Will's Latest Antics

1. We had the electrician over to install some lights and an outlet. Rob wanted different lights, so he ran to the store to buy some quickquickquick. While he was gone, Will ran in and insisted that he had to talk to Papa. I gave him the phone and he called Rob on the cell.

I didn't find out what it was about until the next day. Rob was walking around the electrical department in Lowe's and gets a cell phone call from Will. He says "Papa, the electrician said a swear word"

It didn't even occur to me until two days after that to ask what the bad word was. "The C word, mama!" which I thought could indeed be very, very bad. But no, the electrician said "Oh, crap" which makes him more fit for raising children than I am. Remember, gentle readers, that during his Permanent Marker On Furniture phase, Will himself was known to yell "Gambit! Gambit!"

2. This one takes some backstory: Rob has been holding German lessons once a week. At one, he decided to introduce the Struwwelpater, a classic children's book which has cautionary tales about children who possess some awful behavioral tic which then leads to their downfall and the moral to the story. They are pretty Brothers Grimm; for example, the boy who sucks his thumbs ends up getting them chopped off; the girl who plays with fire gets burned up; you get the idea.

Rob read some with the kids. They examined the elements: the character has a flaw which overcomes them, there is a moral, and it has to have rhyming couplets. Then he assigned them to make up their own. He gave them each an appropriate topic thinking he would be slick and have them work on their own shortcomings: Maddie's was a girl who whines and Will's was a boy who always says "no".

Maddie has a very serviceable text about "Die Motz Marie," but Will would not show his to Rob until it was almost completely finished. Here is what he turned in (with a rough translation following).

Nils der Neinsager war ein Papa
Er sagte den Kindern "Nein!" und "Klappe!"
Weil das doch viel zu oft geschieht
Kauft sein Sohn viel Dynamit.

Bum! da ist der Vater tot

Weil er dem Kind zu viel verbot.

Nils the naysayer was a dad

He told his kids "No way! Too bad!"

His kids got sick of it, so one night,

They blew him up with dynamite.

And six feet under he was hidden,

For all the things he had forbidden.

So crafty of Will to take Rob's sneaky little lesson and turn it on its head! And while Rob helped him with the meter and some verb tenses, the most brilliant and diabolical rhymes (Papa/ Klappe, tot/verbot) are 100% Will.

3. He calls the springs on the side of his new retainer "mouthtraps" because his tongue and food keep getting caught in them.

4. I gave him the iPod while I fed Joss in the front of the minivan. He usually plays the few games on it, but he began singing songs from The Ramones in his best British accent. There we were with all the windows down while he belted out "I Wanna Be Sedated" and then "Beat on the Brat with a Baseball Bat.'.
5. While the rest of the family watched the sun set over Monterey Bay, Will insisted that he still had to jump into the roaring incoming tide and get completely wet. We were annoyed but, as usual, got worn down by Will's iron will. And so he went into the surf--and was befriended by a family of passing sea lions. We had all "ooh-ed" and "aah-ed" when a head bobbed up way off in the waves somewhere, but only Will-O has the anamistic aura and sheer chutzpah that attracts his fellow wild animals to come within a few meters. We shook our heads. Even though it is hard to explain why, we sure love this boy--he is a force of nature.