I often wonder what L is going to look like when she’s older — three, seven, ten years old. Once she reaches three it will be easier to guess what she might look like five years later.
At five months, though, it’s fairly difficult to imagine what she might look like as a little girl rather than an infant.
But sometimes, when her expression is just right, there’s a little glimpse.
Memorial Day we took the Girl and the babcia for a hike at Graveyard Fields. A short, easy hike: probably less than 4.5 miles all told.
Along the way, new flora continually caught J’s eye. “What’s this?” and “What’s that?” and “Is this X? It must be!”
“Nie wiem” became the phrase of the day, renewing (for about the 100th time, at least) my desire/resolve to learn more about plants.
L “met” a young lady named N who, despite being two months younger, was significantly smaller.
And of course we took lots of pictures of the Girl.
The Creation Museum recently opened in Kentucky.
DefCon provided an informative guide about the errors of young earth creationism. Entitled “Top 10 Reasons Why the Universe, the Sun, the Earth, and Life Are Not 6,000 Years Old,” it’s available at the DefCon web site.
The girl has begun reaching for things. For anything. If it’s in her field of vision, she’ll put out her little hands and try to grab it.
The other day, she grabbed a glass of water while we were eating dinner and turned it over on K. First time, certainly not the last.
And so, for the first time, I proposed making pre-planned video. “Just go around the apartment and hold her in front of things,” I asked K.
It seems the Poles are taking a page from Falwell’s book of idiocy:
A senior Polish official has ordered psychologists to investigate whether the popular BBC TV show Teletubbies promotes a homosexual lifestyle.
The spokesperson for children’s rights in Poland, Ewa Sowinska, singled out Tinky Winky, the purple character with a triangular aerial on his head. (BBC)
A kid who has gone from completely ignoring authority figures to complying but with a huff and a puff and an expression of disgust has still come a long way. A kid who has gone from cussing out staff when upset to merely walking away while being spoken to has begun developing coping skills.
I worry that some of our kids, despite the tremendous progress they made, will encounter less-than-perfect people in the world that will see their shortcomings and nothing else. They’ll be completely unaware of how far he/she has come and punish him/her in some way for lack of perfect social skills.
This possibility arises from the fact that the skills we’re teaching the kids are so basic that we don’t even notice when an adolescent uses them: eye contact; maturely disagreeing; accepting no. It’s the societal norm, the baseline. These socials skills are to normal life what reading is to majoring in English.
Long ago I found a video of Russian kids doing some really unbelievable tricks. Watching it, I thought, “Dang, that looks a lot like Poland.” The ubiquitous boxiness of Stalinist architecture is the same throughout Eastern Europe, I guess.
It turns out, some lad in Jablonka, K’s home, village discovered the video and, apparently impressed, learned some tricks and made a video himself called “Tricks by Buma.”
Small world…
Our realtor told us at the outset that she didn’t want us expecting to find the home of our dreams this first time out. Rather, she said that we need to be looking at the areas and determine which area of town we’d rather live in. Many people buy houses they love without checking out the area, and then they find that the services they want and need aren’t available or aren’t nearby. So they wind up with a house they love in an area they hate. The first step, then, is not to find a house, but to find an area.
Yesterday, we found the area.
And we thought we’d found a house. But it’s amazing what a night’s rest will do for your perception of a house.
Didn’t make much of an impression — little enough impression that I didn’t even take a picture.
In a historic district, walking distance from two parks (!!!), Contestant Two had a lot going for it from the beginning. It was was a fairly attractive house, with plantation shutters and picket fence in the front.
The interior was pleasant enough, with a somewhat odd upstairs bedroom — the chimney goes through the middle of the room, dividing it almost in two. Pleasant enough, though requiring some work. “I love it,” K said. “It’s okay,” I thought. Until we went into the “basement.”
Duct tape on a foundation wall can mean only one thing: the owners are trying to hide something. The fact that it’s painted indicates that they’re really trying to hide something.
And then the back of the house: siding clearly put on by a less-than-professional. It’s fairly clear that there’s water running off the roof and into that siding. Which means one thing: water damage. No — it means two things: water damage and mold.
The final negative factor: it was literally covered with trees. Not good for a roof; not good for affordable insurance. At that point, it was decided. Add to it all the age and the possible problems with wiring and plumbing, and, despite the good location, the final verdict was a definitive “no.”
We left the city-proper and went to Maldin.
First impression — standard brick ranch. The house looked good, but nothing spectacular. And then we saw the backyard: huge, wooded, landscaped — in a word, amazing. A couple of kitschy “water falls,” but nothing that couldn’t be removed.
Once we walked in, I thought, “Okay — this is a house worth spending some time in, checking out, really looking it over.”
The kitchen/dining area was open, with a fireplace in the corner. Opposite was the living room. Immediate thought: “Tear out the wall dividing them and what an amazing space!”
Downstairs, a real basement — no quotation marks required. Half of it was finished as a family room. The other half: man cave. Clean, cool cinder-block with a new furnace — everything screams, “Workshop!”
The price is great; the location is perfect; the home is an amazing first-home. And, after the first two disasters, I think, “Hey, there is good stuff in our price range!”
It was all downhill after Contestant Three, but we looked further.
Contestant Four: lots of potential (with an amazingly large backyard, too), but requiring a lot of work. Porcelain tiles as a kitchen counter-top treatment just makes you feel like you’re cooking in a bus station bathroom.
Contestant Five: with roads on three of the four sides of the lot, it was a definite “no” before we even got inside.
Contestant Six: no! No! A thousand times no! The Portokalos-style fireplace just was so hideous that I ran screaming from the house.
Contestant Seven: What a kitchen! What an interior! What train tracks five-hundred feet away! What a flood plain! What a disappointment!
Contestant Eight had a lot going against it from the beginning. Far, far north; on a semi-busy street; few trees.
Then we stepped inside, where it became obvious that this was a case of “Flip this House.” However, as my father said, it was more like “Flop this House.”
At first, everything seems decent. New appliances; new tile floor — which goes all the way from the kitchen, though the dining/living area, down the hall.
And then a close look at the kitchen counter revealed a few things:
Words do not do it justice, so I present “Counter-Top Edge”
Add to it the fact that the hardwood floor in the living room was finished in the ever-popular Spill-and-Smear style, we decided to give it a pass.
First house hunt behind us, we learned a lot about what we really want and what’s optional.
We’re about to begin the process of looking for a home in Greenville. When we did it in Asheville about a year and a half ago, we were heading out with entirely different thoughts. We knew that the prices were completely disproportional to our income (particularly since I was working as a teacher’s aid in an EC classroom), and we were just hoping to find something in our price range.
In said price range, we found
When we began looking at real estate in the Greenville area in the same price range, we were shocked — and that’s one of the reasons we decided to move there. You can still get a house for well under $200k there! In fact, there are two-bedrooms listed for under $100k!
That’s like driving by a service station and seeing the price of gas at $1.89. (Which in the south does happen — it just means the station closed several years ago and was simply abandoned.)
We’ve sat down and made a list of wants and needs.
The most pleasant thought in all of it — that L will have a backyard to play in.
So tomorrow we begin our hunt. It’s kind of exciting, looking for a house with the intention of buying, as opposed to looking at houses with the hope of finding something affordable that’s not a complete dump…
Several times over the last few days I’ve come out of the apartment to find a congregation crowding around a water drainage grate at the corner of our parking lot. It seems that a pregnant cat crawled into the drainage system that runs through our complex and gave birth to her kittens there. Except for times of rain, I can’t imagine a safer place.
Recently, an industrious woman decided that she would try to get one of the cats. So with some difficulty (I would imagine — I wasn’t there and didn’t see this part), they pulled the heavy iron grating off and the lady got down into the dry drainage inlet.
But she couldn’t get a single kitten. Imagine that. And so, finding no success, it was time to get out, with the help of K and others.
And once out, it was necessary to put the grate back. (It’s from seeing this from the balcony that I made the reasonable assumption that the ladies got the grate off in the first place with “some difficulty.”)
Apparently, the Humane Society has been notified and they were unable to do anything; the neighbors are obviously unable to do anything; and I’m left wonder what all the fuss is about. Wild cats have survived throughout millennia. These kittens seem to be getting resourceful genes — they’ll fare just fine, I’m sure.
We recently went to Biltmore again. Yes, once is enough in a lifetime, but J hadn’t ever been, so we went.
The gardens were not nearly as spectacular as we would have liked because of the record low temps in April. But it was pleasant anyway.
L, most unexpectedly, also has her own little canal. It too is singularly effective at channeling .
L doesn’t do much of anything without putting her full effort into it, and pooping is no exception. But with pooping, she has a particular gift. Without some much as a raised eyebrow, L can expel her cottage-cheesy poop with such energy that, upon impacting the diaper, it follows the path of least resistance, right up her back.
A good poop means that she leaves wet marks mid-way up her back. A spectacular poop goes three-fourths of the way up to her shoulder blades. Her personal best is just below her shoulder blades.
It’s spectacular. I had no idea babies could achieve something as wondrous as pooping halfway up their backs. And when she’s done, there’s a little mischievous smile that, though I know is from relief, seems like it just might also have a bit of pride mixed in.
Only a Pole could make a movie like Kanał (Canal, 1956). Such resigned nihilism can only arise from a country that has literally both ceased to exist (the Partitions) and been razed completely (Poland 1939-1940).
The second in Andzrej Wajda’s trilogy about World War II, Kanał tells the story soldiers in the Polish Home Army who were encircled by Germans during the last days of the Warsaw Uprising. Ordered to retreat, the 44 soldiers try to escape via the sewer system. Most of the film takes place in that most unimaginably horrid location: encircled by the enemy above, surrounded literally by s— below.
While at first glance Kanał seems to be a film about Poles resisting the Nazis, it’s equally — if not more — a critique of the lack of Soviet intervention during the Warsaw Uprising. The common Polish view is that the Soviet army camped out on the eastern bank of the Vistula and did little if anything to help the Polish soldiers. Some historians, it seems, dispute that account, but having lived in Poland and married a Pole, I am partial to the Polish view (and, generally speaking, the majority view, I believe). In that sense, it’s a minor miracle that the film made it past the censors, as it not only lacks a show of communist brotherhood but even hints at the opposite.
Certainly not a movie for simply “kicking back,” but well worth viewing.
We went to visit family yesterday. This meant a lot of time in the car, which meant, for L, a lot of time in the car seat.
We discovered, much to our surprise, that L doesn’t really like the car seat as much as tolerate it. Imagine — she doesn’t like being strapped into a virtually immovable position for hours on end.
We think liquids might help, because she seemed to cry much less violently during that last hour when she was working on a bottle of tea.
In Poland, in summer, potatoes — those ever-present tenants of the Polish table — are always served with fresh dill. All told, I had to scrape of pounds of it during my years there, and no one could understand that I just don’t like the stuff.
“Tea!? You give your 5-month-old tea?” I can just hear the voices now. Well, to call it “tea” is really a stretch. It’s a special granulated herbal concoction J brought from Poland with her. It’s made specially for infants, and it’s made from dill and aniseed. To my nose, it stinks like the dickens, because I don’t like either one. But the girl likes it, and it eases her stomach, and it will undoubtedly ease time in the car.
After all, K and I buy green teas for the road. Why shouldn’t she have something to drink to?
Maybe it’s just one of those paradigms you slip into when your baby is breastfed. Additional drink is like additional food — unnecessary. What we’re learning is that that is only true — duh — for the first four or five months.
When I was in Poland, I eventually reached a point in my linguistic development at which I understood everything going on around me. It wasn’t fluency, because in any given sentence there might be one or even two words I didn’t know, or couldn’t immediately place, but I learned that understanding 100% of the language doesn’t mean understanding 100% of the words spoken.
Once I reached that linguistic milestone, it felt I’d always been at that point. It felt like I’d always been able to understand everything, even though I knew it wasn’t the case. Like swimming and reading, understanding Polish was something I couldn’t remember what it was like not to be able to do. (What an awful example as a teacher I’m setting with that sentence! And this one…)
Today, we went to see my cousin and her recently-adopted baby. The little girl — S — is six weeks. She’s about a pound heavier than L when she was born. And I looked at that little girl, her eyes still mostly closed, and I couldn’t imagine L being that size. I know she was. We have the pictures to prove it. But, as with the language, I just feel she’s always been this size; that she’s always been able to hold her head up; that she’s always been able to look around, to smile, to cry from boredom, to giggle, to coo.
And then, a little voice: “That is how you’ll wake up one morning and realize she’s going off to college and for a brief moment, feel complete unprepared for it, and feel she’s completely unprepared for it.”
It’s not quite synonymous with “taking for granted,” but it’s awfully close.
And I think that’s one reason why I’m trying so hard to write in this silly blog so often. To mark the lines of development; to make a record for later — to make an online baby book.
Besides, what else am I going to write about in my newly realigned universe?
The first time I was in Polska, I started making a little ‘zine that I’d mail out to friends and family. I called it “Entropy.”
I remember that yesterday evening and wondered who had “entropy.com.” I knew it wouldn’t be available, and I typed “entropy.com” in the address bar.It re-directed me to “entropy.ie”.
“Entropy — Secure Networking.”
I’m not sure how much faith I’d put into a networking security company that’s taken its name from a principle of decay.
What would its logo be? A frayed networking cable?
Anticipating user confusion, the company included this explanation:
Conall Lavery founder of Entropy decided upon the name after reading a book called “The Crying of Lot 49” by the American author Thomas Pynchon.
In the book the professor uses the two theories of Entropy (thermodynamics and communications) and invents a perpetual motion machine that is driven by telepathy.
There are various definitions of Entropy.
According to the Collins dictionary, Entropy means “a thermodynamic quantity that changes in a reversible process by an amount equal to the heat absorbed or emitted divided by the thermodynamic temperature.”
In my view, that doesn’t help clarify things that much.
L’s had a lot of hair since she was born. Recently, we decided that it had grown too long — at least the little lock that was swooping down into her eyes.
First step: wet the hair and get it standing up — as Elmo looks on…
Next: cut it. Given L’s propensity to jerk suddenly when a flash fires, I didn’t actually get a shot of that.
Finally, comb it.
And in the end, she looks like one of those wet-hair-look Euro-trash boys (and I say that with tongue firmly in cheek).
All she needs now is a tracksuit and she’d fit in perfectly at any Polish soccer match…
When playing with your child, some common sense is in order. After eating, for example, is not the best time for bouncy play.
That’s fairly logical, but there’s a derivative from this: after eating (up to, say, an hour after), avoid any play that places the child’s head directly above your head.
As a newly washed car is to a bird, so your face, with it’s stupid, wide-open-mouth smile, is to your child…
A (redacted) email I got today:
I just wanted to get back with you to thank you for your interest in [our high school] and to inform you that we have decided to go with another candidate. I wish you the best as you continue to positively impact the lives of young people.
Amazing how an earlier, accepted job offer can mitigate such an email. It is, in short, nice to be that “another candidate” for a change.
Funny thing is, though this letter reads like I’d interviewed for the position, I’d never even spoken to the principal.