The other day, the Girl’s class had “Dress as Your Favorite Character” day.
There was only one option for L.
the girl
Barbie Bike
It took her a while to save up the money, and in the meantime, she had to learn how to wait patiently.
And for a little girl who is obsessed with all things Barbie, the effort and time involved in opening the package was almost too much.
But in the end, she got it open, and then I began clipping this and that anti-theft string and band.
And we sat for a while pondering why they put the drive train on the left side, and why bikes generally have them on the right to begin with.
Morning Play
We’re almost in quarantine. With the Boy still a little iffy from a previous illness and K sick, we have stayed inside the whole weekend. Sometimes, though, that’s just what we need: a lazy Sunday morning with everyone doing what we want. L reads; the Boy plays; I hang out with my children.
As the morning wears on, I turn my attention to the Boy’s lunch: a soup made of pureed potatoes, carrots, squash, broccoli, and chicken. The Boy loves it, and I can see why: it’s really not that bad, despite the fact that it’s a bit bland due to the lack of seasoning.
The Girl helps with our lunch, which includes an eternal favorite for L: shrimp. This time, we set her to work cleaning them.
After lunch, a walk that reveals the irony of suburbia: nature and concrete.
With a short week in front of us, a relaxed Sunday is about perfect.
Sick
“‘I cannot go to school today,’ / Said little Peggy Ann McKay.” So begins one of the Girl’s favorite poems, the famous “Sick” by Shel Silverstein. Yet in our case, the sickness is real, and the truism shows itself to be more than mere cliche: When Mama is sick, everyone suffers. Mama is the glue that holds everything together, and when she’s down with the flu, the rest of us start coming apart.
And priorities shift, like this silly blog.
Generosity
The Girl has always been a bit nervous about spiders. For a while, she thought ever spider she saw was a Black Widow. Her choice of books at the Book Fair reveals how much she’s grown. Her decision to spend her own money to buy a copy for a friend shows it even more distinctly.
Failed Experiment
The Girl tried an experimental paper boat as she’d seen in Curious George.
Sadly, it didn’t work.
First Book Fair
There are few things, I think, as joyful for a lover of books to attend her first book fair at school.
Sunday Downtown
We never made it to Falls Park during our walk yesterday, so the family decided to start there today. I would have guessed, were someone to ask me, that we were too late to get much of an autumnal view, but I was happily mistaken.
This time, though, we took the whole family, including our one-and-a-half tooth Wonder Boy who seems willing to smile at just about anything.
The Boy’s smile probably had something to do with my wiggling fingers and silly face, but with colors like this, though, who could resist a smile?
As we headed into the main downtown area of the park, the sun came out fully and consistently, making the Peace Center glow. We, though, were less glowing, especially the Girl, who had by then adopted an all-too-familiar refrain: “I’m hungry.”
Nothing is quite as filling on a fall day as an ice cream cone,
and it never tastes as better than when outside. Or so someone told me.
Downtown
The Girl and I decided to go downtown this afternoon and explore. After a visit to the library, we wound up at Springwood Cemetery in downtown Greenville. It was there; we were there — why not?
I couldn’t remember if the Girl had ever been in a cemetery before. I recalled a visit to a cemetery in Rock Hill, but she stayed in the car.
“But I’ve been in a cemetery in Poland,” she assured me.
We quickly learned this cemetery was different, really a cemetery worth visiting. It wasn’t one of those modern graveyards with flat grave markers to make mowing easier. This cemetery had worn stones and wrought iron fences.
And a number of plots for unknown Confederate soldiers.
The past is truly never too far away when you’re in the South. Those of us from the South face a lot of stereotypes as a result, not all of them completely unearned. I’ve never had much of an accent at all, let alone a southern accent, but I still felt somewhat out of place during my two years in Boston. As we walked around, words from that modern, proud redneck band, Drive-by Truckers, came to mind:
You think I’m dumb, maybe not too bright
You wonder how I sleep at night
Proud of the glory, stare down the shame
Duality of the southern thing
I can’t say I’ve ever been proud of the glory, but I’ve done my share of staring down the shame.
Perhaps that’s the modern southern thing?
Whatever the case, I didn’t have long to settle on those thoughts: we were soon walking down Main Street (literally), weaving in and out of fellow Greenville-ites also out to enjoy the warm Saturday, snapping pictures here and there. The Girl has begun requesting pictures — and posing — so I willingly complied.
I wanted to walk all the way down to Falls Park, but with K and the Boy back home, we decided to head back.
With the Grandparents
Entertaining
With some help, the Boy can now sit. He casts his eyes here and there, his attention drawn to this sound or that motion, and his arms or legs are constantly in motion. It seems like it would be a good match for the hyper Girl.
They sit together, banging anything and everything, both delighted with the racket.
The difference comes later, when the Boy has a moment alone and sits silently, almost contemplatively, for a seemingly impossible length of time. The Girl wouldn’t last three seconds.
Dominoes
The Girl has learned how to play dominoes — at least, a version of Mexican Train from a set with missing pieces. She generally tends to place her tiles on the table face up because, as she explains, she needs help. I tell her that perhaps it’s best if I don’t see what she has because it’s tempting to make decisions based on that knowledge.
Still, she does need the help. She often overlooks playable tiles and tends to draw without really thinking. And then there’s her tendency to get ahead of herself — a less magnanimous father would say “cheat” — and slip another tile down before I play.
In the end, the Girl wins, semi-fair-and-square. I’m fairly sure there were a couple of times she played twice while I was wrestling the Boy. Then again, I know of at least one time she missed a tile and I said nothing. Perhaps I was desperate to make a decent showing.
Then again, when I draw these three tiles toward the end of the game, one can hardly fault me, I think.
Serenade
The Boy is ready to eat; K doesn’t have his food ready yet. There’s only one thing to do.
The Girl and I keep him happy.
Reading in the Front
Current Obsession
This is the song that the Girl, through her enthusiastic, dramatic singing, has drilled into my head, K’s head, and likely little E’s head.
“Honey, could you sing a different song?” is our little refrain to this particular number.
Halloween 2012
With the Boy just getting over some congestion, there was only one option: a quiet, stay-at-home Halloween. Which would have been horrible for the Girl, except for the fact that a neighbor offered to take her trick-or-treating with her daughter and another friend.
Apparently “trick-or-treat” was less accurate a description than “pillage and plunder.”
There was one thing missing, though: a visit to knock on Nana’s and Papa’s door. Still, they weren’t willing to break that tradition, so they came to us this year.
And naturally, Papa monopolized the Boy.
Babies
I understand radio and television stations had been counting down the days, but last Wednesday, the waiting ended. The Greenville Zoo tweeted, “It’s a boy! Greenville Zoo staff selected the name Kiko, meaning autumn’s child!”
To call him a “cute little boy” would be misleading: he’s cute, but he’s certainly not little, for he looks to be over six feet tall. Still, compared to Mama, he’s a shrimp.
The Girl and I set out this morning finally to get a look at him. With this tweet bouncing around Greenville, we weren’t the only ones: “It has been a zoo here today! Everyone wants to see Kiko! Tomorrow he will be out from 11am – 2pm”
The question of who had the best view changed from moment to moment as mother and son paced about the enclosure, with mother always keeping a close eye on Kiko, occasionally looking behind her to check on his progress, and frequently bending her long neck to give a reassuring nuzzle. Mothers do that, and I suspect they do it even when their babies are fully grown. At least we humans do it — looking at mother and son this morning, I couldn’t imagine it being any different among animals.
It’s tempting to say something like, “It’s fairly different for the giraffes and such because there’s no culture out there trying to pump their heads full of garbage” (yes, still stewing from yesterday’s post), but they face existential threats hourly in the wild: I suppose the stress level is about the same. Still, do baby giraffes do things that make their parents just cringe?
Probably. They probably even get dizzy just watching what their children do — that height probably doesn’t help much.
Still, as I watched the Girl after the zoo turning endless circles on this and that VIA( Vomit-Inducing Attraction), I started thinking that perhaps our lives are not so different, we and giraffes, or any other animal for that matter. We face our dangers, we teach our children to face them, and we hope that we’ve given them enough to survive, or thrive.
But I suppose giraffes don’t photograph their children as obsessively as we.
Dress Up
She’s growing up fast, but she’s still got some inches to grow.
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Open Letter
Dear Typical Parents:
I think it’s about time that we all sit down and have a little chat. While we don’t have a great deal in common, we should have in common one important thing, and that is the interest in the well-being of our children.
In the old days, parents’ job consisted mainly of protecting physically their children. They made sure their children were warm and fed. They protected them from the dangers of invading armies as best they could. They protected their children in a thousand and one ways, great and small, but almost always physical.
Those days are long gone, but our responsibility to protect our children remains. Only now, the dangers from which we are shielding our children are much more insidious because they are not readily, physically apparent. These dangers are all the more deadly because they threaten not the physical, but the spiritual. They threaten not the destruction of the body but the destruction of the soul. I’m speaking, of course, of our children’s mindset, their worldview, the lens through which they see the world and the matrix by which they interpret reality.
The pervasive worldview of our culture is carnal. It’s physical. It’s driven by a pathological inability to forego a momentary pleasure in the interests of a longer-lasting good. It ridicules self-denial and worships at the altar of immediate and total gratification, usually physical.
My wife and I are trying to raise our children in such a way that they understand that the “now” is often not as important as what’s to come, that the physical is never as important as the spiritual, that the mental always outweighs any pleasures that come through our senses. This is difficult because it runs counter to everything our culture — through advertising, through music, through casual conversation — everything our culture promotes. In other words, my wife and I are trying to raise freaks. Not freaks of nature, but freaks of society, freaks of culture. We’re trying to raise kids that understand that sex is not everything, and that it comes with some pretty important responsibilities, that it’s pleasure is secondary and subordinate to its ultimate purpose, which is procreation.
I wish I could say that our concerns with society deal with a number of other issues, that it isn’t only the sex, but unfortunately our society has made it so that it is only about the sex. One only need look at the recent Lena Dunham advertisement for the Obama campaign, which draws direct correlations between voting and sex — let’s be frank: when you watch the ad, she’s simply talking about the first of many sexual experiences a woman is expected to have in the guise of “serial monogamy — to see how deeply embedded in our culture this obsession with sex really is. One only has to read Kristin Iversen’s mocking commentary on the critics of the ad to see how obsessed our culture is with pushing sexuality on younger and younger children:
Does Dunham say how important it is that the first time be special? Yes. Does Dunham comment that her first time voting was what made her a woman? Sure. Is all of this amusing and charming and only blush-inducing if you are a 10-year-old girl, in which case, why are you watching this, you can’t vote anyway? Also, yes. (Source)
Our whole culture seems obsessed with it, willing to do anything for it, and increasingly expecting others to pay for the responsibility of it. It seems willing to trade of any good in a Faustian bargain for short-term ecstasy.
That is not the priority I want my daughter and son to have. And I hope it’s not the priority you want your children to have.
Unfortunately, the things my daughter comes home from kindergarten saying, drawing, and doing make me think that, if that is your priority, if you are consciously trying to raise children who put the spiritual (and you’re almost free to interpret that as liberally as you wish at this point) over the physical, then sadly, my friends, you are doing a very poor job of it.
How do I know?
When my daughter comes home with a picture she drew in school that she later explains is the plan by which Friend A wants to conspire to break up the “relationship” of Friend B with her boyfriend (these are all three kindergarteners, mind you) so that Friend A can have the young man for herself (again, these are kindergarteners); when my daughter comes home explaining this in great, illustrated detail, explaining all the steps necessary, using the terminology “break up”, “boyfriend”, “fall in love with”, and “twist”; when my daughter comes home with these images and ideas and norms, I am afraid you and I are at the very least with how conscientiously we are trying to raise our children. And at the very worse, that you are consciously raising your children to have goals and plans diametrically opposed to mine and my wife’s.
I am having to explain things that, quite frankly, I don’t want to have to explain. At five years old, she’s too young to know what a boyfriend is in any real, experiential sense, whether her experience or vicariously through the experiences of those she calls her friends.
You might not be doing this consciously, and indeed, I hope and even doubt that you are. However, the fact remains that you are teaching my daughter that I really do not want my daughter to learn. You are teaching my daughter through the example of your children, who throw up their hands and say, “I don’t care” with such derision that it even disturbs my daughter, though she has begun doing it herself. You are teaching my daughter by allowing your children to listen to the sex-infused popular music of today without even explaining, it seems, that “sexy” is not a word that needs to come out of a five-year-old’s mouth. Through your children, you are teaching my daughter so many things at five years of age that I thought she would not encounter for at least, in the very worst case scenario, another year or two.
Still, I should be grateful. You have made me more thankful than ever that, through some odd, unlikely grace, I found myself married to a Catholic woman and eventually baptized into the Catholic church myself. You have made me exponentially more vigilant about the crap — sorry, but there’s no other word for it — that today’s culture is trying to shovel on her. You have taught me that it’s never too early to be on guard. You have reminded me that my promise to my daughter and son, of which I remind my daughter almost daily when she’s frightened by this or that by simply asking “What’s my responsibility” and knowing that the response is always “To protect me”, is my primary responsibility on Earth today and that every other Earthly responsibility is secondary or tertiary at best. I don’t mean to sound bellicose, but you’ve reminded me that I am in a war for my own soul and, until they can defend themselves, my children’s souls.
All the same, it would be so much easier if I knew we were all on the same side. Sadly, I’m not sure we are. Still, it’s good to know where we stand. You and your children will be in my prayers, but my own children’s spiritual well-being will be in my prayers and my conscientious, purposeful deeds.
Regards,
The Girl’s Dad
Bubbles
They’re a little like childhood, bubbles. They’re fun, fragile, short-lived. And in a sort of tautology, kids love them. Creating well-formed bubbles, like children, requires patience and a gentle hand.
And they’re a joy to watch.
