fun in threes, sometimes fours
the boy
The Girl loves our cat, Bida. Loves. Too much. It borders on obsessive, and she traditionally has shown it in ways that are far from gentle. This probably explains why the Bida loves the basement hideaway we set up for her.
It also might explain her trepidation with our newest family member.
Fortunately for her, there’s really only one thing he wants to do.
The first real step toward mobility is probably the ability to roll over. The only thing we as parents can do to help that develop, though, is simply to put the Boy on his belly as often as possible, most frequently just before feeding.
Sitting, the second step, is something we can help him with. All we need is something to support him — from every direction.
Yet he remains more interested in his bib.
The Boy has been discovering his hands, discovering that he has them, discovering that he can control them.
The final day at Lake Tillery also included a boat ride, with the girls sitting in the back singing Polish Christmas carols as the Boy slept.
The destination: "Big Bridge," a name that sounds just like something a three- or four-year-old would name a bridge that is rather large. Sort of like Big Wolf. (He still sleeps with the Girl every night. "He keeps me calm," she once explained.)
Of course, there was one last swim...
Day two at Lake Tillery began and ended with a boat ride. “I’ve never been on a boat,” L announced in excitement, obviously having forgotten earlier rides in Slovakia.
Yet it was certainly the Boy’s first boat ride, the first time we bundled him up in a life jacket.
“L would not have put up with this for a moment,” K laughed as we pulled out of the channel into the lake. The Boy, though, simply snuggled into the jacket and fell asleep.
Had he known who was driving, he might not have been quite so calm. L’s best friend from Montessori, E, was at the wheel, his father at his side, doing a fine job despite the jokes.
Pulling into the dock of E’s aunt, K immediately loosened the Boy’s life jacket and found a place for him to continue his apparently eternal nap.
The Girl took a quick break, and upon waking, the Boy joined his mother in the lake with his newest friends.
Our trips to Rock Hill are almost always the same: we go to visit family. It's a rhythm, as predictable as the beat of a Sousa march. That's not meant to be a complaint: there's comfort in ritual.
Yet sometimes, it's good to change the beat a little. K, with her adventuring spirit, is always a catalyst for those changes.
"Did you know there's a children's museum in Rock Hill?" she asked earlier this week. "Maybe we could go on Sunday, after we meet with family." I did not know, but after a lazy morning, we head out for Main Street in downtown Rock Hill.
The museum is small -- minuscule, in fact, compared to the Children's Museum of the Upstate here in Greenville, which is three stories of adventure. Yet L doesn't complain. She takes off exploring immediately.
Papa doesn't complain either. He gets the Boy, who at eleven weeks looks and feels (he weighs over sixteen pounds already and is already wearing clothes for babies six to nine months old) much older than he is.
The Girl, though, has no time to sit for pictures with Papa, or anyone else for that matter. There is a pulley systems to explore.
And a scale with a barrel of bean bags beside it.
"Which do you think weighs more? A round one or a square one?" I ask. We perform an impromptu experiment to determine that square ones weigh a touch more.
But what happens if we put them all in? Every last bean bag?
And what happens if we put everything in sight into the sale?
Soon, she's creating magnet art with K, exploring the dress up room (located inside a vault -- the building used to house a bank), and returning to her favorite stations.
In the end, she finds perfection: a small kitchen with two buckets of bean bags. She spreads them all over the floor, then takes the broom and sweeps them into piles before collecting them in small wooden buckets she later dumps into the barrels.
"Daddy, I'm Cinderella," she begins, and I know the rest: "And you're the evil step-mother." I tell her how awfully she's cleaning, then kiss her and remind her, "We're just playing, remember? I don't really think you're doing an awful job."
"Oh, I know."
"Everyone wants to meet the Boy," Nana explained a few weeks ago, and so we take a trip to Rock Hill to see the aunts, uncles, and cousins.
A trip to Rock Hill means a trip to one of the best hosts we know -- my aunt. She'll suggest a get together, say she wants to cook as little as possible, then bring out half a dozen different dishes. We arrive early to help out a bit. I cut some squash; K makes herself busy with melons; and soon, we have too many cooks in the kitchen.
When the rest of the family arrives and adds their food, we we end up with a bar covered with salads alone. "If anyone leaves hungry," Nana often laughs, "It's his own fault."
Yet tasty as it is, the food is not the reason for the visit. Family, family, family -- and this is only the smallest portion of the smallest percent of our huge family. Had all the cousins and their children come, we would have easily had forty or fifty people in the house.
Yet enough cousins came to make a party for the kids as well.
I watch the kids -- who can even count them all? -- playing and screaming, and I think, "This must be what it's like to be the Brady Bunch."
Not a bad thought, indeed.
This was written on the 28th but not uploaded due to a lack of internet access. Plus, I have to keep my once-a-day record up for July, hence the cheating back-dating.
Breakfast should have been a hint of the day to come. While at Aldi yesterday, we found a real deal on small fillets, so we had steak (one fillet shared between the two of us) and eggs for breakfast.
The Girl entertained the Boy while we finished up breakfast, and I joked, “This is the kind of breakfast that sticks with you until dinner.”
Little did we know how busy we would be
It looks like such a short, innocuous list, but between steps three and four, K and I fell asleep while the Girl watched an episode of Martha Speaks and the Boy took a post-meal snooze.
And nature provided the first test of four mornings’ of waterproofing
K heads upstairs with the Boy and the camera. "We haven't done any portraits in a while," she says, "and the light is good in the bedroom.
With a two-month-old, frequent portraits reveal the cumulative daily changes that seem to slip by almost unnoticed.
Like toenails that need trimming.
It's a time of recycling. All the infant toys that have sat in storage for literally years are now out, dumped in the bathroom sink for a good scrubbing before handing them off to the Boy.
The Girl's constant refrain -- "Can I help?" -- receives an enthusiastic "Yes."