The time is fast approaching for our kittens to find a new home. Our plan is to give them to the MSPCA to adopt out, but they suggest that we exhaust any other venues we might have to adopt them first. So, does anyone in the Boston area want a kitten?

Our three kittens are about six weeks old, weaned, and very playful, though perhaps a bit overeager to use their claws. Butterscotch is male, orange and perhaps the cuddliest of the group. Scissors is a grey female with white striping around the face and the most adventurous. Eggplant is a black male and likes to blend into the scenery, but can be mischievous: he’s usually the first one to run into the house when we leave the door open a crack.

If you or anyone you know might be interested, contact me.

This summer Peter has been going to his preschool for “summer camp”. During the year, Terri took him to preschool but one of the problems with that is that dropping him off and picking him up is two round-trips from our house; nearly an hour of driving for a three hour session.

To avoid this, I’ve been taking Peter on the bus in the mornings and working in the Starbucks in Arlington Center. When his session is over I take him home, grab lunch, and take the bus to MIT. Surprisingly, the timing and bus schedules work out to make this a really efficient process and I enjoy the extra time we have to spend together.

As for his camp, it’s more like a play group than either traditional day camp or his preschool. He and the other kids mainly play with toys, read stories, sing songs, and do art projects. Every week they have a theme for their stories and projects. They’ve learned about the jungle, the desert, and the United States during the first week in July.

This week’s theme was pirates (the kind from the Caribbean, not Bittorrent) and the projects included a pirate hat, eye patch, boat, and treasure chest. Stepping back, I find it odd that pirates are so prevalent in children’s stories but they are, in no small part due to Disney where they appear everywhere from Peter Pan to Winnie the Pooh stories.

As we went to sleep last night, Peter hit me with another one of his question. “We learned treasure chests today. They have lots of gold and jewels….But what do pirates need money for, Dad?” After thinking about it for a while, I told him they use their booty to pay for parrot food and port entrance fees.

Our family has grown by three, at least for the next few weeks. Two weeks ago, Terri was awoken by mewing coming from under our porch. A neighborhood stray had had three kittens only a couple days before. Though she later admitted that she hadn’t fully thought things out, Terri decided to take them in. They weren’t abandoned, but Terri thought that it would be better for them to be raised by humans and adopted out instead of growing up wild.

The kittens are of course adorable, and it’s been a good experience for Peter. We’ve had a bit of trouble with Alex, who doesn’t have the word “gentle” in his vocabulary (actually he doesn’t have any words in his vocabulary). Still, after a few weeks practice we seem to have trained him not to strangle the kittens upon sight, so we count that as progress.

The downside is the kittens need to be fed every 3-4 hours. It turns out that shelters don’t take kittens this young for this reason, instead placing them in foster homes who care for them as we are. So, for now the plan is to keep them until they’re weaned, at which point there should be no problems adopting them out. In the meantime, we’re frequently traveling with the kittens and have taken them on our anniversary outing and to two weddings (they stayed in the car). We’ve found that they make a great conversation piece—when you bring three kittens to the park everyone wants to stop and talk to you.

One of the fun things about being a parent is the chance to see the world anew through the eyes of your children. As adults experience the world, we clump together experiences, ideas, and languages into rather large chunks. On the one hand, this allows us the ability to make sense of a complicated world. But on the other hand it can be difficult to get out of the same mental paths we always tread.

For example involving language, I turn to a conversation that took place in our house this week. One of Peter’s toy wooden boxes broke and Terri told me to fix it with wood glue. Peter heard this and said, “You should use superglue.” Terri replied, “Peter, I don’t think superglue would work for this.” To which Peter politely insisted, “But its super!” I now imagine superglue being to ordinary glues what superheroes are to ordinary heros.

We’ve entered an exciting new stage of sibling rivalry. In the initial stage, Peter was vaguely discontent about the threat Alex represented. He had to compete with Alex for our attention, but at least the house was still his dominion. However once Alex started crawling, the threat became more immediate but it was still only Peter who seemed to mind. Alex was a baby, oblivious to the anguish he caused when he grabbed a toy or knocked down a block building.

In the last few weeks, it’s become clear that the rivalry is now mutual. My first indication came one day when I was holding Alex on my lap. Peter wandered up to leaned on my leg and Alex reached over and pushed him away as if to say, “My daddy!”. There have been other incidents too, where Peter’s interest in a toy or parent has caused a reaction from Alex.

Which isn’t to say that there’s an epic battle going on in our house. It’s more like a series of passive-aggressive provocations. Provided we’re on hand to referee disputes and prevent escalation, the boys do a fairly good job at sharing their space and even playing together from time to time. But we can’t leave them unsupervised long or the provocations usually end in someone crying.

I’m still struggling with the right way to be “fair” in such disputes. Peter is so much bigger and knowledgeable that it’s easy to blame everything on him (“You shouldn’t have built that tower here where he could get at it…”). I try to remember he’s just four years old and still has much to learn about social interactions.

My iPod went missing for the past several days. It was last seen in the hands of a quite-nearly one-year-old boy who took it from my nightstand while I tried to get another five minutes of sleep. This boy loves to play with portable electronics—he looks adorably drunk with power as he presses buttons—and I regrettably let him have the iPod rather than have to get out of bed and entertain him myself.

The problem is that lately he has taken to put then in random drawers or trash cans. When it didn’t show up after a day, we started a more thorough search of the house—up to and including the trash we had already taken out. Fortunately, it showed up today under Terri’s desk. I was worried we wouldn’t find it until we moved out.

We had an excellent visit to Chicago this past week for my sister’s graduation. It was a very social visit and we got to see many people we hadn’t seen in a while as well as visit with my grandparents for an entire week. My only regret is that not much work got done on my research while I was there, but that is typical.

The boys had a good time in Chicago too. Alex took advantage of the wide open spaces to really hone his walking skills. Though he took his first steps at the beginning of April, it wasn’t until the beginning of May that Alex transitioned to walking more than half the time. The transition was actually fairly sharp; I’ve heard of kids who were such good crawlers that they were never motivated to walk, but I think having an older brother has made Alex much more interested in walking.

Peter, meanwhile, has gotten interested in playing Wii games and every day in Chicago had at least a few minutes spent with the Wii. He’s a whiz at Wii bowling and his top score of 171 beats mine by a few points. We also are able to hold our own at Mario Kart—I steer and he works the buttons (we’re still working on not throwing banana peels right in front of our kart, however).