the girl
Eleven
The Girl turned eleven today. Babcia called to wish her well.
Santa and Mrs. Claus dropped by with pecan pie and presents.
And the gifts — almost all cash, as the Girl is saving for her own iPod — came pouring in, relatively speaking.
Eleven years she’s been with us. Just over four thousand days.
And they seem to have disappeared in a flash.
Now Taking Orders
The Girl is creative: there are no two ways about that. She’s always making something, recycling something, inventing something. Sometimes, it comes about after some searching for DIY methods; sometimes she just thinks of something.
Her latest obsession is stress balls — balloons filled with various items. Rice, flour, slime, sugar (white and brown), quinoa. Whatever she can find. I think that’s the experimental part coming out.
Kids at school have asked her to make them their own stress balls. Or perhaps she just offered to make them. At any rate, she was buzzing around the kitchen in the afternoon, looking at the notes she’d made, filling orders for rice stress balls and flour stress balls and sugar stress balls.
Lost Acquaintances
At some point in the day, I often look at the “Time Machine” module at the bottom of this blog to see what was going on one year, two years, ten years ago. The other day, this one popped up: L’s fourth birthday party.
I clicked through and read. It was the party we had at the horse farm near our house. A fun party that involved lots of brushing horses, talking about horses, and even riding horses.
A picture from L’s fourth birthday party stopped me.
I didn’t recognize a single person — not one adult or child — other than family. It’s not that I looked at a child or a parent and thought, “Yeah, I remember her. What was her name?” It was as if I was looking at people I’d never seen in my life. Complete strangers.
I find that lots of commenters that visited the site in the early days, when I promoted it, have not maintained their own hobby-horse blogs — sometimes for over ten years. Some of them were simply one-time commenters, probably leaving a comment just with the hope of a follow-up visit to their site. But some of them were regular commenters who have completely disappeared, and their own blogs with them. And here I am, fourteen years later, still plugging away at it, not promoting it, writing for myself as something of a journal replacement, but occasionally wondering where everyone went.
Games
The kids stayed home today, and so I stayed home. What to do on a day off? Simple — play games.
First, Sorry. I love how this game teaches patience: you get all your pieces moving around the board, making real progress, and suddenly someone draws an 11 and switches places with you, destroying the work of the last few moves in an instant. Or worse: your opponent draws a Sorry card — back to the beginning for you. Then there’s the opposite problem: you’re right at the entrance to your safety zone, and you draw a 12 card.
“Time to make another lap,” I told E when it happened to him. He was frustrated, but dealt with it well. (Yes, I see it. I choose not to acknowledge it.)
The real surprise for me these last few days has been our children’s desire to play chess with each other. I’ve been teaching the Boy to play chess, and since L already knew, she decided to take it upon herself to teach him the final pieces (king and queen) and start playing with him.
Naturally, she beats him as badly as I would beat her were I to play seriously against her, not pulling my punches, so to speak. Still, Magnus Carlsen began taking chess seriously at about E’s age because his older sister kept beating him and he didn’t like losing. Now he’s the world number one, with an astronomically high rating, and by and large seems unstoppable. Doubtful, but one never knows. The love of the game and the patient critical thinking it encourages are enough .
Slush
We never know when we’ll get snow here in South Carolina. We once went several years without much more than a little flurry that melted the instant it touched the ground, so when we do have snow, we have to make the most of it. We have to get out into it, feel it, hear it (if it’s mixed with ice crystals, which it often is here).
So last night, with dinner done and the kitchen cleaned up, we all took the dog for a walk in the snow. Unfortunately, the snow was mixed with rain, and what lay about the road was a slushy mix that got everyone wet almost immediately. K and the kids turned back quickly; I went with the dog for another mile or so.
Today proved to be better. It was supposed to stay below freezing all night, and there was a forecast for continued snow throughout the morning. And fall it did — big fluffy flakes that floated down delicately that would then transform to smaller flakes that fell quickly. Back and forth between the two forms of snow throughout the morning.
But the kids begin still sick, we were reticent to let them out. The Boy and I decided to play a bit of chess. He’s learning piece by piece. For a few weeks, we played only with pawns until he got the hang of their basic nuance. Then we added bishops — after all, they move in a way similar to how pawns attack. Then rooks. Finally, knights. We spent several evenings just practicing how knights moved.
“Daddy, can we play with rooks, bishops, and knights now?” he asked this morning, and so we went for it.
“Are you sure you want to move there?” became my mantra. Occasionally, he would look and reconsider.
“Oh, no! You can take me there!”
“But can you take me back?”
And so we played. I made purposefully stupid moves for him to take advantage of, but I made a little rule for myself: if he didn’t reconsider his move after I suggested it, I would take the piece, so in the end, I won. (The aim in king-less/queen-less chess? Get one pawn to the other end of the board so that it can’t be taken. It’s how I teach my students at schoool as well.)
Still the snow fell — but almost none of it was sticking to the roads, which were wet and relatively warm.
“Maybe we’ll have a snow day Monday!” L pondered.
“Likely not.”
Still, we have a large district, and we have had snow days when there’s not a flake on the ground here because of what was going on in the northernmost edges of the district.
First Snow
The announcement was simple: “Teachers, please check your email.” Though there was not a word said about the content of the email in question, we all knew, teachers and students alike, what it said. It had been snowing for an hour, and there was only one option: early dismissal.
By the time all the kids were gone, it was only a few minutes before teachers’ normal departure time. Still, with everyone — absolutely everyone — on the road then, it took over double my normal time to get home.
By the time I got home, the Boy and the Girl had already spent a good bit of time in the snow, such as it was.
The Dog, Kids, Tramp, and a Ball
Playing in the Leaves
It was a job the Boy wanted to do from yesterday morning.
"Now can we rake leaves?" he kept asking.
"No, first we're putting up Christmas lights."
He wandered off to play with a neighbor, to have a break inside, to ride his bike, but he came back occasionally to help out.
"Now are we going to rake leaves?" he asked after I finished with the last lights.
"No, now I have to mow."
"Why?"
Indeed. It's December. Why should I be mowing now? That's the reality of living in the south. I'll likely mow again before Christmas. The primary motivation was to take care of the leaves, but the grass was looking a bit unkept as well.
"Now are we going to rake leaves?"
"No, now we're going to Nana's and Papa's to help with their Christmas decorations and to have dinner."
So when we got back from Mass just after noon today, we started raking and blowing the leaves. After Scouts today, we finished up.
The Girl joined us, because what was the end goal of it all? Simple: a pile of leaves to play in.
Backyard Play
