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It’s a nightly occurrence: a few minutes after we put the Girl to bed, she calls one of us. It’s usually “Mama!”

We take turns answering the call, and L doesn’t seem to matter who responds.

“Yes, sweetheart,” I say as I open the door, and I immediately one of several possible answers. Sometimes it’s just a fragment of a story she remembered; sometimes it’s something straight from her imagination. It could be that she needs juice or that she wants to rock with me in the rocking chair for a moment. Occasionally she’s not pleased with the sleeping music.

“Yes, L,” I say tonight as I enter her room.

“We didn’t rock,” she replies calmly.

I take her out of her bed and sit with her own my lap. Usually she’s a little squirmy. Tonight she’s too tired to squirm.

Out of the blue, she opens the age-old conversation: “Tata, I don’t want to grow up.”

“You don’t have a choice. None of us do.” I think this, but I certainly don’t say it. Instead, I simply ask her if she likes being three.

“Yes,” she says quietly. She snuggles a little closer, pauses, and leaves me speechless, whispering, “Three’s easy.”

While Babcia was here, she kept busy. Luckily for us (or should I say “Luckily for L”), the way she usually keeps busy is through crotchet. Her visit gave Babcia just enough time to make a dress and cap for the girl.

March is a month for kite flying. Though I rarely flew kites, it was always a favorite pastime for me as a kid. Perhaps it’s the indirect flying. We introduced kite flying to the Girl this weekend, much to her excitement.

When shopping for our kite, there was only one criterion: there must be a princess on it.

“I’m not a _____! I’m a princess!” L is fond of saying these days. In the blank can be just about anything, even “little girl” (or “big girl” for that matter). Once the princess kite was assembled

and launched, L was fascinated.

For about three minutes.

Much more inviting were the rocks and twigs scattered about.

If there is a town with kitsch as the central design premise, it is Myrtle Beach.

As a kid, I’d always wanted to go there. All my friends went there during the summer, and for us southwest Virginians, it was at least a seven-hour journey. It was not a place where one merely spent the weekend.

I finally went to Myrtle Beach this weekend for a middle school conference. It was everything I expected.

All decor seemed to have a heavy-handed marine theme, especially for the restaurants

and the stores. My companions and I wondered about the warmth of being invited into a shark’s mouth for a little shopping

Given the fact that all such shops are peddling to tourist, it seems somehow perfectly appropriate.

The kitsch extended all the way to the oceanfront, with hotels painted colors that only rarely occur in nature.

And then there were the mini-golf courses. We counted at least twelve on the main road, each with a different theme applied to the same goal: knock a golf ball through some obstacle.

“Who knew that the market could support this number of courses,” I muttered as we passed by yet another.

But we weren’t there for entertainment but for education, and we all received enough information to make us wish we could turn back the calendar to the beginning of the year and start again. In that sense — as well as the collection of mini-golf shots — it was a greatly successful weekend.

Romeo and Juliet

Every year I teach this I learn something new about it. This time, I noticed some symmetry in Juliet’s lines when she learns that Romeo has killed Tybalt and Romeo’s response to the opening scene’s brawl. Juliet descries Romeo in III.ii:

O serpent heart, hid with a flowering face!

Did ever dragon keep so fair a cave?

Beautiful tyrant! fiend angelical!

Dove-feather’d raven! wolvish-ravening lamb!

Despised substance of divinest show!

Just opposite to what thou justly seem’st,

A damned saint, an honourable villain!

These oxymorons mirror what Romeo says in I.i:

Here’s much to do with hate, but more with love.

Why, then, O brawling love! O loving hate!

O any thing, of nothing first create!

O heavy lightness! serious vanity!

Mis-shapen chaos of well-seeming forms!

Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire,

sick health!

Still-waking sleep, that is not what it is!

And I was struck, ever more forcefully, by Romeo’s utter immaturity. He whines and cries in III.iii, learning of his banishment, as if here were a toddler who’d had his toys taken away from him. In fact, that seems to be all Juliet is in that passage.

As I Lay Dying: Meditations on Return by Richard Neuhaus

This book opened my thinking in many ways. First, it introduced me to the writings of Simone Weil and inspired me to buy one of her books, Gravity and Grace.

The Faiths of Our Fathers: What America’s Founders Really Believed by Alf Mapp

We often hear claims about the Founding Fathers’ religious views, with those claims fairly accurately reflecting the religious and political beliefs of the speaker: conservatives claim they were all traditionalist Christians; liberals claim they were deists with only a token belief in God.

A few surprising things I learned:

• Ben Franklin was positively polytheistic, believing in a supreme god who was over a lesser god, the creator of our universe.
• Thomas Jefferson’s books were not place in the Philadelphia Public Library’s circulation as late as 1830 because of a belief that he was an atheist. He was, briefly, in his youth. Eventually, he became something of a Christian, though he rejected all notions of the supernatural. He even edited his own version of the New Testament, removing all reference to miracles.
• Benjamin Franklin was a guest of the Hellfire Club at least twice, though according to some sources he was merely spying.
• George Washington refrained from taking communion. There is some conjecture that he did so because he felt “unworthy”, as defined in First Corinthians 11:25-29, with verse 29 being key: “For he that eateth and drinketh unworthily, eateth and drinketh damnation to himself, not discerning the Lord’s body.”
• John Marshall was famous for his Christian ethics and charity, but like Washington, he didn’t take communion.

Life of Pi by Yann Martel

It used to be one of my favorites. When I learned about the charges of plagiarism, the book lost a lot of its sheen. Still, the combination of zoology and spirituality makes the book worth it on a basic level. (I read this during our daily Silent Sustained Reading period at school. I wasn’t necessarily intending on re-reading it, but I needed to set the proper example, and that was the the only book at hand.)

1. Re-read
2. For school

Almost all children adore animals. Kids are attracted to the novel, and what could be more novel than another living creature?

L’s love of animals borders on obsessive, and like many obsessions, hers leads to behaviors that seem counterproductive: she loves are cat almost literally to death (at least that’s certainly the cat’s point of view). And so a visit to a farm is simply perfect for L: she gets to experience animals up close, yet the familiarity that leads L to take so many liberties with our cat  is missing.

Over the weekend, we went to a birthday party held at a local stable and farm — brilliant idea. We petted chickens and fed goats.

The highlight, of course, was in the barn.

Like all good riders, the children got a chance to do a little horse grooming, learning how to brush the horses with the various brushes then applying their new knowledge.

L is a curious mix of excitement and conscientiousness. She was eager to try the various brushes and wanted to use them correctly, but she never really took the time to try to remember — to allow others to remind her — how to the various brushes.

She’s a little like me, I guess: she dives in, fairly confident that she’ll get it right soon enough that any mistakes made along the way won’t be significantly problematic.

Fortunately, the conscientious side of her took control when she was on the horse. She listened carefully and didn’t deviate from instructions even slightly.

Once it was all over, the swings outside the barn beckoned. L had had fun the entire day, but she seem a little relieved to be doing something she knew how to do. Novel is good, in small doses.

The Girl enjoys playing with the chess set I brought back from Poland. (If I remember correctly, a gift from Nana and Papa, when they came for our wedding.) She has invented her own little version that involves us using single pieces to push our opponent’s single piece around the board for a few moments. She loves the game, but I’ve yet to discern the sublime objective.

Occasionally she just gets all the pieces out and puts them on the board. There’s usually a pattern: black pieces on black squares; white pieces on white squares.

A perfectly impossible position, but notice: the white king is in check, forking the queen.

It’s another example of the similarities between toddlers and older children with autism: pattern, pattern, pattern. Everything has its place, and to disturb that order is to invite chaos, in more ways that one.

We’re more like that than we’d like to admit. A colleague once commented that we’re all on the autism spectrum; it’s just that some of us have very mild cases. Mine manifests itself in my obsession with seeing patterns in floor tiles and then feeling a compulsion to walk in accordance with said patterns.

That’s probably why I looked at L’s work, smiled, and said proudly, “Very symmetrical. Well done.”

It promised to be a lovely morning: after a day of snow, the forecast was for cloudless skies Saturday morning. I opened my eyes and realized I had to get outside with camera and tripod as fast as possible.

But it was hardly any fun alone. Since we finally had snow, K and I were both eager to get the Girl out into it.

Once outside, L was keen on imitating K and me: in short, she began cleaning. First, seeing us knocking the snow off the car with a broom, she needed to help. But weightier obligations awaited her in the back.

The deck.

When we had a snow an ice day, L enjoyed knocking the ice off the banisters and deck chairs, and she was eager to get to work. In the course of a few minutes, she’d just about knocked off all the ice.

Yesterday, she applied her expertise to snow. She banged it a few times as experience had taught with the ice, then knocked it off.

If only we could keep this urge to clean in imitation going for another fifteen years or so.

As it was, the cleaning bug lasted only a few more minutes. She knocked some snow off trees and shrubs, then headed to the front.

The great sadness was that the snow was too dry to make even a small snow ball, let alone a snow man.

Still, snow angels seemed doable.

“Watch and learn,” I told the Girl, then gingerly lowered myself onto the ground. I’d forgotten how quickly the snow invades shoes, sneaks up jackets and settles into just about every article of clothing.

L took a more direct route, and with a flop was wallowing in the snow.

She didn’t mind the snow working its way down her boots, up her jacket, around her neck: by the time we forced her back inside, she was covered with it.

Not ice. Not sleet. Snow — actual snow — began falling just as school let out this afternoon and continued until well into the evening.

Such a rare occurrence in South Carolina that it became the evening entertainment. Some quiet music (Madeleine Peyroux), red wine, and a view of the snow falling.

Certainly all my students are disappointed that all this happened on a Friday, and a Friday before a free Monday (Presidents’ Day) to boot. No chance of a snow day.

It’s a fairly dry snow, piling up lightly and promising a fun morning with the Girl tomorrow.