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the girl

First Music

Friday 17 January 2014

The first album I ever bought is one I’m almost loathe to admit to now. The second, less so: Boston’s Third Stage. I was in seventh or eighth grade when I bought those albums, and it was no small feat, for my father had made a rule that he had to investigate and approve any music purchase I made. At the time, I thought it was ridiculous. As a father myself, now I understand.

Recently, L made a discovery: portable music is highly convenient. She’s been taking my iPod about, listening to whatever she finds on there that strikes her fancy. That’s almost fine: most of my music I’d willingly play for her, but there is this and that which I don’t think she’s quite ready for. Fortunately, she was more drawn to jazz than anything else. Ben Webster’s “Late Date” was a particular favorite.

Still, there’s always the risk of accidental discovery of something she’s not quite ready for. So when L suggested she buy her own MP3 player with the money she’s saved up, it seemed a good idea.

It came Wednesday, and I loaded it up with Ben Webster, Sonny Stitts, Buena Vista Social Club, Beatles, and similar selections, and K bought her the Frozen soundtrack as a first album.

And yet, as I sit here listening to the newest John Mayer on Spotify, I realize that by the time she’ll be the age I was when I first bought my first album, iPods will even seem old-school. All music available all the time.

What will she listen to?

I’m not so much worried about what she’ll listen to as I am the music her potential suitors will be drawn to. A boy who listens to misogynistic rap will likely be somewhat affected by it — at the very least, his disregard for what the man is actually saying will be worrying. Of course with the prevalence of free online porn, what the young man might be listening to might be of less concern than what he’s streaming on his phone.

All of this flashed in my thoughts as I saw L dancing about, singing along as best she could to a song she barely knows, and I thought that perhaps Babcia is right: the nineteenth century was so much better…

Using What You’ve Got

Tuesday 14 January 2014

I arrive home and the Boy is in the backyard with Babcia, and he absolutely, positively doesn’t want to come in. He’s rediscovered the simplest toy, a found toy: a big pile of dirt. Add a couple of sticks, and he’s positively in a daze of joy.

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He digs a little hole, moves to a new spot, digs a little hole, moves to a new spot, digs, moves, digs, moves, digs — a circle that seems endless.

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Soon L stops illustrating the driveway with chalk sketches abstract and traditional and joins us in our digging. Soon, she has an idea: a stick forest.

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E and I head deeper into the wild of the backyard to find more sticks. He tugs at exposed roots, drags sticks until something else attracts his attention, looks up trees until he loses his balance, picks up rocks and tosses them, and together, the three of us spend almost an hour together laughing, exploring, and playing completely toy-free.

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The common regret of modern life: we’re so spoiled that we’re ruining ourselves. Imagination in kids today sometimes seems to be as illusive as quicksilver, but hopefully not in our children, and today, some evidence.

A stick forest.

Not a bad idea. Progress.

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Monday 13 January 2014

New Park, New Experiences

After the cold, after the rain, after the dark, it was time yesterday finally to take the whole family out somewhere — anywhere — and do something. And so we packed the Girl’s bike, the Boy’s four-wheeler, some snacks, the camera, and Babcia and headed to a new park near Nana’s and Papa’s place. The boy has been doing circles in our house with his four-wheeler, but it’s a route filled with sharp turns and short straightaways. Yesterday he was able finally to rev his vehicle up to its full potential. At times I found myself trotting beside him thinking, “Perhaps we should put a helmet on him.”

We explored, took some pictures, chatted — just what we needed.

Aligning and Sighting

Sunday 12 January 2014

Dear Santa,

You brought L a telescope.

Thanks.

You clearly didn’t do a lot of thinking about how much of a puzzle it’s going to be for all involved.

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And you clearly didn’t care who would be doing the unraveling.

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But it’s not that difficult in the end. Getting the sighting scope aligned was easier than I anticipated, so I guess you know what you’re doing.

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And the excitement later in the evening, when I found and focused in on the moon…

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well, I guess it was worth it.

Moving On

Saturday 11 January 2014

For a while, it was Barbie. All Barbie, all the time. Barbie Volkswagen Beetle. Barbie bike. Barbie camper. One birthday, she got five, six Barbies, perhaps more. Like I said, all Barbie. So intense was her obsession that she even saved up all the money she got from grandparents and parents to buy a Barbie bike.

But interests change. Girls grow up. And soon enough the Girl informed us that we could pack away the Barbie camper. “I never play with it,” she explained. It sat at the base of her bed, taking up valuable space. So back in the box — honestly, it ever left, for the box was its garage — and down to the basement.

Eventually, all the Barbies and paraphernalia ended up downstairs.

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Fast forward a few months. Our church’s annual rummage sale — An Angel’s Attic it’s called — was approaching, and K was deciding what to sell. The subject of toys came up.

“You can sell all my Barbie stuff,” the Girl suggested casually one evening. There was of course the question of who gets the proceeds, for the church gets thirty percent of donated goods while seventy percent goes back to the owner.

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Once it became clear that she would get some of the money, she was all for it. And so this morning, while the Girl was off with a friend at the local science center, K gathered all the Barbie plastic and a number of other items and arranged them on the bed.

“Go up and see if you’re okay with selling everything on the bed,” K instructed when the Girl when she arrived home. She bounded up the stairs and returned shortly.

“Yes, that’s fine.”

But not so fine with me: as expected, she’s growing up faster than I was ever prepared to accept.

Checkout Line Lesson

Sunday 5 January 2014

080212 (Lannis Waters/The Palm Beach Post) BOYNTON BEACH - Customers check out at the new Boynton Beach Publix in Sunshine Square, which opened Thursday morning.

We buy a lot of yogurt: everyone in the house eats it, and so we head to the store on a regular basis on a yogurt run. This evening, L accompanied me after some hesitation: she was probably hopeful that she might get a little treat (we shared a bag of chips on the way home), but I was glad she was willing to go. She is not often.

We were standing in the checkout line, and L watched the customer-side screen that shows an itemized list of all the items purchased, along with the price.

“There’s a lot of things for sixty cents,” she observed.

“Well, what was the item we purchased the most of?”

She thought for a moment: “Yogurt.”

“So?”

“It’s all the yogurt!”

And then the real question I was interested in, for I’ve found myself these last months trying to teach my daughter some of the same things I’m teaching my eighth grade students. One of those skills is both the ability to infer and the ability to recognize when one is doing it. So I asked the question: “What skill did you just use?”

“Math?” A direct-from-observation-to-response answer: after all, she’d seen a lot of numbers clicking by, and it was what she’d paid most attention to.

“No. It begins with an ‘i’,” I prompt.

Nothing.

“Inferring.”

“Oh, right.”

The cashier, a young high school student, just smiled.

Singing Kids’ Songs

Tuesday 31 December 2013

One of the unexpected results of having kids in the house is the tendency I have of late to start whistling, humming, or even singing “The Wheels on the Bus” or similar songs out of the blue, walking down the hall at school, cooking lunch for the kids, driving to have my oil changed…

Wigilia 2013

Tuesday 24 December 2013

“You girls got to play all day yesterday; today, you’ll be helping out a lot.” Thus began the day, and thus the girls began their day of helping, much of which was more spiritual than physical. Still, transferring the clean dishes from the dishwasher and moving the dirty breakfast dishes from the table to the dishwasher was a good start

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And so for a change, every year’s is not the same, at least at the start. The girls all chip in throughout the morning, taking care of the Boy as he horses about,

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or cutting veggies for the Christmas morning breakfast. (How odd I used to find it that a Polish breakfast might include a salad of some sort or other; how odd I now find it that I used to find it odd.)

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It’s always amusing to me how a little Tom Sawyering can turn anything into a game for kids this age. At one point, one of the girls suggested they go up L’s room to play. “No,” the other two replied, “we want to help.”

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As the day turned to afternoon, though, the Girls’ help became more spiritual, less physical. T took out her holiday music and began playing for the Girls as they sang carols.

They began with “Angels We Have Heard on High,”

and followed it with “Go Tell It on the Mountain,” to which E added some avant garde accompaniment.

As we continued cutting, chopping, boiling, spicing, setting the table,

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and whining, the girls performed “Silent Night,”

and moved quickly to a very interesting arrangement of “Jingle Bells.”

Of course the girls wouldn’t be The Girls if they didn’t add something silly to the mix. T sat this one out, but C and L had great fun recording their version of “We Wish You a Merry Christmas.”

By this time, though, it was time to stop with the silliness and get started on the main courses for the evening. I went out to fire up the grill and the Girls all transformed. The Boy waited though. “He’s still wiping his nose on his sleeve,” K explained. “We’ll wait with him.” And so picture-perfect girls bounded about the house while I grilled salmon, fried an improvised invention (oyster and crab cakes, which I think I’ll try again), and Babcia looked on with a smile.

Once Nana and Papa arrived, the rest of the evening went by in a blur. We began as always: Papa read from the Gospel of St. Luke, chapter 2.

I scooted about, taking pictures, directing L to stop messing with E and listen to Papa, and generally worrying that the crab/oyster cakes might not be as tasty as I imagined.

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The dinner itself went by in a blur, which is always the case, and I always find it somewhat tragic. So much time spent preparing barszcz z uszkami, crab/oyster cakes, mushroom soup (where did those mushrooms come from? surely not Poland!), cabbage and mushroom pierogis, salmon, potatoes, and salad, cheese cake, Polish sweets, and a million other delicacies and it’s gone in about an hour. We try to slow down; we all comment on the tragedy of it all; and every single year, we all inhale it. This year was no different, which is both a complement to the chefs and a sad illustration of how quickly we all tend eat.

For the kids, though, it was normal: there was only one thing on their minds. The presents.

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So we moved to the living room, listened to more caroling,

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and eventually began opening presents.

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We tried out some of the gifts

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and lamented and celebrated that such an evening occurs only once a year.

Previous Years

Wigilia 2003
Wigilia 2004
Wigilia 2005
Wigilia 2006
Wigilia 2007
Wigilia 2008
Wigilia 2009
https://matchingtracksuits.com/2010/12/25/wigilia-2010
Wigilia 2011
Wigilia 2012

Pre-Wigilia Messes

Monday 23 December 2013

There’s a mess in the kitchen as the baking, baking, baking starts in the morning and extends into the evening.

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There’s a mess in the Girl’s room as three little girls and a little boy start playing in the morning and finish up in the evening.

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Seventh Birthday Party

Sunday 8 December 2013

The first party was such an event. Our first child’s first birthday party was, in a word, a first. This is not to say that successive years the significance of birthday parties has diminished. But firsts are firsts. With practice we’ve gotten better at the parties. Practice makes perfect.

In short, though, we’ve found that it’s simpler to pay other people to do the big stuff — the food, the cake, the drinks — while we focus on the fun. This year, an ice skating party. The Girl had a head-start, or perhaps foot-start, with all the roller skating she did this autumn on our fresh concrete drive. Her first ice adventure was halting, with complete reliance on the walker-like skating aid. This year, after a few minutes’ instruction, she was ready to head off on her own.

In a sense, that’s what birthday parties are all about, getting children ready to head off on their own. In her own time, in her own time, some might say. Still, even a seventh birthday is a suggestion of the development that is simultaneously distant and just around the bend.

I only have to look at E to be reminded how quickly it can pass.

Transformations

Saturday 7 December 2013

Today was a day of transformations. We put an entire chicken, a bit of beef with the bone, two stalks of celery, a few carrots, some fresh parsley, sage, and thyme into a pot with water and let heat and time transform it into a deceptively clear stock. It had a yellowish tint to it, and there were globules of grease floating on the time, but by the time we’d poured it through a fine sieve several times, it looked like it should have little to no taste. Warmed water. And yet…

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In the afternoon, we took a plain Fraser fir and transformed it into the magic of the season. Lights, baubles, ornaments, angels.

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Babcia, L, and K put on some carols — Frank Sinatra to begin with — and hung gingerbread houses and hearts, beads, and lights, and I piddled about the yard. Sort of sad: it’s always a highlight for me to decorate the tree, and I regret missing out on it. I always feel like a kid hanging the ornaments, sipping on something warm.

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And in a way, I am a kid at it: only in the last few years could I stop saying, “I’ve celebrated Christmas so few times I could count them on my fingers.” Yet not having participated in the holiday growing up makes it all the more meaningful for me now.

Yet early celebrations with K always lacked a little something. For me as a non-believer, Christmas was a season of pleasantries and friends, but little else. “If only people would be this nice to each other throughout the entire year,” I would say, and that was about the extent of the spirituality of Christmas for me: a longing for a kind of utopia that I thought briefly and imperfectly existed during the Christmas season.

Having converted to Catholicism, though, adds a new meaning to Christmas. Properly speaking and on a most basic level, it adds new vocabulary: Advent, St. Stephen’s Day, Vigil Mass. Of course there’s more to it than just vocabulary, but I’m still a bit ill-at-ease to discuss it further. Old faithless comforts (or in this case, lack of comfort) disappear slowly.

So that particular transformation is still incomplete. The water is still boiling around me, still drawing out the essences, purifying. It’s one more thing I’m waiting on in Advent.

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Indoors and Out, Sort Of

Saturday 30 November 2013

The day began with Polish lessons, with Babcia taking over for this particular round. This has its advantages, to be sure, the main one being her inability to speak English. Since the Girl can’t speak Russian, the only language Babcia and L have in common is Polish, so it forces the language out of L, squeezes it out of every little necessity.

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Once that was out of the way, it was playtime. The Girl’s favorite play location of late has been the livingroom couch, somewhat transformed.

“It’s a fort! An E-proof fort!”

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Something tells me that this will soon be a favorite of E, as well. He certainly stayed in the “fort” for a long time, and he seemed content the whole time, as did everyone else. The OCD version of Tata, though, was going just a little crazy with the mess. Good clean fun doesn’t really exist with a six-year-old and a toddler.

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In the evening, we decided it was time we finally went to Hollywild’s famous Christmas light safari (their term, not mine). We’d tried some years ago, but we’d given up and turned around after wandering about in the middle seemingly of nowhere for long enough to drive me batty.

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It’s a strangely American concept: set up an incredible number of lights — snow men, rocking horses, various Christmas scenes, various winter scenes — and let people drive their cars around in the display.

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“What a waste of gas!” some non-Americans (and likely some Americans as well) might suggest. “Why not get out and walk — you missed a chance for good exercise.”

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And that’s probably true, but this evening was particularly cold, and the Boy would not have fared well in such cold weather: he gets sick just thinking about getting sick. No, he gets sick with anyone around him thinking that he might get sick. It’s suggestive illness.

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And so we played along (as if we had a choice) and drive through the presentation, behaving perfectly cordially with all the other drivers (what a change) and patiently oohing and ahhing at all the right spots.

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“Look at the reflection!” L pointed out, right before Babcia did the same in Polish. Or was it the reverse?

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In the middle of the safari was the Enchanted Deer Forest, which was an odd term for the plot of muddied, treeless ground all the cars wandered about in as if they migrating animals, separated and lost from their herd.

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The enchanted deer part, though, was easy to see. They clumped around cars and ate from people’s hands, walking in front of slowly-moving cars without a care.

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We tried to get a few to come to our car, but the closes we came was a short, semi-attentive stare.

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To get really close to the animals, we had to get out of the car and into Santa’s Village. Who knew Santa had camels and bison and strange cattle?

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The Boy, though was strangely apathetic about the animals. He was much more interested in running, running, running. And falling. And running again,.

“We’ll come back in a couple of years,” K laughed as we headed back to the car, “When the Boy is interested in more than just running.”

Polish Sunday

Sunday 24 November 2013

Polish Mass
Polish baking
Polish games
Polish family

Babcia

Saturday 23 November 2013

has arrived.

Dac, Redux

Saturday 16 November 2013

When L began speaking Polish, we made a video of her saying her first word.
Now that the Boy is beginning to speak, we thought we’d do the same.
With the same word.