Suddenly at school he came out of his shell. Of course I didn’t hear it from him, just the same old one-word answers to how his day was – Dash has never been particularly chatty – but his teacher mentioned it to me. Apparently, Dash had at least partially abandoned his “I go my own way” routine.

I’m cool either way with it, but as a parent you like to see your kid getting along with the other kids. Maybe it means that they enjoy school more; maybe not. But I do think it means that Dash is learning how to interact in a civil manner with his classmates.

Since this has come to light he’s now talking a lot more at home too. There are still the typical moments of silence, but these are overshadowed by an ongoing dialogue happening in the house between him and at least one of us and, if we’re both there, both of us.

It’s nice to have this sort of narrative flow going on, but sometimes it gets kind of annoying. If I had my way, there would be no conversation before 8:30 am unless it was a question about how I want my coffee or tea. In the three-plus years that we’ve been together, we’ve had a certain rapport, and chattiness hasn’t been a part of it. Nor has asking the same question over and over and over again morning, noon and night, or the concept of simultaneously repeating everything I say, particularly when I’m on the phone. How do kids know that this is really annoying? I don’t know, but its deathly effective.

One thing that hasn’t changed is the fact Dash rarely speaks with other adults when his parents are around. Maybe he feels that he’s cheating on us if he does, but with him being one of the few kids on the block has given him celebrity status with the neighbors, which means everyone knows who he is and says hi. He just stares at them as if he’s never seen them before. I attribute this natural shyness and I’m not too worried about it.

It’s also worth noting the timing of this shift. It seems like all the big shifts in his behavior come between Thanksgiving and Christmas. It’s when he learned to walk. It’s when he finished potty training. It’s when he learned how to really talk in complete thoughts, and now it’s when he learned how be more social. With his birthday happening in mid-December, I guess his internal rhythm is truly tied to some sort of annual clock.

Post script: We got Dash an aquarium for his birthday and I have to say we’ve gotten off to a rough start. The tank had to be returned because it had a crack in the glass. The overhead light already died and will cost half the price of the original aquarium kit to replace. And if that’s not bad enough, nearly every fish originally purchased has had to be replaced, which is not cheap. Why didn’t we get him a fishbowl with goldfish? Because I thought it would be nice to have an aquarium that he would grow into. Oy!

Nonetheless, some of the behavior brought home from school is driving me a little batty. I am a firm believer in children having an opinion on a wide range of topics, but not an opinion that is delivered with a finality of a despot uninteresting in listening to counselors.

Dash has taken to saying things like, “I’m going to take this ornament off the tree, right now!” Another one is: “This toy goes right here, you can’t move it.” I understand that he’s asserting his individuality. And in a classroom where you’ve got assert yourself among 20 other kids, you have to do it emphatically. I’m just not particularly hot on my 4-year-old dictating terms to me, particularly when they are counter to the often explained house rules about putting toys away and not carrying around things that could cut you if they break. But it’s like talking to brick wall. My attempts to get him to repeat what I just said or try finding a non-confrontational solution are generally ignored.

I’ve also talked in the past about how happy I am that the kid likes his groceries. Until recently, I could put Dash at the table and he’d sit there and eat his food either on his own or during mealtime. I kept the number of toys and knickknacks on the table to a bare minimum, telling him he can play when he’s done. This mostly worked.

Now he’s taken to half sitting/half standing in his chair and constantly wandering away from the table to put his dirty hands on whatever object catches his fancy. Perhaps most egregiously, he’s taken to playing with his food. Mealtimes here mean that we don’t constantly check our cell phones. Maybe it’s too Leave it to Beaver for some out there, but for me sharing a meal together means just that. It doesn’t always happen – sometimes I can’t get it all together before Dash’s meal bell goes off – but if we are all present and able, it’s nice to go the family dinner route.

But now the spoons are launching pads for a plastic spider and his excursions often bring back something that is to be played with instead of eaten. Last night at the table he even told me “I’m playing” when I asked him to eat his food.

His meals we pack for school are coming home half-eaten, so I think maybe lunchtime is more of a party than a meal when he’s with his classmates. I know he’ll eat when he’s hungry, but it is still hard to watch your kid walk away from food, particularly when you know it’s stuff he likes.

So it seems that I’m really not in charge here. Before I could steer the ocean liner along, or at least I felt like I could. Now it seems that the ship taking its own course, parental navigation be damned.

Post script: Dash’s fourth birthday went quite well. Friday at school he seemed embarrassed by the attention when we dropped off cupcakes, but Saturday at home he was fine during a feast of Korean BBQ. He managed to share his toys for the most part and had a good time playing with his friends.

I’ve been asked more than once to don a Santa suit since my college years and I’ve always managed to dodge that bullet. I’ve said no to pushy aunts, but somehow hearing the pre-K-to-3 teachers at Dash’s school tell me I was their last hope made this Grinch’s heart grow three times the size… Well not quite, but the phone call from my wife after she fielded the request caught me by surprise, which was then matched by my surprise of saying yes.

Just last year I was grappling about what it means for a parent to celebrate Christmas with their kid, and now here I am dressing up as Santa Claus. It’s a slippery slope, I tell you.

Intellectually speaking, I told myself it was a good idea to do something and hold that card till the next something like this came around. I took one for the team and can move on. But then it dawned on me that I’d be playing Santa to about 60 kids as well as their brothers and sisters. I was told I would be handing out books, but other than that I had no idea what to expect.

So with this in mind I showed up at OLC’s Christmas Sing-a-Along and I was hustled off to the art room where I could change. Twenty minutes later I was ringing a bell as I walked through a crowd of elves that came to my waist. Their eyes were wide and their mouths open as they ran towards me and then spread apart so I could make my way to a special chair.

I was a little worried that Dash would figure out who was behind the beard and clothes, but not only did he not recognize me as I walked by, most of the other parents couldn’t either. It was pretty cool to shout out “Merry Christmas!” and I called out to certain kids who I knew by name.

Once I was seated, they came up in swarms of 10 from a succession of numbered tables. Each got a book after they introduced themselves — amid the fray it was sometimes hard to hear the names of the more soft-spoken ones, but I muddled my way through. Parents were snapping photos and smiling as their kids sidled up to me.

Finally Dash showed up and it was the moment of truth: would he be able to tell? All he seemed to see was a big curly beard and the outfit when he walked up and quietly asked for his book. He got it and ran back to mom, only to return to say, “Thank you.”

It was pretty darn precious to see and soon thereafter I made my exit, claiming the frigid New Jersey night was way too warm for Santa and that he needed to get back to the North Pole.

As I left one boy started crying, but overall I considered the night to be a success. If I only pushed one kid into therapy through my performance, I have to think that I did something right. I imagine a few years from now this Santa gig will be a lot harder as know-it-all brats will question the veracity of the old St. Nick in front of them. But on this night I was the epitome of all things good walking in the midst of all these kids, and it felt pretty awesome.

That’s stuck with me the last few days. I seem to focus this blog on the drama of what goes into raising a kid; it’s partly because I’m most frustrated about it and need to vent, and it’s partly because I often feel that difficulties of the ongoing parenting process make for the most interesting reading.

Now that he is the age he is, I tend to think of him more as a kid than as a baby or toddler. But I have to remember that it’s going to take a while before we can shew him out of the house to go study anthropology in Africa or plumbing in Queens. And I have to admit that, while he gets on my nerves sometimes, my kid is pretty damn adorable. Yeah I’m biased, but what parent isn’t?

Quite possibly the cutest thing Dash is doing right now is what I call his disembodied head routine. While this may sound like a slasher flick, it’s really something closer to Baron Munchausen (if you don’t get the reference after reading this, do yourself a favor go back to the Terry Gilliam movie). Dash’s version of the game is to sit on the couch and wrap his entire body except his head in a blanket. Then he’ll look at me and say, “Daddy, where’s my body?” There is a twinkle in his eye and mischievous smile on his face. Of course, he moves from there to hiding his entire body under the blanket, morphing things into a game of hide and seek, but he always goes back to the just his head showing. It’s really sort of brilliant in a metaphysical way of thinking.

Something else he’ll do is kiss the dog or give me or Kathy an unprompted hug. Dash has never been much of a snuggle bunny though that changes with mom when they get up in the morning. Me? I kind of feel like the old-school dad who never hugs (this is of course untrue, I just feel this way sometimes). But sometimes he’ll just walk up to me and wrap his arms around my thigh as I’m standing there doing something and he’ll just squeeze. It’s an awesome thing, particularly when it’s unexpected. I’m less sure about the dog, but the good news is that she’s not growling and fleeing at first site of him. I take this to mean that the kid is being a little nicer and there is a truce where he isn’t always bugging her.

There’re other things he does too. There’s mimicking me when we brush our teeth together. There’s his hand searching for mine as we leave the house and start walking down the sidewalk. There’s his newfound interesting in sharing, which usually comes unprompted by me. There’re other things as well, so I guess Tierney was right: he really is a teddy bear.

While Dash usually wakes up closer to 7 am, he has been known to get up as early as 6. So this week he’s taken it upon himself to get up early, which now means 5. It’s pitch black and the middle night. The paper hasn’t even arrived yet. I should also point out that it is not me who takes one for the team on these early mornings. Mom is up in the morning long before me and has been for many years before Dash arrived, but 5 am is still pretty damn early for her. Have it mentioned that it’s early?

This seismic shift has also effected the dinner schedule. Suddenly the kid comes home from the park, and like your average 16-year-old he goes straight for the refrigerator, pulling out the various things he wants to eat for dinner. Never mind that it is 4:30. I tried to talk him into having a snack and saving himself for dinner, but he was having none of it. In Dash’s 3-year-old I-want-it-now-poppa mind, nighttime is approaching and he’s hungry. So for now he’s having dinner at the same time farmers do.

He also has a farmer’s appetite, eating two bowls of pasta, two yogurts, one orange, some corn and some carrots. As I write this, just minutes after his feast, he’s already asking about his dessert options. This was markedly different than about a week ago when his lunches were coming home half-eaten and I had to do some serious coercion for him to eat a single bite. It’s exhausting and worrisome having to do this and I have to thank my lucky stars that this flight of finicky is the exception rather than the rule. But I digress…

I have to say that the one up side to the time change is that Dash’s strict adherence to his internal clock has meant that he’s going to bed about as early as he ever has. We are now beginning his wind down around 7:30 (if there is a bath) or 8 (if there isn’t), with his head hitting the pillow around 8:30 rather than 9 or 9:30. Some parents tell me they have their kid in bed by 6:30 or 7 and I just can’t see that ever being the case with this family, but 9:30 is the absolute bewitching hour for the average night at home – any later than that and it just turns ugly for both the parents and the kid.

So the trick moving forward is to try and move Dash’s dinner hour back a bit but keep that optimal bedtime. Maybe a quick snack right after school will do the trick. Of course this is all going to get screwed up once we head out to the grandparents’ for Thanksgiving.

I went duck hunting for a few days last week with my dad and brother. It was really fun to hang out with them out on the North Dakota prairie hunting a lake we’ve hunted since I was nine or ten. Someday I hope to bring Dash back there. Not because I’m particularly interested in teaching him how to shoot a gun, but for the familial camaraderie one finds in a duck blind while watching the sun come up. On those days when nothing is flying and the only thing to shoot is the shit, or you can just enjoy the quiet together. I’ve got lifetime memories that I carry with me from hunting with my dad and I’m trying to pass those special kinds of experiences along to Dash as well.

But to bring it back to Dash, the interesting thing about coming home was that I picked up Dash from school on the day I flew in. I hadn’t seen him in five days and he just looked at me as he came out of school like he’d never seen me before. Except that he was so self-consciously avoiding saying “hi” or giving me a hug that it was actually a really powerful moment for him. Finally he just took my hand and we started walking home with him elliptically doling out nuggets of information about his day as we went.

It’s weird: Dash plays his emotional cards pretty close to the vest. He’s not the kind of kid who is prone to running up to his friends and saying hello. Instead he’s one of those cool cats who acknowledges his buddies with a nod but doesn’t go so far as to give them a hug. (He’s usually better about that during goodbyes.) I’m pretty sure that this will be a phase, instead of lifelong behavior, because his parents and extended family are extremely tough on quiet wallflower types. But who knows?

What I do know is that time in a duck blind isn’t all that different than a walk home with your dad or child. Nearly every hunter I know never earnestly complains about a bad shoot — they may mock accuse a hunting partner of bringing bad luck, but that is something different — because it’s the time spent out there that is important, not the net results. The same could be said for a walk home because it’s not necessarily about what is said on the walk, it’s what is unspoken but conveyed during the time together. And honestly when I think about it, I think I do some of my best parenting when I keep my mouth shut and just let the moment happen. The trick is, of course, to remind myself of this when I’m not in a duck blind.

My last entry was all about bitching about my son. Parents do this all the time, often to other family members, other parents (which can turn into an one-upmanship competition of “well my kid did this”), or just out loud to themselves (preferably out of earshot of your child). The other side of this bitching badge of honor stuff is the impossibly smitten parents who witness junior doing or saying something so cute that they just weep with adoration. The more unexpected these moments are, the more sublime the experience.

We had a little bit if rain this morning and so as the family left the house, Dash took a child-size Spongebob Squarepants umbrella (which appeared out of nowhere a while back). I was walking down the sidewalk with the dog, trying to avoid sidewalk traffic heading to P.S. 3 and 4, keeping the leash from clothes-lining my son, and game plan with Kathy on our days. I look down from my angle above him and all I can see was these little legs coming out of the umbrella as Dash walked alongside us. He wasn’t saying anything, just walking with the rest of us and holding that umbrella. The family unit on the move as one, with the incredible little guy under the umbrella right there with the rest of us.

I haven’t said much about Dash’s vocabulary lately, but suffice to say that it’s growing at an exponential rate. He’s still learning the nuances of tone (see last week’s entry), but there are times where he is just talking. Talking in his normal voice like a normal human being either to myself or to his friends. I see this and I see visions of the future Dash – how he will interact with people, what his natural speaking pattern will be, how he thinks. The best time for this to happen is when neither one of us is trying to navigate the other in a certain direction (i.e. he wanting a balloon or something, me trying to get us out the door or whatever). It’s even cuter when I see him talking with other kids. A lot of it is pretty basic, but it is so cool to see Dash being interactive instead of doing parallel play. I feel like a fly on the wall, and once again feel that the future is right there in front of me, perhaps more so because friends will rank equal in importance as his parents.

Kids do cute things all the time and it’s hard to pick out one thing that is particularly sweet. One would be the two of us brushing our teeth together. On the nights when I put him to bed, we brush our teeth together, which is to say that he mimics what I do while swallowing the Thomas Toothpaste (still can’t get him to use the regular stuff). He brushes away, not particularly well, and he doesn’t seem to get frustrated by the experience: I brush one side and he brushes that side; I switch, he switches. It makes me feel like a good parent that I’m teaching him this skill and I know that my mind will wander back to these moments when I brush my teeth in the years to come.

And finally, it’s absolutely hilarious to be a one-man audience for these little shows mother and son put on. The other day while Dash was taking bath, they put together a whole skit of different funny faces. Happy Dash featured this big ferociously fake smile. Scared Dash recalled Edvard Munch’s The Scream. Shy Dash features a tilted head and pouty facial expression – here he looks like a clothing model. Sad Dash also has a tilted head but instead of a pout it has this wide grimace with an under-bite.

So here you have it. Some incredibly cute moments of life with a child that is three-and-three-quarters years old. More to come…

Parents have said to me that kids lose some of the cute and endearing quirks as they figure things out. I’ve always been a little puzzled by this sentiment. I mean, I don’t really think I’ll miss the 9 am meltdown that took place every day last winter, or the terrible twos or threes. This is to say nothing of carrying a diaper bag, stroller and other assorted baby paraphernalia wherever we went. But behaviorally speaking, let’s see what we’ve got.

A decided quirk around the house is that Dash has decided that he is the one to always go up or down the stairs first. Often times he’ll shut an invisible gate once he gets to the top or the bottom of the stairs, leaving mom or dad on the other side of it trying figure out the protocol for opening it. Sometimes dad is too preoccupied and doesn’t even notice the gate’s been shut, which leads to a vocal beat down from the gatekeeper.

Annoyance scale: 70. This is more of a quirky inconvenience than an annoyance, particularly when we are on our way out the door.

Another quirk is Dash’s flair for decorating. He gets these ideas of where things are to go. This could be a menagerie of plastic animal figurines sitting on top of a bookcase, or part of a wooden toy placed just so on the rug in front of the back door. There has been a short line of train cars nestled up against the base of the upstairs railing for the better part of week. There is a pillar of Legos in the front window for a week. If any of these or some other installation is touched, moved or disposed of, Dash’s wrath is swift and loud. Annoyance scale: 58. This is more quirky than annoying.

The volume of his voice has gone up considerably in recent weeks, and this is probably the heart of most of Dash’s recent annoying behavior. I wonder if it has something to do with the fact that he has to now compete with 20 other kids to be heard by his teachers when he’s at school. It could also be an indictment upon me — years of rock clubs and playing drums has left me hard of hearing, so maybe he feels he needs to yell.

He can just be yelling, carrying on, and running around the house like most three year olds, which is fine – I get it – but there are occasions where it escalates.

He’s taken to yelling at the dog. Granted some of this is learned behavior – if the dog barking incessantly because someone rang the doorbell, you have to yell to be heard over the din. Dash, however, tends to be more territorial about his yelling – he’s lost a few meals because he’s left the table temporarily only to return and find his plate licked clean. So he doesn’t like the dog lurking near the table. Ella has taken a shine to a few of his toys over time as well, but you can’t really blame her – while kids typically don’t get plastic bones to play with, baby toys and dog toys aren’t all that different.

Sometimes he just yells for no particular reason. My usual response is: “indoor voices.” But he just keeps carrying on. At other times he bump things up a notch when he initiates the all-too-common practice (among young kids) of yelling and making a lot of noise when one parent is trying to have a conversation with the other parent or adult.

Annoyance for yelling for no reason at all: 82.
Annoyance for yelling at the dog: 75. It’s annoying in the moment but doesn’t linger because it stops after the dog does.
Annoyance for ignoring my request for “indoor voices”: 88.
Annoyance for yelling to disturb adult conversation: 95.

These are mostly sort of nitpicky kind of things so maybe he is getting more boring. For the sake of balanced coverage, next week I’m going to go from annoyance meter to a cuteness factor.

Kids collect things. At various times during my own childhood I collected old tennis balls, rocks, coins, beer cans, and stamps. This is to say nothing of the embarrassingly large number of CDs, LPs, and 7-inch singles that have threatened to overwhelm our living spaces over the years. Dash seems to have picked up this habit as well. So this is likely the first of many installments called The Things They Collect.

After an early dalliance with feathers Dash found in the park, no doubt left behind by disease-ridden pigeons, he has been in a tizzie about sticks. That’s right, sticks. As in small limbs that have broken off of trees. If you frequent Van Vorst Park you may see some of his handiwork – he assembles piles of sticks of various sizes at various places near the playground. It basically looks like a campfire (minus the logs) waiting to happen.

As he goes about gathering together his booty, he’ll have this ongoing narrative with me the size and shape of each particular stick: which one is taller, which one is bigger. Strangely, none of the sticks are ever described as small or medium. They are generally various degrees of BIG. And the actual size of said stick isn’t always reflected in his analysis – sometimes he’s he’ll hold up a six-inch twig and say: “Wow, poppa. This stick is SO huge!” Descriptions range from “huge” to “giant” to “big” to “biggest stick ever.”

Then when it’s time to leave the park, he generally has to grab one or two from the pile for the walk home. During the walk he’ll display his latest artifact to whomever he happens to meet on the street. Sometimes his unsuspecting audience needs an interpreter, but he’s generally pretty clear about how cool and exciting it is to have the stick in his hand. After the last three weeks of passionate stick collecting, most of the neighborhood has been indoctrinated into this stick experience.

Once we get home, we have to figure out what to do with the stick. Dad is a big fan of leaving the sticks out front in the little area next to the stoop. This way, as I explain it to him, everyone walking by can see the sticks. Usually this works, but sometimes some sticks are dropped into the garbage from the top of the stairs. There have also been certain special sticks that have made it to the “backyard,” so there are about a half dozen sticks sitting on the small terrace off our kitchen.

I know, it could be worse. Sticks come cheap and can easily be disposed of. So we are getting off easy, though it does look a little weird to see this three-year-old walking down the sidewalk holding a stick with a death grip and seemingly preparing to whack whomever happens to walk by. Thankfully this hasn’t happened yet.

He seems to recently be transitioning into plastic shopping bags, which I’m not at all excited about because he’s already once put one over his head. Needless to say, we are actively discouraging this. So we’ll stick with sticks for now, though with fall around the corner, I imagine a leaf collection will be in our future.

Weird thing: Mom and dad were singing a little song (OK, it was the closing prayer to my yoga practice chanted in Sanskrit, because they came home as I was finishing). Anyway, Dash goes absolutely ballistic and runs into the living room and throws a TV remote. Maybe this is a variation on the “stop talking to each other and concentrate on me,” but it goes down as inexplicable.

Well, the first week of school is behind us at this point. Some stuff completely caught me off guard while other things that I anticipated came true. But when all is said and done, I couldn’t have hoped for a better week.

Things got off to a rough start on Monday, the first full day. Pictures were taken with both parents and Dash was fairly accommodating during this prelude. But that came to an end once it came time to say goodbye: he was having none of it. After having the concept of dropping him off for school explained to him for the umpteenth time, he announced: “I am going home right now!” He then turned around and started walking down the sidewalk towards our house. I literally had to run down the sidewalk and have a quick huddle that at least stopped him. I told a visibly upset Kathy to peel off, and then I just picked him up, walked him to the door, and handed my screaming child to his teacher.

I found out later that he cried for the first 15 minutes and then he came around. He wasn’t exactly happy, but at least he wasn’t having a fit.

I spent the rest of the morning and early afternoon meeting a deadline, but it was remarkable how little I got done. Yeah, the story was written, but the amount of work that I fantasized about getting done during six childless hours was not quite met. In a way it made me realize how much I get done when he is around – he’s so good about playing by himself or at least giving me some space to take a phone call or check my email. He’s not so patient with mom because he thinks mom is a lot more fun and interesting than I am, and I couldn’t agree more.

I got a big hug from him when I picked him up and off we went. He was excited because we were off to go visit with grandparents in from Minnesota, but really didn’t have much to say about school. He kept intentionally mispronouncing his teacher’s name and absolutely refused to talk about what happened in class.

This carried on for the next few days with only little nuggets of information passed along. His teacher was helpful about what he was up to, but she’s also handing out 20 other kids to parents, so it’s not like she has time to give me a complete rundown on his activities. I guess I got used to the full rundown I got from the staff at Toddler Time, which had considerable smaller classes that lasted only half as long. Anyway, this is first time where I don’t know exactly what my kid is up to. I need to let go of that, but it’s something that’s been a given for the last three years even if I hadn’t realized it.

Of course the funny part of this is that Dash is absolutely no help. It’s like talking to a 15 year old. This is an approximation of our post-school conversation; add about a minute of silence and a vacant stare before each of Dash’s answers.

Me: “Dash, how was class?”
Dash: “Good.”
Me: “What did you do today?”
Dash: “I played.”
Me: “What did you play?”
Dash: “I played.”
Me: “Who did you play with?”
Dash: “Gabe.”
Me: “What did you and Gabe play?”
Dash: Silence.

As the week progressed, we’ve been unrelenting in our cross-examination. So far, he’s given us a rundown on the playground rules; he’s also said he likes the blocks; and he learned a horse dance in gym class.

While he doesn’t have much to say, it’s cool that he is definitely excited to see me – there is nothing cuter than seeing your kid spotting you amongst a crowd of parents and waving excitedly to you. That right there is probably the best part of the day – seeing his face light up and the big hug I get when climbs into my arms. All in all, it was a pretty cool week.