Mahalo.ne.Trash

me: "owen, come here. it's time to get a new diaper" him, sprinting down the hall with no pants on: "forget about it!" he's quoting benny the rabbit, a short-lived sesame street character who happens to be in his favorite "count with me" video. i'm turning my head, trying not to let him see me laugh, because his use and tone with the phrase are so spot-on.

I can now talk to a teenager and say something like, "You kids with your Faceblags and text message woozits. When I was your age we used a ' telephone ' with a cord attached to it. If we wanted privacy we stretched the cord into another room and closed the door on the cord. And that's the way we liked it!" "Whatever, old man."

Erin: "Wanna go watch Owen sleep?" Me: "Heck yes! It's Friday, what else are we gonna do?" Indeed, what else would we do? Hit the night clubs? Now that we are parents Friday nights are a lot like other nights. Get the boy down and enjoy the quiet. And every night we like to sneak into his room and check up on him. Under any other circumstance, in any other setting, this little activity of ours--sneaking into someone's room and watching them sleep--would seem pretty disturbing. But then again, so would picking someone else's nose and examining what comes out. When thinking about the day-to-day things you do when raising a two-year-old it's often best not to think too critically about them. Part of it is that we just enjoy seeing him in one place for longer than 30 seconds. It's relaxing and gives us the illusion that he's, well, sane. The other part of our desire to spy on him at night is because of his recent sleeping habits, which are anyt...

every tuesday and thursday we head out to "owen's school" - a preschool where parents come with their children to encourage the parents' role as primary educator. we're one of just a handful of non-hawaiian families in his program, which gives preferential treatment to native families, but we've felt welcome from the very beginning. admittedly, i've struggled with learning his peers' hawaiian names, but mostly because i have no frame of refrence for most of them. we've also started learning a bit more hawaiian. oli - a chant that's not danced to (we do a series of greeting chants) ke kino - the body (we do some hawaiian hokey-pokey) maka - eye lima - hand manamanalima - fingers wāwae - foot (w's are said as v's) po'ohiwi - shoulders pau- finished ("are you pau?" is asked often) Pōʻalua- Tuesday Pōʻahā - Thursday (these are the days we go to school!) o's favorite things at school are definitely the rice table and the w...

after two weeks with a household full of family, owen and i prepared for our first morning back to our routine. bedtime had been a little late saturday night, so i was thinking, wishfully, that he'd sleep at least 30 minutes beyond the normal wakeup time of 6:30am. 6:15 am rolled around and owen called out: "mommy please open door, owen want all done sleep". covering my head and pretending this wasn't happening, i heard the little voice again, "mommy, mommy, owen all done". sigh. i brought owen into our bed (john was at the telescope) and told him he had to lay quietly for "10 minutes". this is a concept he seems to understand some of the time. he was so quiet, i thought he'd fallen back asleep. nope. again, but now from much closer "all done mommy." it was now about 6:40, and i was going to continue to fight to stay in bed until 7 am (the futility of the act has prompted john to call it "fighting the wind."). as al...