The warrior comes, a vicious flanking surprise attack with that most feared weapon: the broom.
A fierce battle ensues: experience versus speed, Swiffer Sweeper versus broom.
If only all of our battles were so fun.
And surely, I’ll look back at the epic bedtime battles, the fussy mornings, the frustrated afternoons, and I’ll wish our current battles could return.
There are times when the Girl most decided looks older than her actual age: riding her bike in the carport the other day was such a time; at the beach this summer was another. Yet looking older and being older are two different things. Indeed, looking older, acting older, and being older are three different things. Two of those three are out of anyone’s control. Acting older is a function of biology (brains and bodies must develop, after all), psyschology, and lastly, choice.
I try to influence that choice by increased reference to the Boy. “When Little Brother is here,” I’ll begin when I sense some fussing is approaching, “will you really want to act like such a little child? Don’t you want to be big sister?” Perhaps a bit manipulative, but isn’t that the case with most aspects of child rearing at this age? Manipulation will only get me so far in the game, though. The rest is her choice.
Tonight’s choice: to cook dinner. It’s a lazy, almost-emergency-nothing-planned dinner: we have a jar of spaghetti sauce and some noodles in the cabinets for such evenings. Perfect for a little girl.
“You’ll do the hot stuff, Tata,” she explains. “I’ll crush the sugar for the noodles and other stuff.” (I can never get “bullion” into her head; it’s always “sugar.”) She pours the jar of sauce into the pan, swirls around the water in the jar to rinse off the leftover sauce, cleans off the table — everything she can do, she does.
These are the small accomplishments that instill intense pride. “When Little Brother is five or six, he can help, too,” she says offhandedly as she crushes bullion cubes. “Guess what, Mama!” she almost yells when K walks through the door, “I cooked dinner!”
And so the future unfurls itself slowly in front of us. We watch and smile, anticipating and almost dreading: we’ll look back wistfully on these blog entries some day, we know.
But this is only half of the story.
As surely as she shows flashes of the years to come, the Girl reminds us that she’s still five. “Want to see how I can jump like a frog?” she asks after dinner.
If only she can keep this balance of youthful excitement over the most seemingly insignificant things and an increasing sense of responsibility, I’m quite certain of her future.
For us, the holidays are a time of Wigilia leftovers. We’ve begun our lunch two days in a row now with barszcz z uszkami. The Girl likes her barszcz without the “ears,” (i.e., dumplings), though. For sane people, it’s the wild-mushroom-filled dumplings that elevate the dish to perfection, but the fact that L loves barszcz is enough.
It’s not the barszcz she’s used to, though. This is peppery, clear barszcz, made with fermented beet juice to give it an edge. The result is a testament to the Girl’s love of the soup: it’s peppery enough that afterward, she fusses about how her throat burns, and she eats it knowing this is coming.
After lunch, I pack her small bike and helmet in the trunk, and we head for our favorite park, leaving K at home to rest and enjoy some quiet. L quickly makes friends with a young Latino girl her age who is also on a bike, and the two spend the next ninety minutes together, playing games, comparing notes about second-language abilities, and being five-year-olds.
Later, when L and K are both in bed, I occupy myself with old pictures. I look through the pictures of our wedding in 2004, pictures I’ve seen dozens of times, then move to pictures from the day after: a small garden party, family and friends relaxing in a surprisingly warm day in my in-laws’ yard.
I drift into thoughts about how different this life is from that, and how similar.
Step one: arrange some improvised pylons.
Step two: break into enormous smiles at the successful completion of the first turn.
Step three: take off your helmet and engage in wistful thought
And give another hint of what you’ll look like in ten years.
My first Wigilia — Christmas Eve — celebration was a tense affair. Six months in Poland in December 1996, I’d returned to the host family with whom I’d stayed during the twelve-week training session. While I got along marvelously with my host mother, her son (I suppose one would call him a “host brother”), four years my junior, was not always the most pleasant person to be around. “There’s a lot of tension between you two!” a fellow PCV remarked after spending some time with the two of us. The tension didn’t lessen that Christmas, and it was, in fact, the last time I visited them.
The next year was the first Wigilia that gave me a hint of what it should be like. I spent it with neighbors in the small village in which I’d been posted. They were so much like family that I’d taken to calling the matriarch “Mama.” I had dinner with the whole family that snowy Christmas Eve before heading to Babcia’s to meet with the rest of the family. Laughter, singing, joy — I knew this was what Christmas Eve was supposed to be like.
My third Wigilia was in Berlin, with family of an Indian friend that made for a warm mix of the Subcontinent and the Black Forest.
The next time I celebrated a true Polish Wigilia was three years later, after having spent two years in Boston before realizing that there was something — little did I know at the time, someone — I’d left behind in Poland. I was back with my neighbors, now my landlords, as I was renting a room from them. Still like family, we celebrated another proper Wigilia, waiting for the first star to appear as the various aromas of the waiting feast drifted through the house.
Finally, during Wigilia 2002, I spent the evening with K and her family. K and I had let our long friendship evolve into something more, and while I might not have been able that evening to say it with 100% certainty, it seemed like the first of many Christmas Eves together.
Christmas Eve 2003 we were engaged. A friendship that had begun seven years earlier was a few short months away from becoming a life-long and joyous commitment.
We married a little over four months before our third Christmas Eve together. My folks — Nana and Papa, though still two years away from being Nana and Papa — had sent a tree ornament that celebrated “Our First Christmas,” with an inset for a cameo-size photo. It hangs on our tree as I type, a yearly reminder of that first year together.
By 2005, we were in the States. It was our first solo Wigilia in the kitchen. We learned a lot that year, including how to make the fermented-beet zakwas for barszcz.
In 2006, we had our first Wigilia as a family of three, the Girl still delicate bundle of spitting-up joy.
Since then, we’ve begun new traditions, with new guests that arrive every year to celebrate this holy night with us. We share the opłatek, enjoy a traditional meal of barszcz z uszkami, pierogi, fish, kapusta. We open our gifts and try them out — “Can you hear me, over?”
When the guests are gone and my girls are asleep, I sit in the living room, reflecting at the wonder of love and family, and I find myself aware that, as perfect as this evening was, it can only get better.
https://matchingtracksuits.com/2010/12/25/wigilia-2010/
A day that starts like this — sunny and warm after a cold, cloudy day before — begs to be played in (and have passive voice sentences written in). We need to visit a park, go for a walk, play in the sun.
But it’s baking day, and the Girl has been waiting anxiously — pesteringly, one might even say — for this day because she gets to use her fabulous new holiday-themed cookie cutter set. After a quick lesson, she’s ready to go.
Soon we have candy canes, Christmas trees, gingerbread men (though cut from sugar cookie dough), and stockings ready for the oven.
All we need are a few sprinkles of decorative mystery color that the Girl picked out, filled with uncontrollable excitement, during a trip to the market yesterday.
The adult versions get a coating of frosting lemony frosting and a sprinkle of roasted pistachios. A cheese cake in the afternoon and the year’s modest holiday baking is complete.
Naps at school have disappeared this year. It’s a straight-through-the-day affair for the Girl. Add to it the fact that the more academic portion of the day is in the afternoons this year, and it’s clear that some days, it’s all she can do to keep from falling asleep in the car during the short ride home.
“Tata, can I take a little nap when we get home?” she sometimes asks. “Sweetie, you need to take a short nap when we get home,” I occasionally suggest. Either way, the result is the same: she curls up on the living room couch and is asleep within moments.
These are the moments that I value the most. That’s not a sarcastic comment about the peace and quiet a nap brings. It’s a statement about the incredible miracle that occurs when someone trusts you so fully that she’ll let you guide her to a soft spot and know without asking that you’ll cover her up.
What would a Polish Christmas season be without a gathering that included a “short artistic program” — a skit? It seems the urge to produce amateur dramatic performances leaches into the potatoes that sustain Poles because it’s simply everywhere.
Yet the idea behind such performances are among the things that keep a culture alive for centuries. It’s the same creative impulse that leads to symphonies and epics.
And in a situation like the one in which K and the other area Poles find themselves, in a different land with different traditions, such performances ensure that the legacy they leave to their children will have a significant element of beets, potatoes, consonant-laden words, and songs — a culture within a culture.
Last year’s celebration is here.
Our daughter is five today. The best present (for us all): the news that she’s a big sister.
Pasta has always been a favorite for the Girl, but she’s particular about it: sauce of any sort is a no-no. “Bez sosu” is the common refrain pasta is on the stove. The result, of course, is rather sticky noodles,
which can cause problems with long hair.
We’ve been struggling to get the Girl speaking Polish on a regular basis. She’s resisted consistently until a recent trip to Poland: two weeks with Babcia, including a week with cousin S, and suddenly, she’s speaking Polish spontaneously — to her toys when she’s playing alone.
And so we’ve reached a point at which the Girl can play Polish games, like Scrabble. We play a modified version: a small marker indicates both where to start and what word to spell. We work through hulajnoga (scooter), kot (cat), dom (house/home), and of course mama (mom).
It might be no surprise that the Girl won the majority of the rounds: it’s tempting sometimes to let her win to keep her interest up. (And it’s equally tempting occasionally to arrange a loss or two in order to help her learn how to lose gracefully.) This evening, though, she wins fair and square.
Five years of joy and frustration, smiles and cries, small victories and smaller defeats all culminate today. Technically, the birthday is next Friday, but try explaining that to L today.
All week it’s been the same refrain: “How many days until my birthday party?” And who could blame her when the birthday party involved drawing (almost) anything her imagination can inspire?
Two years ago, we went for an art birthday party and K kept it in the back of her mind as an original yet fun party for the Girl. Today is that day, a day of blue backgrounds and gray elephants, trunks up, tails down, trunks down, tails up — whatever each child wishes.
The instructor is just as you would imagine her to be: questioning (“Is this the inside or the outside of the elephant’s ear? The outside, right? What part is pink, the outside or inside?”) yet ultimately accepting of the young artists’ decisions (“You can make it any color you like; it’s your elephant. But what part of most elephants’ ears are pink?”).
The kids work, the adults talk, and the afternoon slides by in a smear of every color imaginable, all accompanied by continual laughter and chatter. The artists check each other’s work, make comments, ask questions, offer suggestions.
Yet there comes a time in every artist’s creative endeavors when a decision must be made. Paul Valéry once said, “A poem is never finished, only abandoned,” and I’d imagine that most visual artists feel the same. Yet cake, ice cream, and presents waited, so the creative process was sped up with the assistance of technology.
And after some cleaning,
and a ceremonial hanging of the art,
it’s time for the cake. It’s the first year K didn’t bake the cake for L’s birthday, and certainly every atom in K’s Polish body screamed, “It’s not right! You can not be a good mother and not bake your daughter’s cake!”
But somehow we all survive.
The presents make up for everything.
And the greatest present of all: so many people took so much time out of their Saturday to come share the Girl’s day.
What does she want to be when she grows up? An artist? A princess? A surveyor? A teacher? An engineer? A stay-at-home mom? A police officer? Bob the Builder’s assistant? L the Builder?
It seems so distant. And so close.
