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the girl

Boat Ride Bookends, Part One

Monday 06 August 2012 | 1 Comment

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.

L has fallen in love with water this summer. Among her favorite sports to watch in London are swimming and diving; she asks daily to go to the pool; she flops about in the tub in her best imitation of Rebecca Soni. Despite her consistent love of water, though, she wasn’t that wild about the beach when we first went. Or when we went the second time. So when we headed to North Carolina with friends for a weekend at the lake, I was a but curious how she would take swimming in the open water.

As might be expected, she was a bit cautions at first. Thought she’d given up her arm floats earlier in the summer, she learned that one of the rules of the pier was that children must always wearÂ flotationÂ devices — and since there were no more swim belts, the Girl was stuck wearing her arm floats again.

There was also initial concern regarding what else might be swimming with her — or under her. Talk of an enormous catfish that broke a line earlier in the day had her worried and sitting on the edge for a while.

But only for a while.

Thus began a weekend of firsts. Fishing, for example — something that requires more patience than I thought the Girl had ever shown in her whole life. Something that involves touching things the Girl might not like to touch, like hooks and worms and fish. Something that can pass hours with only one reward: the peace of the wait.

Yet the girl is growing, and she’s always surprising us with what she can do, what she’s willing to try, what we can force her to eat. (Some humor intended there.) Fishing became the big hit for the Girl.

Yet there were the old stand-bys — what kid in history has been able to turn down an invitation to watch a film while sitting in an old water heater box?

Cramped, stuffy, view-blocking — it didn’t matter. What mattered was to beÂ in the box. The movie was only secondary entertainment.

With a full moon that night, though, adults had other forms of less-cramped, more serene entertainment.

Mixing

Friday 03 August 2012 | 0 Comments

The Girl has fallen in love with the Olympics. "Can I watch gymnastics tonight instead of reading before bed?" she asked last night. This morning, it's the same. She has her favorites, but she'll watch just about anything. Gymnastics, though, sends her into a hypnotic trance -- at least as much as a hyper five-year-old slide into motionlessness.

After breakfast, she, K, and the Boy curl up to watch beach volleyball -- not the Girl's favorite, but she still chants "U-S-A!" endlessly.

It's been an inspiring week for her. A week of growth. Rarely does she list "princess" as the first thing she wants to do with her life. Now the list includes gymnast, swimmer, dancer, and artist. Occasionally she adds "princess" to the mix," but so many other things seem so much more interesting.

But I'm not really worried about that kind of mixing. She'll have enough goal mixing as she grows up. I anticipate at least three different majors during her freshman year, now only thirteen years away. No, it's the little things that thrill me more.

Things like stabbing a green bean and a piece of chicken onto the lunchtime fork in an effort to kill the bean taste. Or mixing rice and leftover chicken.

Children’s Museum

Sunday 29 July 2012 | 0 Comments

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."

Meet the Boy

Saturday 28 July 2012 | 0 Comments

“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.

From Dawn to Dusk

Friday 27 July 2012 | 2 Comments

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

Applying another coat of Thompson’s on the deck (it didn’t make sense to leave a touch in one can) while K took care of the kids and did laundry;
Mowing in 95 degree pure sun as K took care of the kids and cooked barszcz;
Cleaning the house while K took care of the kids and did more laundry (The Boy goes through so much laundry that it’s a miracle there’s still water left in the county);
Taking the Girl for a promised swim as K took care of the Boy;

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 ofÂ Martha Speaks and the Boy took a post-meal snooze.

And nature provided the first test of four mornings’ of waterproofing

Princess Camp

Tuesday 24 July 2012 | 0 Comments

Princess ballet camp every Tuesday. Can you imagine anything any better?

The final session today ended with a performance, which included a bit of insight into how the little ballerinas get ready -- the stretching, the prep.

Cleaning

Monday 23 July 2012 | 0 Comments

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.”

The New

Sunday 22 July 2012 | 1 Comment

With temperatures what they are, the new will have to wait. Exploring this or that place with a sweaty infant does not in the least sound entertaining. For anyone.