Taken on Father’s day at Lake Joesomethingorother in South Carolina.

See, the way humans acquire language is this: The baby/toddler listens to people talk to him, notices some particular feature of human speech, then cutes up the house practicing that feature.

1. They listen and hear people saying “Blah blah blah” — so they babble.

2. Once they get that down, they listen and notice that language has intonation and particular sounds to it – so the baby starts babbling in fake English or Portuguese or what have you.

3. Oh, wow! Some words mean things. That could be useful! So they practice learning nouns and ignore the rest.

4. Then they notice oh shit, wait — there’s a whole grammar going on here. And they spend the next two years practicing the many ridiculously complicated and annoying rules of their language’s basic grammar. Where verbs go, how to make thing possessive or plural, how to properly tell someone to step the hell off of your foam blocks, etc.

5. Once they have that down, they start tuning in to the nuances of conversation. Turn taking is the most obvious feature, so they practice that for awhile before noticing that conversations are supposed to run along a single topic. Aha! What we’re doing here — maybe the point of everything back to the babbling — is talking about something. So they have to practice listening to a conversation, identifying the topic at hand, and joining in with their own relevant comments.

Graham has entered phase 5. It’s awesome. If everyone is talking about something that happened long ago, he scans his brain for something that will fit in the conversation. It can be anything, as long as it sounds sort of related. I just hope he outgrows it before adulthood…

ADULT #1: I thought the pacing of the movie was odd. It made it feel like the audience is peering in on someone’s life. I wonder if that was a deliberate choice?

ADULT #2: I don’t know, but it felt slow to me. Maybe that’s why.

ADULT # 1: Or maybe they just didn’t edit it very well, so the whole thing ended up sort of plodding along.

ADULT #2: Right – well the movie was good, but definitely odd.

ADULT # 3: I saw a movie about a ROBOT!

Which is a much more interesting turn in the conversation really, but some people aren’t that open minded.

On Sunday, we were up in the mountains of South Carolina. Nicolaus and Graham were sitting with their cousin Gavin, all in tiny plastic chairs, under/inside a low, wide, squatting sort of tree. I don’t know what kind of tree it was, but its branches made a perfect little house for kids. They sat in there and talked about bad guys and theoretical physics and other topics of interest to children.

They heard thunder in the distance. Gavin, the oldest, looked up through the branches. “Was that thunder? Maybe we should get out from under this tree so we don’t get killed.”

“Why would we get killed?”

“Because! Lightening could strike the tree and boom, kill us.”

Nicolaus thought about that for a second. “No,” He said, “I don’t think it would kill us. Because wood doesn’t conduct electricity really very much. So if lightening hit the top of the tree, it couldn’t really travel all the way down here to kill us.”

“Oh. But! What IF that storm turns out to be a tornado? That could kill us for sure.”

“Yeah. Or a hurricane! We could be blown away or even flooded right out of here. And you might not think so, but floods can kill us because we aren’t, we aren’t wearing life jackets.”

“Oh yeah. A hurricane would definitely kill us.”

Graham, having analyzed the topic at hand and identified it as a serious and important one, joined in with a helpful offer: “If I had a knife. If I had a pocket knife? I could kill y’all.”

I want to hug him all day long.

Don’t know why I felt quiet this week. I’ve been increasingly in a gloomy funk. Why? Not sure. The flurry of summer visitors is over, my biggest steady work=money contract ended, and it’s hot outside. I have a big troublesome gut, and my hair needs a trim. Blah, it’s not any of those things though. Not sure what my problem is.

So even though sleeping 18 hours a day sounds pretty appealing, I’ve been forcing myself to work on art a little each day. Each time I press forward on the projects I feel a tiny bit better. Today Kevin was home so I put him in charge of loosely supervising our children, and I focused on art all day. There’s this little show in September called 7 of 7. Seven artists contributing seven pieces each.

So today was good. Big progress on my seven pieces. I’m doing all seven in sort of a plexiglass/plastic + science + Tiffany likes birds theme. It has a very complex and intractable inner meaning, which I’m sure I’ll come up with in time for the show. For now though: oooh pretty!

These are prototypes, not finished pieces. But still, I’m having a lot of fun painting on test tubes, petri dishes, and little observation and measurement vials.

We are sort of mellow about gender roles. There’s that wonderful Woody Guthrie song that goes

Why can’t a grandpa be a grandma? Tell me why oh why?
Same reason your daddy is not your mama
Goodbye goodbye goodbye

That’s about as deep as it gets around here. The boys know that boys have different anatomy and ladies are generally the only ones who can have babies, but other than that we haven’t really ever clarified what boys are supposed to do or like or want or be. It helps too that our kids aren’t in school right now and we have no television and generally insulate ourselves from the outside world, partly because we’re antisocial jerks (me) and partly because we’re just lame (Kevin).

So it’s turned out to be sort of an interesting social experiment. In the absence of any overt pressure to be “all boy”, what does a boy act like?

Observations/results so far:
You end up with a boy who is a dancing swan showing off his ballet moves one minute, and blowing things up the next. Nicolaus loves things that are glittery and jewel-encrusted, has already picked out some lovely sandals at Target that he hopes I’ll buy him for summer, and plays with babies and animals and really can’t decide which is prettier: unicorns or peguseses.

But then he’ll spend an entire day playing this thing where see? There’s two brothers. And one of their parents was an Indian and the other was a white settler, and so one of the brothers is Indian and one is a white settler and so together! They fight evildoers on both sides! Holy shit, you guys. What they do to the bad people they capture? The Lone Ranger would not approve.

For starters, they shrink the bad guy down to the size of a plastic toy generic gi joe-type guy. It’s their only army man toy, and it has no arms because of an inexplicable design choice where the guy is supposed to have interchangeable arms. What the fuck? My mother in law bought it, and even she does not know why. It came with all these little parts and several arms, which are all now missing. So all we have is an armless dude. Which was perfect though because it turns out that Nicolaus has a magical RING, which looks suspiciously like something that a pre-teen girl might buy at Claire’s, that REMOVES YOUR ARMS. The arm removal takes place after the ring shrinks you down so you can’t beat anybody up. It’s all very intense.

Sometimes he wears gigantic butterfly wings out in public. When people whisper “Hee hee look at the butterfly,” he is wholly offended. A butterfly! Do I look like a sissy?? And he defiantly declares, “I am not a butterfly. I am a FAIRY.”

He’s king of the fairies in fact, on account of this crown and also thanks to being several hundred times larger than most fairies.

Which was excellent when we went to the playground with my nephew last week. The butterfly wings caused much confusion because, like many people do, all the kids wrongly thought he was a butterfly. So my nephew took up the cause, and marched around telling everyone, “My cousin is a GIANT FAIRY.”

And Nicolaus nodded and was very pleased. I’m writing this down because whether both of them turn out gay or straight or what, that’s going to be awesome to tell him about when he’s older.

But his favorite book at the library is The History of Weapons. It’s a picture book that shows in great detail all of the weapons from ancient Greece and India and China and so on and the best way to get him to be good at the post office is to bring that book and a bunch of strips of paper and tell him to sit down and mark all his favorite pages. He’ll tell you which knives are for cutting and which are for stabbing and which are for… well, anyway. Boy stuff.

The experiment continues with Graham. His favorite color is bright magenta, also known as pink. He steals my flowery headbands and wears them. And as much as he loves cars and robots and building and wrecking, the other day my mom took him to the Walmart toy section to buy him a dump truck, and instead he came home with a baby doll wearing a lavendar hat with little hearts. It moves and coos and says Mama. He named her Campy Ard, and he and Nicolaus have been taking excellent care of her. Admittedly, they care for her between periods of neglect that would warrant a call to CPS, but it’s not because they’re boys. It’s because they’re little kids. That’s why everyone’s against 5 and 2 year olds having children. They make sweet but crappy parents.

Last night Nicolaus showed Graham how to change Campy’s diapers. Nicolaus adores babies, and is as sweet and attentive as any little girl would be.

But then again, last night I heard him say, “Graham, there’s something about her that’s not 100% baby. I think she might be mostly baby but a tiny part warrior. The next time people are attacking the city, we’ll have to report to the baby and find out what weapons she wants us to use.”

So there you go. You can take the overt societally-generated preconceived gender roles out of the boy, but you can’t take the boy out of the overt societally-generated preconceived gender roles.

The beautiful thing about quoting conversations with a two year old is that there is no such thing as taking it out of context. There IS no context that makes it make sense. He is two. So here’s the kinds of things you’ll hear me say during the course of a normal day:

“No! I mean – yes, milk does come out of cows. But no, it doesn’t come out of their mouths.”

“I do not want to have to say this again: NO riding tricycles during dinner.”

“Honey, people don’t like when you stab them. No one likes that.”

(the response to this was: Why? Why do people not like that? Nicolaus never did the classic “why why why” thing. He asked questions, but they were more what questions. What is that bird doing? What is the meaning of life? Etc. But Graham is doing the why thing. It’s very endearing but lately I sort of want to die by the end of the day. (Why?) )

Graham’s other excellent questions and comments from the past few days include:
“I have a penis. What do YOU have?”

“Barack OMAMA! That’s funny. Barack. O. NICOLISS!”

Oh and he has his birthday all planned out. On his birthday we will wake up and go to the zoo, where he is hoping to ride and/or pet and/or befriend a baby giraffe. Because adult ones are way too big, duh. Then we will drive home and there will be a party waiting for him in his house with a cake and a green balloon and a yellow balloon also. And that will be happy!

I was surprised that he didn’t want to go to Chuck E Cheese after completely loving his cousin’s recent birthday party there. But today he told Kevin, “Daddy? I love Chuck E Cheese. But, Daddy? That big-enormous mouse? Freaked me OUT.”

We’ve never heard him use that phrase before, but he’s right. Big mouse = freaky. And I’m pretty sure Chuck is in fact a rat, which is even more freaky. Either way, a definite health code violation to have him cooking pizza for children.

Also overheard in Grahamland:
I have babies in my tummy too. Mine are two girl babies. They don’t have a penis, but they can still poop.

(playing with tiny plastic people and a large plastic jeep): You’d better be good in that jeep! No! I’m going to be really naughty! Don’t do that, don’t be naughty in that jeep!

I stopped myself from interrupting his quiet pretend play. But I really want to know what the hell was going on in that jeep.

When our friends were here last week, he was quite taken with their two-year-old Maggie. He eagerly shared his toys with her, followed her all over the park, and generally went along with anything she suggested. They both speak standard dialects of garbled toddler, and they both listened to each other attentively, nearly ripping my car in half with cuteness whenever we put them in carseats side by side and drove around listening to them converse. The only time I saw Graham yell at her was one night at dinner.

GRAHAM: Mama, I want ice wadder in my cup.

MAGGIE: Can me has ice wawa pease? Me want ice wawa.

GRAHAM: We don’t have ice lava.

MAGGIE: Yes!! Me WANT ice wawa in my CUP.

GRAHAM: You can’t have lava in your cup. We don’t have lava.

MAGGIE: ME WANT WAWA

GRAHAM: NO WE DON’T HAVE ANY LAVA!

MAGGIE: YESSSS!!!! WAWAAAAA

GRAHAM: NOOOOO YOU CAN’T HAVE LAVA!!!

It true, you can go ahead and judge me. I don’t buy lava for my kids to drink, because I don’t think that beverages that are >2500 F are good for growing bodies. That plus artificial dyes and sweeteners are my big hang ups. I know, I know, when they are 18 and they go off to college they’re going to go totally out of control and drink nothing BUT molten sedimentary rock because it’s been the forbidden fruit all these years, but you know what? They will be adults making that choice. And by then their bones will have fully formed and a cure may have been found for permanent disfigurement caused by fourth degree internal burn wounds.