His Name is Not Ro Ro

Ilan is not even 18 months old, yet he is already perfecting his role as annoying little brother.  His latest stunt is to say "Ro Ro" again and again until Roan tells him, exasperated, "my name is not Ro Ro."

At which point Lani looks at him, smiles, and says "Ro Ro" at the top of his lungs.  Or chants, "Ro Ro Ro Ro Ro Ro Ro Ro."  Or, my favorite, pauses for dramatic effect, and only when Roan has turned back to whatever he was doing, says in a quiet, victorious tone of voice: "Ro Ro."

It's this last tactic that enrages Roan the most.  He gets up in Ilan's face and shouts, "my name is not Ro Ro!" Or, "nobody's name is Ro Ro!"

Truly, Ilan can only say a few recognizable words: Dada, Mamma, Again, and Ro Ro.  We are impressed that he's found a way to verbally torture Roan with such a limited vocabulary.

Ilan likes to save the Ro Ro game for mealtimes, when are all stuck at the table and he has a captive audience.  It leads to a lot of shouting, and sometimes Roan is nearly brought to tears, but it's an improvement over the Feet on the Table game, where both kids ganged up on me.

I try to lessen the blow by explaining to Roan that Ilan doesn't know how to talk, and he only calls him Ro Ro because he hasn't learned to say Roan yet.  So Roan has spent a lot of time patiently teaching Ilan how to say his name.  The result is that Ilan will occasionally say "Ro-Ahhh."  But why would he settle for Ro-Ah, when Ro Ro provokes a much more dramatic reaction?

The worst is when I mistakenly call him Ro Ro.  Sometimes I don't even realize I've done it.  Other times I realize it too late, but think I'm safe, because I'm upstairs and Roan is downstairs, or the clothes dryer is pounding away, or the music is on.  But then I'll hear his voice, laced with frustration, traveling all the way up the stairs, cutting through the din of our daily lives, shouting, "my name is not Ro Ro!"

Aunty Nub, I think Roan understands how you feel.

Hair Cuts

Before the hair cuts

After the hair cuts

Wear and Tear

These are Roan's shoes.  They are also his brakes when he rides his balance bike, which he does a lot.  See how the black marks end before they get to the inside of his foot?  That's not a design thing - Roan has worn off the soles of his shoes.  There's such a height difference between the outside and the inside of his shoes that when he walks he appears to be pigeon toed.  The last time we were at the pediatrician his doctor mentioned it to me, he said something like, "did you know your son is pigeon toed?"  And I said he wasn't, and I showed him the bottoms of his shoes.

Here is the outside of Roan's shoe, which has a nice thick rubber sole.

And here is the inside of the same shoe, where you can see the rubber sole is worn down the canvas.

This is part of a general trend I'm getting used to.  Last week I devoted 20 minutes each night to patching the holes in Roan's jeans.  I cut up an old maroon corduroy blazer that never really fit me right, and now it lines the knees of all of Roan's pants.

Guess we won't be able to hand these shoes down to Ilan!

Found Time

Jay went on a fishing trip last weekend, to celebrate Grandpa Lyons' 70th birthday, so I had the boys all to myself.  The first notable thing was that Lani dropped his much loved piggy bank on his foot.  It's a large ceramic piggy bank, heavy with coins, and it shattered and left a deep gouge in the top of his big toe.  His foot is otherwise fine, and he runs around all day until I take off his shoe to change the dressing, at which point he experiences the trauma of the injury all over again, refuses to put any weight on his foot, or walks with an exaggerated limp.  As soon as I put a sock on him he forgets all about it and walks normally.

Then Lani fell off our backyard step and scraped the skin off his nose.  This makes it pretty near impossible to wipe his nose, which is constantly running.  So he's got a face full of snot and scabs.  His appearance got even worse after I cut his hair.  His bangs were getting in his eyes so I grabbed the kitchen scissors and snipped them straight across before he could protest.  Now he looks like a friar.  A friar that got in a bar fight.

Ro saw me cutting Lani's bangs and asked for a hair cut too.  So both my kids looks like friars.

Lani also picked up a strange habit over the weekend - he won't leave the house unless he is wearing one winter mitten.  It has to be one of the mittens that he wore as a baby, so there are no thumb slots.  It's like a straight jacket for your hand, which really pisses Lani off anytime he tries to grab stuff.  Still, he refuses to take it off.

Ro has a new nickname for Lani: disgusting.  Which he pronounces as "dissusting."  He used to reserve it for meal times, when Lani smeared food everywhere, or to generally remark that "babies are dissusting."  But now it's more like a term of endearment, he'll say, "come on, dissusting," when he wants Lani to follow him or come and play.

Saturday morning we drove to Kids n Action, an indoor hasidic amusement park, for a birthday party.  It's on McDonald, so we drove under the elevated train tracks, with the F train rumbling above us.  Kids n Action is huge, and it was all shuttered, which should have been my first clue, but we were early and I figured by the time we found parking and walked there it would be open.  It was only a few blocks to walk but it took forever - Lani insisted on walking himself, so Roan held his hand to try and speed him up, tugging his arm and saying, "hurry up dissusting."  Every store we passed was shuttered and the streets were deserted.  I realized - we were in Borough Park on Shabbos.  Nothing was open.  I had my dates confused; there couldn't be a birthday party in this neighborhood on a Saturday.

I don't why, but I get this feeling of freedom and joy at times like these, when I've made plans that fall through.  It's like I've just found a few spare hours in my pocket that I hadn't counted on.  Saturday was beautiful, a crisp and sunny spring day, we were all dressed and well fed with brushed teeth, and we had just been given the gift of nothing to do.  The whole day opened up in front of us.

So we climbed the Avenue I station and went joy riding on the F train. The sun streamed through the windows and Lani stood on the bench and Ro sat on his knees, their heads together, watching the tracks and  the roofs of houses rush by.  The whole thing felt extra sweet because I hadn't had to plan it.  All the effort and hassle of getting us out the door was assigned to something else, and this train ride was something extra that fell into our laps.

We did make it to the birthday party on Sunday, and it was lots of fun.  But our sunlit ride on the F train stands out as my favorite part of the weekend.

Nice Track

I don't want to brag, but I think I've gotten pretty good at taking pictures of train tracks.  I've certainly had a lot of practice.  These first three are photos from the Highline, an abandoned elevated rail line in Manhattan that was converted into a park / public space.  We used to live right above the Highline.  We spent two years dealing with all the construction, and moved out 2 months before it opened.

These next three are tracks I shot on my trip to London last month.  I took the train to Cambridge to visit an author, and these tracks are from the Cambridge train station.  Below that are old rail ties with Scottish lighthouses carved in the middle of them, on display at Jesus College. And last is a shot of raised track from the Underground.

The Best Age