These moments. They’re accumulating faster than I can take note of or savor them. They’re the little grooves at the edge of the Interstate that are supposed to keep you awake if you get too close - dozens and dozens, blurring together… shifting and flickering to form an unbroken whole. Together, they create a timeline, stretching out to the vanishing point - in front, and behind.

Stay awake, Da-da.

Of Rockets and the Geneva Convention

For Nate’s second birthday, he received his Most Favorite Toy Ever - The Little Einsteins Pat Pat Rocket. Rocket has a cockpit that opens, a speaker that emits rocket-type noises, and lights on the front that blink in time with these noises. He’s manned by all the Little Einsteins who Nate loves to watch in their various mass-marketed DVD adventures. Each Einstein has been given a single, defining character trait: Leo leads the group, June loves to dance, Quincy plays music, and Annie chain smokes.

Nate gleefully lumbers up and down the hallways in a barely-controlled fall, hunched over Rocket like Quasimodo, with one hand on each of Rocket’s flared back fins. Rocket’s cockpit canopy is prone to pop off a little too easily, and it is slightly beyond his ability to clip back into place. His growing concern over the fact that Rocket is in two pieces is unfortunately coupled with both an inability to fix it himself, and a stubborn insistence to attempt to do so anyway. 

“Doit! Do-EEE! Hep!” he demands, insisting on doing it himself and perplexingly, asking for help at the same time. About every third time he asks for hep, he will accept the hep. He slowly taps the loose canopy over and over against the clip it fits into. He’s like one of those hapless, disoriented beetles that try to mate with discarded beer bottles - there’s a lot of tapping, but no results. Sometimes, he comes tantalizingly close, and I resist the strong urge to simply snatch it from him, click it into place and hand it back. It’s like watching someone with an inner ear problem try to thread a needle in the back of a moving pickup.

His favorite Einstein by far is June, who loves to dance. He calls her “Dooooon!”, and the first few days he had the Einsteins, she went everywhere with him. Dinner, the bathtub… he even took her back to his crib. I’ll let the teeth marks on her head tell their own story. 

Liam also loves Rocket. When things are good, he and Nate take turns, with one watching longingly from the kitchen while the other shambles up and down the hallway. When things are bad, it’s pretty much the same thing, just with more screaming and a sudden spike in slap-fight activity. Liam has to hunch a little further over Rocket, but they both laugh and generally love it.

At night as we get one of them ready for bed, the other is usually at the sink in their bathroom. They’ve both adopted the curious and slightly disturbing practice of waterboarding the Little Einsteins. They each fill their miniature bathroom cups with water, then methodically pour water onto each Einstein’s face before dunking them headfirst into the cups, often leaving them under for extended amounts of time. Even June is not safe from this practice.

Of Tricksiness and Improbable Movements

Liam has stepped up his trickery. For example, we tell him to “Buckle up!” after he climbs into his booster seat, and he appears to be agreeably doing so, and most times, he is. However, we’ve noticed on several occasions that he was simply going through the motions, then hiding the buckles and keeping his arms over his lap. He’s palming the handcuff key.

If he’s supposed to be asleep for his nap, we’ll sometimes hear him jumping from his bed to the floor with all the stealth of a bucketful of bricks. Once, on about the sixth chandelier-shaking landing, Jill interrupted our conversation and said, “Did you know that Liam isn’t asleep? Yeah. He’s upstairs, jumping.”

Sometimes he sits on the side of his room opposite his bed and shakes the radiator pipes. Once, he was doing this, and I walked over downstairs and gave it a good shake back. I heard his footsteps scurry back across the room, where they presumably took him back into his bed and stayed there with him.

One afternoon, I opened the door unexpectedly on him, and caught him sitting on the floor with his blocks. I stared at him, and he stared at me. I struggled to keep my poker face, and he didn’t know which way the wind was going to blow. Finally, he broke the silence.

“Hi Da-da. Liam just woke up!” he lied cheerfully.

Another day I walked in to find him sitting in the middle of his bed, sucking his thumb. All his curtains had been pulled down, so I asked him how that had happened.

“Nay-nay did it. Nay pulled down all those curtains.” he replied.

“Really? So Nate got out of his crib, came into your room, pulled down all your curtains, then went back into his room and got back into his crib? Nate did that?”

He took his thumb out of his mouth, raised his eyebrows, and responded, “Naynay pooped in Weem’s diaper too.”

Of the Inherent Hilarity of Tooting

Sometimes, when I’m changing Liam, he tries to toot on Da-da. I’ll yell, “Don’t toot on Da-da! NO toots!”, and he’ll strain to the point that I worry he’s going to give himself a hemorrhoid. It probably doesn’t help that I’m either laughing or trying not to laugh the entire time. You try not to laugh while he’s grunting and pushing, and his ass looks like a dry-heaving starfish. Once, he succeeded in blowing the diaper cream completely off my finger, like he was blowing out a birthday candle. The lad got me.

Of Being Fat and Reaching New Gastrointestinal Milestones

Note to Sam: Sam, you’re fat. Maybe the heftiest of them all. Like, 97th-Percentile-Tubby. By definition, that means that you’ve got bigger tits than 96 out of every 100 other babies who were born when you were. Seriously, where are your wrists, dude? You look like a pack of Ball Park Franks. I bet you’d be delicious to an alligator - all chewy and pink - nothing to spit out. Of course, he’d have to get you after a diaper-change, because damn. Now that you’re on solid food, you’ve soared to new levels. You can spackle up some serious adult-sized stanky. And you smile when you do it. Of course, you smile at almost everything. And I don’t care if you annihilate a diaper or have dimples where bones should be. I love you, baby.

Of Sleeping and Waking

Sometimes, Liam does sleep when he’s supposed to, and he wakes up pretty cute and with a head and eyelids two sizes too large. Several weeks ago, he rubbed his eyes and told me, “Yellow egg is sleepy and his mouth looks like a pentagon.”

I sat on his bed next to him and listened intently.

“Purple egg isn’t sleepy; he’s just waking up slow.”

I wasn’t sure exactly what this meant, but I appreciated the number of words that were in each sentence, and how earnestly the information was relayed to me. I don’t know if it was that he was half-asleep, or half-awake. Maybe that he’s half-and-a-three.

Nate sometimes wakes up and cries in the middle of the night. One of us will go upstairs and hold him in the cushy Pottery Barn rocker until he calms back down. If you try to put him back into his crib too early, he’ll hug you like a Spider Monkey - a Spider Monkey that can say “No! Bed!”

Sam wakes up several times a night, or so I’m told.

Of Easter

All three boys were visited by the Easter Bunny, and he hid many eggs and baskets. Nate delighted in finding his behind the hallway door, and sat down immediately to explore its many unexpected treasures. We led Liam directly to his and basically pushed him towards it. Visibly agitated, he declared “No Easter Bask-KEEET!”, thereby continuing his unbroken streak of acting in completely the opposite way that one would guess a three year old would act. Sam sat in his highchair and smiled. They all got stacking robots, spinning tops, and sugared snacks. Sam also got a helicopter that was immediately commandeered by his brothers, which caused him to smile again.

Of These Scenes I Don’t Want to Forget

Nate, hearing any unfamiliar noise, dropping whatever he’s doing, finding one of us, then tapping his ear while asking repeatedly, “Whazzat? Whazzat, Da-da? Whazzat Muh-mum?” until we tell him whazzat is.

Me, trying to wash Liam’s hair while he screams, and eventually just stepping back and letting Jill take over. Then listening to her calmly talking to him, involving him in the process, and finishing the job as he looked up and actually smiled at imaginary airplanes.

Liam and Nate, dragging their disconnected swings back under the swingset and collapsing into them, understanding the ‘what’ and the ‘where’, if not quite the ‘how’. Then, with little hands firmly grasping the sides of each swing, sitting expectantly and waiting for something to start, like the guy in the old Memorex ads. Me, walking over to them sitting there in the grass like two broken puppets, and Nate looking up and saying, “Hi Da-Da!.”

Jill, under her umbrella in the backyard, kneeling and picking up toys in the rain.

Me, standing at the kitchen window, feeling the coolness of the glass, and watching Jill picking up toys in the rain. And appreciating how lucky I am. How lucky I am to have found my perfect accomplice. How lucky I am to be holding firmly onto her hand as we’re pulled along like two kids in a crowded funhouse through this uncharted adventure. And how lucky I am to be dry, and inside, instead of out there, picking up toys.

Sunday mornings that smell like cinnamon bagels, sound like slamming screen doors, and look like small boys running through tall grass.

Sam, giving us blueberry raspberries.

Of Seizing the Moment

But too much time has now passed between when I observed these things, and when I found the time to write about them. Most of these things are already done and gone. They were really gone the moment they occurred, and trying to capture them here is like trying to catch moonlight with a butterfly net. They are as tinny echos, chasing each other down hallways like carefree footsteps and pealing up through the unfolding leaves of spring, like laughter from a sandbox.

Rocket’s canopy is now in a different room than Rocket, and Nate doesn’t seem concerned to see one without the other. This morning, I saw June laying forgotten in a plastic pumpkin, alone but for Leo, group leader. I can’t remember exactly when I last saw Nate with either of them. He’s moving on.

Liam no longer needs to resort to slight of lap to escape from his booster, as with a little effort, he can defeat his buckles even when clipped. And when he does buckle up, he clips in not around a diaper, but around a Pull-up. So there’s no need for changing tables or diaper cream. He’s moving on.

It’s also stopped raining, so Jill no longer needs her umbrella.

Thankfully, Sam is still pretty fat.

For the moment.