for school.
Me: A BLENDER?!
S: A blender.
Me: What (in heaven's name!) for??
S: For paper.
Me: (light bulb coming on). Ohhhhh. A BINder.
S: Yeah, a binder. Hey. Don't laugh at me. I'm leaving if you're laughing at me.
12/13/99. Recently (a couple of weeks ago or more) Spencer and I were cooking something and talking about knife safety and other kitchen safety things, and I asked if he knew what to do about a kitchen fire. He said you should throw baking soda on; he knew this from a Mickey Mouse little golden book in which a character catches some popcorn or something on fire. He did want to know why this would work, and I explained that a fire needs oxygen in order for the reaction to continue, and that the fine-ness of the baking soda means it will get into all the little cracks and smother the fire.
So, fast forward; the other night we built a fire in the fireplace, which we haven't done before. I went to put on more wood. Spencer was very interested and wanted to know why I placed the wood thus and so, and I explained I wanted to leave a space for air for the fire in between. He thought a minute and noted this would be the opposite of putting on baking soda.
01/10/00. Last night Spencer's homework was to take a normal sentence and personify the subject. This was my favorite of his answers.
He changed "The flashlight turned on" to "The flashlight opened its eye."
02/16/00. Last night late S and I were having one of those nice parent-child times where there is no particular agenda or task to do. I can't seem to reconstruct how we arrived at this topic, although we had been discussing--at his initiation--that multiplication is iterated addition. We went from there to how exponents are to multiplication what multiplication is to addition in this way, and we imagined what a picture of this (a graph) would look like: a straight line for iterated addition, and a curve getting steeper and steeper for iterated multiplication. And somehow from this we got to talking about shapes. We were talking about parallelograms and why you can't have a 5-sided one, and how a hexagon or an octagon can have all the opposite sides be parallel, but you don't call them parallelograms anyway, and I asked him if he knew the special name for a parallelogram that would result from "tipping" a square rather than a rectangle. He thought about it a while and came up with this:
"A squarallelogram?"

Graham was born 11/16/95, seven weeks early. He has now begun thinking of cute things to do, too...

9/29/97: Graham's interpretation of Pooh characters:
- Pooh
- Pigot (rhymes with bigot)
- Bun....WABBIT
- Doggie (That would be Eeyore)
- Tigger
- Kanga and Roar (complete with Roar imitation)
10/3/97: his recent idea is that he wants to "help" the cat find his food, so if said cat isn't currently eating, he gets a can of cat food which he can't open, and puts it on the floor, then picks up the cat around the middle (cat with ears back thinks this is not very funny at all) and takes him to the sealed can of food. First of all usually the cat worms his way free and scratches in the process, and second of all, when he gets to the still-sealed can, he thinks that we are cruel practical jokers.
01/05/98: We went to Bi-Mart, where he cheerfully announced over and over that the handle of the cart said "Bi-Mart." When we got to the checker, he told her, too, and then said, unsolicited, "W-W-W-dot-Bi-Mart-dot-com." Kids and the information age!
01/31/98: So now that Graham always knows where his eyes and nose and ears are, we are working on the finer points.

What's this?, I say, pointing to my eyebrow. "Eyebrow!"
And this? (eyelash). "Eyelash!"
And this? (earlobe) "Earlash!"

And subsequently, another time: (nostril) "Noselash!"
6/1/98. Pete signed both boys up for the junior Emeralds club, the Emeralds being the local single-A baseball team. They get to go to Sunday and Monday games free, get to run around the bases after the games, some hats, some coupons, etc. Anyway, Graham loves his hat. Puts it on, invariably at some non-forward angle, jams it all the way down to where the tops of his ears have to bend outward out of the way, and announces to anyone who will listen, "I'm CUTE!" No self-image problems here...
10/28/98 Graham has learned that he sometimes is too rough and hurts people. You understand, this hasn't changed his behavior. It's just that if he digs an elbow into you or something and you holler, he gets this very serious look, and says, "Sorry" with very big round eyes, and kisses whatever he interprets as the wounded area.
Halloween, 1998. I asked Graham during the evening who he was--he said "Pooh" I asked where Piglet was, and he very indignantly and with full-on attitude said, "MOM. BEARS and PIGS do NOT live together!"
11/03/99. Last night we went to the store, and as we sometimes do, we had Pete drop us there on the way to the work, we had the stroller, and we walked home. Since Graham had his monkey (one of those monkeys on that commercial; made of 2 wool socks...) with him in the car, it came home with us, too. As we approached the house, he took the monkey, which he had set in the stroller (after a while, he walked and the groceries rode), hugged it tight, and ran for the house. As I came up after him, he turned around and announced, "This is my mucky. He is my most, best, favorite. He loves me!"
11/11/98. We went to see Grandma Lydia, who is in a nursing home due to a combination of the effects of Parkinson's, Alzheimer's (they think), and recently a broken hip from a fall. She very slightly smiled when each of the kids came up and patted her cheek and told her they loved her and such, but the real kicker was, Spencer went to halfway pull up on the bed, and Graham very seriously said, "Spencer, don't. Be careful. Grandma broke her lip."
12/1/98. Graham had croup. Sounded terrible, and clearly felt worse. I was holding him, engaging in mom-type cuddles, stroking his face and murmuring things at him. I guess I was irritating him by rubbing close to his eyes, because suddenly he got real alert and very crankily said, "Mom! You Leave My Big Beautiful Brown Eyes ALONE."
12/7/98. Graham likes jigsaw puzzles. For a while, he couldn't quite get the 24-piece kind all together on his own, so in order to allow him to do it partway, I'd make the puzzle, let him see it all together, then remove 4 or 5 pieces so he could "finish" the puzzle again on his own. Now, he can do the whole thing...but when done, he removes and replaces 4 or 5 pieces over and over. All part of the game.
05/04/99. The other night Graham wanted to play Nintendo some more, and I had literally taken it away from both boys and put it up where I surely would know if they were climbing for it. I said no, and he asked if he could then play "tomorrow, after I wake up and it is light again, and it's another day." It was hilarious because A)it was very reminiscent of Scarlett O'Hara (tomorrow being another day and all) and B)it was a ridiculously complete definition of "tomorrow."
07/99. Graham and Spencer have been enjoying Tom and Jerry cartoons sometimes. The other night out of nowhere (while I reading him a completely unrelated story), Graham turned to me, and as ever with very big serious eyes, told me this: If there were a brown mouse to play with, I would be the Poosy Cat (Poosy rhyming with loosey goosey...), and I would sometimes be in a box but that would make me square when I got out of the box. And that would be silly.
Editor's note: ...and those parenting guidelines that say three-year-olds talk in maybe four- or five-word sentences? They clearly do not apply to my three-year-old.
04/11/00. As Safeway was having a sale on strawberries, we were making shortcake. Usually I roll and cut out shortcakes, but I was in a hurry so just opted to make the "drop" style this time. Envision for a moment what raw drop biscuit dough looks like. Graham came in during the dropping and watched a minute, said, "What's that?" and then, upon hearing it was shortcake, looked momentarily puzzled, then asked, "Mom, why do those shortcakes look like sheep?"
04/11/00, same day, separate event. I pulled Graham up on my lap with my email and asked if he wanted to write a happy birthday message to Grandma. He did, but he did not want my help. He wanted to write it all by himself. And he did: "Happy. Hhhhhappy. Hhhh. H!....Haaaappy. Haaap. Aaaa. A!..." and so on. His eventual message, in its entirety: hapebrfdda. Well, he's only four.
5/00: At the grocery store as we went in I reminded the boys to help me remember the specific items we needed: bread, milks, apples, and coffee. I was getting other stuff too, just wanted to specifically remember those things. So as we wandered thru the store, Graham hollered out, "Mom, you said coffee, there are the coffee seeds!"
5/00: the boys had a spider in a web up in a difficult corner of their room for some time. Graham named it George. One day recently he notified me that George was gone, and postulated that perhaps George had gone on vacation to visit someone. Personally I was thinking George was probably just dead and fell down, but I went with his analysis. Several days later a large spider showed up on the living room ceiling. Graham was very upset about it and didn't want to walk under. I had an injured foot and didn't really want to do anything about it just then, so I suggested that perhaps it was George, returned from vacation and he grew while he was gone. Graham looked at me for a moment, looked at the spider, said, "Hi, George," walked on under, and became totally unbothered by the spider.

Kids say (and do) the darndest things...

But this isn't news.Here are cute things my kid(s) did

But this isn't news.
Here are cute things my kid(s) did