Category: kids/family life

Between Santa and Hannah Montana

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Age 4 3/4 (or whatever they are, almost five) is a transitional period, or so it would seem today.  First Iris handed me a “Hannah Montana & Miley Cyrus Best of Both Worlds Concert” poster that I was supposed to put on their bedroom wall, after writing “Iris” in indelible marker on the poster.  This was some kind of door prize at the “hair salon” — i.e. Great Clips — where Sarah took them for a trim today.  You get a Hannah Montana poster and a lollipop.  C&I LOVE going to the hair salon.

Then Iris and Celie were asking me “how can Santa and the Easter bunny know where everyone lives?  Are there different Santas and Easter Bunnies in every place?”  I kind of hedged and dodged the question, and Celie speculated, “well, if Santa and the Easter Bunny have a printer, they could print out everybody’s address.”  (Do they think Santa and the E. Bunny are a couple?)  The girls also love printing things out — preferably their names in purple and pink.

Kitten Thinks of Nothing But Murder All Day

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That’s a funny Onion t-shirt (I think it may originally have been a headline with no article, just a photo — brilliant).  It definitely evokes Pot Luck these days.  In other words, he is thriving: he’s a real tussling, pouncing, biting fighting kitty now.  He’s off the bottle and eats slightly diluted canned food in a dish.  He still lives in the bathtub but usually when we’re home we let him wander around.

My pick for the funniest thing he does is tussle with my Croc.  I’m not sure why he likes/hates it so much — I suspect that the rubber is a nice consistency to bite.  He stalks it and ends up entirely inside it, kicking and squirming, as if it’s a little boat or space ship or something.

Another hilarious thing is when he’s in the middle of some energetic tussling, suddenly runs out of steam and falls asleep lying on his back with his paws in the air.

Here’s a nicely diabolical shot (taken by my laptop as Sarah’s camera charger has been misplaced):

Mother on Fire: A True Motherf%#$@ Story About Parenting!

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Sarah and I have been reading Sandra Tsing Loh’s Mother on Fire: A True Motherf%#$@ Story About Parenting!— sort of stealing it back and forth from one another. It’s actually laugh out loud funny (and it takes a lot to make this grumpy old man laugh OL as opposed to just doing a sort of Cheney lip-curl of mild amusement). Sandra Loh is an NPR commentator and comic/performance artist (she does one-woman-shows); the book is partly a memoir about how she became a public-school parental activist in L.A.  It’s really smart and biting about parenting and especially the insanities of parental competitiveness, gifted-children mania, and private school admissions craziness.

The “motherf%#$@” in the subtitle is less gratuitous than it may seem in that part of the plot of the memoir involves her getting fired from her gig at the L.A. NPR station for the inadvertent use of an obscenity, which ends up temporarily turning her into a cause celebre.  (Coincidentally, this happened to me too — I was suspended from my college radio station for one week in a crackdown when I read something from the back of a New Jersey punk band’s record cover that contained a curse. Unaccountably, though, I did not become a first amendment hero on campus for this brave act.)

One moment I love occurs when she is bitterly regretting the quasi-bohemian life she and her husband Mike have lived in L.A. with no attention paid to property values and school districts:

And look at this house we bought.  What were we thinking?  It seemed so charming, this thirteen-hundred-square-foot 1926 Spanish-style bungalow.  We were the sort of wide-eyed, barefoot, idealistic, Joni Mitchell-style bohemians who were so amazed we could buy a structure that we bought it without FIRST VETTING THE NEIGHBORHOOD.  Our method of buying a house?  Look at that sunshine!  Look at that cactus!  So pretty!  Pretty cactus!  Pretty, pretty cactus!  Idiots!… We paid little attention as to whether we were doing the smart thing — moving to a good school district, next to lawyers or bankers or periodontal surgeons.  Idiots, we would have insisted on NOT living next to such bourgeois sellouts!  Oh, how we laughed and partied on this sagging deck, with its Chinese paper lanterns and Miles Davis records and Two Buck Chuck from Trader Joe’s.

Another hilarious recurring theme has to do with her dismayed realization that while certain friends’ children were preparing for private school exams with Baby Einstein and “kinderjazzbastics,” her own kids were engaged in random activities with no educational value:

I notice that there is quite a bit of pointless dancing around in underwear in this house, to wild keenings of jazz.  There is much fussy making of messy blanket nests in discarded cardboard boxes.  There is much random shampooing of bears.

Sarah and I keep chucking about the shampooing of bears.  So true!

In the end the book is also inspiring in its call for upper-middle-class parents to rethink their reflexive phobia of urban public schools. Here’s an interesting interview with Loh in Salon.com.

Thinking vs. imagining; Swordy

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On Sunday I took Celie and Iris to a special classical music concert for kids (a really neat event; peer pressure somehow led all the little kids to sit relatively quietly on the floor in front — very sweet).  I was explaining to them on the way there that the music (it was Ravel and Debussy) is intended to help you imagine things.  Iris said, “I’m always so busy thinking things that there isn’t any room for imagining.”  When I pressed further, she said, “well, maybe I can tell my body to push all the thoughts out so I can try to imagine.”  (The contradicts, btw, a recent comment she made that she’s always thinking of secret stories in her head.  Although maybe that’s what she means by thinking.)

Years ago a friend of ours commented that the following experience finally made her believe that gender is to some degree hard-wired: they gave their (2 year old?) daughter a toy train, which she lovingly swaddled and put to bed.  The girls did something yesterday that reminded me of that.  C&I were playing and having play-fights with this “sword” (a plastic extendable thingy that looks kind of like a light saber).  At one point we overheard Iris murmur, “I’m the mommy and I’m putting on my goodest fighting gloves.”  (These are gardening gloves Sarah bought them recently that they primarily use to play with Pot Luck.)  Later they put “Swordy” to bed for the night — put him in the cloth napkin drawer where they tucked him in like a baby.

(Let me add that I would never claim that this proves anything about biological gender — at this point, almost age five, C&I’s veins course with princess-y gender ideology that is way beyond our control.)

Canvassing for Obama

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The whole family went canvassing Saturday on a semi-rural stretch south of town.  Sarah had been assigned this cluster of 30 or so residences in this area and handed a google map with the addresses highlighted.  These were people whom the campaign had reason to suspect of being undecided or wavering or persuadable.  We parked the minivan in the Laminated Tops store parking lot (closed on Sat.) and hauled the girls on the wagon.  We’d brought along coloring books and markers, and had stopped at Kroeger’s on the way for a bag of Tootsie Roll pops to dole out to the girls for good behavior bribe the girls.

Our first pass was in a little mini… not sure what to call it, a tiny subdivision?  Basically just a big driveway off the main road with 5 or 6 multifamily apartments.  My guess is that these places might rent for $500-600 a month, I’m not really sure.  Not fancy at all, with a touch of trailer-park feeling, but in a way, nice; one good thing about living here, if you want to go this way, is that you can have this kind of rural existence with a forest off your back yard and still be a 10-15 drive to town.

Anyway, the first name on our list turned out to have a big POW-MIA poster in the window, so we weren’t hopeful, and he didn’t really want to talk.  Wasn’t rude, but did not want to tell us anything about his political views (part of the task here is to mark down whether the person is leaning toward Obama or McCain, and what political issues matter most to them).

The next guy was a sleepy-faced 22 year old, maybe, with no shirt on.  He was friendly, especially when he saw Celie and Iris — he mentioned that he was a twin too.  He told us that he was probably leaning toward Obama because his sense was that Obama is “probably more for the working man.”  He is a construction worker and a member of the union; he sort of apologized for his appearance and mentioned that he had a shoulder injury and had slept in late because of the medication. He did not seem to know much about the election; when I said something about Biden, I wasn’t sure if he knew who I meant.  I mentioned a factoid about McCain planning to give the top 1% wealthiest members of the population an over $100,000 tax cut, and that seemed to make an impression.  Overall, talking to this guy felt useful if only to associate some friendly local faces with the Obama campaign (Celie and Iris probably helped).  Also, we left him with two voter registration forms which he seemed happy to have.

There was one other encounter like that – a nice mom type whose very friendly 3-year-old daughter was eager to invite Celie and Iris in to play in her bedroom.  I missed this conversation, but S. says that the woman explained that her husband is McCain all the way, much of her own family are Obama supporters, and she’s kind of wavering or in between.  We were excited to hear that she said she was turned off by the bitterness and rancor of the RNC.  Sarah’s strategy was to stress what Obama will do for the middle class and on economic issues and to point people towards the campaign website.  She commented that it suddenly felt very useful to self-identify as a Middle-Class Mom (probably better than an oil painter and hugelkultur practitioner, for this purpose).

We found it kind of surprising to witness how many people are truly undecided.  We talked with a friendly man who explained that he and his wife generally wait until the last week or so to decide.  I wasn’t sure if this indicated a basically personality-based approach to the decision — deciding which candidate they feel most personally comfortable about — or whether it was more a sign of a set of political beliefs that is truly squarely in the center, whatever that means.  Sarah was struck by how determining family seemed to be; many of the people we spoke to immediately made reference to what their husband or wife or siblings thought, and that really seemed to be the most important single factor.

A lot of people were not home and I can’t imagine this little stint was hugely meaningful, but it felt good to have put a bit of sweat equity into the campaign (dragging that wagon is hard work!)

I’d urge everyone to consider doing some canvassing.  Remember, there are people in your neighborhoods (or nearby) who may barely know who the candidates are, or know little beyond what their spouse told them, and people who will not bother registering if someone doesn’t physically hand them a form.  Just call the Obama campaign and say you can do some Neighbor-to-Neighbor canvassing.

http://my.barackobama.com/n2n

Drool in the Pool

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Took Celie and Iris to the long-awaited Drool in the Pool.  After the local pool closes for the Fall, they have a night (two nights this year) where dogs are allowed to swim.  It’s kind of a nutty scene with large retrievers and labs heaving themselves into the diving pool with an enormous splash to fetch tennis balls.  I treasure the memory from last year’s event of this little fat pug doing a determined dog-paddle around the perimeter of the pool while wearing a life vest with a handle on top.  As dogs five times his size leapt heedlessly over him, he had this expression of concentration on his face, like “just doing my laps, folks, don’t splash please!”   When it looked like he was starting to get tired, his owner reached in and scooped him out.

The girls spent about 20 minutes throwing a purple plastic bone for a sweet dog named Zoe.  It all went great until Celie accidentally clocked another little girl in the ear with the bone.  I sort of saw that coming — they were heaving the bone without a whole lot of scrupulous aiming.

That’s odd, someone posted a video from last year’s DITP with a soundtrack of Queen’s “Fat-Bottomed Girls.”  huh?

I hate to say it, but the whole Drool in the Pool concept makes me reflect that a normal day at the pool is basically Pee in the Pool, considering the number of babies and toddlers splashing around.  Remember, “the use of swim diapers and swim pants may give many parents a false sense of security.”

Watching the Olympics with Celie and Iris

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So far Celie and Iris seem to consider the kayaking to have been the high point of the Olympics. I think they only watched it for a few minutes at some point when we were out of the room. Ever since then they bring it up occasionally, always saying, “Daddy, if the kayaking is on, TRUST ME, watch it! They go SO fast,” and variants of that sentiment, always including the phrase, “trust me,” which I don’t recall ever hearing from them before. They also liked the BMX biking and kept asking me if the bikers who fell over had died. And the gymnastics, of course. Their main insight while watching the men’s rings was that it would be really easy to tickle them under their arms while they did that.

After 15 minutes or so of watching they generally start their own Olympicking, as they call it, doing various stunts on the mattress, generally with some loose connection to whatever sport we’ve been watching. The problem is that we’re expected to offer amazed, appreciative Bob Costas-like color commentary on every move or tumble. The other night they were doing some kind of jogging race around the mattress with their dresses pulled up on top of their heads and I had to issue a series of penalties and points-off for bottom-revealing (which is strictly prohibited in international play).

Eat Your Heart Out Chris Matthews

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Hilarious/great talking head commentary on the Democratic race by two five-year-old twins, one a Barack supporter, one in Hillary’s camp. There’s some nuanced discussion of their respective willingness to vote for the other candidate if he or she gets the nomination, etc.

These girls are a bit more politically sophisticated than Celie and Iris, who are Obama supporters but can’t quite seem to get it through their heads that Sarah and I are not also candidates for office.

Boss donkey

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not an actual donkey we sawSarah and I and the girls went to visit some donkeys and a horse at a nearby stable. They had gone last week without me. I wasn’t sure it was necessarily OK to wander in and feed the animals, but Sarah was confident this was all right. There were 7 or so donkeys and a horse, also a sweet barn cat who followed us out to the field and acted as if she wanted some celery and carrots too. The donkeys were very adorable; they seem miniaturized like a puppy or kitten. There was one boss donkey who wanted all the food and definitely wanted to be in charge of who got the food when. There was a bit of boss-donkey-management required — one of us had to tempt him away to one side with some good carrot pieces and then the other subservient donkeys could quickly be fed a few pieces.

How Puppies Die

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I was a parent teacher the other morning at my daughters’ preschool and witnessed a kind of amazing moment. C&I and their new-best-friend A., who is 5 years old, and three boys (mostly younger) went in the corner of the yard and sat on this little structure and explained to me, “this is where we go to tell sad stories.” A. said she would tell about “how puppies die.” Her first story was about one sentence long – the puppy went out in the street and it got hit by a car. The boy F. was pretending to be a puppy and he put his hands up in a sad-paw gesture and whined, and C. and I. and A. all said consolingly, “don’t worry, puppy, we wouldn’t let YOU go in the street.” The next story was a little more complex: a puppy got into the playground and a big heavy slide fell on him and crushed him. And, it had a sharp point and it cut right through his back. Once again, F. whined and the three girls said “oh, don’t worry puppy, we would never let YOU go into the playground.” The mood was sort of excited and upbeat, maybe like telling ghost stories around the campfire? A student teacher said “oh they did that for about two hours the other day.”

Later I asked C & I about why they liked “sad stories” so much and they said “because we’re interested in what’s inside bodies.” So sad stories are apparently ones that involve injury to the body broaching the boundary between what’s inside and outside. I wonder how general a principle of narrative that might be.