the girl
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?"
Tabula Rasa
Dear Terrence,
I handed out report cards today along with the notices to your parents about which classes some of you guys are failing for the year. Of course we only include the core academic classes in that list: English, science, math, and social studies. You’re failing all four.
Why?
I think we all know, but you provided eloquently ironic commentary on this when I asked you guys to do your quarterly grade assessment. Three simple questions:
- What are your grades like?
- Are your grades what you expected? Why are/aren’t they like you expected?
- What specific actions can you take to change this for the fourth quarter?
When I took up the papers, yours was blank. Just your name in the corner. Nothing else.
This has your modus operandi throughout the school year. When I ask you about it, you always respond the same: “It’s hard. I don’t get it.” Surely you can’t say the same thing about this, though. Surely you understand this. It’s simple. But it’s hard: self-reflection, honest self-reflection, always is.
As I was thinking about today’s letter to you, I was helping my daughter with her homework. She gets monthly homework tables, and she’s trying to get the whole month done in a single week. Today she had to do the following:
Remember your 3-D shapes. Draw a sphere, cylinder, cube, cone, and pyramid. List something around your house that is shaped like each one.
“Daddy!” she exclaimed, “I can’t do pyramids!”
We looked online, found a drawing of a pyramid, talked about the lighter and darker lines, and she said, “Okay, I can try.”
That’s all you need to do. I’m not looking for perfection; no teacher is looking for perfection. We just need effort. You just need effort, because you’re creating such dangerous habits for yourself with this chronic underachieving.
If I could, I’d sit by you all the time, like I sat by my daughter, but I can’t. No one can. It’s the tragedy and beauty of growing up.
With hope,
Your Teacher
Just the Two of Us
A Sunday morning that begins like this is likely to end as a somewhat sad Sunday. Not enough baggage for the whole family. Someone's staying. In this case, the Girl and I as K and the Boy head to Poland.
We try to make the best of the morning. There's more tadpoling -- it's a new term for us -- and some experimentation.
We try our hand at making a dam, but it is only moderately successful. The child in me begins scheming how we could reinforce the dam, make it more nearly water tight, soon enough the Girl loses interest and we begin looking for flowers.
Some day. Some day, we'll build that dam.
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.
Playing Cinderella with the Girl
“We can play Cinderella!” And so we play Cinderella. “We can tell a story!” And so we tell a story.
Cinderella Around the House
I got my book to clean. I got the laundry and put it in the washing machine. It got me stressed out because it was hard. I did a lot of work to do it.
I cleaned the toilet after I read the page in my book. It told me to get the cleaner, and I got the brush and cleaned the toilet.
I read the page of my book and it said to scrub the mirror, scrub the floors, and mop the floor.
While I was cleaning, my stepmother was resting, playing a game of chess on the computer, and taking a nap. She was eating and telling me chore after chore.
Old Ball Game
I never really played baseball as a kid. Due to various other commitments, Little League in all its guises was always out. Except for softball for the men, the church league in which I often participated didn't really offer ball/stick sports.
Riding a bike -- I did a lot of that. I lost a lot of skin in various wrecks and came to accept the fact that strawberries are always in season. The Girl, bless her heart, has not yet come to accept the fact that skinned knees are a part of the bike riding experience. The dreaded turn at the park notwithstanding, there really have been few occasions for the Girl to get bloodied up. In a sense, I'm thankful for that. Still, a bit pain, some skin left on the pavement -- what doesn't kill us and all that.
The Boy gets a hefty dose of pain on a daily basis, with slips and bonks, miscalculated head motions, blind ignorance. It all comes with the job of being a normal ten-month-old. His pain is a little more difficult to deal with as a parent: we can't simply explain, "Rub it out -- it will make you stronger. Just tough it out." In fact, we might not even always be sure what is causing the pain.
Pain and baseball (finally) don't often together either. Unless you count frustration -- the steep learning curve that's necessary for even simple catch. Though I biked more than I baseballed, I always enjoyed a game with kids of the neighborhood. Some of them played real ball -- and were good -- and I often felt a bit out of the loop. If we were picking teams, I was almost always selected last, for I was as ignorant of the concept of a strike zone, swinging at most anything, as I still am about the infield fly rule. But I enjoyed playing catch with Dad, and I enjoyed play baseball well into the late darkness of a summer night, with both teams taking occasional timeouts to catch new fireflies to smear the ball with florescence.
Now I'm on the other end of things, the teacher, not quite sure if I can really teach something I don't know how to do well myself. I can at least teach the Girl to throw overhanded, to snatch a ground ball, and to pound her fist into her pink and purple "Girlz Rule" mitt.
And we can share the evolving joy of a game of catch after dinner.
