So I have two old videos of prepping E for bedtime. One is set for private viewing only because, well because it’s of E taking a bath. It’s kind of hilarious but, you know.
The other one is of me reading bedtime stories to E. We go through a few before we settle on 누가 내 머리에 똥 쌌어?, which roughly translates to “Who pooped on my head?”
It’s about a mole who comes out of his burrow only to have some poop land on his head and, like the bird in Are You My Mother?
All I can say is, E is a good sport.
Reminds me of a cross between The Mikado and Samurai Futaba:
{{desc}}
via Saturday Night Live – Samurai Delicatessen – Video – NBC.com.
Yes, E has added winking to his arsenal of charisma. I think Grace taught him.
I am pleased to say that E loves books and loves to have books read to him. I mean to, one of these days, have a run-down of his favorite books, but for now I’ll just share some videos of us reading (and singing).
Last summer Dana and I discovered Aladdin Books. They’re an international Korean bookstore chain with a branch down in Annandale, Virginia. One of the best purchases we made there was this combo CD+songbook of fun Korean children’s songs. I swear E already has half the songs memorized; I can barely recall one or two.
Fortunately, I can (sort of) read Korean. Here’s me reading and singing the lyrics of a few songs to E:
I know, my pitch control leaves much to be desired. E’s no better. Here he is, climbing out of an ottoman having emptied it of all the board games we store in it, grabbing for the flipcam and engaging in a fairly incomprehensible medley of songs he knows. He eventually runs away with the camera.
And here I am, reading to E his least favorite book: Dare You Go…Into the Jungle
It’s a book that I picked up at a thrift store. It has a pretty clever sense of suspense, and the last page has a pop-up of a crocodile that scares the bejesus out of E. Dana and I just had to record for posterity his genuine fear of this book:
Forgive us, E.
Note: This is an old scrap I came across. Still seemed interesting.
They started to come to every meeting—Bermudez and Putterman—like a couple, but they never sat next to each other. Bermudez always seated himself next to the coffee, Putterman near the door or sometimes facing a bank of windows to the clear.
Putterman was the Resistor. He stayed quiet for long stretches looking bored, blankly staring out to the clear with a slight and tired mien and, just as the room seemed to coalesce around an idea, he’d start furrowing and arching his eyebrows, and those of us who knew knew to deflate a little, back off our enthusiasm for—here it comes—that withering epithet. Fresh-faced executives or exasperated believers may then parry and push but that would set him off to his inexhaustible rally of tricks.
Putterman came to life as a wall, an undulating, flexing brick barrier swelling to resistance like a sea storm clenching to crush brave and hapless boats. Once he even got up and paced the conference room, jabbing and then chopping the air like a Roman orator, pausing at the end of the table and addressing the CEO directly. I wanted simultaneously to stand up and applause and catch him in a running tackle, but when he got to the coffee machine, Bermudez held his hand up like a kid in 5th grade, and everyone stopped shouting, and Putterman pursed his lips.
This was e over the last summer, what I call his Daniel Craig phase. He had his first major haircut, which he got at Chinatown. It took three adults to hold still his screaming little head.
e was getting really good at climbing around over the summer, developing more confidence with his coordination, and here’s a typical example of his derring-do:
and again, this time with his blankie:
One of the smartest things we (okay, my wife) did was notice that e had particular affection for a certain felt-y fabric from the craft store and cut out several large swatches of it — one for his bed, one for our bed, one for the car, one for his grandparents’ house, etc. — so that we were always within arm’s reach of his blankie.
Here’s e trying to get a handle on eating yogurt and fruit with a spoon. Bib still needed.
And several clips of him eating watermelon. Man, he really likes watermelon.
Next week (or so): reading.
So I’ve had on backburner a bunch of videos that I’ve always meant to chop together into, I don’t know, something, but — of course — never got around to it. Looking back on them recently, I realized they’re sentimentally great on their own, sans music or editing, and they remind me of how much change e has gone through.
First, two clips of e at his 100 day celebration. Here’s him putting on his han-bok (traditional Korean dress).
And here’s a bunch of people eating at the buffet. Okay, so this one is not that interesting.
Here’s e around that time, I think. He’s pretty helpless, unable even to crawl, really.
Here’s him a bit later, climbing the stairs. Sorry about the quality of the video; it was dark in the stairwell.
More stairs, better visibility.
Okay, this next one is fairly long (4 minutes) and features e complaining in babyspeak. I forgot how chunky he used to be. Very cute when he’s cranky.
Fast forward a few months, e is mobile. He’s lost the goose-down hair and some of the baby fat. He knows a few words, but still speaks mostly gobbledygook. His articulation is clearer, though, and it’ll be no time at all before he’ll start challenging my Korean.
Next week: e now.
There was a time would E would sleep through the night, 12, 14 hours, without so much as a rustle. We knew we were lucky, lucky to have a baby that would let us have the night to ourselves, undisturbed.
That changed when E started climbing out of his crib. I think it must have been around month 20, in the summer. He’d start awake from a nightmare, climb out of his crib, and seek us out for consolation. What were we to do? The kid just had a nightmare. You’ve got to let him sleep with you.
Pretty soon it was every night. We changed out the guard rails for a set that had an opening in them because there was no point in pretending that nothing was stopping him from just hopping over them any time he wanted to. We’d put him to bed and sneak out when he fell asleep, but at one or two in the morning, when we ourselves were sure to be in bed, he’d climb out of his crib, march down the hallway with his favorite blanket, and claw at our bed.
The Chinese have a nickname for their little ones. They call them Little Emperors. E is almost two now. He is eagerly testing out newfound powers of refusal, of demand, of whiny attrition. He is our Little Emperor.
And Dana just gives in. She’s ragged from all the school work and stress and doesn’t have it in her to deal with wet eyes and screaming sirens of protest. But I’m the Dad. I’m the man of the house; I’m the law. The buck stops with me, buddy.
So one night, when Dana is away, I decide to take the opportunity to put my foot down. I give E his bath, put him in his pajamas, and turn out the lights. I fish around for the Mighty Brite reading light and read him Goodnight Moon. He’s yawning. Good sign. We say our prayers, and I lift him in my arms and set him in his crib. As I do so, I say, “I’m leaving, E, and I want you to stay in your crib. I don’t want you to leave this room tonight.”
He rocks his head back and forth and ever so faintly says, “No. No.”
“Yes, E. Stay in your crib. I am closing the door,” and I latch the door shut.
Then I go down the hall, get in bed, and wait.
And, indeed, ten minutes later I hear him get out of his crib. I hear him run his hand across the door. What is this? The door’s never been shut before. How am I supposed to get out? I can hear him scratch at the groove between the door and the frame.
And then I hear him go nuts. He starts to whine. And then bawl. And then I hear him stomp around the room blindly. He starts opening all his drawers and flinging out all his clothes. I almost get out of bed when he starts throwing his toys. He starts banging against the door, first with his shoulder, then with his head. He presses all the buttons on the toys attached to his bed. And then it sounds like he’s ripping pages out of one of his books.
I hear a thud, thud, thud, and then I realize he’s tipping over the rocking chair.
I’m sitting up now, but it’s suddenly gone silent. I sit uneasily for five minutes, ten minutes. What’s happened? Is he hurt — trapped, perhaps, under the rocking chair? Is he lying on the floor, exhausted? Is he back in bed?
I think I see a flash of light underneath the door. No… how can…?
And then, dumbfounded, I hear the doorknob being rattled. Chk-chk. Chk-chk.
Is my son seriously…? Chk-chk. Chk-chk.
And before I could answer my question, the door flings open, and E comes howling like a banshee down the hall, waving the Mighty Brite wand so that I see white flashes of his wrathful, grimacing face racing towards me like an avenging spirit.
I was literally flat on my back in fright. I almost fell out of the bed and found myself scampering away from him as he came to the side of the bed and started clawing up. When I got him to settle down and nestle into bed — my bed — sweetly asleep, I could still hear my heart thumping, and I had to laugh out loud, nervously, to force myself to exhale and calm down.
Needless to say, he still sleeps in our bed every night.
Another scribble:
Dear Alex,
I have a secret. Actually it’s not really a secret, since a lot of guys here on the inside do know about it, all the guards and wardens and docs and, therefore, also practically every one in my block, but actually beyond that I think this information is surprisingly not real well-known. Maybe on account of me being a straight up guy and careful with others’ shit. Anyhow, I don’t know if you’ve ever thought about how I look. I’m 5’11″, 200 lbs. at the last weigh-in. I’ve got light-brown skin — so light that I’ve got red freckles around my nose. I laughed when you wrote that you looked like a kid version of Conan O’Brien in your letter ’cause my friends used to call me “Irish” when I was your age. One of the guards tapes Conan O’Brien and plays it in the rec room. Anyhow, I also got this Afro. You know what that is? I don’t know if kids around you still sport those things. I let my hair grow kind of long and then shape it back with a razor so it looks like I got this black foam ball on my head. Except my hair is not super tightly kinked, so it’s more like a mound of cotton candy on my head. It was kind of a thing back in the day. Here’s the thing — there’s a reason why I always, always have my hair this way. It’s ’cause I have a nail sticking out of my head. If you shaved my scalp, you’d see it sticking out maybe half-an-inch honest-to-Jesus. But my hair being as it is, you really wouldn’t be the wiser.
My dad did that, Alex.
Another quick scribble.
Jonas could tell before Tasker said a word that the colonel was not a geek. It wasn’t his clean-shaven appearance or militaristic bearing — plenty of the crack cybersecurity experts are coming nowadays from within the ranks of an Armed Forces keen on keeping a step ahead of technology than its rivals both far and near. It wasn’t even his age, though Jonas certainly couldn’t recall any eminent wizards who looked like Tasker.
It was his scan; the Colonel looked at the personnel rather than the equipment. He lacked the shifty-eyed curiosity of a true geek. He was, instead, a bureaucrat, or middle manager.
“You say one of your own machines is doing this?”
“Sort of,” Jonas explained. “One of the crucial ways we track new activity is by having an array of machines that we call honeypots. They’re completely vulnerable machines, you see, with no firewalls or protective software. We use them to attract as much malicious activity as possible. Their sole purpose is to get swarmed with infections so we can see what new menaces are making their way around networks.”
The Colonel cut him short. “So what happened at 0400 this morning?”
“Well,” Jonas said, “they all started, one after another, sneezing.”
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