Baking with Nana
the girl
2010
Twelve months of the Girl — as the years pass, the significant changes do not occur within such a relatively short time span, and they’re more and more invisible to the camera.
Puzzles and Dolls
“Do you dream of being a princess?” coos one of L’s Christmas gifts before offering game-play options.
Why does L have such an obsession with princesses? It’s not like we initiated it, though we’ve done very little to encourage or to discourage it. (Relatives are a different story!)
Granted, L has watched the films several times: Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, The Little Mermaid, and several other princess films. She has a few princess books — usually thick books we refer to as “the princess collection” and “the other princess collection.”
“Do you dream of being a princess?”
My concern is not necessarily the notion of being a princess; it’s the notion of being a twenty-first century princess, a highly sexualized image that encourages girls to flirt in grade school and has teen fashion magazines offering advice on the cover for how to have a “sexy beach” hair do.
“It’s a long way off,” some might say. “She’s only four.” When I hear stories of six-year-olds getting cell phones, though, I realize the pressure begins shortly.
Or perhaps it’s already begun, the pressure to meet society’s standards of what a “Real Girl” is like. Perhaps that’s what the princess obsession is all about.
Perhaps. It’s somewhat depressing to think that we’re entering a period during which peer pressure is as influential as — if not more than — parental influence. There’s a balance there that we are just beginning to feel out. Its contours are still nebulous because the actual relationships and ratios are still unclear. In the end, it’s all about awareness.
If only it were that simple.
Snowball Fight
“Can we go outside?” L asked.
“Of course.”
“I know what we can do!”
“What?”
“We can make balls out of the snow and then throw them at each other.”
“Excellent idea.”
Before the Storm
The day before Christmas Eve in a Polish household is always frantic. Cakes to bake, salads to make, and general culinary chaos.
The heating system dying in the morning didn’t help, though. The verdict: the zoning system’s main control board is malfunctioning. Cost: the part alone runs $1300. Time to make some decisions. Merry Christmas from Arzel.
In the meantime, we have baking to do. Cheese cake, for instance, requires room-temperature ingredients, a fact inconveniently forgotten by inexperienced bakers the world over.
Fortunately, we had a little helper today to get us through the tough parts. Without her valuable advice and assistance, I’m sure we would have got finished much more quickly than we did been at a complete loss.
With her in the kitchen, it’s a constant battle against her curiosity. “I want to do it!” is her refrain.
At the same time, how can one battle curiosity? Who would even want to? It’s a question of direction and redirection.
Polyglot Concert
Our daughter, thanks to a bi-lingual mother and multi-lingual daycare, knows songs in four languages.
First Solo
Jasełka
Nativity plays date at least from the time of St. Francis of Assissi, eight hundred years ago. This weekend, the concept was, once again, Polish-ized.
To be fair, it was not a one-off occurrence. Nativity plays, called jasełka (ya-sewl-ka) in Polish, are as customary during the Christmas as wreaths and carols.
Unlike the modern American nativity play, which is often relatively high tech and performed by adults, Polish nativity plays are almost always entirely a production of children and adolescents — under the direction of adults.
So in schools and churches throughout the Polish community worldwide, children are have been putting on nativity plays much like the one the small Polish community here watched this afternoon.
Yet this play was somehow different — incredibly different — than all the plays I watched while teaching in Poland. During the final days before Christmas break, students and faculty gathered to watch the year’s play: it was often, it seemed to me, an attempt by the directing teacher simply to impress the other teachers.
These actors were American children of Polish heritage, children who speak English naturally and Polish only when spoken to by an adult. Their Polish has the traces of limited exposure: accents, weak grammar, lower-level vocabulary: they speak Polish like I do, in other words. For all intents and purposes, Polish is a virtually-foreign language to them.
For them, it’s the language of parents and parents’ friends, a language to be spoken only when spoken to. When they sit around, waiting for their scene during rehearsal, they lapse to the more comfortable English, the language they speak without thinking.
And yet they memorized line after line, exchange after exchange, and performed it with few cues.
It was a showcase, a moment for kids to show their musical, acting, and linguistic talent. It was a celebration of one of the pivotal events in history — the pivotal event in the West.
At the heart of the afternoon was the sense of community, the sense of belonging. In between scenes, the audience joined the kids in various renditions of the most popular Polish carols. Put ten Poles in a room together and they’ll end up singing: yet somehow, in suburban America, it had a special glow.
For K and me, there was a first — a first of many, I’m sure. As part of the finale, L sang a solo.
She was was off pitch and out of tune, but it was the sweetest moment I’ve ever experienced as a father.
Stacking the Deck, Redux
L and I are playing Candy Land. It’s a dry, boring game, to be honest, but I’m not doing it for my own entertainment: that comes from watching her.
Still, I’ve been trying lately to make it a learning experience, as a way to help her deal with her frustration. It’s a simple premise: stack the deck occasionally, placing the Candy Cane Forest card for the next drawing when she’s seventy-five percent complete.
“Oh, rats!” she declares, retreating almost to the beginning of the game board.
I try to make it a little more frustrating, dropping the ice cream cone card into place for my next drawing. Will she get frustrated that she “obviously” has no chance to win? Will she want to stop? Will she complain?
No — nothing but a laugh.
There’s only one thing left to do: make sure she gets a few doubles to catch up — not win, but catch up.
The game takes longer than it would have if we’d just drawn and let chance decide the winner. But the girl has uncanny luck and wins more often than not. A loss or two does the spirit good.
Fourth
Time is a relative thing. Scientists tell us that we can travel so fast that time slows. In 1582, Pope Gregory XIII convinced the whole western world to skip ten days.
Yet it’s the smaller moments that have the true significance.
It’s the smaller moments that see a devoted mother spending an entire Friday afternoon baking a cake for a little girl and her guests.
It’s the sweeter moments that see the welcoming of a beloved friend with mutual squeals of joy and anticipation.
It’s the moment less than the flickering of a candle that we all remember, the moment that a little girl has been excited about for days.
It’s the moments that finds us surrounded by friends,
friends who have taken a few minutes out of their lives to come celebrate with us.
Within these series of moments, I catch a glimpse of the future. It happens every now and then: a pose, an expression, a gesture, and suddenly I see what our sweet daughter will look like in five, ten, fifteen years. A birthday celebration offers a hint of birthdays to come, and the bitter-sweet realization that these present moments are disappearing all too quickly.
The pony rides will disappear. “Oh, Tata — I’m not interested in ponies anymore.” It’s bearing down on us, this reality, and I both dread and eagerly look forward to it.
In the meantime, we — family and friends — enjoy the moments of helping and hugging, the moments of screams of laughter often followed too shortly by cries of frustration. There’s a big girl inside our L, but she’s still a little girl. Almost one year older now, but a little girl all the same.
“Technically, it’s not your birthday,” I try explain to her.
“You mean I don’t have my birthday party?” she replies, in a panic.
“No, you’re having your party today, but your birthday is Thursday.”
“But Mama said today is my birthday. Today is my party!” There’s a certain panic in her voice that tells me that time is such a relative, elastic thing — after all, in Asian cultures, children are born one year old — that I can shift time and calm a panicking daughter with few repercusions.
“Well, Mama was right,” I relent.
“You were just joking,” L giggles.
Perhaps, but not about this: happy early-birthday, our sweet daughter. May all your birthdays be raspberry-covered and laughter-filled.
The Girl Dancing
Sunday Afternoon
“Tata, I want to help!” she calls as she hops down the deck stairs. With an armful of branches and twigs, I’m agreeable, but I smile, wondering how much help I’m actually going to get.
“Grab a couple branches,” I explain, “and follow me.”
We march to the street, L chattering all the way, explaining how she’s going to explain tomorrow how she helped her daddy.
Suddenly, behind me, I hear it: “Ouch!” She’s rubbing her eye; I’m wondering when she’s going to ask for a bandage. It’s been her obsession lately: no matter the wound, no matter the location, there must be First Aid.
“The stick went in my eye,” she says, with concerned voice. After so many months of learning her various voices, I know it’s nothing serious. It’s not quite play — something did happen — but perhaps her concern is exaggerated. She sees K and me hurt ourselves, and she models the reaction.
“Come on,” I say offhandedly. “You’ll be fine. Little things happen when you work as hard as you’re working now.
She plods along, amending the story she’s going to tell tomorrow, practicing the Tragedy of the Stick.
As we’re returning to the backyard, the late afternoon sun reflects off the golden autumn leaves, and it’s as if she’s walking into pure light or developing a halo. I walk about twenty paces behind, watching her hair bounce and sway as she dances into a golden November afternoon.
Helping Papa
There’s a Doctor in Our House
We took L to the doctor today: a lingering, stubborn cough that has persisted through a round of antibiotics, Benadryl, and Musinex. A quick check and another round of antibiotics.
But suddenly we have a doctor in the house. K and I have both received several checkups. It’s obvious L was paying close attention to what the doctor was doing: L runs her makeshift thermometer over our forehead and down one cheek. She puts her stethoscope on our chest then on our back and asks us to breathe deeply. Warning, “This might hurt,” then whispering the instructions to cry afterward, she plunges a syringe into our arm and clamps a plastic bandage on it.
“You’ll be alright,” she soothes.
Alright! Break Over!
What happens when you take a break from the online scrapbook of your family’s life? You get backed up with photos, among other things, and you want to post everything, in one shot. Which is unrealistic.
You want to post some pictures from the pumpkin patch.
And from the apple picking — which wasn’t much of an apple picking. The hordes arrived early for Pink Ladies, and the trees were bare.
And you’d want to share pictures from the walk about the yard for leaves as your daughter pulls a leaf from each
and every
plant and tree she can find
regardless of the leaf’s size, color, or condition.
You’d want to post all these with great descriptions and compelling observations about Life, the Universe, and Everything. With a soon-to-be four-year-old, three courses as a student, full time work as a teacher with extra-large classes, a wife (remember?), and an ongoing yard project, you probably wouldn’t have  much time or inclination for posting.
The Girl with Nana
Sunday Morning
Beginnings
L has been dancing whenever she hears music from the time she could stand. At first, it was only rhythmic bouncing with her knees and upper body. As her motor control improved, so did her moves.
So great is her love of motion that she’ll gladly sit and watch others dance. One of her favorite videos to watch is a clip about one young English lady’s ballet instruction, and from the first time she watched, she declared, “I’m a ballerina!”
Now, at close to four years old, she’s finally of the age that we can actually begin to make that reality.
A quick trip to the ballet supply store, a few phone calls, and we have a reluctant ballerina.
L is a cautious girl: she doesn’t just dive into this or that without concern. She is, in short, a worrier. And so on the first day of ballet, though she had been talking about it all week, she fretted that she might not like it after all.
Fear set in, and before long, she was declaring, “I don’t want to go.” No amount of cajoling could convince her.
The Opportunities-We-Never-Had dilemma set in: we never want to force her to participate in anything creative — where’s the joy in that? Yet we knew that if we could just get her there, just let her see the other girls dancing, that all would be well.
Finally, K simply declared that in order to cancel the lessons, L herself had to go with Mama to  cancel the lessons.
She ended up staying.
Saturday morning, before her second lesson, L was all smiles.
Lost
In the first installment of the Toy Story series, Woody, thinking he’s been left behind, falls to the ground and decries his new, depressing status: “I’m a lost toy!”
Surely there can be many things more terrifying than being lost. One of our great childhood fears is getting lost, being separated from our parents and unable to find them. It’s the stuff of every child’s nightmares, and in a modified way, the plot of great books of the past.
Losing something dear to us is like losing a part of us.
Today, before Mass, somewhere between getting out of the car and walking out of the restroom, L lost her Madeline doll. “She may be teeny tiny, diminutive, petite.” L’s Madeline doll was all those things, and she even had a scar from having her appendectomy.
I walked back to the car, looking for the doll that I thought surely would be easy to find. No such luck. K and L went back to the restroom. No doll. After Mass, I talked to the ushers. Sadly, there’s no lost and found bin anymore, but they informed me that people often leave lost items on the tables outside the sanctuary. No Madeline. We checked the bathroom once more and looked carefully as we went back to the car.
No luck; no Madeline.
Fortunately, L was not terribly attached to the dolls, so a few tears and it was all fine.
But I’m genuinely curious about what happened to that doll. Did someone take it? If so, why? Isn’t it obviously a lost toy? If someone found it in the parking lot, isn’t it a reasonable assumption that the owner will return to look for it? In short, who would simply take a toy when it’s obvious where the owner is? Who would take a doll from a church parking lot?
Perhaps it will show up next week. There’s always that hope — the idealism that led me to be a teacher still says, “Someone will play with it for a week, then return it.”
Introduction to Chess
The first steps usually happen simultaneously: learn the pieces and the layout of the board. The next step: learning how individual pieces move. L’s got two of the three done, and she’s started on the third, with the most basic: the pawns.
(I might add that L has taken the initiative entirely on this. I’m not some freakish dad pushing his own obsession on his child.)