the girl
Backyard Photo Walk
“Can I take a picture?” It’s a common refrain whenever I bring home the small point-and-shoot I use in the classroom.
The Girl especially likes going for photo walks in our back yard.
I tag along with a camera too big for her even to hold, taking pictures of her taking pictures.
Back in the house, we transfer the pictures to the computer. I straighten a few of hers, delete several blurred ones, and correlate them with my own photos.
“You’re silly, Tata,” I hear behind me, “Taking pictures of me taking pictures.”
Why We Laughed
“They were laughing at us.” L had just gotten off stage, and K, backstage to help with the recital, was there to greet her. Indeed, we in the audience were laughing a great deal through the night, but it obviously bothered some of the children, our daughter included.
Why did we laugh? I fumbled about with an explanation yesterday, but I went to bed thinking about it and woke up with it still on my mind.
If adults had been doing this, we might have called it a disaster. They stumbled about sometimes. They often looked to the side, desperate for a cue from someone wiser. Some stood, looking at the others, trying to remember what they should be doing at this or that particular moment. They were only vaguely uniform at some points, with some putting their arms down as others just began raising theirs.
Yet because they were children, everything changed. Disasters became masterpieces: flubs became arabesques; stumbles transformed into bourre; miscues became fouette; hesitant jumps became grand jets.
Further, if these had been adult dancers, they never would have appeared on stage. Ego would have prevented it, and that’s part of what we mean when we say that these children are cute because they’re innocent. They’re not so concerned with unattainable perfection, and they’re filled with joy just to be dancing.
I think we laugh, then, because we see ourselves in these little dancers and realize that, in so many ways, they have more courage than we have, and we laugh at the joy that courage brings us.
Recital
Parenting is often about firsts when there’s only one child. First this, first that — first dance recital.
I’ve never been interested in dance, but even if I were, I’d pick a small-town dance school’s summer recital over even the greatest ballet. There’s a charm and an innocence in the young girls that unifies an auditorium filled with strangers and makes us all feel truly optimistic for 120 minutes.
Of course, it was the Girl’s scene that stole my heart.
Later, we had a sad conversation. “Tata, they were laughing at us.”
How do you explain the joy behind the laughter? How do you explain that the audience was enjoying the performance so much that it brought them to laughter? K and I tried, but I’m not sure we convinced her.
Practicing
K and I have been concerned about L’s attentiveness in Mass on Sunday. We’ve come to realize that she’s reached that age that quite, unobtrusive behavior is not the goal; participation is the goal.
To that end, we’ve been practicing after school. We stand for prayer, kneel at the end table, sit quietly. We practice crossing ourselves, including one of the oldest variants.
“When do we kneel?” I ask.
“When the priest sets the holy bread,” L replies.
Sometimes the simplest way is the best.
Rehearsal
When is working not working?
When it’s playing.
Beatification
Poles around the world are celebrating today’s beatification of Ioannes Paulus PP. II, born Karol Wojtyła and known to most of us as John Paul II. As with his death, most wanted a commemoration that would please John Paul II.
Poles in the Greenville area celebrated with an outdoor Mass and picnic.
With some free advertising from a Polish-owned market in the Charlotte area, probably two hundred people Poles from South Carolina, North Carolina, and Georgia gathered in a park outside Spartanburg. A cookout and impromptu soccer football match followed a Mass under a canopy of new leaves in celebration of a newly beatified Pole.
The Mass included a number of songs, anecdotes, and poems about John Paul II, including an encore performance of “ÅšwiÄ™ty, ÅšwiÄ™ty UÅ›miechniÄ™ty,” the song L sang for the Palm Sunday celebration a few weeks ago.
This time, she had a backing choir and a boom operator.
After Mass, everyone did what Poles do best: converse and share food.
There were piles of sausages, bowls of chips, salads of all descriptions, and a table of deserts, and though it was intended to be a “feed your own family” picnic plan, everyone ranged among the groups, sharing food and laughter (among other things).
The children played
the adults talked,
and the priest played soccer football.
Family, sports, dancing, laughing, and Mass —
JPII was certainly smiling.
Sanding
The Girl has been asking for a sandbox for weeks, though she hasn’t done so in as many words. Instead, she’s been playing in whatever dirt she can find, taking her beach toys out to the patch of driveway that is unpaved and playing in the dirt there as if it were sand. She has taken Baby out and made dirt angels; she has created vast mountain ranges only to demolish them with both feet; and she has sprinkled dirt all over her legs until she was a dusty mess.
This week, Papa and I decided it was time to make a proper sandbox, complete with a mesh cover to discourage local cats from turning it into an enormous litter box.
“Why don’t you just go buy one of those turtle sandboxes with the lid?” Nana asked, knowing perfectly well that it was out of the question: a man must build his daughter’s sandbox, not purchase it at some chain store.
No, a father and grandfather must pull out every power tool available — yes, even the router — to create a mishmash masterpiece.
But that’s only the smallest portion of the fun.
Swiety, Swiety Usmiechniety
Independent Hands
It’s only expected that a four-year-old grows more independent daily. Lately, that independence has moved out of the normal realms of the everyday, personal actions — bathing, brushing hair, cleaning teeth — and into more wide-ranging spheres: cooking and buying.
She wanted a quesadilla the other day, so I asked if she’d like to help make it.
When it was done, she ate it with more relish than I’d seen her eat anything in recent memory.
During our first spring zoo outing today, we stopped for an ice cream. L needed to pay by herself — it was imperative.
The “I can do it!” phase is thankfully far from over.
Polska Dziewczyna
Kotlet schabowy z ziemniakami. She loves the pork — though we sell it to her as chicken — but she has to give the potatoes a bit of thought.
Still, she’s a Polish girl, through and through. Her favorite meal, the thing she would eat daily, the dish that gets her squealing with delight when she learns it’s on the day’s dinner menu: barszcz.
The Artist, Redux
The Girl likes to refer to herself as an artist. Just a few days ago, she was proclaiming that she’s an artist but that it’s a secret.
This morning, as I was planning some lessons, she came into the study from downstairs, picture in hand.
“Here Tata. I’m an artist.”
I glanced at the picture, saying the obligatory, “I know honey,” then stopped what I was doing to take a closer look.
“Did you help her with this?” I called out to K downstairs.
“No,” came the reply.
“Not even a little bit?”
I think I can be forgiven my initial skepticism.
Treasure
A four-year-old has treasure stored up in every corner of the house. There’s the princess umbrella that sits in the toy basket downstairs, ready for deployment. There’s the scooter downstairs, festooned with princess regalia, parked by the pink bike. There’s a bookshelf packed with books, new and old, tall and short, thick and slim.
And then there’s the jewelry.
All L’s treasure had its own, proper, fitting place before today except for the jewelry.
A small but colorful cardboard from Ikea held L’s beads and rings, her bracelets and necklaces, her charms and her gems. And so when she saw the jewelry box at Barnes and Noble this afternoon, there was no question. She’d come with money sent from Poland with the intention of buying a book.
She left with a new treasure,
to hold all her other treasures.
Games with Nana
Shadows
It was a mystery: walking down the street in our home outside of Rock Hill, I found that no matter how I jumped, sprinted, or turned, my shadow stayed with me.
It’s a novel observation, but one we all experience. So ubiquitous is the discovery that are shadows are inescapable that it finds its way into our cultural imagination. Recall that in Disney’s imagination, Wendy first meets Peter Pan when he’s trying to capture his shadow.
Yesterday, the Girl discovered her shadow is relative.
“Tata, look! My shadow is big
and then it gets really little.”
The rest of the swing time, L kept her chin buried solidly in her right shoulder as she contemplated the mysteries of her ever-changing shadow.
Slip Sliding Away
Stepping onto the ice for the first time in probably twenty-five years can be a bit of a stressful experience. My mind turns back to the last time I ice skated: I recall being fairly confident; I remember the importance of having tightly-laced boots; I think about how I was finally able to skate backwards the last time I ever went as a kid. Or was I? I did go only a handful of times, after all, and most of those times my attention was not on the ice but on those on the ice around me — usually on specific person.
Maybe I only imagined I could skate, because the instant I step onto the ice, I’m fairly certain this is the first time I’ve ever ice skated.
Yet I watch the Girl, who truly is on the ice for the first time, and I realize that perhaps I haven’t forgotten everything. I push off and begin to glide — I realize I have.
Perhaps because I have more experience and a more developed sense of balance, I’m not as bad as the Girl: her feet are slipping this way and that, forward, backwards, left right. She looks like she could have been the model for some cartoon about a character’s first time on ice.
By the end of the hour, though, she’s able to skate glide by herself from me to K and back again. A few more times and she’ll be asking when she can try her first jump.
Ice Skating
Zoo and Playground
Dancing
The Girl loves dancing. We’ve known that for some time, and made videos and photos several times.
It’s such an odd thing for me, a complete non-dancer. She can hear music that she likes, and she’ll jump up and start dancing — in the kitchen, in the living room, in her room.
I imagine if any of her favorites came on the radio while we’re out shopping, she’d dance about there as well.
She dances to anything. K puts on Polish folk music and within minutes, the Girl has burst into the living room and is dancing. Anything by Chopin gets her swaying almost majestically.
Elvis Costello can get her feet moving so fast it looks likes she’s running in place.
It is the ultimate sign of a love of music.
Our hope is that it will last and deepen over the years.