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growing
Feeding
It can be a joyful experience, with smiles and giggles and obvious relief on the face of the starving Boy. He opens his mouth wide; he waits patiently for the spoon; he closes his mouth slowly and seems to relish and inhale the food at the same time.
It can be a tragedy, with fussing and battling, with a head jerking back and forth in an almost desperate attempt to say "No!," with hands flailing and pushing away the spoon to make sure the message gets through.
Whatever the case, the cleaning that follows can be Herculean. Food smeared here, there and everywhere. Dried caked food on the chin, the cheeks, the forehead.
But it always ends the same.
Food is joy for the little man. All food. Any food. He tries it all, rejects almost nothing, and seems to relish even the most exotic offering.
Truth be told, that's a bit of a relief compared to the Girl, who still squawks and squeals whenever we try to get something new in her.
Change is good.
Clean, Clean, Clean
“I wish today was Monday!” It’s rare for a six-year-old to say something like that on a Saturday afternoon, I would assume, but this Monday is not just an ordinary, begin-the-week blues Monday. Sure, we have the day off of school — a snow-make-up day that the county works into the schedule in case we have that rarest of rare snow days, which we didn’t this year. No, it’s not that we have the day off. Indeed, L is so fascinated with early dismissal that she was complaining Friday that we have Monday off. “I wish we had school Monday so I could get early dismissal!”
What would get a little girl more excited about a Monday, school or no school, than anything else? Mama returns, with little E, after three very difficult weeks in Poland.
K is coming back, so that can only mean one thing for a family with a Polish mother. Even without this post’s title, one could probably guess what we did today. L was in charge of her room while I did the rest of the house. Piles of art materials on her work table disappeared. Books returned too shelves. Some old art work got tossed out. In short, a miracle occurred in the corner bedroom.
Planting Plus
A busy day. A day filled with life in all its varied forms, from the little microbes and vermin that turn banana peels and rice to compost. Such hard workers, they deserve a new compost bin, I decided. And we need a place to leave curing compost while we spread that ready black gold (not oil, not by a long shot, except literally) in our postage-stamp-size garden.
Next steps: out with the old, in with the new. Roots, tired soil, and general chaos of six plus months of sitting unattended pile up in our little beds, so the Girl and I rake and hoe until we have a loose mat of roots sitting beside the beds and loose, dark soil ready for a turn of new compost. We plant beans, sugar peas, and peppers in the tired bed on the left in an effort to replenish some nitrogen and more tomatoes in the right bed.
Then we come to the part the Girl has been waiting for all day. Every activity has been punctuated with a simple question: "Daddy, is it time to bring the flowers yet?" She had a list of dream flowers, an amalgamation of flowers she heard about in class, read about in various books, and simply liked: Sweet Williams, zinnias, marigolds, snapdragons, and a few others.
We set up a temporary potting workbench with sawhorses and some plywood and get to work.
As I head to the front with a couple of pots, I notice our bird family that has made its home in the crook of our gutter now has teens in the nest.
"L," I call, "Come look at this!" We watch them for a bit, gently jostling the bottom of the nest to see if they will reflexively open their mouths for a feeding. Instead, the hunker down, pulling up half-down, half-feathered wings -- part of newly formed instincts.
We return to the backyard to finish our cleanup. "They'll be gone soon," I explain as we walk.
"Why?" she asks.
"They'll be grown and leave the nest to start their own lives."
I think of how quickly it all has developed: a nest one day, a few eggs in the blink of the eye, some bald chicks craning for food a whisper later. I think of how quickly it has all developed, and I am glad that humans develop so much more slowly.
Prints and Patterns
L recently bought an activity book called "Fabulous Me!" at the school book fair. I can't deny my decided lack of enthusiasm at the decided lack of humility in the title, but this is the twenty-first century: "I" must stand at the center of everything, and it's pretty inescapable.
One portion is entitled "Fabulous Fashion," and it includes a checklist of patterns for material with boxes marked "fab" and "drab" for little fashionistas to mark their opinion of each.
"Daddy, can you help me with this?" she asked just before bed the other night. "I don't know what these patterns are."
I promised to sit with her at the computer and help her look them up. "Now, Daddy?" became a mantra in the house. Tonight after dinner, we finally took the time to explore patterns.
Tartan was the first. I was curious what she would think -- after all, her last name does has a distinctly Scottish feel to it.
Her reaction was instant and unqualified: "Preeetty!"
"Floral print" was sure to be a hit. After all, she is always interested in flowers. She wants to pick them, to grow them, to draw them.
And based on her reaction -- "Wow!" -- probably to wear them now.
When we came to "check pattern," I thought she'd turn up her nose. Compared to a floral pattern, it's awfully rigid; compared to a tartan, it's virtually monochromatic. (Well, I guess most check patterns are in fact monochromatic.)
The reaction was a half-hearted, "It's nice." She checked off "fab," but not with much enthusiasm.
When she read the next pattern, "heart print," she was excited before I even began typing it into the search bar. She knew -- just knew -- it would be something special.
"Yes!" she shouted, checking off "fab" and adding another "Yes!" for good measure.
I thought "stripes" would get a pass. Not that she wouldn't like them -- she did, so-so. I just thought she wouldn't care so much what Google dished up. Turned out, that's exactly what she was curious about.
"I just want to see. You know, I want to see what they show for 'stripes.'"
Zig zag print
"Gingham," I thought, being essentially a check pattern, would elicit the same response. Wrong.
"No!" she said emphatically, checking off "drab" with decided purposefulness.
Finally, we reached "animal print." The best reaction of all.
"Goooorgeous!"
Indeed.
Pause Button
I've often joked with my wife that a pause button for our six-year-old daughter would be an absolute God-send. It wouldn't have to be much: just something that one could press, say, once a day for ninety seconds of peace. "Then you'd complain that you could only press it once," she laughed. And so she's probably right. But in reality, the Girl has a pause button. How else can I explain the fact that she went to bed last night discussing the "favs list" pages of her new activity book and woke up this morning and, rubbing her eyes, said, "There's a list for favorite patterns. Daddy, what's a pattern?"
Tadpoles
"Daddy! Look! I see fish!"
The small stream that forms behind our house after heavy rain has always been a source of fascination for the Girl. At first, it was fascination mixed with a hefty dose of trepidation. As she grew older, more comfortable with the water, and taller, she realized that it posed no threat and in fact could be a wonderland right in her own backyard. Still, it is only a small trickle through most of the year, and I initially chalked up her discovery to imagination.
But sure enough, small creatures stirring. Tadpoles.
"Daddy, can I get in the water?" was only a question of time. "I want to catch a tadpole." With the temperatures of late, though, that was of course out of the question.
Yet nothing makes a guy feel like a real dad like building something, spur of the moment, for his daughter. Some scrap lumber, a handful of screws, and we have a bridge.
"But you might find," I explain as we're walking down the hill to place the bridge over the small spring stream, "that catching tadpoles is a little trickier than you imagine."
And so it was. Today.
Balance
Happiness is not a matter of intensity but of balance, order, rhythm and harmony.
Thomas Merton
For the first few months of our lives, it's our goal, our solitary goal, though we're not even aware of it. Trying to calm that sloshing inner ear so we can crawl, stand, walk, run -- it's all we struggle for during our first months. In truth, it's what we struggle with our whole lives, always upping the challenge, always looking back at our earlier miracles of balance as if they were simple magic shop card tricks all nine-year-olds revel in. They are miracles because all motion, not just walking, is controlled falling. Coordinated near-disaster.
The Boy, lately a master of scooting who is graduating slowly to crawling, nonetheless likes to press his luck and try the stairs. It strikes him suddenly, this urge that, like Everest to George Herbert Leigh Mallory, inspires him to climb simply "because it was there." Often he's on the other side of the room when he realizes he hasn't ascended the stairs in some time -- usually a few minutes -- and with a shout of recognition, flings his entire body forward, catching his whole upper weight with his chubby arms, lowering himself into position, then crawling like some new army recruit scooting under the barbed wire of an obstacle course. There's not much question of balance in this scooting, but the force with which he throws himself forward from a sitting position to all fours rivals an Olympic tumbler's dismount of the high bar: a loud thud after moments of seeming almost to hover in the air, most of us holding our breaths even though we know, most likely, he will make it.
The slick torture of our hardwood floors (with the old linoleum of the kitchen) has made crawling an exceptional challenge. Knees slip out from under the Boy faster than he can cope with, and after a few feet of crawling, he usually resorts to his scooting. Balance.
For her part, the Girl has taken on new challenges of the inner ear. Ballet would be the epitome of these new contests between self-control and inner ear, but it's only weekly. Limited. But never mind: she finds new tests of balance daily, like twirling seemingly endlessly to transform all possible potential bubbles to kinetic bubbles. Her ability to turn in circles, evidenced by so many pieces of playground equipment, makes most sane adults dizzy at even the thought. Yet there she is, turning, turning, turning, turning, turning.
Her latest balance challenge: roller skates. They might more aptly be named "roller walks" or "roller slips," but that's the nature of learning to keep ever-moving feet, unpredictably moving feet, under us. She hangs on with white knuckles to the stroller, demanding that we come to a full stop before she'll even consider --Â consider -- letting go.
It's been so long since I had anything with small wheels under my feet that I can't remember what to do, what knees, arms, thighs, arms, waist, or anything else should be doing, but I'm pretty sure that those locked knees are disaster in the offing.
"Bend your knees," I suggest. "Bend your knees a bit. Don't keep them so straight, so locked." She bends her knees to approximately 110 degree angles and promptly flops backward. She looks up at me with a hint of a glare, a hint of frustration, a hint even of betrayal.
"Not so much," I smile reassuringly, remembering that each question of balance consists of yet more, seemingly smaller mysteries of the inner ear.
Park and Ride
It’s the second day of Easter, and if we were still in Polska, everyone would have the day off. As it is, the twist of luck that gives L and me the day off due to spring break isn’t nearly so kind to K: she heads off to work while I stay behind with the kids.
The clouds subside by the time E goes down for his first nap — easy, gently, for he’s so tired that he doesn’t even have the energy to fuss. After lunch for us all, we head to the park.
The Boy gets on his four wheeler and sits and inspects the playground. The kids at the swings are out of control; those darting around the jungle gym are perhaps worse.
After a few moments of thought, he heads off to a somewhat deserted corner of the playground.
Third Sunday of Lent 2013
With the Boy, schedules and perspectives on them change. It was the same with with L, but you forget over time. The Boy reminded us quickly, and the reminders continue daily. Among the things that change of course is the notion of what it means to sleep in. That has changed gradually as we've left behind the carelessness of childhood and adolescence.
These days, sleeping in until half past seven is a luxury indeed, especially for for K. Sunday mornings.
From there, the rituals, old and new, take over. Sundays are days filled with ritual, both sacred and recreational.
Mornings lean toward the former; afternoons edge toward the latter.
