Thursday, April 23, 2009

The Ninja and The Nut



I've recently discovered a few things about Melora that should have been obvious to me a long time ago. First, I discovered that she is really smart. Really. I know that I'm totally biased because I'm her mom, but please trust me. She was "racing" Isaiah up and down the hall yesterday (which is a game Isaiah loves to play because Melora is such a gracious and consistent loser,) when she found an old pacifier lodged in a basket. She apparently thought it would be funny to pop it into her mouth, since she no longer has any interest in sucking on a pacifier whatsoever. So she put it in a laughed at her own joke and continued racing. Then a minute later she abruptly veered off the racecourse and headed into Isaiah's room. She crawled straight around a corner and picked up a clam shell-style sunglasses case she must have remembered was there. Then she worked for about two minutes straight until her little fingers had pried it open, dropped the pacifier inside the case, and went right back to racing Isaiah. Huh.

The second thing I discovered yesterday was the Melora is actually a ninja. A tiny, cute, very powerful ninja. I was changing her diaper when she whipped her leg around and flipped herself onto her tummy in the blink of an eye. And like a shot, she was off and crawling her poopy little butt away, giggling to herself. When I caught her and brought her back to the changing mat, I had to pin her down with my legs while I used one hand to hold her ankles and the other to put a new diaper on. It took 10 minutes to finish the job, and somewhere in there I realized that a 20 pound baby girl should not be a match for me.

The third thing I discovered was actually the logical conclusion of the first two epiphanies. Melora is really smart, and also a ninja. Therefore, Michael and I are in major trouble.

Earlier this week, I let Isaiah have an ice cream cone for eating such a good lunch. Soon after I gave it to him, it became apparent that Melora's diaper was emiting foul odors. So I left him to his ice cream and went to change Melora into something more fresh. After I had put her into a new diaper (a great feat, if you remember that she is a ninja with a funny sense of humor) I went into the bathroom to clean it out, and I let her crawl away. After a few minutes of spraying the diaper into the toilet (with this super-awesome diaper sprayer!!) I heard some repeated banging coming from the kitchen, as though a drawer were being repeatedly opened and slammed shut again.

"Isaiah, what's going on in there?"
"It's okay, Mama. I'm cleaning it up."
Cleaning it up? Cleaning what up? Do I even want to know? My hands are too poopy right now to actually do anything about it. What would I do anyway?
"Um, thanks for cleaning sweetie."

A few minutes later I came in with freshly washed hands to see what the damage was, and I found half an ice cream cone in the middle of the kitchen floor, covered with every single kitchen towel I own. Isaiah was smiling the sweetest smile as he told me that he had shared his ice cream cone with Melora, and then cleaned it up when she dropped it. So I hugged him and thanked him for being such a sweet brother and such a wonderful helper. He beamed.

My favorite new thing Isaiah does now is muse about God. When he went to the bathroom one morning, he declared, "God turned my pee on." And when we were learning about planets, he said, "God made Earth nice so all the robots could live here." More than once he has told me that he did something scary, but it was okay because God was keeping him safe. We have a board game called "Boz's Big World," which is basically Christian Candyland. If you draw an orange card, you are supposed to thank God for something. One time when we were playing, Isaiah seemed to be getting every orange card in the deck. He had already thanked God for his trains and for his sister and parents, for his friends and for Lightening McQueen Fruit Snacks. Then he drew another orange card, and promptly said, "Thank you God for this card," before moving to the next space.

He's suddenly become so grown up, and it's nice to see that he's growing into such a loving brother and sweet boy. He rarely lets me hold his hand anymore, and when I automatically reach out to help him take off his shoes or get down from the car, he cries out, "No! I can do it myself." But he also hugs me for no other reason than I look tired, and he reads me stories while I sit on the floor of his room. He's so proud of himself when we do our school time, and he loves having something to show Daddy at the end of the day, like a maze he completed, or a new state he can identify. I used to mourn the fact that he would not always be my baby, but I never counted on how amazing it would be to see him grow up.

2 comments:

Mels Place in Big Bear said...

Wow, you have ninja kids. Cool.

k-doh and Bosanova-b said...

Not to Brag myself but it sounds as if Melora and Sam may have been trained together by some secret group that turns babys into ninjas!

Sam is 28 pounds of chaos, he is into more things than Collin is now or ever was at a year.

I am glad that Isaiah and Melora ore doing so well. Karole and I need to do some major updating for the boy's blogs.

Bill