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Imitation

Monday 28 November 2016

The Boy sees me do something, and he starts doing it. He sees K do it, and he starts doing it. He sees L doing it, and he starts doing it.

L has always enjoyed playing store, though in recent years, she really hasn't taken the initiative to play it. When her Polish near-cousins come from the Asheville area, they might play school, and they might, just might, play store, but the oldest is now in middle school and such games seem pointless with just two.

She saw the Boy setting up his store after dinner and desert -- a treat from the Halloween bucket -- and she just had to play. And take over. And start directing the Boy. Playing with her can be so exhausting when she's like that, and I often worry that she might be that way at school as well. She might not have the most friends possible as a result. And part of me wants to do something about that, to guide her a bit. And I have. But nothing has changed, so I've decided to take K's advice and just let it be. It's a lesson she'll have to learn for herself.

Risks

Sunday 27 November 2016

Part of growing up is learning to take risks and learning not to take them. It all depends on the child, I guess. For us, it's both: the Girl dives into almost everything without much thought of the consequences sometimes, and it's something that's always worried us; the Boy on the other hand watches, thinks, calculates, and sometimes -- often -- walks away from a given situation that he evaluates to be too risky. Between the two of them, the perfect mean.

Parenting is about risk as well. At the most basic level, there's the risk of some kind of congenital defect in our children that provides them with challenges that might seem or simply be unfair, overwhelming, disheartening. Some folks are reluctant to have children for that reason. "What if our kid is born without certain wiring working and grows to be a sociopath?" is the extreme of this worrying. It's never really been a worry of mine, though. It's out of my control, so why worry about it.

That fear aside, we all want our kids to grow into these super-beings that fear nothing that needs not be feared, that boldly takes risks that matter, that stand up to bullies and make perfect grades. Of course all those things have differing priorities and can all be subsumed under the general idea of "well-rounded person" in the risk department. To that end, we teach, train, and so on. But there's only so much as parents we can do about our kids' personalities and outlooks on life. Nurture takes you only so far; nature gives some pretty strong dispositions.

The Boy, as a four-year-old, has certain risks that he decides to take that are appropriately sized. He's begun to turn his back on his little Baby Bjorn potty and head straight for the toilet. He's begun standing instead of always sitting. And that involves risks. Today he went upstairs to go to the restroom wearing one pair of pants and came back down wearing shorts. "I siu-siu'ed on my pants," he explained, using his typical Polish-English combination: a Polish base with the English past-tense inflection.

A few minutes later, he trotted back upstairs to clean up the mess, illustrating another parenting risk: lack of proper instruction on how to clean up potty messes leads to testing the absorbency of the bathroom rug.

The Girl's risk-taking is appropriately sized as well. She'll swing like a maniac, but today she realized she was going a little too high and decided to stop pumping her legs. That kind of self-awareness has been a long time coming.

Still, she does things on our newest tree swing that make me just cringe. She likes to drop back and hang from her knees as she swings. She never does it when she's swinging high, and she always holds on with both hands (unlike the picture below, taken before she actually started swinging). At some point, she's going to decide that her gymnastics training, meager as it is, is sufficient to begin turning backflips out of the swing like the girl in elementary school who could do that, stopping students' and teachers' hearts alike. That will be a risk I don't want her to take, but it's a risk I'm also not sure she would take. As we approach her birthday -- a little over two weeks to go -- I know we're edging ever closer to the risk-taking that makes all fathers nervous: love. Sure, it's still a long way off, I tell myself, but those first stirrings will begin in the next couple of years or so, and she'll begin offering her heart to boys. And we all know what that means.

Their risks are my risks, so for now I'm happy to face the little risks with the Boy and smile as the Girl pulls back a little from her ridiculously high arc.

Fresh Starts

Saturday 26 November 2016

All things come to an end, and more often than not, that end is itself a beginning. Our summer's adventures in remodeling have finally come to a complete and total end. Well, almost -- there are still pictures to hang on the walls, but we're 99.97% finished now. And so as we prepared our yearbook, we finally took the time to unclutter the kitchen and take some "After" shots to complete our "Before" shots.

Our parish is in a similar situation: a two-year building project came to completion tonight with the dedication of our new Our Lady of the Rosary church. Like with our kitchen, there are still a few things the Father Dwight said we need to do, like completing an enclosure around the whole campus to ensure safety for the parish school -- can never be too careful these days.

Father Dwight warned, so to speak, the parish that the liturgy for the dedication of a new church is long. "Really long," he stressed. We dropped the Boy off at Nana's and Papa's as a result, because we really didn't know what "really long" might mean. K comes from a country where most churches' age is measured in centuries, and so the idea of attending a Mass to dedicate a new church was completely new to her. But Father did say "really long," so we decided not to take a chance -- the Boy can handle only so much sitting still.

"Really long" turned out to be just shy of three hours. Having grown up in a church were every week's service was at least two hours long, I would say two hours and forty-five minutes make a long service, but not a really long service.

The liturgy was lovely, and it's fitting that Fr. Dwight be the pastor of the parish: it's a uniquely Catholic-looking structure, and Fr. Dwight is a uniquely un-common Catholic priest. Raised a Protestant, he converted to Anglicanism and moved to England where he married, started a family, and had a lovely parish. Then trouble struck, so to speak, and he and his family converted to Catholicism, which meant the loss of his vocation. Or so it would seem. It turns out, several dozen married Anglican priests have converted to Catholicism and then been re-ordained as Catholic priests with the discipline of celibacy being waived for them. So he posed with the bishop and his wife and four children after Mass, making it an odd sight in an oddly traditional church.

The real stars of the evening, though, were the members of the choir, including L. She's been singing in the children's choir for several months now, and she spent more time in the church today than she'd spent in a month of Masses -- over five hours.

The results, though, were stunning. A Catholic church that looked, smelled, and sounded like a Catholic church.

During the entire liturgy, I smiled occasionally as I thought, "This is not just some lovely church we're visiting while passing through here or there. This is where we will go to Mass every Sunday now."

Four Changes

Saturday 26 November 2016

One

“You always use that one.” The Girl was downstairs as K worked on our yearly photo calendar and putting finishing touches on the yearbook I create and she polishes (which is not to say she was Polishing it — it remains untranslated this year). Since I was upstairs, I really don’t know what the conversation concerned other than the selection of this or that picture. It occurred to me that she is becoming a vocal and thoughtful member of our family cognitively. Her tastes and her views are no longer merely childish, and entertaining them is no longer simply a matter of being a good and patient parent that encourages a child by simply listening to her. We’ve been through that; we’re going through that with E. Now, she has her own opinions that are not based entirely on childhood fancy.

For instance, she selected the granite that completes our kitchen. It wasn’t just a matter of, “Ooh, this is pink and pretty!” like she might have as a younger child. (The granite is not pink of course.) It was a thoughtful choice that, as I recall, she made with K as they held the sample of the cabinets we’d chosen.

Two

This afternoon I caught a glimpse of another kind of change. We took the kids to see Disney on Ice after lunch, and it was the second time for L. The first time, she was so into Disney and princesses and pink and blue. She sat in rapt attention, almost in awe. There was Peter Pan and the Simba and everyone else she’d watched at Nana’s and Papa’s. Today, the show ended with the inevitable: a long-ish re-telling of Frozen. A couple of years ago, she was obsessed with that, with that music. She marched around Fort Pulaski singing that song, performing it for any passers-by who took the time to stand and watch — and a few did. As the song approached, I was curious what she might do. “Here it comes!” I whispered as Elsa retreated to her winter hideaway. “Here it comes!” And she smiled at me. A polite smile. The song began. I looked over at her again. “Aren’t you going to sing along?” The same polite smile, head cocked a little bit, as if to say, “Daddy, do you think I’m so childish or something?” The thing is, she can still be surprisingly childish, but at that moment, she was fourteen or more.

The Boy’s take on Disney this afternoon can be summed up in three things he said:

“I just don’t like pretty things.”
“I like vehicles. There were no vehicles.”
[Spreading his arms out as far as they could go] “Disney on ice was this long.”

Three

As I’ve spent the last several evenings putting together our annual yearbook, pulling pictures from our photo collection and occasionally taking a bit of text from here — every year, it’s the same: I swear I’m going to make it as the year goes along and then never even begin re-gathering the pictures (and I say re-gathering because I reuse many from here) until late October — I had a conversation with K in whispers as the kids were up having their baths.

“Do you realize that almost all the pictures from this year seem to be of E?”

She nodded in sympathetic agreement. “Well, he is the youngest.” But it just seemed like some kind of favoritism. We agreed that she’d actually been kind of avoiding pictures, not showing the least bit of excitement when the camera came out, even frowning at it occasionally. Foreshadowing the soon-coming day that she actually chides me for putting pictures on the internet. “My friends might find that picture!”

Four

Before the show, we made the requisite restroom stops, and I stood outside the ladies’ room to the side waiting for them. (The Boy still occasionally chooses to go with K — only a little longer before that’s really no longer appropriate. But that’s a different story.) L was the first to emerge, and for a moment, she didn’t see me and merely walked toward my general location. There was a little bounce in her step that made her gait appear a little older, and her hair was lying on her shoulders in that casual way that older girls probably only dream of getting their hair to do — slightly unplanned, slightly messy (perhaps pouting might be the better term), yet certainly not unkempt, just casual — I could see her at fourteen, at fifteen, at twenty.

Comfort

Tuesday 15 November 2016

The Boy and I were playing just before bedtime. The miasteczko that T and he made during their visit this weekend is still up, so we decided to make use of it. As often happens when playing, the Boy decided to pontificate a bit. Picking up a convertible, he began explaining, "This is a big car. It can hold a lot. I think maybe 38 gallons." He handed me the car upside down and asked me to read what kind of car it was.

"It's a 38 Gallon Cruiser," I said. He beamed.

"I said that!"

I was expecting such a response, hoping for it at the very least. I like when something I say, something K does, something L makes him, gives him a certain kind of comfortable joy. It was the same with L when she was his age, still working out how everything worked, still not quite sure she had a handle on some of the basics. Of course, I look at her now and think, "You still don't have a handle on some of the basics," and I look in the mirror shaving and think, "You still don't have a handle on some of the basics."

K has a handle on the basics though. She knows what brings a smile to everyone's face: homemade rosół. The Boy leaves his bowl empty; the Girl goes back for seconds; even the older cat is happy to get the dregs in E's bowl.

The basics.

Monday Chills

Monday 14 November 2016

When I got home today, everyone was in the back yard. The Boy was swinging, the Girl, wrestling with Polish lessons.

Rainy Sunday

Sunday 13 November 2016

"We can't stay for choir practice because we have family visiting," K explained to the choir director this morning after Mass. As the dedication of the new church is only weeks away now, after-Mass choir practice has really ramped up. But today, we decided L could miss it. Because of family.

Of course, M and her daughters are not related to us in any other sense beyond her being E's godmother and sharing the same adventure as K of being a Pole in America. But they're still family. We spend holidays together; we know (or rather, K and M know) rather intimate details about each others' lives; we've shared the same struggles at times.

You choose your friends; you don't choose your family. It's a truism that gets both sides of the equation right and wrong: because you don't choose your family, it can be more difficult to love them and more important. (Note: such is not the case here.) Because you choose your friends, the relationships are more valuable and more fragile. That's why close friends and family blurry the lines: these relationships have both elements.

So time with this kind of family is precious: E gains two more sisters for a weekend, and L gains siblings more her age. And because they're more like family than friends, there's no compunction in telling L that she's being a pain in the back side (which she can be) or telling E that he's got to share his new siblings (which is is reluctant to do).

Late October Sunday

Sunday 30 October 2016

With it being the last Sunday of the month, our family had a lazy morning that included a bit of television, a bit of computer, a bit of baklava, and a bit of exploring, all before lunch. The Boy and I went to our normal haunts, though we decided this time to go a bit deeper into the "woods" that consist of vines and bushes on the property behind ours, the house abandoned now for several years. We went deep enough that I had to crawl for a moment. Afterward, there was the usual: swinging, exploring the creek (where we found our lost ball behind our neighbors' house), and lounging in the hammock. We were there when K came out onto the back deck to call us in for lunch.

"We're being lazy on the hammock," the Boy responded.

In the evening, Nana and Papa came by for dinner -- another adventure in "we're no longer worrying about whether our kids will eat what we cook because they can survive skipping one meal from hunger." Of course that won't really happen with the Boy: first, he's too adventurous with his eating for that to happen, and second, when push comes to plate, he quickly reaches a point at which the stubbornness gives way to the hunger.

The Girl, of course, is an entirely different story, and I still wonder whether or not we're doing the right thing by her. That's the eternal worry of parenting, I guess, but I try to keep things in a more global perspective: hungry kids in Africa and all of that. Tonight was not all that much of a battle because it was tortellini: she likes pasta, though she predictably didn't like the fact that it was pasta stuffed with something. Despite the fact that she likes pierogi, which are essentially the same thing.

Sometime later this week, we're planning Indian -- dal with palak paneer. That should be a really interesting night...

Forbidden Fruit

Tuesday 25 October 2016

K bought a bag of treats for trick-or-treaters next week. It was sitting on the counter when E came down this morning.

He’s always the first of the two to come downstairs. We hear his little voice as we’re getting our breakfast ready: “Mama!” He needs his “stinky diaper” taken off, and he needs to get downstairs as fast as possible. Nevermind that often makes it downstairs half asleep and then plops down on the sofa in the livingroom for another half hour of sleep. He has to get downstairs.

So when he came down this morning, he noticed the candy.

“Why is there a bag of treats on the counter?” he asked.

“It’s for Halloween,” K explained.

She went back upstairs to do her hair and I peeked down to find he had taken the step ladder out and set it up to get a closer look. Elbows on the counter, chin in his hands, he just stood and stared.

It would take no cajoling at all to get him to eat the whole bag. Perhaps not all in one sitting, but then again, he might be able to pull that off. Then how he would complain about how his stomach hurts.

“My belly hurts” is his common excuse to get out of finishing dinner. Even when he says he likes it. Even when it’s potato pancakes.

In the evening, the Girl brought up a new concern. I actually brought it up; she worked it to a frenzy. Thursday is a special day for whatever reason, and the kids can take a stuffed animal to school.

“Daddy, I can’t decide which animal to take,” she explained.

Knowing the stinkers she has in her class, I reminded her that they might do something mischievous and to take that into account when deciding. A few minutes after going to bed, she came down to get some advice from K. She explained her concern: “When the teacher is not looking or when I go to the bathroom, one of them might grab the stuffed animal and do something to it, like cut it up.”

K gave the opposite advice: “Don’t worry about it. That probably won’t happen.”

But L was already worked up about it. She probably won’t get to sleep until late, and then we’ll have a rough morning, trying to convince her to pull herself out of bed.

Perhaps I should have thought things through a little more carefully.

Saturday

Saturday 22 October 2016

What did I love about today? That E got his shoes on all by himself without much prompting and without help getting the correct shoe on the correct foot. It's a sign of his growing independence that the little things he takes on himself.

That L helped him put on a hoodie that he was dying to wear without me even knowing she'd done it. It must have been a frustrating task, because the neck of that garment does not slip easily over his head. But instead of hearing any fussing, I heard nothing at all.

That they both found a way to entertain themselves. That E did so by working -- his favorite type of play -- and that L still is in love with skating.

That I discovered K is right: watering the flowers can be a delightful job. The Boy was eager to turn play work into real work. And I love that he's always willing to lend a hand.

"Sure," he always says.

That we have a small fire pit in the backyard. With it being so dry, it's always a bit of a risk to have a bonfire, but we keep it small (despite the appearance of this -- it was built up for the picture and for E to help) and have a hose at hand.

That life in our family can be so hectic and yet peaceful at the same moment. That our kitchen is done. That I managed to eat Brussels sprouts tonight.

That the Girl is so interested in crafts. Nana and Papa bought her a small sewing machine for Christmas some time ago (last year? year before?) and perhaps she was too young, because she's just now getting interested in it.

That my family is my family.

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