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Clean, Clean, Clean

Saturday 27 April 2013

“I wish today was Monday!” It’s rare for a six-year-old to say something like that on a Saturday afternoon, I would assume, but this Monday is not just an ordinary, begin-the-week blues Monday. Sure, we have the day off of school — a snow-make-up day that the county works into the schedule in case we have that rarest of rare snow days, which we didn’t this year. No, it’s not that we have the day off. Indeed, L is so fascinated with early dismissal that she was complaining Friday that we have Monday off. “I wish we had school Monday so I could get early dismissal!”

What would get a little girl more excited about a Monday, school or no school, than anything else? Mama returns, with little E, after three very difficult weeks in Poland.

K is coming back, so that can only mean one thing for a family with a Polish mother. Even without this post’s title, one could probably guess what we did today. L was in charge of her room while I did the rest of the house. Piles of art materials on her work table disappeared. Books returned too shelves. Some old art work got tossed out. In short, a miracle occurred in the corner bedroom.

Developing Spring

Thursday 25 April 2013

“Daddy! Daddy!” come the cries of excitement from the front of the house. “Daddy, you have to see this!”

The zinnias are sprouting. “Unless they’re weeds,” she says stoically as we head back to the front yard.

“It’s entirely possible,” I mumble to myself. But they’re coming up just in the center of the pot, almost certainly zinnias. How would I know? I couldn’t recognize them in full bloom let alone when they’re just sprouting.

More squeals from the backyard moments later: “You have to see this!” The snap dragons’ blooms are opening.

“Are they everything you expected?” I ask as I head up the stairs to inspect them.

“Well, no,” she says with her sly grin. “I was hoping they would snap!”

In Bloom

Tuesday 23 April 2013

Planting Plus

Saturday 20 April 2013

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

Friday 19 April 2013

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

Thursday 18 April 2013

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

Tuesday 9 April 2013

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

Monday 8 April 2013

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

Saturday 6 April 2013

“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

Friday 5 April 2013

“We can play Cinderella!” And so we play Cinderella. “We can tell a story!” And so we tell a story.

Cinderella Around the House

Friday 5 April 2013

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

Wednesday 3 April 2013

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 withÂ 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.

Balance

Tuesday 2 April 2013

Happiness is not a matter of intensity but of balance, order, rhythm and harmony.
Thomas Merton

For the first few months of our lives, it’s our goal, our solitary goal, though we’re not even aware of it. Trying to calm that sloshing inner ear so we can crawl, stand, walk, run — it’s all we struggle for during our first months. In truth, it’s what we struggle with our whole lives, always upping the challenge, always looking back at our earlier miracles of balance as if they were simple magic shop card tricks all nine-year-olds revel in. They are miracles because all motion, not just walking, is controlled falling. Coordinated near-disaster.

The Boy, lately a master of scooting who is graduating slowly to crawling, nonetheless likes to press his luck and try the stairs. It strikes him suddenly, this urge that, like Everest to George Herbert Leigh Mallory, inspires him to climb simply “because it was there.” Often he’s on the other side of the room when he realizes he hasn’t ascended the stairs in some time — usually a few minutes — and with a shout of recognition, flings his entire body forward, catching his whole upper weight with his chubby arms, lowering himself into position, then crawling like some new army recruit scooting under the barbed wire of an obstacle course. There’s not much question of balance in this scooting, but the force with which he throws himself forward from a sitting position to all fours rivals an Olympic tumbler’s dismount of the high bar: a loud thud after moments of seeming almost to hover in the air, most of us holding our breaths even though we know, most likely, he will make it.

The slick torture of our hardwood floors (with the old linoleum of the kitchen) has made crawling an exceptional challenge. Knees slip out from under the Boy faster than he can cope with, and after a few feet of crawling, he usually resorts to his scooting. Balance.

For her part, the Girl has taken on new challenges of the inner ear. Ballet would be the epitome of these new contests between self-control and inner ear, but it’s only weekly. Limited. But never mind: she finds new tests of balance daily, like twirling seemingly endlessly to transform all possible potential bubbles to kinetic bubbles. Her ability to turn in circles, evidenced by so many pieces of playground equipment, makes most sane adults dizzy at even the thought. Yet there she is, turning, turning, turning, turning, turning.

Her latest balance challenge: roller skates. They might more aptly be named “roller walks” or “roller slips,” but that’s the nature of learning to keep ever-moving feet, unpredictably moving feet, under us. She hangs on with white knuckles to the stroller, demanding that we come to a full stop before she’ll even consider –Â consider — letting go.

It’s been so long since I had anything with small wheels under my feet that I can’t remember what to do, what knees, arms, thighs, arms, waist, or anything else should be doing, but I’m pretty sure that those locked knees are disaster in the offing.

“Bend your knees,” I suggest. “Bend your knees a bit. Don’t keep them so straight, so locked.” She bends her knees to approximately 110 degree angles and promptly flops backward. She looks up at me with a hint of a glare, a hint of frustration, a hint even of betrayal.

“Not so much,” I smile reassuringly, remembering that each question of balance consists of yet more, seemingly smaller mysteries of the inner ear.

Park and Ride

Monday 1 April 2013

It’s the second day of Easter, and if we were still in Polska, everyone would have the day off. As it is, the twist of luck that gives L and me the day off due to spring break isn’t nearly so kind to K: she heads off to work while I stay behind with the kids.

The clouds subside by the time E goes down for his first nap — easy, gently, for he’s so tired that he doesn’t even have the energy to fuss. After lunch for us all, we head to the park.

The Boy gets on his four wheeler and sits and inspects the playground. The kids at the swings are out of control; those darting around the jungle gym are perhaps worse.

After a few moments of thought, he heads off to a somewhat deserted corner of the playground.

Easter 2013

Sunday 31 March 2013

An Easter of firsts. And seconds. And thirds.

The first time in three months that everyone is together at Nana’s and Papa’s for dinner.

The first time the Boy tries ice cream.

And the second time he tries ice cream. It’s a hit from the beginning. He watches K eat her cone, reaching for it incessantly.

Until he gets his third taste. And his fourth. And some more — too many to count.

He’s sold.

Holy Saturday 2013

Saturday 30 March 2013

Blessing the baskets, digging the garden, and more.

Sixth Sunday of Lent 2013

Sunday 24 March 2013

Palm Sunday is not supposed to be like this: rainy, cold, miserable. The expressions tell the whole story: we’re not pleased with the lack of spring. It makes the whole process somehow just a touch gray, literally and figuratively.

It’s hard to smile when the temperature outside never rises above the low forties, and the rain has been puttering down, on and off, for three days.

Even the Boy, not feeling 100%, got a bit of the Polish-American Gothic vibe.

#34 — Chance and Meeting

Saturday 23 March 2013

“We want everything that has value to be eternal.”

“Now everything that has a value is the product of a meeting, lasts throughout this meeting, and ceases when those things which Â met are separated.”

“That is the central idea of Buddhism (the thought of Heraclitus). It leads straight to God.”

“Meditation on the chance which led to the meeting of my father and mother is even more salutary than meditation on death.”

“Is there a single thing in me of which the origin is not to be found in that meeting? Only God. And yet again, my thought of God had its origin in that meeting.”

And looking at our children, I have to think it was more than chance that led to my and Kinga’s meeting, but doesn’t every parent think that?

#29 — Divided Intents

Monday 18 March 2013

I’m certain that somewhere, in all the notebooks she kept, Simone Weil wrote something applicable to today, something that I could pair with the pictures of the Boy and the Girl playing on the kitchen floor, the Girl pretending to teach E how to bake.

Perhaps she wrote something about the importance of play, the relationship of siblings, or something equally profound. She does seem only to write about profundity in the journal excerpts collected in Gravity and Grace. With a title like that, though, one could hardly expect much frivolity. And considering her biography, it’s hardly surprising.

Still, it would have been convenient to look at the topical index and find “Play” instead of just topics like “Evil” and “Illusions” and “Self-Effacement.” How can I find any suitable quote from such topics to go along with the day’s pictures?

Perhaps if she’d had kids…

Fifth Sunday of Lent 2013

Sunday 17 March 2013

It’s been some time since the whole family was together — Nana, Papa, the Girl, the Boy, K, and I. But with a prognosis for wonderful weather and a completed recovery, there was only one thing to do: pack up the family and meet Nana at Papa’s “spa” to have a mid-March picnic.

We took the kids’ bikes (though E tends to use his four-wheeler more as a walker than anything), some sandwiches, a fresh Polish spring salad, some mango juice, and made an afternoon of it.

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