Tank took this picture of me. It’s a good picture and also illustrates the increasing bagginess of my clothes as I continue with the 30 Day Shred

Lightsabers and NERF guns

Who shot first? Han? Greedo? Nah, it was Babypie.

A few months ago, Tank decided that his middle name needed to change. I’m perfectly willing to go along with a temporary name change and even told him he could change it to whatever he felt was the right name for him as soon as he turned 18; I’d support him completely. Given the complete freedom to name himself anything he wanted, he spent a few minutes thinking hard and mulling some ideas over aloud, before his eyes lit on Captain Science’s t-shirt (black with a white guitar with bat wings). “My new middle name is Bat-guitar!”

We discussed the appropriate spelling. He can’t read yet, but he could weigh in on whether it was one word, two words, or hyphenated (he chose the hyphen). I agreed to call him Tank Bat-guitar McLernins as long as that’s what he wanted to be called. I even changed it on his Facebook page, because, yes, my kids have Facebook. They enjoy Pet Society. Shyuddup.

Today, Tank announced that he no longer wanted to be Bat-guitar. Instead, he wanted his middle name to be Charm Bracelet. A few minutes later, he decided it should just be Charm. A few minutes after that, he decided it should be Charmander.

Charmander, I choose you!

A little while after that, he asked if I knew who Mace Windu is, because Mace Windu is a great name. “I think my middle name will be Mace Windu, only without the Mace. So just Windu.” When Captain Science urge him to keep Bat-guitar, tank said, “I’ll go back to Bat-guitar next summer.”

He’s stuck with Windu all day, so there you have it, folks: Tank Windu McLernins.

I still prefer Bat-guitar, myself, but it’s not my name, after all.

The abacus I bought for Tank has 2 rows each of 5 different colored beads (blue, green, red, yellow, tan). We started by just using the blue beads to count to 20, as well as writing the numbers on the dry-erase board. About two weeks ago I started writing some simple addition and substraction problems on the dry-erase board, Tank would use the abacus to find the answer, and then he would write the answer on the dry-erase board.

Last week we used the green beads to count by 10’s, and wrote that sequence on the white board. We then did simple addition problems using multiples of ten to illustrate how the tens and units place combine in written form and with the abacus. For example, we would write out 20+2=22 and he would count out 22 on the abacus.

Today we ventured into subtracting from numbers greater than 20. First we practiced substituting 10 blue beads for 1 green bead, and vice versa. Next, I wrote down some subtraction problems on the board with numbers greater than 10, and we practiced starting with a green bead and exchanging it for 10 blue beads to facilitate the arithmetic. The final problem (his Challenge problem) was 30-14. He was a little confused at first, so I re-wrote the problem as 30-10-4. He understand that no problem. We started with 3 green beads and he took away a green bead (10) and then exhanged a green for 10 blue to subtract the 4.

When I told him how well he did with subtraction, and that he even figured out the Challenge problem, he said “I know! That’s what’s making my mind get bigger!”

The abacus is a great tool, and I have the advantage of first learning arithmetic using one. I used poker chips to teach Cpt. Science about odds and ratios. I highly recommend Texas Hold’em for those concepts.

Five and a half years after Captain Science was born, Tank rocketed into our family…and I do mean rocketed. I had just enough time between pregnancies to completely forget what to expect, which is good, because Tank’s was completely different from Captain Science’s. I had it so easy — almost no sickness, plenty of energy, no swelling, and all the weight gain going straight to my belly — that I think I was lulled into a false sense of security. I was certainly not prepared for Tank’s explosive entrance into the world. Good thing I was planning on a homebirth, because I never would have made it anywhere else! I went from “oh, I might be in labor” to Tank’s head popping out in its entirety as my water broke. Rocket man from the beginning, he’s lucky his Nana was able to baseball slide and catch him before he took flight.

No, he hasn’t slowed down since.

My Tank was not an easy baby. He took right to nursing, which as a relief, but the sleeping thing was another story. At a month old, he turned into the shrieking colic monster. At around four months old, he decided he could only be nursed lying down; I had to trick him by latching him on side-lying and then sitting up. I don’t think he was put down for more than a few minutes until he was nine months old. He was a funny baby with a huge, gap-toothed smile, but he also had a serious furrowing brow, which earned him the nickname “Dubious D.”

If Captain Science taught me flexibility, Tank taught me patience. Everything was on his time table and his time table was completely different from what Captain Science’s had been. He sat unassisted well at 3 1/2 months, crawled by around 5 months, but didn’t walk until 13 months old…at which point he took off running. He said just enough words by his second birthday for it to be “enough” words, then his vocabulary exploded overnight. He decided to use the potty at 19 months old, changed his mind after a week, then completely potty trained again at 22 months (this time, thankfully, for good). He demonstrated excellent gross and fine motor skills from an early age, draws beautiful and intricate pictures with an excellent sense of color, but still has only the vaguest interest in learning to read (though he really loves knowing how words are spelled). For Tank, the parts are so much more interesting than the whole.

Sometimes I think Tank is my maternal grandfather reincarnated. He has the same booming Ballard voice, the same dark good looks, the same roguish grin (often coupled with a “I know what I’m getting away with” wink), the same BIG stage-like presence. He’s not a large kid — tall enough, but with a slight build that makes him appear smaller than he actually is. I try to remind myself that my hoss of a younger brother (the original Tank, btw — Tank’s nickname is technically Tank Junior) started out that way, too, and could pick me up and carry me around by 14. Tank resembles his uncle quite a bit. He also looks a heckuvalot like Officer Daddyman, especially his mouth and those brows.

Tank wakes up early and hits the ground running. He goes non-stop until bed time, when it’s a struggle to get him to stay in bed long enough to actually fall asleep. Tank wakes up during the night to demand repositioning of his blankets, the hall light turned on, a drink of water, or an answer to any of a number of odd questions. Nothing in the world can convince him that 3am is a less-than-ideal time to ask about what ants eat or whether or not ghosts have their own planet (and what it looks like, and what they do there, and how we get there). He is full of questions, day and night, and he expects a serious and thorough answer. He’s highly observant, especially about the number/volume of things/people and their social relationships. From an early age, he could sort items into perfect even piles for people to share. He asks insightful questions about why people act how they do.

One of Tank’s greatest ambitions in life is to turn “hive” and “pay hootball.” He threw himself into soccer this year with abandon. He loves homeschool ice skating day, and even though he falls down, he gets right back up, because something as insignificant as a little gravity can’t stop him. He will run around the house when he gets excited until everyone watching him gets dizzy. He loves riding his bike. He will play hard until forced to stop. I can’t stop him from leaping onto and off of things, turning things over, dumping things out, scaling the cabinets to find a hidden piece of Halloween candy. He talks non-stop, even though most people can’t understand a word he’s saying. He is movement and energy in a boy shape. Sometimes he’s selectively deaf (two hearing tests have confirmed that any hearing problems he has are selective) and exceptionally naughty. Sometimes he’s the sweetest boy, wanting to sit in my lap and cuddle me.

Last year, when Captain Science start homeschooling, Tank wanted to badly to stay home with us. He enjoyed the little preschool he attended for a few days a week, with his best friend Dimhibbins, but what he really wanted was to be here with us. More than anything else, Tank loves us. More than anyone else, Tank adores and wants to be like Captain Science — so of course, he torments and annoys him endlessly. Tank waffles between devouring workbooks and snubbing anything resembling curriculum. He’s a Gemini, though, so duality is his way. He keeps me on my toes, which is something I probably needed to get better at, anyway.

He’s a delight and a joy, a handful and then some, a bull in a china shop, a little artist (sometimes of walls and his body, too), and an unbroken spirit. I wouldn’t trade him for anything else in the world, and I am so grateful for him.

I had planned on getting Dinosaur Island for Tank for Christmas. It is absolutely the perfect gift for him. I love the simplicity of the design and the images. He wanted dinosaurs. He loves wooden playsets. He needed a large central present from “Santa.”

Behold! The awesomeness!

Dinosaurs? Check. Wooden (to make a naturally-minded Mama happy)? Check. Appears durable (he is named “Tank,” after all)? Check.

Available in the United States? *sigh* Uncheck.

No success in finding the damn thing anywhere in the country. It’s roughly $99 US no matter where in the UK I find it and I will have to pay who knows how much on top of that for shipping. For the 15lbs or so the playset weighs, I might end up paying $25+ in shipping, which ends up with this one item being the entirety of Tank’s Christmas budget. One dealer in the UK (runs a hobby train shop) and one in Ireland are sending me pricing for shipping tomorrow; if it’s reasonable, we might go ahead with this, the perfect gift.

I have been directed to an alternative wooden dinosaur playset, Dinosaur Park from Constructive Playthings. It’s comparably sized, less expensive, but less well-made, than Dinosaur Island. It’s available in the United States. The images are printed onto particle board, rather than painted. The wooden segments are thinner and the only review I could find only gave it 3/5 stars (but did say that if the playset was constructed and then left, rather than constantly taken apart and put back together, it would likely hold up better). The “less expensive” and “available in the US” aspects make this a reasonable alternative…but my foot-stamping inner 2-year-old doesn’t want an alternative. I want what I want! *stamp stamp*

It’s just so…American, isn’t it? Simple is never enough.

Of course, for the price of Dinosaur Island (without even considering shipping), I could order the Dinosaur Park and the ZipBin Dinosaur Playset to hold everything and provide a play base.

We do love bins around here.

So here I am, having a hissy fit because it makes more sense to buy the less expensive, domestically available item(s) and get more for my money, but it isn’t what I want. I know, I know. I’m a little old for that sort of behavior, but I had a vision of the perfect Christmas gift and I can’t make it happen for the price and ease we need it to be. I know Tank will be thrilled either way and I should just think of it with that perspective, but I will know he’s not getting the coolest thing out there, and that makes me all grumpy and such.

Types of Spider-Mans
as dictated to Smrt Mama  by the Tank while riding in the car

• No-Hands Spider-Man. He has no hands and shoots webs from his arms.
• No-Head and No-Hands Spider-Man. His stomach is his head. His belly-button is his one eye.
• No-Tummy Spider-Man. His arms and legs and feet come right out of his head.
• Mind Brain Spider-Man. He’s a scientist of brains. If you need to find out about brains, you call him. He has a car with a map on it to help you find where the brains are.
• Muscles Spider-Man. He shoots webs from his muscles. My costume is Muscles Spider-Man.
• Wheels Spider-Man. Instead of feet, he has wheels. He shoots webs from his wheels.
• Top Spider-Man. He makes lots of statues. The statues shoot webs. “Top” is his nickname.
• Upside Down Spider-Man. His feet are his hands. His hands are his feet. He uses a tornado to walk instead of his legs. He shoots webs from his tornado.
• Robot Spider-Man. This side [left] of his body is Legos and this side [right] is robot. He shoots webs from his fingers. That’s what he is.
• Night Spider-Man. I don’t know about Night Spider-Man. He…He…I don’t know what he’s about.
• Giant Spider-Man. I forgot about one Spider-Man that I love, Giant Spider-Man. He’s a giant Spider-man. He can crush bad guys because he’s giant. It’s kind of hard for him to see, because he accidentally crushes buildings.
• Big Hand Spider-Man. He can crush bad guys with his big hands. He can punch them and stuff and throw them out of the world.
• Super Spider-Man. He can fly and he has a special rope that can swing on trees and go to the other part of the world. It might be the Dark World. The Dark World is so easy, I’ve found. That’s the world I’m on.

There you have it, folks. In case you were wondering about Spider-Mans, you now know all the different kinds.

This morning, Tank and I actually sat down and spent about two hours doing school work together. We tried to do some work with his telling time cards and his foam clock, but the concept of telling time beyond the hour is still a bit over his head. We did move the short hand around the clock and say the times out loud. He also identified the time on a few of the cards that were just hours, no minutes. I might cull the hour-only cards from the rest of the stack and work on those.

We also pulled out the Phonics I flash cards (we have two sets, Phonics I and Phonics II) and went through the letters and their sounds. I was worried that Tank didn’t know all his letters, but it turns out he actually does know them all, with just a slight mix up with Y (he can differentiate it from V side-by-side, but thinks it looks like V otherwise). He could identify all the letters in order and out of order, with the exception of G when shown it out of order, which I think threw him mainly due to the picture of a goat, which he thought was a sheep. He’s also showing some progress with his fricatives! He was able to make a clear S sound for the first time today. Came out of the clear blue! He says he’s been using my iPhone phonics app to practice the sounds the letters make.

We also did a little building w/ the unit blocks. He made a castle with two guns. I made our house, complete with all our porches. After that, we had a snack, and now he’s watching some Mickey Mouse on the Disney website.

Tank, perhaps as a stall tactic to avoid going to sleep, just rattled off his Christmas list. He would like the following:

• A magnifying glass
• Dinosaurs. [Big dinosaurs or small dinosaurs?] Both. Big dinosaurs and small dinosaurs. Dinosaurs from movies and maybe people from movies, too, you know, like Wow Wow Wubzie. And the dinosaurs.
• The games [from Gamewright, our favorite game company, Feed the Kitty and Bzz Out]
• Pretend bombs
• Doodle Track
• No, instead of Doodle Track, a book about how dinosaurs lived and a book about how trees grow

Quite a list, no?

We learned this after Tank vomited dramatically in the middle 4 o’clock performance of the Indiana Jones Stunt Spectacular. He’d been complaining of a tummy ache throughout the late morning and afternoon, but when that blast of heat from the exploding truck hit him, it was all over. I swiftly removed him from the show, cleaned him up in the next door restaurant’s bathroom, then watched in horror as he got sick all over the restaurant floor. He was rewarded with another sponge-down, a Sprite to sip on, and a fresh new Indiana Jones t-shirt. We figured he’d earned it.

The poor kid continued to ralph every 30-90 minutes, dozing in between, for the rest of the evening, managing to get tidily and quietly sick into an assortment of small, plastic Disney bags. We had reservations at the Hollywood Brown Derby (in Hollywood Studios) at 6:45 and were in a bit of a panic over what to do about the sleeping Tank, in his giant rented double stroller. Enter St. Alma.

Alma was the hostess at the Brown Derby that evening. She was a tiny, older woman with a dignified and commanding presence, who initially came out to tell us we could not park our stroller there (“there” being outside the Brown Derby, in a pathway that was used for wheelchair parking). Once Alma learned why were trying to get the stroller into the cool, shady spot, however, she immediate became our angel. She arranged for a table with space to park the humongous stroller and invited us to bring it inside and right up to the table. The Brown Derby is a nice restaurant — small, fancy portions of exceptional food on pristine white plates, with a decorative drizzle of sauce — and takes two deluxe dining plan credits (absolutely worth it, btw, sick kid or no sick kid). Whatever. Alma let us park our four-wheeled monstrosity up next to the table.

Alma fretted over Tank for the rest of dinner as though he were her own grandchild. She brought us some ice water for him to sip (with a Mickey Mouse curvy straw), encouraged us to put a cool cloth on him, constantly reassured us that it was FINE that our child was occasionally dry-heaving into a plastic bag in the middle of their restaurant, and sent the manager our way to check on us. The manager, Debbie (another Derby Angel), brought us a snapping cool-pack to help bring down his core temperature, since at that point it was pretty clear that the issue was a combination of overheating and dehydration, and brought him a white paper bag filled with metallic confetti (in Mickey ears and stars) and three light-up ice cubes. The paper bag was labeled “My Bag of Pixie Dust.” She said she thought it might make him feel better when he woke up and saw it. She was right; the puking didn’t stop, but morale definitely improved. Before we left, Alma and Debbie both came back by to check on Tank again and to make sure we knew where the first aid station was (where it was confirmed that he’d gotten dehydrated and overheated).

We’re writing letters to Disney praising Alma and Debbie, but I also wanted to share this story here, to encourage you to give the Brown Derby a try if you’re ever at Disney’s Hollywood Studios. I expected friendliness and happiness from Disney employees; it’s what they’re paid to offer. What I didn’t expect was the level of genuine human compassion and care we received at the Hollywood Brown Derby. It was a five star experience in every way.