fun in threes, sometimes fours
the boy
Of late, the Girl really enjoys playing with the Boy. Not pestering him; not hanging on him; not kissing him mercilessly. Playing with him. Granted, she still does all those things: she gets a little carried away with her affection. (But then, who doesn’t?) Still, there’s been more developmental play of late, trying to get the Boy to do this or that. More gently some days than others, but still. Improvement is improvement.
"I've had him for an hour; it's your turn." K woke me with those words last night, or rather, this morning, at around three. It's not an entirely uncommon occurrence, but neither is it really all that frequent. Like most things with infants, the trouble is, you never really know when it's going to strike. A Tuesday night/Wednesday morning is a particularly bad choice, in my estimation, but there was little I or anyone else could do about it.
I took him in my arms and knew immediately it was not going to be a short exercise. The Boy's head popped right up, and he glanced around the room, taking in as much as the blue-tinted nightlight could illuminate.
"Nah nah nah!" he cooed, then patted me on the shoulder -- his way of saying, "All is well, Dad. Let's go!"
And go we did. We watched a little bit of a documentary; we played a bit; I graded some papers. (My sarcasm was unmistakable in those particular marginal notes.) At four, the fussing began, and I thought, "Not that bad. An hour? I can survive that." I walked the circuit through our kitchen and living room. The head plopped down on my shoulder. And stayed down. A few more circles, then up to bed. I lay him in his crib, took two steps away, and the howling began again.
Repeat previous paragraph.
At five, when he finally went down, I figured it made little to no sense to sleep for thirty to forty minutes, so I made the morning coffee and began wondering just what kind of a day was in store for us all.
Shortly after dinner, the inevitable.
The Boy wants to stand. Just like the Girl at this age, he pushes up into a wobbly standing position any and every time he has enough support.
We discovered tonight, though, that unlike L, the Boy loves the strange, hang-in-the-doorway bouncer that we got from who knows where or whom.
He liked the effect of jumping, bouncing here and there. He liked the effect of swinging, the gentle motion causing him to squeal his "I'm thrilled silly" squeal.
But mostly, he liked to swing his legs wildly. That boy's going to be a runner, I tell you.
“Our Father, who art in heaven,” we all intoned together during Mass this morning, and as I recited the prayer, I caught a glimpse of my reflection in the glass separating us in the sadly named “Crying Room” from the rest of the parishioners. For a second, I stared. It’s not that I didn’t recognize myself — that would be silly. But it struck me that the reflection had aged some, that the reflection was somehow not a true image of the real me, the young me, the just getting started me, the “me” we all invest so much energy into. Then, seeing a reflection of L, standing beside me, I realized I was paying less attention to myself of late and more attention to more important things. At least that was the reflection I wanted to see. Ask others and they’re likely to say I haven’t changed that much at all. Or maybe they won’t.
The funny thing about reflections is that they often “distort” because we’ve already distorted our own self-image. Perhaps that’s why so many don’t like having their picture taken: the photo shows them an individual they hardly recognize because it is so misaligned with how they see themselves, or want to see themselves. It’s a reflection they can’t manipulate by turning their good side or altering the light. It’s time and reflection frozen, and those little slices of existence can be very unflattering when taken completely out of the contextual stream of our lives.
In some ways, then, the ultimate mirror is our children. By the time a child is L’s age, she’s reflecting much more than what we show her, and that’s always of concern. Yet children always act as a mirror for parents, and if we parents pay attention, the reflection our children provide can be a self-correction device.
It’s easy to get caught up with this reflected light, though, and think it’s the real thing. Plato and St. Paul both talk about this from different directions but with the same effect: we see ourselves reflected in the crying room glass (what a metaphor for the world — a crying room) and think that reflection is all there is to it. We forget to look through the glass to see what’s on the other side.
The same could happen with our children. When we live too vicariously through our children, when we try to force them to reflect the light we want in all situations, we’re doing the same thing. We’re not looking through the pane of our children’s achievements but merely at our reflection within it.
Looking at my reflection this morning, I thought back to an earlier point in the Mass when the Fr. Joe was swinging the thurible over the altar, with great wafts of smoke rising and curling, slowly creating a haze around the altar that we could have not only seen but smelled had our family not been in self-exile in the crying room. Fr. Joe’s words, too, were altered, coming through speakers that made him sound remote and artificial.
That somehow seems to be a metaphor for all the things we miss out on when we get too caught up in all those reflections. And one of the dangers of always carrying around a camera is the tendency to increase that separation, to view what’s going on around as cliche director in one of those films about films, always going around with his thumbs and forefingers making a rough frame for imagining life to be a film, a two-dimensional projection of one’s own overly-hyped interpretations.
At the very least, we can wait to impose a storyline on life until we are home, the kids are in bed, and we’re sitting a keyboard.
When the Girl was much younger, much smaller, and much lighter, we spent a lot of time down at the swing. L could pass whole afternoons in the swing if she would have had someone there patient enough to push her that long. If took the time, I could find pictures of me pushing her, Papa pushing her, Dziadek pushing her, friends pushing her -- anyone who came for a visit, down there by the small creek that forms the boundary between our property and the neighbor's, pushing, pushing, pushing. Higher, higher, higher. That was the formula.
Today, we took the Boy down for the first time.
It must be genetic -- his love and fascination were instantaneous.
One day, a day of brilliant sun and warmth. A day of walking and running on boardwalks and paved paths throughout Conestee Park.
A day of friends giggling laughing freely.
A day of a little boy standing a little taller.
A day of friends.
Another day, a day of rainy departures.
I think we all agree: the first day was better.
We lowered the Boy’s mattress today. He’s about to be able to sit up on his own, and it was courting disaster to leave it so high.
Now, from a certain perspective, he’s in a prison cell.
He doesn’t seem to mind too much.
And once he can push himself into a sitting position on his own, he’ll have a whole new point of view.
If you could have one superpower, what superpower would you choose? Why?
--Plinky
The Boy is working on his first superpower. It's an amazing feat of balance, coordination, and timing -- and something we all take for granted. It's a cliche now to say that walking is nothing short of controlled falling. Yet the Boy can't even crawl yet, let alone stand, let alone walk: even with support, he wobbles and sways.
So he is indeed working on superpowers.
When you’re colorblind, certain doors are most definitely shut to you. Being a fighter pilot, as I understand it, is out. Being an interior decorator or fashion designer, also out, though I don’t really care much about either one of those exclusions. The fighter pilot thing would upset me if I hadn’t already understood that my nearsightedness disqualified me.
I’ve recently learned, though, that certain games are immeasurably more difficult for us colorblind folk. Like Bubble Pop on the Nexus. With dark blue and purple, I’m lost. With shades of green, red, and brown that blend into an identical blob, it’s hopeless for me.
The girls are enjoying it, though.
After several days of rain, days of grey skies that look identical at ten in the morning and three in the afternoon, days of — let’s be honest — Polish-looking skies, the bright light of the dawn this morning literally stopped me mid-step. A ribbon of yellowish, pinkish, orange light (at least to this colorblind fellow) stretched across the backyard, with a muted blue sky rising above.
It was a day of clarity. The Girl, clearly growing older, conquered her first extended Lego-building session. Sure, there was a lot of help, but that was to be expected: the lower age on the box is still a year beyond Lena’s experience. We worked together, exploring the wonder of perspective drawings in instructions, how one could position the in-progress creation just right beside the instructions and see exactly where the next blocks belonged. By the end, I was only checking; she was doing the building.
Relationships clarified themselves further. That the Girl loves her little brother has been obvious from the start, but today she was able to sit and actually play with him for extended periods without the silly five-year-old drama (after all, she’s six now) that made every other playtime an exercise in self-entertainment for the Girl. Today, she seemed truly interested in helping E enjoy himself. Until the end, when the silly L returned. But still, progress. Growth.
And in the evening, with the clouds still at bay (they’re scheduled to return this weekend), the moon shone clearly through the branches of the trees, turning this morning’s watercolor into an etching. I went out with the intention of doing some bracketed shots for an HDR shot.
In the end, after merging the photos and doing the requisite tone mapping, I realized the original was better. It whispered the hints of mystery that have kept the generations looking upward and feeling comforted by the clarity.