Shark

Jen asked Oscar what he wanted to be for Halloween. As it happened, they were on a train passing over a bridge at the time. He looked down at the river below and said: “Salt water.” Then, after a moment’s reflection, he added: “That sharks swim in.”

The Halloween Committee determined that, since mama made the costumes last year, poppa would take on the task this year. After consultation with Oscar, in which I pointed out that “Salt water that sharks swim in” might be a little too conceptual given my meager (i.e., nonexistent) costuming skills, we narrowed it down to “Shark.” After I’d spent a week’s worth of late nights frantically scheming, sewing and gluing, of course, he announced that he wanted to be a shark princess, and while the Halloween Committee found this concept to be brilliantly subversive, his pink tutu couldn’t be located. So we were sharks. Plain old toothsome great white sharks.

We participated in his school’s Halloween Parade, and in the neighborhood parade. We trick or treated the stores on Avenue A and in our building. We still have a shocking amount of candy to work through, at two or three pieces per day. Might get us to next Halloween.

A few weeks back, Oscar and I went up to Massachusetts – or, as he called it, “Mask-a-two-shits” – for the Honk Festival, traveling on the band bus (or, as he called it, the “green and glitter bus”). He was so excited to travel on the bus, a big old schoolbus painted green, black and silver and converted to run on veggie waste oil, although I think we were burning diesel that day. It was all he talked about for a week beforehand. Of course, he passed out in a Dramamine daze almost as soon as we were moving and slept most of the way, waking only for dumpstered waffles and a round of showtunes singing.

Our first gig was at Boston Common. It occurred to me on the ride up that Boston Common, being a big, central swath of green, was probably the setting of Make Way for Ducklings, which we’ve been reading of late. When Oscar awoke, I mentioned this, and he got really psyched about it. In time, we arrived, performed, and met up with Karen, who knew of the bronze sculptures of the ducklings, and of the pond with the swan boats, and eventually we found ‘em at the adjacent Public Garden.

We went out to Groton with Karen and, in the morning, went to visit our old friend Horatio the horse and his coterie of poultry pets. Horatio’s humans weren’t home and he wasn’t feeling especially social once he figured out that we didn’t have any apples for him, but we stood outside the electric fence for a bit, admiring him, when there was a tremendous commotion among the birds. Chickens and the peahens skittered under a pine tree, while duck and goose hovered protectively over them, honking and quacking at top volume. A hawk swooped but came up empty-taloned. Horatio, having retreated to his stable, clambered out and stood there with duck and goose, as if to tell the hawk: you want those chickens, you gotta go through me. It was all very exciting and I’m not sure I’ve ever seen such interspecies solidarity before.

Oscar was such a good traveler, and he gets such a charge out of the band and vice versa. They took such good care of him. It was a little stressy traveling solo with him and a sousaphone in such a chaotic environment, but I got a lot of support from them, and he got so much out of it.

We've just had a breakthrough on the potty training front after many, many weeks. He's been perfectly capable for a long time, but still has had a lot of accidents, whether due to forgetfulness or habit (and occasionally retaliation – particularly the one just after we sat down for dinner nearly every night).

But when I went to do the laundry last week, I found, for the first time in several months, not a single soiled pair of pants or underwear hanging out to dry in the bathroom. And we realized that he'd at last become self-motivating about it, asking to use the potty even when he had pull-ups on (he still wears them to bed and for car or subway trips).

Bedtimes and naptimes are tougher, of late. We've had it pretty easy on that front. Now he always wants a grownup in the room with him while he goes to sleep. Our bedtime rituals have gotten more and more intricate, typically involving 15-20 minutes of him calling us in to demand a grownup's presence or tucking in (with the corners of the blanket just so, of course), or the stuffed lion he threw out of the crib, etc. And he finally climbed out of his crib for the first time today -- just hadn't occurred to him before now, I guess.

But for all his advanced speech, his absurdly complicated sentences studded with five-dollar super-polysyllabic descriptors, etc. -- still, when in the middle of the night he wakes and wants to be plucked from his crib and put in the big bed with the grownups, he says, as he has since his first words, "A-bed?"