Category: Family

There was one in the bed
And the little one said,
"Roll over,
Roll over!"

Alex role-plays a lot of the complex issues in his life. Very often these games involve him turning the tables on us. For example, he sometimes tells us it’s time to go to bed, and he will lay down a pillow and a blanket for us. Other times, he will say that he is angry with us, and that we have to be sad.

Last week, he told me that I was being very naughty, and that I had to go to my room until I was a better boy. I obediently went through to my room and sat down on the bed, while Alex closed the door on me. He then went through to his own room to giggle and play.

A few minutes later, I stood up and walked to the door. Alex heard me making a noise, and he rushed through to greet me. “No, you caaaan’t come out of your room,” he said, gesticulating with his expressive hands. “You’re not being a haive.”

I wasn’t being a what? A haive? (It rhymes with “slave”.) Was this a new word he had picked up at nursery?

The explanation hit me a moment later. We often tell him that he has to behave. What he has been hearing, however, is us telling him to “be a haive.” His brain had figured out that this strange noun “haive” was equivalent to “good boy.” Which, idiomatically, is mostly true–it’s the grammatical fineries he got mixed up.

Yet another fascinating and funny insight into linguistic development. Our days are filled with them.

Alex loves videogames, or, as he calls them, “TV games”. With both a Playstation 2 and a Gamecube in the house, TV games are as much a part of his everyday playtime as his toy trains, cars, and books. He is particularly fond of Nintendo’s Mario games, and the characters in them. Whenever he plays with his toy farmhouse and the four plastic farm animals that go with it, the animals take on the personas of Red Mario, Green Mario (Luigi), Daisy and Peach. Whenever the four real humans in the house hang out together, Alex will regularly instruct us on what roles we should all adopt. “I’m Red Mario, you’re Green Mario, mama’s Daisy, and Che-o-Fiona’s Peach!”

This isn’t the only videogame vocabulary he has adopted. Piggyback rides put him in the mindset of Ratchet and Clank, where he is the tiny robot Clank who clings to the rabbit-like Ratchet’s back. We often play at “Boss Battles” together. Anything you can do with two people becomes “multiplayer”: multiplayer potty time, multiplayer bath time, multiplayer bedtime. If we want Alex to do something, we can pretend that we’re holding the “Alex controller”, which has jump, cuddle, kiss, and run buttons on it. I often whizz him around the room from sofa to table so he can “grind the rails” like in the snowboarding and skateboarding games. And he is convinced that my current job involves fixing giant robots all day. With a spanner.

When we first started playing SSX Tricky together, he could barely hold the controller, but in the last six months or so he has started to get pretty good at his games. In games like Ratchet and Clank and Mario Sunshine, he can easily control the characters on screen, making them run, jump, and hit things. In Mario Kart: Double Dash!, he no longer always comes last when he’s playing against the computer.

The violence in videogames is something we have to watch out for. He doesn’t get to watch me play Vice City or Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance any more. The games we allow him to play where he can hit things (Ratchet and Clank, Super Smash Bros. Melee, Zelda) are –most of the time–cartoony and playful, and about as aggressive as Tom and Jerry, or Road Runner.

We have also been drumming the distinction between fantasy and reality into his little head. It seems to be working. A couple of months ago, we rented the game Billy Hatcher and The Giant Egg for a weekend. On the Sunday morning, I got up with Alex and fired up the Gamecube. When Abi came downstairs a little bit later, she greeted the scene by saying “Hello Alex, hello Billy Hatcher.” Alex turned round to her, and said in a serious voice: “Billy Hatcher’s not real, mama, it’s a game.”

Last Friday I had a half day from work. Alex, Fiona and I all went into town while Abi took a relaxing afternoon off. While I was browsing through the games section of the Virgin store, Alex wandered off to play with the Gamecube demo pod. It was running the new James Bond game, Everything Or Nothing.

I watched as Alex took up one of the game controllers and started playing. After a while, he got distracted by something, and spaced out for a moment or two. In that time, another boy, who looked to be about twelve or thirteen years old, joined him at the demo pod, and picked up the other controller. At the same time as the older boy started to play, Alex returned from the twilight zone and started paying attention to the game again.

I moved in a bit closer to make sure that Alex didn’t start telling the other boy to go away. (He can be rather bossy at times.) On screen, James Bond sneaked around a darkened control room, occasionally popping up from behind conveniently located crates to subdue an unwitting guard or enter a keycode at a computer terminal. Bond seemed to be doing just fine, but the older boy was looking up and down from the screen to his controller in frustration. He thumbed the buttons hard a couple of times, then pushed it aside. He probably thought the game was stuck on demo mode, and that he couldn’t interact with it.

Meanwhile, Bond carried on as if nothing had happened. Sneak, sneak, jump, fire, roll stealthily under a desk. The older boy looked from the screen down to Alex. Alex pushed the joystick forward and from side to side, and rolled his little thumbs over the buttons. I saw the older boy’s eyes widen as he realized that the game wasn’t on demo mode, but that this toddler was holding the active controller, and was directing Bond like an expert.

The older boy turned away and walked off to join his pals at the other end of the store. I laid my hand on Alex’s head and couldn’t stop grinning.

That’s my boy!

Before Fiona was born, we already knew that we wanted her middle name to be Chenoweth. It’s an old family surname from Abi’s side of the family, and because it’s so unusual, we could use it equally well for a boy or a girl. (We didn’t know Fiona was going to be a girl.)

“Chenoweth” also gave us a useful placeholder name to use for her in utero. It was the name we used when we talked to Alex about the baby in mama’s tummy, and by January he was quite thoroughly drilled on the idea. Then we changed the rules on him, and told him that Chenoweth would be getting a new name when she was born. Alex seemed to grasp this concept, too, but when Fiona actually arrived and got her new name, Alex thought she was getting her new name in addition to her old one. He started calling her “Chenoweth Fiona”.

Well, so did we. If you’re a parent, you’ll be familiar with the way that families develop their own idioms and figures of speech. You’ll say something to the child, and the child will misinterpret it, turning the phrase into something almost unrecognizable, but terribly cute. Then you start using the altered form of the phrase, reinforcing the mutation, and a new “family phrase” is born.

“Chenoweth Fiona” turned out to be quite a mouthful for Alex, though, and he quickly started abbreviating it to “Che-o-Fiona”, or “Chuffiona”. And recently I’ve started calling her “Chuffy” just for short.

It’s strange how these things go.

There’s only so much you can do with a baby screaming in your ear. Reading becomes difficult. Writing becomes damn near impossible. Physical coordination is impaired. There’s something in the shrill, primal wail that short-circuits your synapses and jams your neural pathways. So is it any wonder that the US military is using this noise as a new weapon in Iraq? (via Making Light)

US troops are to be armed with a stun gun that uses a baby’s high-pitched scream to bring the enemy to its knees.

The gun, which will be issued to marines in Iraq this month, fires “sonic bullets” that can be targeted like a torch beam.

Anyone hit with a full blast would suffer excruciating pain, permanent deafness and some form of cellular damage. A prolonged blast could kill.

The “Secret Scream” gun as it is called, could revolutionise the way US troops deal with snipers, suicide bombers and riots in the turmoil of post-war Iraq.

The actual sound used is a recording of a baby’s scream played backwards.

“For most people, even if they plug their ears, it will produce the equivalent of an instant migraine,” said Woody Norris, chairman of American Technology Corporation, the Californian company that has produced the weapon.

“It will knock some people to their knees.”

No shit. Prolonged exposure to babies’ crying has been known to make even men yank out their breasts in the vain hope of appeasing the boundless appetites and unplumbable desires of a howling infant.

According to the height and weight charts, our wee Fiona, ten weeks old today, is the size of a healthy five-month old. She’s not fat, she’s just huge. Most five-month olds are eating some solid food to bulk out their diet. But because Fiona is too young for solids, she gets a breastful of milk at three-hour intervals…and then is hungry again an hour later. You can imagine how happy that makes her.