fun in threes, sometimes fours
the girl
Alligator is after L. She tells me that he starts lurking about around bath time. When we're getting her out of the bath, Alligator starts looking for her in earnest. I tell him he should look in the backyard. It buys us a little time. We get the Girl dressed, brush her teeth, and to her room, but by then, L is worried. It doesn't take that long to search the backyard, and Alligator might come back any moment.
Fortunately, Crocodile is available to stand watch.
Living this far south has its advantages: we’re still getting tomatoes from our backyard vines. More importantly, it makes getting out as a family easier, and the usual field trips continue.
Today, it is a trip to the zoo. L has been so many times that she has the sequence of animals memorized. The elephants get everything started — appropriate, because “they’re my favorite,” L declares.
The monkeys are next, followed by the reptiles. Usually L breezes through, barely glancing at the cold-blooded, slow-moving creatures. Today, though, they were unusually active, especially the rattlesnakes.
Once we get to the giraffes (who are right after the reptiles), though, L decides she’s had enough. “I want to go to the big playground,” she says, and we rush to the playground, stopping only long enough to get a picture with Bear.
The playground also has its routine. Swings are always first. Afterward, perhaps the slides, or maybe the huge jungle gym complete with music stations.
With the bright sun and warmth, we’re hardly the only ones out today. Everyone seems to realize that this could be the last truly warm weekend.
Then again, who would any of us be kidding?
Christmas could be almost this warm.
The problem is that the warmth is unpredictable. Planning birthday parties at the park — we’d love to have L’s at the park — becomes impractical because it might just turn cold that weekend. For this birthday group, though, the weather was on their side.
As we’re leaving, L surprises us by wanting to try a few new stations. This park has some truly innovated toys, though the first one L wants is a new twist on an old torture.
Nearby, though, is a track-based activity that is almost always broken: it seems to attract everyone, even teenagers who are much too heavy for it. Luckily, L’s interest coincides with a period of functionality. Next week it will almost certainly be broken again.
We return home and finish the day with a game of Candy Land. L quickly grasps the idea behind the game, but the multiple colors combined with the element of chance are too much for her. The fact that she might not get her favorite color — blue — is overwhelming, and so we make a new rule: L gets a blue card to begin with. Period.
With blue in hand, L happily goes along with just about anything.
Some daycare centers seem to attract a certain international clientele. Every year, the school sponsors an International Day when families can show off their heritage and learn a little about the world at the same time. The kids receive passports; each country receives a stamp. The kids arrive and it’s an endless cycle of visitors and visits.
This year, at Mexico’s booth, seasoned grasshoppers were available. I’m not certain they were a hit with the kids, but I took a handful to try. Salty, crunchy, proteiny, Israelitish. “We use as snacks, for tacos — that kind of thing,” says the host. “Not quite what you find in the typical Mexican restaurant,” K comments later.
While I was munching salty grasshopper, L was visiting her friend. Actually, since I tend to refer to L as “the Girl,” I suppose I could call this young lady, J, the Friend. “We hear L’s name all the time at home all the time,” J’s father tells me.
Not surprisingly, we hear J’s name at home all the time. For a while, L declared that her baby doll — generally referred to as “Baby” — was “J”, but that lasted only a few days. Perhaps it was odd to have a best friend and a baby with the same name.
L sees an elephant — her favorite — at the India and hustles over for a quick visit. This particular elephant is not supporting the world on its back; indeed, it seems to be supported by a soccer ball. I’m sure there could be some kind of symbolic significance, but before I have a chance to think further, L is off, returning to K. As usual, I tag along behind.
In a little over a month, Babcia will arrive for a several-week visit. It will be the first time in a year and a half that we’ve seen her; L has gone from being virtually an infant to being something more than a toddler.
L is excited about the arrival. She mentions it every now and then, and every time an airplane flies over our house, L points and asks, “Is that Babcia?”
It will be a time of linguistic development for L. She understands Polish perfectly, and she even mixes a few Polish words into her English vocabulary. She doesn’t speak more than these occasionally mixed up words. When Babcia arrives, though, it will be time to start speaking Polish.
Only recently it occurred to me that this might be almost as difficult as learning to speak English. Her initial instinct will be to speak English, and knowing L’s stubbornness, she is likely initially to refuse even to try. Babcia has a secret weapon, though: fluent Russian. She might turn the tables on L.
With L's newly found sweet wealth, a daily activity is the counting of the candy. We pour it all out at the kitchen table; we dump it on the coffee table; we spread it around the floor -- we count it again and again. And again.
It's a blessing and a curse, really: she is counting, but I'm not sure what she's counting is actually worth counting.
We were hoping that L's initial reaction to candy -- a wrinkled up nose and immediate retreat -- would last, but she's developed a love for sweets that we absolutely have to monitor.
"That much candy will last you for two months," I guessed the first time she dumped it out; with our one-a-day rule, I just about got it right.
A couple of weeks after our wedding, K and I went for a walk in the fields of Lipnica Wielka, the village in southern Poland that was my home for seven years, our home for one. We'd returned home from our honeymoon at Balaton, moved her stuff to our small apartment, and begun the process of settling down.
The day after I took this picture, I wrote in my journal,
Finally everything seems to have settled down a bit. [K] and I have moved into the apartment; we've done some decorating; we've had dinner here; we've gone to [K's] folks' house for Sunday lunch already. And here it is, just before seven, and I'm writing in my journal. Everything's back to "normal" in other words, but that "normal" isn't quite like it ever was before.
It's odd how one's sense of "normal" changes so easily. For several years, we had a "normal" newlywed life: traveling, having parties, meeting friends for dinner, staying up.
Then L came along, and for a while, getting no real sleep and always having an infant in our arms was "normal." Getting up multiple times in one night became an expected routine, and it often had its own pleasantness: there is an unparalleled intimacy involved in helping an infant -- getting a bottle, changing a diaper, calming a nightmare -- when the rest of the city is asleep.
Now "normal" is "No!" and "No, no, no!" It's "I want it!" and tantrums. It's dealing with independence in a still-dependent little girl. It can be more frustrating than getting up for the fourth time with an infant.
Soon enough, I know "normal" will be something entirely different, and it occurs to me, as it has to many through the millenia, that perhaps a static normal is not normal.
A trip to the orchard is supposed to involve stretching to pick the perfect apple that is just out of reach. It's supposed to mean a delicate tug and twist to remove an apple without causing others to fall to the ground. It's supposed to be about branches bending under the weight of apples. Last year it was about all those things. This year, it was a question of picking them off the ground.
It's a little disheartening to be scavenging apples rather than picking them, but Pink Ladies -- sweet with a tart edge and a crunch that is audible -- are not apples one leaves to rot on the ground.
So we picked them,
hauled them in baskets
as well as wagons,
and brushed them off and ate them.
Every now and then, we stopped for a group picture, which reminded me of the greatest features of digital photography: easy sharing. No more line of cameras at the photographer's feet. No more "One more! Just one more!"
No more last minute re-groupings as someone realizes that he wants a group picture, too.
And that certainly was a possibility, given the number of photographers in the group.
In an old zoo in Greenville that was covered with vines
Weaved hundreds of children in one very long line;
The smartest, cutest, and funniest was Madeline.
She was not afraid of the candy-sharing workers of the zoo,
And to the snake behind the glass, she just said "Poo poo!"
"Poo poo" to the lion, too.
The animals in the cages had all gone to sleep,
And it almost made poor little Madeline weep,
But the thought of more treats made her pick up her feet.
She posed for pictures with pumpkins and hay,
But in the end, she was glad to call it a day.
In the parking lot, "Watch out for the cars" was almost all she could say.
That Brooke — she’s a bad influence. At school, she teaches L to disregard all safety, to live on the edge, to do somersaults.
There were a handful of less-than-perfect landings for each perfect one.
For the first several months of L’s life, K and I could be fairly sure that everything she knew was something we’d taught her, directly or indirectly. Sometimes she would imitate us with prompting, sometimes without. There were few moments that prompted comments of “Where’d she get that?” and the like.
When she started spending time with other kids and adults at daycare, the gradual shift began. Slowly she picked up as much at daycare as at home; then, daycare overtook us.
Now she comes home with songs we’ve never heard:
Twinkle, twinkle traffic light…
Red means stop
Green means go
Yellow means very, very slow
She comes home with skills we haven’t touched on: tracing numbers and letters is the most recent.
These things come from the teacher, who told K this morning during the first of many parent-teacher conferences, that L is a “good old-fashioned girl” with good manners and a strong sense of right and wrong.
Other things come from friends. Brooke taught her how to swing by herself.
She’s growing more and more independent.
Now, she knows she can get her information from other sources, that she’s not dependent on us mentally any more than she is physically.
Which, in reality, is still quite comforting: still many years to go. It comes in mercifully slow steps.