The 4 year old and I were drawing shapes on our whiteboard, and he told me to draw a beehive. I guess it wasn’t up to his standards because he said “this is not art” and drew a red circle and slash over it:
I agree it wasn’t my best work but still… harsh.
A spinoff of an ongoing series
Raffi. His greatest hits have been on heavy rotation as it seems to be the only music that calms down our 8 month old when he’s upset, which is often.
Hamster maze videos on YouTube. The 4 year old is delighted by these. Random but could be a lot worse.
Who Smarted? A fun and educational podcast for kids about all kinds of topics.
Toniebox. As audio players for kids go, we’ve hitherto been a hardcore Yoto family. But several characters the 4 year old loves are only available as Tonies (Wild Kratts among them), so he got several for Christmas. It’s nice to have more variety for listening, even if the overall experience is less ideal than Yoto.
Mr. Men and Little Miss. The 4 year old has been on a kick with this book series. We own an old copy of Little Miss Scatterbrain but we got more of them from the library and he just loves them. He especially loves looking at the grid of characters on the back covers and asking us what each of their names are.
Sometimes when we’re driving, our 4 year old will provide turn-by-turn directions in a robotic voice as they do in Bluey as the “sat nav” (i.e. GPS). Which is always funny because he doesn’t understand directions. But it was especially funny the last time he did it because his directions were not only wrong but hilariously indifferent.
Go in a straight line, he droned, then go whichever way you want. It’s up to you, whatever makes sense.
It went on like this for a bit. My wife and I were trying not to laugh, but it felt like an SNL skit waiting to happen.
More photography here and on my Instagram.
When you go into an elevator and look up to see this face of doom:
The skyward view outside my workplace:
Caught this partially melted ice cube on a countertop:
Why save your Halloween costume for a few hours on one day when you can wear it all the time around town and look like a superhero:
View from a bridge at a mini golf outing:
Autumn is upon us:
Here’s an exchange I had with my 4 year old while on a recent walk around the pond:
“Papa, guess what: penguins cannot fly.”
“Why is that?”
“I don’t know, I need to learn.”
We were walking past some ducks when he said this so that must have triggered the fact about penguins, which I’m guessing he learned from one of his Yoto cards.
I love that part—that urge to share what he knows. But I also love his response to my follow-up question: when confronted with something he didn’t know, he both admitted ignorance and expressed the desire to investigate further.
Both of those impulses come naturally at his age, so I’m not saying he’s special in that way. I just really respect and enjoy the preschooler’s tendency to declare what they know (or think they know) and remain insatiably curious about what they don’t.
Recently my aunt got my 4 year old a “something special for the new big brother” gift: a popup butterfly garden with a cup of live caterpillars. The cup came in the mail prefilled with caterpillar food, which they ate over the course of a week as they grew and eventually retreated into their own chrysalides.
Then soon enough, they wriggled out one by one and emerged as painted lady butterflies:
We fed them some fruit and “nectar” (sugar water) and after a few days set them free into the wild. As they were flying away, the 4 year old said: “Goodbye butterflies, I’ll never forget you. I think the butterflies will always remember me.”
It was a fun little project for all of us, and a cool thing for the 4 year old to witness and directly facilitate.
Recently my father-in-law unearthed my wife’s old Nintendo 64 console, which was accompanied by the Super Mario cartridge. I was skeptical it would still work after all these years, but we plugged it in and it fired up like a charm.
I didn’t have video game consoles at home growing up, so my exposure to them mostly happened at friends’ houses. For Super Mario it happened once a year around middle school age, when we traveled to central Wisconsin for my sister’s figure skating competition and stayed with some family friends. They had an N64 and Super Mario, which I played seemingly endlessly.
Diving back into it now, over 20 years later, was a bit surreal, especially now that I’m introducing our 4 year old to it. He’s slowly picking up basic movement and actions, though mostly just wants to watch me play. Luckily he doesn’t know or care that I don’t really know what I’m doing—I just try the different doors and magical worlds and see if I can stumble upon any Power Stars before I inevitably die through clumsy play.
We’re not planning on having other video games in the house, so he and his newborn brother will just have to get by with Mario & Crew for a while. Which, of course, will make them the coolest kids on the block.
Photo: Mario stuck in a tree with not much life left, so you can tell how good we are at Super Mario.
More photography here and on my Instagram.
Spotted these two lights reflecting off the Whole Foods cafe counter, the rainbow from outside and the fluorescent light from above:
Investigating a hail storm from our porch:
Tunnel vision at the children’s museum:
It’s a shame our neighbors live in a bubble:
Baseball diamond? Nah—giant sandbox:
There’s a quote I discovered floating around Instagram Reels that people use as narration for clips of their little kids:
You have little kids for four years. And if you miss it, it’s done. That’s it. So, you gotta know that. Lots of things in life you don’t get to do more than once. That period between 0 and 4, 0 and 5, there’s something about it that’s like a peak experience in life. It isn’t much of your life. Four years goes by so fast, you can’t believe it. And if you miss it, it’s gone. So you miss it at your peril, and you don’t get it back.
(I was surprised to learn the speaker is Jordan Peterson, whom I’ve never read or even heard speak before. Not interested in litigating Peterson as a whole, just taking this quote for what it’s worth.)
I was talking with an older coworker about kids and how mine recently turned 4. His are all grown now, he said, but he would do anything to have just one day when they were 4 again, to do bathtime and all the other kid things that fill your life so intensely for a few years before the kids grow into other phases.
It’s a sentiment I’ve heard often, usually in the form of parenting clichés like “The days are long but the years are short” and “They’re only young once.” The annoying thing about clichés is that they’re usually both trite and true, and I’m grateful for when they tap me on the shoulder at just the right time.
A recent example: I was sitting with my 4 year old playing with his Carry Around Robot Town as (who else?) The Okee Dokee Brothers were on in the background—this time their 2018 album Winterland. He was immersed enough in the game that he actually let the album play through instead of wanting to jump to his favorite tracks, and that allowed me to enjoy some of their quieter, more reflective songs he’s usually not interested in.
We got near the end when on came “New Year,” a beautiful tune in the form of notes back and forth between two friends inquiring about their lives and children.
Here’s the lyrical exchange:
Hey say, Happy New Year
Have you had much snow
And how’s that new baby boy of yours, JoeHappy New Year to you
The snow’s still deep
And he’s our little roly-poly
I sing him to sleepSay how’s the weather
Have you had much rain
And can that new baby sing your refrainThe weather’s changing
It feels like spring
And as he falls asleep
We can hear him singHave the leaves changed
Where does the time go
And now how old is that son of yours, JoeLeaves blow away
Time goes on
He’s all grown up now,
singing this song
Perhaps you can now see why the combination of this song and the moment—cozied up next to that son of mine while he cutely played—made me tear up: I envisioned the time that has already passed in my life with him and how in a snap more time will pass and he’ll be all grown up and singing his own songs, only I won’t be cozied up next to him.
It was a moment of mono no aware, a Japanese phrase I love that indicates “the awareness of impermanence or transience of things, and both a transient gentle sadness at their passing as well as a longer, deeper gentle sadness about this state being the reality of life.”
That concept cuts both ways. Everything in this stage—and in life—is impermanent: the good moments, the hard times, the drudgery, the occasional euphoria. “Nothing gold can stay,” wrote Robert Frost. And that’s why it’s so important to love them at the age they are and every year they grow, because they’ll never be that age again.
There is one workaround for this: have another child. Our second is due in late May, so I’ll get another chance to start at zero and bask in this unique time once again. And you better believe I’ll be working extra hard to enjoy bathtimes while they last.
See previous year in review posts.
My view from the end of all things 2022:
(Not visible: the buffalo plaid pocket square accompanying the bowtie.)
The biggest thing that happened to my family this year was trying to have a second child. It was a long and demoralizing journey that ultimately ended successfully (due in late May), but it’ll take more than a bullet point to say why.
Beyond that, we just kept on livin’. Here’s what that looked like this year:
More photography here and on my Instagram.
A sunbeamed leaf as seen through our car windshield:
The yin and yang of a backyard bonfire remnant:
At work in his corner office:
Cloudy with a chance of a refill:
The bubbles are back, and they’re multiplying:
Mr. 3 Year Old is eager to shovel at the slightest dusting so we’re out there even while it’s still snowing. This results in what I call snombré (snow + ombré), where the freshly shoveled blends smoothly into the re-covered areas:
More photography here and on my Instagram.
The view of the capitol building in Madison from the Madison Children’s Museum rooftop:
Mr. 3 Year Old and his cousin on the slide at the Madison zoo:
Stumbled upon this view atop a slide at a nearby suburban park:
Ascending a magically wooded tunnel of stairs adjacent to a sledding hill at another nearby park:
More stairs, this time at the DuPage Children’s Museum:
The above is a screenshot from a video on my phone that’s come to be known in my family as “Ball Under Table.”
Recorded shortly before the first COVID lockdown, the video documents a little game our (at the time) freshly minted one-year-old created. He would roll the little squishy soccer ball under our table, wait for me to get down and reach to get it, then waddle off into another room.
It was his way of trying to sneak off, which, having just learned to walk at that point, he was doing a lot. The video ends with me having “caught” him in the living room and asked, “Are you sneaky?” After a pause, he smiles mischievously and sets off again.
Now three years old, he loves to watch this video over and over again, along with the many other videos of him from birth to present. It has become so indelible that he’ll recreate it in the exact same spot. (Though his wobbly toddling has turned into straight-up sprinting.) And if his mother or I dare to veer from an exact reenactment of the video, he’s none too happy about it.
It’s interesting how this moment has morphed over time. When it happened, he was too young for it to make a long-term impression. But once he was old enough to watch and rewatch the recording, that’s what became his default understanding and memory of that moment.
Which is a phenomenon I understand well, having watched and rewatched a lot of my own home videos from when I was a kid. How many of those moments would I actually remember if they’d never been recorded? Not a lot, given my woefully weak capacity for long-term memories that aren’t useless bits of trivia.
He’ll have just as much (if not more) footage of his childhood as I did, thanks to our smartphones and camcorder. And he’ll have to deal with far more screens and reality-distorting technology in general. How will that affect his mind and those of his generation?
That was a question from my 3 year old during a recent walk as he was looking at the sky. We’d recently introduced him to the concept of seeing recognizable shapes in clouds, so I’m guessing that’s what he was getting at. But this phrasing was so much more deep, man.
Previously in Accidentally Philosophical Preschooler: “what music is that noise?”
A spinoff of an ongoing series
Bluey. A not-small number of times after watching an episode I’ve thought, “Was that one of the greatest episodes of TV ever?” Hot take: the only TV shows a kid needs, really, are this and Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood—the yin and yang of instructive, high-quality children’s entertainment.
Picture books aplenty. A few he and I have enjoyed in equal measure lately: Creepy Carrots and Creepy Pair of Underwear by Aaron Reynolds, Jazz for Lunch by Jarrett Dapier, and Up the Mountain Path by Marianne Dubuc.
Our Planet. Gave this Planet Earth spinoff on Netflix a whirl with him and he was mesmerized. Nature is so metal.
YouTube. An amazing learning tool. He learns about volcanoes in a book; check out this compilation of eruptions. He starts t-ball class but has never played baseball before; let’s pull up some highlights of a random game.
The Okee Dokee Brothers. Always and forever.
The playground at the park near my parents’ house is getting renovated, which means the place as I knew it from ages 11-18 will be no more.
I’m glad for the memories I have from there, many of which are shared with my childhood best friend, Tim, who also lived a block away from the park. We logged countless hours at the basketball court and amidst the playground, making up spy games and other shenanigans.
The shenanigans have continued into the next generation, with my son and his cousin having romped around the same structures I did. Here they are last summer on the very old and rusty slide:
They took many, many turns on the slide, engaged in a constant loop of climbing up, sliding down, and running around. The next time we visit that slide will be gone, replaced with another slide for adventures anew.
