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Max and his dad in Roseville. As before, most of my time spent with Max is really fun but I have no idea how to write about this without boring you, the esteemed reader. 

Max at the Sacramento Zoo in the spring.

Max at the zoo again. This fascination hasn't changed for 2 years. Delia's mom wants to give him toys but he loses interest quickly. I told her to see if Toys R Us has sewer grates. Some of Max's other interests these days include kitchen faucets, sink faucets, bath faucets, garden hoses, drinking fountains, lakes, pools, gutters and sprinklers. This must be a fairly old photo, as we haven't been able to get him to wear a shirt for months.

Ahh, here's a more recent one. Max is obsessed with this faucet, and we've sacrificed tons of water to satisfy his obsession. While we restrict his time, somehow he always ends up in this position.

Me and Great Uncle Peter (Delia's mom's brother) helping Max get down to a beach near San Francisco. Delia's dad is behind us.

Peter and Max at the ocean.

Well, hello, everybody. I've had the usual amount of busyness, but, gosh, it's been a long time. I just logged in to my blog and I found (1) It's a completely new interface, (2) Google's picture sharing service is now way easier to use (removing a major reason I hate writing blogs), (3) I now get detailed stats on how many people are reading it, and (4) amazingly, I had 5 people read my stale, moldy blog a couple days ago. Max, trust me, I took care of you and we did lots of stuff together, but I have no record of it. 

Actually, I have some records. Here's a story from March. It made me so proud that I told everyone at work about it.

We're sitting at a restauraunt near San Jose.  Max is walking around and almost hit his head on a table corner.  

Aunt Allison tells Max, "Be careful!  That's a table corner and it could hurt you!"

I add, "That's a table corner.  It's sharp.  The table corner is sharp."

Max, who is generally quite careful, gingerly puts his finger on the table corner.  It's really not that sharp.

Allison tells Max, "It won't hurt to touch it, but if you hit it hard, it will hurt!"  

Max stares at Allison. Allison makes the motion of hitting the corner hard a bunch of times.  "See, if you hit hard, it will hurt!  Max, try it!" Max looks at her quietly while Allison tries again. "Hit the corner hard!"

Max grabs my hand and whacks it on the table corner.

Max actually uses my hand for a lot of things, and it now makes more sense. I've been really behind on my parenting books, and only recently while sceruptitiously searupticiously impulsively looking through other articles did I link to this Wikipedia entry on attachment theory. For me it is the Top Quark in my unified theory of parenting. Meaning, it explained a lot of bizarre behavior on Max's part. For example, why would he do something he knows he's not supposed to do, while making sure I'm around to watch him do it? I thought he entered adolescence early, but the answer, it seems, is that the world's a pretty dangerous place for him and he knows it, so he always wants to have someone around to keep him safe while he does his experimenting. Or, to have a spare hand to let him know if a surface is too hot to touch.

Now that Max can walk and talk, he's much more fun to be around. However, in a way, parenting was a bit easier before he was 2. The advice up to that point was basically to love him as much as possible. Now, it's pretty clear he'll have to learn things from right and wrong and to adhere to arbitrary social conventions. 

Max eating pasta. Kindly look at his left hand.

Delia and I are trying to come to terms with rules and discipline, and we don't have all the answers. What is very interesting to me, however, is, once we explain the rules, how quickly Max tries to game the system. 

Max gets absolutely furious if we yank him away from doing something. So one of our babysitters, who actually got training in this stuff, recommended we count down instead (ie you get one minute to play with the faucet). It works quite well, generally. For example, after disposing of several gallons' worth of water from the CVS drinking fountain, I'll give him one more minute on the fountain. He'll actually step down from the fountain a little early (very nice of him), wanders off about 5 yards, casually walks back and...hey, there's a drinking fountain! Let's see how it works...

He'll often not tell us about his intentions either. He will say "Want to sit with Daddy", which is very sweet until I realize it, too late, it means he wants to play with Daddy's laptop. Similarly, he will wait very quietly in the car until it's parked and we've unbuckled him, when he'll lurch forward and demand "Want to play in the car!" It's a hard maneuver to stop, which is why we frequently have this situation.

Max in car. Oftentimes we'll be in a park and Max will want to spend his time messing with all the buttons in the car instead. It generally takes less than a minute after he's done to reset the turn signals, radio, hazard lights, etc.

TUMMY

Grandpa (Todd's dad) and Max at the aquarium. His expression indicates he will soon say "Wanna play with camera?"

It was a pretty hot day at the zoo in Denver, and Max was listless and cranky. Given that we're visiting the zoo for him, this is not a welcome development. He kept saying "Want your shirt off?" (He's imitating us when we say "Do you want your shirt off?"..he doesn't consistently use "I" or "me" yet.) It's too sunny to take his shirt off, but he's miserable, I'm tired, and given that the shirt thing has been his only real demand, I finally relented. "OK," I finally say, "You can show your tummy." I take his shirt off, and he gives a huge smile and says huskily, "Tummmmmyyyy!" and starts running around. He had a great time the rest of the day, and that's been more or less the last time he's put a shirt on.  

Before this, he had a rash on his tummy for a while, and Delia realized he may have gotten it from being too hot. In fact, we'll be out at night in the mountains, there's a wind, I'm wearing a jacket, and Max is happily wandering around shirtless. I ask him "Are you cold?" He'll casually say, "No" and investigate a light on a walkway. I feel him and he's fine. We spent the first two of his shirtless weeks waiting for him to get sick, but it never happened (except for a certain time he drank swimming pool water, but I digress.) I don't know where he gets his cold tolerance from. I don't have any, Delia doesn't, and my mom has circulation problems. Delia's mom and dad will wear full clothes and jackets in the summer. Delia's brother and grandfather stay hot pretty easily, so apparently he got some genes from them. I only saw him shivering once, after swimming in Lake Tahoe for an hour or so. This includes a trip to San Francisco on a windy day where a bundled up person pretty clearly wanted to take a picture of me (wearing a jacket) and Max (wearing almost nothing) so she could post it in one of those "Father of the Year" sites.

SWIMMING

We also gave Max his first swimming lessons. This should be right up his alley, given his fascination with water. But we ran into problems. First, there was the bubble blowing. Every day, he was told to blow bubbles. Usually, he'd volunteer me to blow bubbles for him, but a couple times he stuck his mouth underwater. Then I heard a gulp. Umm, Max, you're not supposed to drink the water. So he gave me the biggest grin and gulped the water again. OK, we're done...I let him do some other stuff but the teacher comes by to evaluate progress. So Max puts his mouth in and...gulp...The next day we skipped class on account of illness.

As the sessions continued, Max became less and less interested. To explain what I think happened, I may need to back up for a second to explain "remote control wars." I had a college roommate who had a TV with two remotes. So we grabbed the remotes just started flipping channels until the other person gave up.  It was a miserable experience and there really were no winners. But if there was a winner, it was me. I realized the key was not to use the remote indiscriminately, but to watch him instead. He flipped through the channels wildly, but I waited, alert but relaxed, for the slight backwards movement that accompanied him sagging into his chair.  Ahh, he found a show he liked. I waited a couple of seconds for him to be fully engaged, and only then did I yank the channel to a test pattern.  

So, back to Max's intense 30-minute pool sessions. He would investigate the pool filter or water jet, only to be yanked away so he could the hokey pokey in the water with the rest of the class. By the end of the sessions he mostly didn't want to do any of the activities and didn't want to go in the water. The last couple of days, wondering what was wrong, I stepped back from the frenzy and noticed a lot of the other kids were being carried around by their parents instead of participating in the drills.  Ahh, I'm not alone. Similarly, I stepped back from Max's shrieking when I dunked him in the water, to notice the sounds of desperate screams from little lungs all around as other kids were put in the water also. 

Max, by the end of the lessons, took matters into his own hands and started ignoring the teacher to walk around (the pool was only 2 feet deep) and watch other kids do their drills, and I mostly let him. When he got some independence he got much happier in the water, and that's probably the point of the whole experience at this age. He never really learned how to blow bubbles in the lessons, but oh well. He asks to go to the pool now, which is good enough for me.

Actually, he learned to blow bubbles on his own later. We were at home after the final lesson and Max asked me, "Want to blow bubbles?" Cool. I give him a bowl of water and put it next to the sink. I was really excited. Max blew some bubbles, but that's not really what he learned. I know this because over the next couple weeks, Max would ask "Want to blow bubbles?" I would then enthusiastically gave him the bowl of water next to the sink. He maybe would put his chin into the bowl, then immediately forgot the bowl existed and started playing with the faucet instead. Angry I was outwitted by a 2-year-old, I told him "OK, WE'RE DONE!" and put him down. So Max sweetly asked me, "Want to blow bubbles?" Umm, sure. Of course he did the exact same thing to me again.

EXERCISE

Grass Valley had a long, rainy winter, and Max was cooped up inside quite a bit. Daddy got worried. Max needed to get out and exercise. So as the weather improved and the days grew longer, I tried to take Max on some runs.

Max never ran before but it only took a couple weeks of this before he started running in earnest. However, his running is not the same as adult running. I shall give an example. We were in Lake Tahoe, and Max spent the day in the stroller or playing in the sand. So the sun was going down, everyone was leaving, and I was determined to get Max some exercise. So when everyone else got far ahead I told Max, "OK, let's run after them!"

Max gave a war cry ("AAAAAAHHHH!!!") and then took off for about 10 feet before he noticed a light in a rock wall. He spent some time to investigate the light thoroughly, and when he was done we were even farther behind.

"Max, look how far ahead they are! LET'S GO!"

"AAAAAAAAHHHHH!!!!" Max yelled, and took off....and stopped. Oh, the rock wall had a light on the other side too. He needed to investigate.

However, it took maybe a little less time to get him away from the light and start running again.  "AAAAAHHH!!!!" He yelled, and ran... about 20 feet.  There was a light in a post.  This was the first light in a post and Max needed to study it. I looked down the path towards the family members fading in the distance and noticed there were lights every 20 feet. Sigh...Thankfully, Delia's parents are very patient and Max did run/walk the 200 yards while memorizing about 80 lights or so.