the boy | matching tracksuits

Dzień Dziecka

Sunday 01 June 2014 | 0 Comments

We were in the backyard, blowing bubbles, chasing bubbles, popping bubbles -- just a bit of outside time between our return from Mass and the Boy's nap time.

Suddenly, Mama appeared.

"I've got surprises for you two!" she said, in Polish of course. "Today is Dzień Dziecka."

It sounds so much more natural to me in Polish: Children's Day. Nah. Dzień Dziecka. In the States, we only have Father's Day and Mother's Day; Poland adds Children's Day, Grandparents' Day, Siblings' Day, Uncles' Day, Aunts' Day, Cousins' Day, Second Cousins' Day, Cousins' Twice Removed Day. Well, perhaps not to that degree, but they don't stop at just two family days.

One could argue that every day is Children's Day, especially in big families. Still, it's nice to have an excuse to give kids a little something to make them smile, like new books or a new train for a growing Thomas collection.

Shoots and Roots

Saturday 31 May 2014 | 0 Comments

This year, our garden is much bigger than previous years: more than double the size, in fact, which only means we've added two more raised beds. We had slowed down significantly the last couple of years because of the additional joys and responsibilities the Boy brought, but now that he's growing, so is our garden.

Gardening is one of those things that reminds me how much I've changed as I entered adulthood, married, and become a father. As a teen, or even in my early twenties, I couldn't imagine spending the amount of time I do setting up lines for beans to crawl up, hunting suckers on young tomato plants, looking at several sprawling cucumber plants and wondering if they can be enticed to climb (they can), examining leaves of radishes to determine what's eating them -- and doing all this willingly and even enjoying it.

Boys’ Afternoon

Thursday 29 May 2014 | 0 Comments

What do you do when the Girl is off with Nana and Papa (or "Papa-Nana" as the boy calls them) and Mama is not scheduled to come back until a full hour after her usual time? What are two boys to do? Playing with cars is a definite must, including lining them up, rearranging that lineup, and directing the Older Boy to play with this one, not that one while the Older Boy tries desperately to provide the Boy with yet another opportunity to practice sharing.

Dipping your bread into your soup when there's no one else to give you dirty looks -- well, K wouldn't do that anyway, but that doesn't sound as good -- is another must.

Sick Sunday

Sunday 25 May 2014 | 0 Comments

Sick Saturday

Saturday 24 May 2014 | 0 Comments

The Boy always stays sick. Or is it a dairy allergy? At any rate, he’s always coming down with something, and so when we took him to the doctor ten days ago, this weekend’s plans wobbled just a little: “He might not be up to camping,” K said. I was optimistic, though: “He’ll get better.” But as he was getting better, K started feeling worse. “Perhaps you and L can go on the camping trip instead of all four of us,” she suggested. Then Wednesday, L returned home from school feeling positively awful and slept from four to seven, then went back to bed at nine and slept till seven the next morning. Three out of four, that meant only one thing: Tata has to step up his game.

Cleaning, diaper changing, cut bandaging, medicine dosing — I usually miss these things on a spring Saturday morning. This or that gardening/hardware/tool store is calling, or the lawn beckons, or the Leyland cypresses stretch out to remind me they need a trimming. It’s always something. This morning, though, it was just an ever-running laundry, new adventures with a fussy son, a cat in the laundry basket, and cold coffee.

Enough to make me appreciate again all the things that K accomplishes inside while I’m outside on a Saturday.

By the early afternoon, the kids had both rebounded almost fully. The Boy and I went on a little field trip while L was up the street at a friend’s house. By the evening, K was once again exhausted — she insisted on cooking dinner — and the kids were tired from their newly-rediscovered outside freedom.

“Water!”

Friday 23 May 2014 | 0 Comments

Jazz 2014 and Puppies

Tuesday 20 May 2014 | 0 Comments

Tonight was L's jazz concert. Greenville Ballet divides the two forms into separate lessons (unlike our former school, which had half an hour of ballet followed by half an hour of jazz), and this year they had two separate shows. If last night's performance was any sort of standard, it was certainly magnificent.

Meanwhile, at the house, the Boy and I had our own adventure: a walk to the drug store, some swinging time, some up-the-stairs, down-the-stairs time -- everything a boy and his father needed to make a perfect evening of it.

Bedtime presented its own challenges. As I was dressing the Boy for a hopefully-long, hopefully-restful evening, I slipped his puppy pajama bottoms on without thinking about the fact that the matching shirt was nowhere to be found. He was fine with it, but started asking a little later about the top: I'd laid him on the bed to slide him into his sleeping sack when he began asking, "Sapappies?"

"We don't have the top, E," I reassured him. "I don't know where it is."

Despite this reasoned explanation, the protests grew more frantic: "Sapappies! Sapappies!"

I tried explaining again, but it was not no avail: he slid off the bed, marched to his chest of drawers, and began opening them one by one. Look in, he'd exclaim, "No!" before slamming the draw closed (I could just hear the screams if he caught his finger in one) and opening the next. The third attempted was successful. "Tu! Tu!" he shouted ("Here! Here!" in English). He pulled out a pair of socks and cried, "Sapappies!"

(Note to non-Slavophiles: "socks" in Polish is "skarpetki," so in typical dual-language fashion, he applied a bilingual double-plural to it in addition to the ineffably charming pronunciation.)

Independence and Responsibility

Sunday 18 May 2014 | 0 Comments

Sick at Home, Tired at Rehearsal

Thursday 15 May 2014 | 0 Comments

The Boy, in one form or another, stays sick lately. Or so it seems. Today was my turn to watch him, to take him to the doctor, to help him with his newly-prescribed breathing treatment. We started the morning playing with cars on the sofa. It ended quickly.

That was the morning. Afternoon and evening were spent in an auditorium as the Girl prepared for her two (count them: two) dance recitals coming up, jazz and ballet. I took my little laptop along with the intention of returning to a recent writing idea that seems promising but got off to a wrong-footed start that I only really realized how wrong-footed 25,000 words into it. While writing, though, two random thoughts:

Random Thought One

The girls running across the stage, somewhat stumbling occasionally, reveal the irony of grace: in learning to be graceful, we're often anything but. We watch a professional company's performance of the Nutcracker, and the dancers seem positively to float across the stage. The lifts look more like the man his keeping the ballerina from soaring of into space rather than supporting her. These little girls look more like kids in the playground playing cowboys and Indians, galloping about like mad, than like ballerinas–when judged against that standard of near-perfection that professionals seem to achieve. But grace and elegance comes in many forms and is in itself somewhat relative. After seeing how spastic L can be, in the completely natural, seven-year-old way, it's an act of supreme grace just for her to tiptoe onto the stage, hands on her hips, and slide gently into first position.

Random Thought Two

I once made the analogy with a professor that for me, faith was like watching people dance from a sound-proof chamber. “I see the unity, the ritual, the sequence, but not hearing the music myself, I only suspect what is choreographing it all.” Dr. R said that was a very positive view, and perhaps he thought then what it took me almost twenty years to figure out for myself: my professed atheism might give way to something more musical.

During the last few months, I've experienced the opposite: while sitting in the Greenville Ballet and Jazz waiting room as L took her weekly lesson on Monday afternoons, I heard the same song over and over. A few moments here, then stop; a few more snippets of the song, then silence again. Muffed voices as the instructor presumably corrected this or that dancer, perhaps the group as a whole. I had no idea what the whole might look like. While waiting for L's group's performance, it finally all came together: an older group of girls, probably just a bit older than my students.

Back home, I check on the song, apparently a band called Capital Cities: