I can’t say when it started, but she’s begun to lie. I’m neither disappointed nor upset. Actually, I’m a little happy that it’s come so soon, still three months shy of her third birthday.
A few days ago, shortly before dinner, she asks me if she can play with her fingerpaints. I was in the kitchen making dinner, so I punted and asked her to ask her mom. A few minutes later, she comes back, holding back tears and sniffling, asking if she can play fingerpaints. Although I knew the answer, I asked her what her mom said. Without hesitation, “She said, ‘Yes,’” she said.
I’ve been bracing myself for this, and the day has come. A little early, but it’s come. An article from New York magazine has been my guide, a layperson’s compilation of the research on children and lying.
It starts very young. Indeed, bright kids—those who do better on other academic indicators—are able to start lying at 2 or 3.
“Lying is related to intelligence,” explains Dr. Victoria Talwar, an assistant professor at Montreal’s McGill University and a leading expert on children’s lying behavior.
Although we think of truthfulness as a young child’s paramount virtue, it turns out that lying is the more advanced skill. A child who is going to lie must recognize the truth, intellectually conceive of an alternate reality, and be able to convincingly sell that new reality to someone else. Therefore, lying demands both advanced cognitive development and social skills that honesty simply doesn’t require. “It’s a developmental milestone,” Talwar has concluded.
Before you decide to click over to the full article, note that the above three paragraphs are the most sanguine ones. The rest of it is filled with summaries of studies that reinforce your worst fears about children and lying. It doesn’t matter if they know lying is bad, or how much they know lying is bad. It doesn’t matter if they’re well-adjusted or otherwise well-behaved, get good grades at school, or if you think they never lie.
They do. A lot. And if they don’t, the alternatives aren’t that attractive.
But that’s okay. Neither the steepest nor the most significant challenge ahead. Just add it to the pile.
I just came back from a 12-day trip with a buddy of mine, sans family, to Ho Chi Minh City and Phnom Penh. It’s a different trip when it’s just you and the guys. You don’t see the same things, you don’t go to the same places. You stay out a lot later. And in places like Vietnam and Cambodia, both stops on the current sex tourism circuit, you get approached by different people offering different, um, services.
I didn’t do anything that I couldn’t come home and tell Becky about, but I did do things that I wouldn’t do with her and CJ. And, of course, what would be the point of a guys’ trip if that weren’t the case?
The family was, however, always on my mind. What would Becky think of this? Would this be a place that we would want to revisit together? How would Becky and CJ handle the current of scooters that flows like a river through the streets of HCMC, oblivious to any laws of traffic or common sense?
I saved for them Hanoi and the beaches of central Vietnam, as well as Angkor Wat. I spared them harrowing rides on the backs of scooters that serve as cheap taxis, street food that could threaten their stomach linings, bus and boat rides that could threaten their safety, and dingy bars that some might say have “character” and others might say lack “cleanliness”.
And, in the end, I returned home, health intact, and only a little worse for the wear. Within four days, I had Becky saying, “Maybe you could go back to Vietnam?”
She’s been out with a fever and, we presume, a flu. Other than being forced to take time off from work to take care of her, it hasn’t been that bad. She’s been a pita, to be sure, but not nearly as bad as I would have imagined…and, frankly, it’s hard to tell the difference between her flu-induced bad temper and her normal bad temper. I don’t know if that’s a good thing or not. Whatev.
Oddly, her fever began just after we returned from a late lunch at a local restaurant that, almost a year to the day, was also the site of her breaking her arm. Last year, shortly after CJ got treated for the broken arm, I received a letter from my health insurance provider asking for details of the incident…specifically, where did it occur and how. It was pretty clear that they were hoping to hit up the restaurant to pay the medical bill.
I somehow misplaced that letter. And the next one. And the next one. I really do need to clean up my desk some day. Or not.
A couple of weekends ago, Becky and I were flat on our backs sick. It hurt to roll over in bed. So, for the first time, we used the television as a baby sitter. Not the kind of use where you put the child down in front of the tube to salvage 10 minutes to make dinner. No, we’re talking about half an hour, an hour at a time, just to get some relief.
And CJ loved it. She sat slack-jawed in front of that box, basking in whatever idiotic images flowed from it. She quickly learned how to answer questions with a thoughtless “Yeah” while never tearing her eyes from the screen.
And, so, it begins.
Television is like a lot of things in life — a force so strong and unrelenting that, no matter how hard you fight, you eventually succumb. Public financing of sports stadiums comes to mind. It’s how parents end up taking their kids to Disneyland.
So, if, in the middle of the night, your child is lying in the hallway, bleating “Mommy, where are you?” for half an hour at a time, is it child neglect to roll over in bed as if you didn’t hear her?
CJ hasn’t been sleeping well the last couple of months. You’d think that after 30 months of practice, she’d have it down by now. She’s been getting up two, three times in the middle of the night, coming to our room and, essentially, keeping mom up. And, as collateral damage, keeping me up.
Our solution? Hide mommy, by having her sleep in a little-used room, with the door blocked closed. Which led to the situation last night. Which we will repeat tonight.
The moments when CJ will have a meltdown because of her need for daddy time are rare, predictable and easily remedied. Her need for mommy time is unrelenting, unquenchable and erratic. So when, at 1:30 a.m. last night, I told her that mommy was unavailable and we would see her in the morning, she let me have it. And then she said she wanted to sleep in the carpeted hallway, without a pillow, without a blanket. I let her.
At 3:30 a.m., she woke up again, again bleating like a lost sheep for her mommy. This time, though, she was willing to be put in her bed.
And Becky slept, gloriously, until 7:15 a.m.
For us, that’s what passes for success these days.
Today at lunch, unprompted and unsolicited, CJ said, “Thank you, daddy, for making lunch.”
I’m sending my macaroni and cheese recipe to a lab now for analysis. Whatever the secret sauce, maybe we can bottle it and solve the Arab-Israeli conflict, forge effective healthcare reform, and develop cheap, practical and sustainable energy technologies. Or get blueberry stains out of girls’ dresses.
Whatever. In any case, it’s a small yet fulfilling step and I will over-value it as much as I unreasonably can.
So, lately, in an effort to achieve a modicum of household tranquility, I’ve been trying to enforce several rules, and I’m happy to report that some of the effort has been paying off. Of course, for the most part, the rules relate to my behaviour, not CJ’s.
My almost hourly mutterings of the serenity prayer over the past 2 1/2 years has led me to the understanding that I have no control over her whining and crying, her intermittent outbursts and histrionics. I only have (modest) control over how I react to them.
Among the rules I’ve been trying to adhere to:
Don’t talk to whining or crying children. They don’t hear me, they don’t listen to me, and it only frustrates me. Just wait it out. This falls under the rubric of “don’t reward bad behaviour.” Unfortunately, it’s difficult to adhere to that rule with any rigor since, let’s face it, with some children, if it weren’t for bad behaviour, there would be no behaviour at all.
Don’t say “no”. Children don’t hear it, they don’t listen to it, and it only frustrates them. Unless it’s a finger in the power socket, come up with something else. Brevity may be the soul of wit, and you can’t get much more brief than “no”, but it’s the death of diplomacy, and child-rearing is all about diplomacy: getting what you want while they get what they want.
Don’t negotiate with yourself (more bluntly put, don’t beg). Children don’t care, it sets a bad precedent, and, of course, it’s humiliating.
It is sadly true that I break all three of those rules on a daily basis, including this morning as I was taking her to daycare. Still, just having some semblance of rules and trying to adhere to them has given me a sense that I have some control…even if that sense is completely illusory.
We bought a new car recently, replacing our near-emancipation-age Toyota Corolla wagon. One of the features in the new car is a fuel economy gauge that updates in real time. It’s standard in many new cars these days, telling you what your mileage is and how it’s fluctuating as you drive.
I need one of those as a parent.
One of the difficulties of parenthood is that you have no idea how well you’re doing. She hasn’t lost a limb, but she has broken one. So, what, does that put me in the 50th percentile of all parents?
A few weeks ago, our teacher at daycare called us to chat about some behavioral issues with Clara at daycare. Apparently, she’d been pushing around other kids. And taking their toys. And, when the teachers would ask her to do something she didn’t like, she would stare them down. This, apparently, was an issue.
Of course, for me, this was a mixed blessing. On the one hand, my daughter was disrupting school and was displaying anti-social behavior. Fortunately, she wasn’t pushing around the smaller kids or taking away their toys. Apparently, she’s rather protective of the smaller kids. Instead, she was pushing around the classmates who were the same size and age. So, I guess, at least in one sense of the term, she’s not a bully.
The blessing part is actually two-fold. Yeah, maybe I’ll have a child who stands up for itself and doesn’t take guff from no one. Whatever. But the other blessing comes from the validation of my frustrations as CJ’s parent that the daycare teacher’s concern gave me. I’m not frustrated because I have a normal child. I’m frustrated because I have a disorderly child, and I have a daycare teacher with training in child development to prove it.
Becky and I really like our day care center. The teachers are really well-trained and attentive, they have a great teacher-student ratio, and, perhaps most importantly, CJ loves going there. As usual, I don’t know nearly as much about it as Becky does, and I really don’t know anything about child care…but they have fabulous parent care. They know how to make us parents happy.
And we have regular parent-teacher conferences, just like in a regular school. Actually, just like in my performance evaluation at work, come to think of it. In the most recent one, under “Goals” there was this:
/Develop more appropriate coping tools to use during times of disappointment.
Well, heck, Becky and I thought, most of us work on that for most of our lives. I still am, anyway. Isn’t half of psychoanalysis devoted to that?
Then this one:
/Continue building turn taking and conflict resolution skills.
I’m thinking of writing a book: “Everything I need to know, I’ve needed to know since daycare.”
Finally, this one:
/Use spoon more consistently at mealtimes.
Yes. Something I can get my hands around. So to speak. Spoons. Got it. Will do.
P.S. The above picture has nothing to do with this blog posting, except that CJ is extremely happy with our small strawberry patch which has been bearing its annual fruit these last couple of weeks.
Did I ask too much
More than a lot
You gave me nothing
Now it’s all I got
We’re one
But we’re not the same
Well we
Hurt each other
Then we do it again
“One” – U2
Okay, so Wikipedia says this song was inspired by a letter that Bono wrote to the Dalai Lama. Whatever. He was really writing about parenthood and asking the most simple things from your child.
Okay, so I’m asking the seemingly impossible. “Please”. I’ve been trying to get her to say “Please.” I’m having second thoughts, though. Not because it’s a hopeless endeavour, but because the return-on-investment isn’t there, or, at least, is less immediately apparent.
The key for me is to reduce the incessant whining. When I prompt her to say “Please,” she stops, smiles and then softly whispers it. I’m not making any progress in getting her to say it unprompted, but for that moment, the whining subsides.
But it seems like I should be working towards many other more substantial and worthwhile developmental goals. Patience. Perseverance. Diligence. Kindness. Generosity. Humility. Integrity. Irony. The list is so long, I don’t know where to start. So I start with the simple stuff.
Sometimes, CJ is incredibly gleeful, as in the above picture, running to meet her grandmother, grandaunt, and granduncle. She rarely gets to see them, but there she is, running up to them, full-speed, as if they were the source of her every happiness.
Other times, the loss of a few goldfish crackers has Vesuvian consequences. It’s in those times that you earn your stripes as a parent. I find myself constantly trying to crack her code, to get what I want out of her in a way that stops short of physically forcing her to accede. Dragging her upstairs to get her into bed is a loss. Letting her stay downstairs is a loss. Having her scream and writhe on the ground inconsolably for ten minutes is a loss. Convincing her to walk up the stairs herself is a win.
A conversation she and I had earlier today while she was strapped in her car seat and the car is sitting in front of the house:
“I don’t want to go out of the car.”
“But it’s time to go in the house.”
“I don’t want to go in the house.”
Followed by five more minutes of back-and-forth, and escalating whining on her part.
“How about this,” I say. “How about you use the other door to get out of the car.”
“Okay.”
Did I win that round? Did she? Who knows? I got what I wanted, but did she get what she wanted, too?
And that’s parenthood, at least for now: a never-ending, relentless series of negotiations, where the counter-party has a seemingly bottomless well of patience and an unknown calculus for an appropriate outcome, and every single instance of bargaining holds implications for the next instance, which lies only moments away.
Clara likes feta cheese. But not the fake stuff you get from France or, heaven forbid, Wisconsin. It’s gotta be the real deal from Greece, the sheep’s milk/goat’s milk blend that’s been aged at least six months.
And she likes olives. But not the green olives you get in a jar, or even the pitted black ones cured in olive oil. No, she needs the black ones that still have the pits in them so her parents can painstakingly carve out the pits and then feed the meat to her.
And I’m not raising a gourmand here. The ketchup on her pulled pork works just fine. Note that in the picture above she’s eating her feta accompanied by a banana.
She just wants it her way. The definition of high maintenance. I gotta stop that.
This weekend is the official start of potty training. We started Friday night and she had one accident this morning. Not a complete success, but a positive step forward.
CJ had been pretty excited about the prospect of potty training for a couple of weeks now, particularly since her best friends at daycare, who are slightly older than her, have already been doing it. The picture above depicts her trying on her new underwear. Obviously, there were some first-timer difficulties. When she cand Becky came home from Target with the 6-pack of girl’s underwear, CJ couldn’t have been more excited. Everything fascinated her, from the plastic bag packaging to the pieces of tape that kept each pair in a roll. I wonder at what age new things lose their ability to inject wonder into our lives. Tonight, we’ll be having pork chops for dinner, and even though we have pork chops at least once a week, she’ll still be ga-ga over them.
I better enjoy this while it lasts.
Why can’t I enjoy things without anticipating the end of the joy?
She’s at a stage where she can respond to questions, but you don’t really know if she understands what you’ve asked, so you can’t quite trust her response. She’ll give conflicting answers to questions that ask the same thing, only in different ways. I feel like I’m re-enacting scenes from “Rain Man.” Next thing you know, she’ll insist on only flying Qantas.
And, of course, she’s been as troublesome as you’d imagine a two-year-old. When she throws a fit, contravenes directions that you know she understood, and, in general, makes me question how our species ever decided to reproduce, I often end up hugging her tight, gritting my teeth, and whispering to her, “Oh, my little pita.”
I don’t think of myself as a particularly severe person, but I guess relative to Becky, I am. And, in CJ’s case, that’s the only point of reference she has.
How does that translate into behaviour? It means that she tries to push Becky in ways that she doesn’t with me. If Becky isn’t home, the process of getting CJ to sit on the potty, go upstairs, strip down and take a bath, get into pajamas, read a couple of books, in bed, lights out and I’m back downstairs is 35 minutes, easily half the time that it takes for Becky. With Becky, it’s an unending set of negotiations and boundaries-testing.
If Becky is trying to put CJ down to sleep and I hear unrelenting screaming, the sound of my footsteps coming up the stairs is enough to alter CJ’s demeanour.
The flip side is that I don’t get the same kind of affection that Becky does. I get affection mixed with a hint of fear. Or fear mixed with a hint of affection. Kind of like the godfather.
I’m not sure where this comes from, though. Both Becky and I are judiciously firm with her, and Becky is certainly no pushover. Is it my (relatively) deep voice? My steely glare? The firm handshake that I use to greet her? (Okay, just kidding on that last one). Maybe every parental pairing has a good guy and a bad guy, and I’m just the less good guy.
Today, CJ is at the stage where she attributes new roles to old condiments. In this case, ketchup. Or catsup, we have yet to determine CJ’s preferred spelling. Here, CJ eats it up with the morning’s oatmeal. Followed, no less, by a second serving of the same.
Certainly, we encourage this sort of harmless experimentation, but I’m under no illusion that she’s much different than any other child her age. And I credit natural curiosity more than anything that we have done. Other than, of course, to make quality condiments available.
Still, it’s cute, so we have a picture of it.
She has yet to acquire a taste for Tabasco sauce, but I’m confident that that will come in time. She’s already learned the distinction between things that are “hot hot” (temperature wise) and things that are “spicy hot.” I’m anxious for her to develop the taste for spicy foods in large part because I’m tiring of frequently having to either bland down my cooking or cook two sets of dishes, one for her and one for me. I’m taking a strategy of gradualism, making dishes progressively more spicy. Earlier this week she balked at what I thought was a rather bland curried rice. Alas, this is going to take longer than I had hoped.
When I picked up the paper the other morning, I showed CJ the headline and mentioned to her that her 529 was in the tank and that she should prepare for community college…not that there’s anything wrong with community colleges. A few minutes later, she dutifully read the paper to her doll, no doubt assuring her/him (I haven’t checked) that his/her tuition was secure.
The economy has me thinking a lot about our household finances. I think about how we’re lucky that we have diversified income streams. I think about our budget and how we could cut back. I think about how we would cope if one of us lost our jobs. I think about my friends who have alreadylosttheirjobs.
And then I think about whether CJ will really notice. Kids don’t really need nearly as much as we think they do. Despite what they might say.
Among the gifts CJ received for her birthday was a tea set, which she adores and uses almost daily. Being a Chinese-American and having been raised with a cup of tea in my hand since as young as I can remember, I’m quite fond of tea. But I didn’t realize until recently the apostasy committed by my wife with regards to this beverage, and she seems to be passing it down to our offspring.
As the above picture shows, CJ has learned to pollute her tea with milk and sugar. Perhaps I’ll be able to pass it off as the remnants of her having been raised by woodland creatures and we rescued her at a still-young age. Maybe I’ll be able to shield her from the cruel comments of her betters as they deride her poor up-bringing. In any case, it will take an Herculean effort to spare her the fate of the Elephant Man, hiding in dark alleys and pleading “I am not an animal! I am a human being!”
This shot was taken a couple weeks ago. Note the hat. She’s already appropriating her dad’s clothing. I thought that wasn’t supposed to occur for another decade? I better start hiding my sweatshirts and flannel shirts now.
We (and when I say “we”, I mean “Becky”) have been doing a pretty good job of encouraging CJ to use the toilet, regularly putting her on the potty. On the weekends, when she’s with us the whole day, we have her on the potty before and after every meal and several times in between. I swear, she must have a pea-sized bladder.
While CJ is generally fairly amenable to the task, on occasion she resists. One of my more effective ways of getting her to sit on the potty is to take one of her books, sit next to the potty, and start reading silently to myself. Eventually, she comes over and asks me to read to her, and I’ll have her sit on the potty while I read. All in all, not bad.
So, of course, now that CJ is into baby dolls, she reads to her dolls as they sit on the potty.
Lesson: Don’t underestimate the power of modeling.
As a parent, it seems like I have only a limited amount of influence over the development of my daughter. For example, I’d like her to be left-handed (makes for a more effective curve ball and slider, going into the batter instead of away from the batter), but right now, that doesn’t seem to be in the mix. The above picture was taken last month while we were doing some holiday shopping at a toy store. CJ saw the toy stroller and baby dolls and took to them immediately, pushing the babies around for more than 15 minutes as we milled around.
CJ has since been caring for her dolls somewhat more attentively than before, pushing them around the house in her wagon and the Tonka truck that she got as a gift.
I’m not a real fan of conforming to stereotypes, so I don’t view this as a particularly positive development. But, clearly, she enjoys the dolls, so who am I to stand in the way?
In the past few weeks, CJ has learned to assert herself and express her, um, needs. That is, she “needs” just about everything. That sippy cup she’s holding in the above picture was something she absolutely needed on our trip to Southern California for the holidays. As her parents, we knew that she “needed” her sippy cup and brought one on the trip. Unfortunately, we misplaced it. On Christmas Day. You can bet that we were at Target bright and early on the day after Christmas.
“I need that!” is one of those phrases that pushes Becky’s button. I call it “Driving mommy to crazy town.” On numerous occasions over the last few weeks, she’s been halfway there.
If expressing your desires is a step in development, CJ has taken a big leap. With a running start. Into a long jump pit.
In one of those random bits of parenting reading that I came across some time ago, it said that children are more likely to eat the things you’ve made for them if they have had a part in the preparation of the meal. Being that I tend to take it personally when she turns her nose up at my cooking, it’s been in my interest to let her participate when I can.
Yes, she actually eats her vegetables, including the Brussels sprouts seen in the picture. Occasionally, I take her grocery shopping, and she insists on biting into the cucumbers that she grabs as we swing through the produce aisles. I know, however, that it’s only a matter of time before she’s pestering us for junk food. How do people deal with the checkout lane? I swear, every time I go through one of those things, surrounded by candy bars and tabloid magazines, I gain five pounds and lose five IQ points.
Eating hasn’t been a problem, yet, but I hear that’s coming. She already exhibits a lot of frustration that you would see from a two-year-old, gritting her teeth and gripping her fists, body trembling when she doesn’t get her way. Every now and then we get the lie-on-the-floor-and-wail treatment, but, so far, not in public.
Right now, the best moments of fatherhood come at the beginning of the day (albeit a little too early for my tastes) and when she comes home from daycare. It’s a brief but satisfying moment (and only a moment) where she cries for “Daddy!!!!” But once I get that hug, she’s gone. It’s as if she just wants assurance that I’m there and haven’t abandoned her, and once she knows she can take me for granted, she does.
CJ does not jump into new situations aggressively. With new people, in new situations, she will hind behind her parents’ legs, clutching her sippy cup, and no amount of prodding, coaxing and wheedling will get her out. Once she’s comfortable, however, she can be as aggressive and enthusiastic as anything.
I know that that is typical for a child her age. Evolutionarily speaking, you probably want a child to be timid in new situations, otherwise she probably wouldn’t last too long in the wilds.
I just don’t want her to be a wimp. It doesn’t look like she will be.
It doesn’t look like a break, but it is, and it’s hers.
They called it a “transverse buckle fracture along the dorsal aspect of the distant left radial metadiaphysis. Subtle cortical irregularity can be seen along the medial aspect of the distal left ulnar metaphysis indicating the site of an additional buckle fracture.”
That is, she suffered a small break in her left wrist.
So how did it happen? On Sunday, we met some friends at a bar for lunch and we had to sit at one of those high tables that requires bar chairs. The infant high chairs and the booster seats weren’t good for those chairs, and so CJ sat on a bar chair. And, of course, fell off of it, breaking her fall with her left hand.
What can I say, the girl can’t hold her drink.
Oddly, she didn’t let out one of those ear-piercing screams that tells you that she’s really hurt. Rather, it was a run-of-the-mill cry that subsided with some nursing. When we got home, she would continuously clutch her left wrist. I asked if it hurt, and she said yes. So I pressed on it a bit, turned it, raised her arm. She didn’t so much as flinch. I asked if it hurt and she nodded and clutched her wrist. So, after a few hours, we were off to the emergency room.
The doctor examined her in much the same way that I had, and, again, she didn’t evince any sign of pain, other than clutching her wrist. I got the sense that he ordered the x-rays not so much because he felt we needed them, but more to both cover his ass and to assuage a couple of concerned parents.
Lo and behold, there was a small break.
As you can see in the picture below, taken the evening after getting her cast (her choice of color), the broken arm hasn’t slowed her down. At first, she worked at how to deal with just one operable arm. By the next day, however, she had learned that an arm in a solid, hard cast can be used to push people out of the way and to leverage her way into tight areas.
…is not necessarily fiction. It could merely be opinion.
A friend of mine recently married a divorcé, who had had children in a previous marriage. One weekend morning while they were lounging in bed, my friend’s husband turns to her and says, “You know, when we have kids, we won’t be able to do this again for years.” Pause. “And it’ll be totally worth it.”
When my friend recounted this story to me, I said to her, “The first part of that statement is a statement of fact.”
I never thought of myself as a particularly prudish sort when it came to song lyrics, but there came a time the other evening that did give me pause. In choosing music for CJ, I’m generally just looking for a dance-ability, although I’m not keen on girl bands, a la The Go-Gos or Bananarama. But, have you listened to the lyrics from “Greased Lightning”? The Joan Jett stuff seems a bit more, um, aggressive than I’d like for my daughter. On the other hand, I’m encouraging aggressiveness, so I guess I shouldn’t complain when I get it.
I don’t know how much of what we encourage actually gets through to her. You can only do what you can do.
She recently has taken to saying “Thank you” and “Please,” and Becky and I are reacting reflexively. First, we immediately and positively respond whenever she says “Thank you” or “Please.” Second, I find that I’m unfailingly polite when I’m around CJ. Gotta be a good role model.
I’m not sure if we’re training her or if she’s trained us.
This car was parked next to ours at the state fair a couple of weeks ago. Going to the Minnesota state fair isn’t just about eating chocolate-covered bacon fried on a stick. It’s not about watching mom lose her hat on the Giant Slide. It’s not about seeing the champion boar or petting a horse.
The state fair is where the great masses of Minnesota converge and you are confronted with the notion that not everyone thinks like you do. And it’s not just some remote whacko screaming on MSNBC/Fox News, it’s a very real person with very real concerns who lives quite close to you, thinking thoughts and holding beliefs that are quite different than mine.
As an Asian-American living in a state with, um, not so many Asian-Americans, I’m regularly reminded that I’m different than most folks here. And, I suspect, CJ will be, too. Those who think that Barack Obama’s candidacy indicates that we have entered some kind of post-racial society have probably not looked too carefully at our society.
Recently, I was chatting with a friend, who also has a young child, about the pain and pleasure of raising a child. Okay, I was talking about the pain. It probably comes as no surprise to readers of this blog that, between Becky and me, I’m the one that does the bulk of the complaining when it comes to CJ. My friend shared that sentiment about raising their child, and my friend felt guilty for being the one to do all the complaining.
Then it came to me. It’s not that Becky doesn’t have things to complain about or that she doesn’t want to complain. Rather, since I’m complaining so much, she doesn’t feel like she has room to complain. Somebody’s gotta be sane.
So this weekend, I promised Becky that I would refrain complaining for the entirety of the weekend, starting from Friday evening and extending to Monday morning. And that she was free to complain all she wanted to.
Becky seemed to like the idea, but she has yet to take advantage of the opportunity. Maybe she is out of practice. And, of course, it’s only 8:30 p.m. on Friday.
All kinds of clues indicate your place in the world. CJ’s verbal patterns indicate where I lie in her world. Somewhere below our dog, Heidi, and somewhere above that stroller. Not much above the stroller, mind you.
Mom, of course, sits on top of the hierarchy. She is the alpha and the omega. I’m somewhere in the middle of the alphabet, one of those squiggly lines that look like a clam fork. And it makes sense. Mom provides comfort, and at the tender age of 18 and a half months, comfort cannot be over-valued.
Mom is irreplaceable.
Dad? Dad provides the fun. He swings you around, teaches you how to make farting sounds, and teaches you the difference between bears and road-runners. Any idiot can be fun. Dad’s eminently replaceable.
I used to think that I had patience, that I was a fairly even-keeled guy, not prone to outbursts.
I was wrong. And it took CJ to teach me that.
Last December, I talked to Becky’s grandfather to wish him a Merry Christmas and ask him for any sliver of advice he might have on raising children. His words of wisdom were as succinct as they were prescient: “Try not to get too annoyed.” Alas, that advice is easier dispensed than followed.
Certainly, CJ tries my patience with her deafness to my pleas not to throw her food, with her insistence on showering herself in root beer, and with her carelessness (in the sense that she really takes no care towards anything). But, I also find myself impatient with her development. It would be so much easier if she could just tell me what she wants. And her wants never cease. I can’t wait until she learns the concept of gratitude. Good Lord, even our dog, Heidi, is thankful every now and then. I have a hankering to sleep in until 7:30 on a regular basis, so I can’t wait until she can entertain herself after her regular wake-up time of 5:30 a.m. before wailing for our attentions.
Did I mention that I lack patience?
And I fully realize that once CJ reaches those thresholds, I’ll simply find new ones to be impatient for her to reach.
The other day, I was chatting with a neighbor who has a daughter about three months older than CJ. As we watched over the two kids, CJ came to a small set of two stairs and walked down them with little effort. My neighbor let out a little gasp of amazement, saying, “She goes down stairs?” The less evil side of me (I only have “more” or “less” evil sides) was tempted to say, “Yes, but she can only count to five.” I refrained from doing so. That’s how I knew it was the “less” evil side of me.
I have a hard time resisting the urge to compare CJ’s development progress to that of other children we meet. It’s particularly annoying to me because I know how much I disliked it as a child when my parents would compare me against children they deemed my peers. And, let me tell you, when you go to a Chinese-American church, your peers tend to set the bar pretty darn high. If they don’t win prizes at international violin competitions, they earn Westinghouse scholarships or translate Chinese literature. Straight A’s and entrance to an Ivy League school? Please, that’s table stakes.
But here we are, less than a year and a half in, and I’m holding up CJ against her peers…do they enunciate better than she does? Do they have a larger vocabulary? Why does she seem to take so long to adjust to new situations?
Of course, my fretting over her relative development probably mirrors my own insecurities and motivations as a parent, and contemplating that for any length of time makes me shudder.
Okay, so she didn’t get into a fight. Rather, she took a fall at daycare and bludgeoned her eye. This picture was taken several days after the fact, and it’s amazing how quickly she’s healed.
Actually, this was one of the few pictures we took of a camping trip that we recently took with Becky’s dad. Our picture-taking has really fallen by the wayside. We take her on her first camping trip and took all of a handful of pictures.
The first night of camping was a nightmare. Rain, thunder, lightning. We neglected to put away all the food in the bear box, and so we had raccoons in the camp. And CJ shrieked most of the night. Woo-hoo.
The second and third nights were much, much better, and three nights of camping is really my limit.
The nice thing about camping with a toddler is that there is a much smaller set of things that can really endanger her. Once you’ve checked around for the poison ivy/oak and other poisonous vegetation, you only really have to worry about one thing: the campfire. Just don’t let her into the fire. Find a stick that has a nice taste? Great. Got some rocks you want to stick in your shoe? Go nuts, kiddo. Want to wander off to find a bear? Knock yourself out. Just bring a bear song or something. We have black bears in Minnesota. Are you supposed to play dead with them, or make a loud noise? Run downhill?
In the city, there are all kinds of rules. Don’t run in the street without your bright orange vest. Don’t put that in your mouth, you don’t know which chemical truck that fell off of. Don’t eat the dog poop, it’s not worth the calories.
But camping? Stay out of the campfire. Life is so simple.
It took 484 days, but yesterday CJ finally nailed it. A clear, loud and undeniable “No.”
She quickly went on to satisfy her daily quota of usage of the word.
She recognizes a lot more words than she speaks, an attribute that I hope carries with her at least through the time she spends under our roof. She knows what we mean when we ask if she wants to go to the park or go for a walk. She has strong opinions about hats and the wearing of them. Best of all, she knows what a “book” is and is often anxious for us to read one or several to her.
I say “best of all” because I think Becky and I would have a rough time if it turned out that CJ did not enjoy reading. It’s probably an elitist thing, and I have frequently and not-unjustly been accused of being an elitist (which, however, does not mean that I will be voting for Barack Obama), but reading is an activity too important to be left to chance. I can’t remember exactly when we first started reading to her, but within her first week I was reading the Wall Street Journal to her. Sure, she has a weak understanding of the relationship between the value of the dollar and exports, but it’s a start.
But, back to “no.” CJ has already done plenty of boundary testing, and I am inclined to think that with the advent of this new capability, more is on the way. Happy, happy, joy, joy.
CJ has three phones. What she is holding in this picture is not one of them. Rather, she has inherited three of our now-dead cell phones, none of which she appreciates nearly as much as the other, working ones.
She also has a remote control (to a now-dead television) and a bevy of other discarded technological junk. But what she really wants is a laptop. Anyone?
Of course, her attachment to these things better reflects our attachment to these things. Sigh.
This picture will probably be one of those that will really make her cringe, in about 10 years. Woo-hoo.
To the casual observer, this picture may appear to depict CJ enjoying a slice of banana bread that her father baked for her, with a special ingredient…love.
In fact, however, this photo shows CJ developing a new consumable product category: the boysenberry jam delivery vehicle. This category is an off-shoot of similar items where the primary item (in this case, banana bread) is a loss leader to sell other, often higher-margin items (boysenberry jam). The most commonly-cited example of this is razors and razor blades.
My previous blog entry posited the theory that because I reckoned my child as being cuter than the other kids in her daycare class, I have evolved into being a true parent. Because only true parents are deluded enough to believe that their child is so exceptionally cute as to be above all others.
A couple of weeks ago, we went on a vacation to Taiwan. The first leg of the journey was to fly to Detroit, where we would take a plane to Japan. During the layover in Detroit, I let CJ loose in the area around the gate. Now, I understand that the Japanese tend to obsess over all things cute. But complete strangers were stopping to take pictures of CJ as she crawled around. Old ladies, young girls, middle-aged men, they would whip out their digicams and cell phones and take snap shots. Some would pose with CJ (and even CJ’s grandmother) and have their friends take their picture.
Now, these are Japanese tourists. They know cute.
So maybe I’m not the delusional parent that I thought I was. Maybe I’m back to just being some guy.
I do not believe in my personal exceptionalism. That is, generally speaking, I believe that things related to me, events surrounding me, and the things that happen to me are fairly normal. Even the most off-the-wall things that occur, I tend to believe, are within the bounds of reasonable expectation. That is, abnormal things may happen to me or around me, but it is normal for abnormal things to occur during the course of a person’s life.
So last week, I was dropping off CJ at daycare, and it seemed to be a particularly busy morning in the Early Wonders room, with infants of different shapes and sizes crawling and toddling around. After taking off her snow suit and putting her milk in the refrigerator, I surveyed the room and thought to myself, “Huh. Yeah. She is cuter than the rest of them.”
That’s when I realized that I am, indeed, a parent.
CJ takes her eating seriously, as the concentrated demeanor in the picture above will attest.
But, sometimes, I think that she doesn’t quite get it, as the picture below will attest.
In devouring her banana, she would alternate between the peel and the fruit, as if they were equally delicious. Who knows, maybe she’s right. Ah, if only I could regain the eyesight of a child.
She can’t walk, yet. She can’t stand on her own for more than a couple of seconds. She can’t figure out how to turn around to go backwards down the stairs.
But she can worry her mother by going up our rather steep staircase.
As with many houses of a certain age, our home has a staircase that would not pass inspection in this age. It frightens me a little to watch my mom and Becky’s parents try to navigate it. I’ve already planned out the trip to the emergency room when CJ barrels down it head first.
The staircase is also a significant reason why it is unlikely that this will be our last home. I’d like to move, but mostly just for the sake of moving. I get bored quickly, and I think CJ would benefit from living in different places. But inertia is tough and I’m afraid I’m getting comfortably numb.
Sigh.
CJ hasn’t quite figured out how to turn herself around and go backwards down the stairs, despite our efforts at modeling the behavior. When she tries and can’t figure it out, she gets frustrated and panics. So, do you help her out or do you have her work at it until she gets it? Do you teach her that mom and dad will always bail her out of a tough spot, or do you teach her that mom and dad won’t be there for her when she needs them?
In an earlier blog posting, I mentioned how CJ got an ear infection and we struggled to get her to take the antibiotic. It was a two-person job, with one person holding her and both her arms while simultaneously pinching her nose to force her mouth open, and the other administering the medicine while simultaneously squeezing her cheeks, to prevent her from spitting the medicine out.
Invariably, about half of the medicine would end up splattered on our clothes and faces, and her hair would be matted down, on both the front and back, from amoxicillin that had escaped her mouth.
Now, however, we’re on our second ear infection (and I’m getting the sense that we should get a Costco membership just so we can buy amoxicillin by the two-gallon jug) and we’ve found that CJ actually likes the stuff. She just doesn’t like it when we give it to her.
So, the key is to let her hold the syringe and she’ll put it in her mouth, and one of us gently pushes down on the plunger until she’s had all the medicine. Becky thinks it’s a sign of her innate willfulness. I think there have been plenty of signs of that already.
As Christmases go, this went pretty well. I’m not sure how a first Christmas is supposed to go, though.
I’m simple, though. My only wish for Christmas gifts for CJ was that they required no batteries. A full set of symbolscymbals and gongs would be fine. Just no batteries. And, for the most part, I got my wish.
CJ and her cousin, Quentin, got theirs, too. Lots of gift wrap to eat.
So far, the clear favorite of her gifts has been three wooden shape puzzles from her uncle Tim and aunt Robin. Simple, satisfying, and easy to taste.
It’s shocking to learn, I know, but I have been known to focus on the darker side of things. Such was the case on our flight down to Baton Rouge in an early winter storm. They had de-iced the wings and the weather wasn’t too bad, but there were ugly premonitions.
Of course, when an airplane goes down, there isn’t really much you can do. Again, why do they have life jackets on an airplane, but no parachutes? I know, I know, you’d just cause havoc. But, still.
So as the flight attendant was going through the motions of explaining what to do in the event of a water landing, I was thinking about what to do with CJ. In her first year, we’ve taken full advantage of the free passage that airlines allow for the first two years of the infant’s life, this being her fourth trip, and we’ve been fortunate enough not to have had an unscheduled landing.
But what if we did? How would we hold her secure? In a crash landing, there’s no way that we could just hold her really tight and expect to be able to hang on. The force of a crash landing, if we were fortunate enough to survive it, would rip her from our arms. So I start looking at the things that we have with us…something that would help strap down CJ…my belt, maybe. Maybe I could hold her tight against me and then close up my jacket around her. I look at Becky’s sweater and consider which would be more reliable, the buttons on my jacket or the zipper on her sweater. Maybe I look for the largest passenger on the plane and borrow their jacket. I recite in my head the plea that I would make to them to help me save my daughter’s young life.
If you’re going to miss a connecting flight and be forced to wait five hours in an airport with a sick child, there are worse places than Memphis International Airport. Not horrible food, clean enough, and lots of empty gates for a child to crawl around through. No free Wi-Fi, though.
When CJ gets sick, it really underscores the different roles Becky and I play. During CJ’s good periods, we played hide-and-seek around empty gates, crawled through tight spaces, and smiled at passers-by. During CJ’s bad periods, it was all mommy, all the time. Mommy is infinitely more indispensable than daddy.
CJ has more or less been eating table food for a few months now, and what you see in the above picture are her four major food groups: cheese, frozen fruits and veggies (in this case, blueberries), Cheerios, and milk. Much of it actually goes in her mouth and down her gullet.
My only wish is that our dog, Heidi, appreciated fruits and vegetables more.
I ran out of gas. I, I had a flat tire. I didn’t have enough money for cab fare. My tux didn’t come back from the cleaners. An old friend came in from out of town. Someone stole my car. There was an earthquake. A terrible flood. Locusts. IT WASN’T MY FAULT, I SWEAR TO GOD.
– John Belushi as “Joliet” Jake Blues
I could have gone with Gloria Gaynor (“So you’re back, from outer space, I just walked in to find you here with that sad look upon your face”), but I think I need to save that one for when it really counts.
Apologies all for my long absence from the blogosphere. It’s been a hectic month and I have numerous but insufficient excuses. Let’s just say I’m a bit over-loaded.
CJ currently has her first real sickness, a combination of a respiratory virus and infections in both ears. The above photo illustrates her rather successful attempts to prevent any medication from actually going down her throat. The early-morning trip to the emergency room last Wednesday had the effect of getting me an early start to the day. Note to self: the ER at Children’s Hospital is remarkably uncrowded during the early hours of a midweek day.
The hospital trip once again highlighted the difference between Becky and I in terms of how we view risk. CJ had been running a fever for several days and had not been eating well. She had a cough, a runny nose, and abnormal bowel movements, and, the night before, she had vomited. We were pretty sure it was something along the lines of RSV, which is a respiratory virus that requires, essentially, just waiting it out. On Wednesday early morning, Becky had gone to CJ, nursed her for a while and she vomited up everything that she had just taken in., and CJ started breathing rapidly. She called the clinic and the nurse decided that CJ’s quick breathing warranted a trip to the ER, so Becky woke me up.
I looked at CJ lying on our bed. I smiled at her. I tickled her belly, she laughs and squirms. I made a funny face at her, she laughs and squirms. I said, “This child does not need to go to the ER.” I look at my wife. We went to the ER.
But, as I said, it wasn’t a painful trip to the ER. No waiting, took some readings, snapped some X-rays, got a prescription for some pink liquid that we have to feed her twice a day for 10 days (joy), and I got an early start on the day.
Tomorrow, we fly down to Baton Rouge for holidays with Becky’s family. I think I’m going to hire a logistics expert.
A couple more pics of our struggles to get medicine into CJ.
Ed. note: Becky says: “I called the nurse line in the hopes that they’d make an appt for us in the clinic. not because of her breathing…I didn’t think we needed to go the ER either, I just wasn’t willing to actively disregard the recommendation of the nurse. It was probably a quicker visit than it would have been several hours later in clinic.”
For six weeks I’ve been doing part-time Daddy Daycare (two days a week), and so far it hasn’t been horrible. We have good days together and we have less good ones, but overall, she doesn’t hate me.
Still, on the days when I drop her off at daycare, she is rarely sad to see me leave her. She sees other parents drop off children, and watch those kids break into relentless tears as those parents flee to their jobs with broken hearts.
CJ? She looks at those crying children, looks at me, looks back at them, and almost shrugs. She has never shed a tear when I have dropped her off at daycare. Rather, she looks at me as if to say, “Oh, hey, you’re leaving? You can find your own way out, right?”
This morning, she waved at me gleefully as I left.
And no wonder. Look at the picture above, taken by her daycare teacher. She loves it there.
Daddy Daycare, on the other hand, is a bore. We shop for groceries, take the dog for a walk, have breakfast with friends, visit the park, and go to coffee shops to play with other kids. She’s 9 months old and already over-scheduled.
It almost goes without saying that children make you feel your age. Lately, though, I’ve been hypersensitive to the passing time.
Guys tend to buy clothing as needed, as opposed to “shopping” for clothes. The other day, I needed to buy some jeans, so I went to Target. Since when did I go to Target to buy clothing? Scanning the wall of denim in various shades of black or blue, in various cuts of slim or baggy, my eyes tracked the price tags. I didn’t buy the cheapest pair, but I had a flashback to a time in my mid-teens when I was desperate for a pair of Levi’s 501 button-fly jeans. And you would only buy them at Miller’s Outpost, nowhere else would do. My parents didn’t get it.
Now, I’m at Target, ignoring the branding and just looking for a cut that wouldn’t embarrass me. The jeans that I chose were actually less expensive than the 501’s of 20+ years ago, even after those years of inflation.
In a decade or so, I’ll be taking CJ shopping and she’s going to be pushing for her 501’s, and I’ll have to search for an analogous desire to achieve some degree of empathy. Becky excels at empathy. Perhaps I can outsource that to her.
I telecommute to my job on a full-time basis, which, generally speaking, means that I work from home or coffee shops or anywhere there’s an Internet connection.
It also means that I dress, well, not like a slob per se. But I dress like most people do on the weekends. Sometimes I shave, usually I don’t. I may wear a shirt that I wore the day before. I embrace disheveledness.
But dropping off CJ at daycare, I see other parents wearing suits and ties and very uncomfortable shoes, looking at me, thinking, “There goes the neighborhood.” The other day, I shaved before dropping off CJ.
And, of course, this is just the beginning. A friend of mine with a four-year-old felt compelled to not only make cupcakes from scratch for her daughter’s birthday, but to have the cupcakes baked in small ice cream cones and artistically iced. Becky assures me that, for health reasons, schools in Minnesota wouldn’t allow home-baked goods. But that just means that Lund’s becomes the baseline. No doubt we’ll have to custom-order something from an artisan bakery in Linden Hills.
For a baby, CJ is not a huge smiler. But we’ve found that the most reliable way to get her to smile is to have her see mom and dad kissing. From a survival standpoint, it’s easy to see why that would be true for babies in general. Their odds of survival are enhanced greatly when mom and dad stay together, and them kissing is a good indicator that they’re happy with each other.
Odd how in a few years having her see mom and dad kissing will become one of the most reliable ways to get her to cringe.
Sorry for the poor job of maintaining this blog recently. I’ve been ill, I’ve been working, yadda yadda.
Last weekend, I went hunting for the first time, with my father-in-law taking me to hunt pheasant. It was both my first time hunting and my first time shooting a shotgun. I managed to fire at something, but did not manage to hit it, and I managed to not shoot my father-in-law. For me, that was success.
Today, we decided to head out for a brief hunt at a (relatively) nearby state park, and this time, I took CJ along. Actually, CJ and I just came along for the walk, carrying our dog’s leash. But the shotgun didn’t spook CJ, and she seemed to enjoy the day in the prairie, even if we didn’t find any pheasant.
Note, her blaze orange cap (borrowed from her grandpa). Safety first!
I’d like to think that I’m open to new things, and I’d like to think that I’d be able to inculcate that in CJ.
But then again, I’d like to think that a major Cleveland sports organization will win a championship in my lifetime.
Today was CJ’s first day in what promises to be decades of institutionalized care and instruction. Daycare.
This is supposed to be a traumatic time for both child and parent. But look at that picture. Does that child look traumatized to you? The daycare teacher took that photo during breakfast. She seems to have had a successful first day of mouthing on a rubber duck and scoping out the kids around her. From what I remember, college isn’t too different.
And it’s not like the actual drop-off was anything more than a perfunctory, “Oh, you’re leaving? Okay.” She happily went to the daycare teacher’s arms and turned away as we left.
As for Becky and I, that wasn’t nearly as bad as advertised. Of course, I have a heart of stone. I don’t know what Becky’s excuse is.
The picture above of my beloved daughter is gratuitous and has nothing to do with this post.
I telecommute full-time, which means that my office is wherever there happens to be an Internet connections. Lately, because grandma has been taking care of CJ and CJ doesn’t like it when I’m at home and not available to play with her, I’ve been spending an increasing amount of time at coffee shops that have free Internet connections. In the Twin Cities, there are a bajillion of them. (Check out my map of free public Wi-Fi spots in the Twin Cities)
One of my favorite places to work is the Riverview Cafe. It has a reliable Internet connection, decent coffee, a decent number of electrical outlets to plug in the laptop, and an outdoor seating area (with a nearby outlet) that is pleasant on a warm day. (Its one drawback is that I occasionally find it to be over-airconditioned).
The Riverview Cafe also has a nice play area for small children and the cafe is a gathering spot for stay-at-home parents (almost all moms) and their kids. And here’s the rub. As a new father, I enjoy watching children play and thinking about how CJ will fit into that milieu as she grows up. But middle-aged men behind computers staring at children is a definite social no-no.
I get cautious looks from mothers, and wary glances from children. Smiling at them only makes it worse. They make me feel like the creepy old man that I’m not. Or, at least, I don’t think I am.
A friend invited me to dinner with her family at her house earlier this week, and I got a chance to see how other families deal with meal time for the young ‘uns. Their child is a year older than CJ, so it was kind of like a “coming attractions” opportunity.
The dad cut up an avocado and some veggies, put it on the high-chair tray, and the kid just gobbled them up. The grandfather said, “You have to eat your vegetables so you can grow up big and strong!”
The next day, it was my turn to feed CJ.
“You have to eat your peas so you can grow up sharp-witted and sarcastic!”
Oh, and if you look real closely at the above picture, you can see peas on her eye-lashes. The food gets everywhere.
If I were Bart Simpson, the opening montage of The Simpsons would feature me at the chalkboard, repeatedly writing out the line “CJ is not a toy, CJ is not a toy…”
My role and Becky’s role has been pretty well defined by now. Becky is the nurturer. I’m the guy who will put her in mortal danger for the heck of it.
The above picture is from this morning, when CJ and I engaged in our frequent dance ritual. Elvis Costello, “(The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes,” in celebration of the new red shoes that CJ was wearing. Mom calls it “dancing,” but it’s more like a combination of slam-dancing and weight lifting. My arms are sore afterwards.
Which is just as well. I gave up my hope of running a marathon this year, so this is about all the exercise I get any more. Last time I stopped running, I gained 15 pounds and took to wearing roomy sweatpants. Pathetic.
“Dancing” with CJ entails flinging her as high as possible without banging her head against the ceiling and simultaneously spinning and tossing her a la a pair of figure skaters. It’s disappointing how I’ve fallen so easily into the stereotypical father role.
Recently, CJ has been making valiant attempts at crawling, hoisting herself up on all-fours and vigorously rocking. Occasionally, I would put a favored toy just a little out of her grasp to entice her, but that invariably results in an awkward lunge, followed by a collapse on her nose.
In analyzing her technique, the problem is clear, and pictured above. Many of her tics have come and gone. She no longer sticks her tongue out, a la Michael Jordan. Her toes no longer hold the fascination they once did. But the hooked ankles and the steady, studied gaze seem to have staying power.
I try to help her out with her crawling, repeatedly untangling her ankles or holding her ankles apart, to no avail. Any facility I have for teaching is totally inadequate to this job.
And, of course, I project my failure to convince CJ to unhook her ankles out into the future and realize that it’s a good thing she doesn’t understand a word I say, because I have a lot to learn about teaching.
I need to stop taking every setback and extrapolating them to broader, horrific scenarios. It’s neither healthy nor realistic.
I’ve always been a city boy, and when the annual state fair comes upon us, I relish the opportunity to visit what is essentially a foreign land to me.
For CJ, of course, it’s all brand new. One of the attributes that has become apparent is that she approaches new things with a focus and intensity usually reserved for art-house films. In the photo above, she inspects a newborn piglet at the fair’s “Miracle of Birth Center,” where they feature fresh-squeezed farm animals. Note the concentration in her eyes. It’s the same look she gives to everything and everyone new. A slight knitting of the brow, a fixed gaze and a timid pat.
Her circumspective nature will come in handy. I told her that “Pigs say ‘Moooo’.”
Becky says that she’ll grow up not believing a word Daddy tells her. I say that will make her a good journalist. And doom her to a life of poverty and ridicule. Oh, well.
Today, CJ learned how to sit up by herself. Not actually get into a seated position, mind you, but maintain a seated position. A milestone, to be certain. But when Becky excitedly pointed it out to me, I had a hard time generating the requisite amount of enthusiasm. I dutifully grabbed the camera and snapped a few shots. (Click here to see more of them)
It’s much too soon to have become inured to the new tricks perpetrated by my offspring. At this rate, I’ll be totally ignoring her before she gets a chance to burp out her first words.
While I failed to be impressed by her sitting up, another development did interest me.
When CJ was first born, we were not prepared with a name for her. In sending out an e-mail notifying folks about her birth, I had said that her name was “TBD” or “to be determined.” For the two days that she was without a name, I lobbied for “Tabeedee” as a middle name. To no avail.
Since then, even after she had been properly named, I’ve generally been calling her “Tabeedee”, although on this blog, I tend to refer to her as CJ, in large part because it’s simply easier to type. Most people, however, generally call her “CJ” or “Clara.”
Today, as I was trying to get her attention for the above picture, when I called out “Tabeedee,” she turned to me and smiled. “Clara,” on the other hand, elicited no reaction. Score.
This is *not* a contest, but I did want to share Gregg and Sarah’s similarly gymnastic adventures with their Henry. Understand that next month Henry turns 2-years-old next month (as opposed to CJ’s 6 months) and that the video is a re-enactment of a time when Henry was of a more manageable weight and size (and when Gregg was not as far removed from his days wreaking havoc on an ultimate Frisbee field).
Also, in my original posting, I neglected to mention the rise this trick got out of a passer-by who witnessed it. When I performed it in a park in Muscatine, Iowa a couple weekends ago, a local woman warned, “If you’re not careful, you’re going to turn that girl into a tomboy!” She did not mean it in a nice way. Yes, she used the word “tomboy,” but she really meant (gasp!) something the name of which she dare not speak (heaven forbid!).
Like a lot of people, I find that I use the same tone of voice in speaking to the dog and speaking to the baby. I also find that my words have the same lack of impact on both of them.
When we got the dog, Heidi, last year, we were without child and Becky seemed convinced that we weren’t going to conceive. A month after we got Heidi, voila. Personally, I would have rather we had waited on the dog, but here we are.
I’m not really good at the high-pitched coo-cooing, but I try. Having the dog to practice on for a few months was helpful, though. “Sit.” “Wait.” “Come!” “Good girl.” At one point or another in the last 6 months, those have all come in handy with CJ. Particularly “Stay.” I doubt that will last, though.
Still, I’m looking forward to seeing whether some things you do with a dog work with CJ. For example, in addressing a dog, you’re supposed to say things only once. Repeating the same command over and over is a waste, because it loses its impact, and the dog thinks you don’t mean it. If they don’t obey after the first instruction, you correct them.
Yeah, that’ll work with CJ. I’m shopping for choke chains now. Do they come in toddler sizes?
As I’ve mentioned in the past, Becky and I have different standards for what constitutes acceptable risk. Last year, before CJ came along, we were visiting friends in Southern California who have two children, one almost 3 years old and the other a 1-month-old. While standing outside a restaurant along a modestly busy street of a Los Angeles suburb, the toddler began walking down the sidewalk. She would peek back to see if anyone was watching/following her, and she was clearly enticing someone to come get her.
Me? I’m just not that great at playing that kind of game. Becky ran after her, appalled that I would let a toddler go alone down a street where cars were going by at 40 miles per hour.
“That’s why they have another one,” I said, pointing to the 1-month-old.
Anyway, the above video is from last weekend’s wedding. I apologize for its tiltedness…I couldn’t figure out how to rotate the video. UPDATE: I figured out how to rotate the video…but now I look fat. Wait. Maybe I am fat.
Becky describes this as “the trick where daddy tries to wrench CJ’s arms off and then drop her on her head.”
Everybody wants to see the baby. I don’t know that I can have a 10-minute conversation without the topic turning to something baby-related.
This past weekend, the family, including Becky’s dad, Vern, went down to Muscatine, Iowa for the wedding of one of Becky’s cousins. Being the newest member of the Wright clan, CJ was a hit and subject to much fawning and fascination. She goes to strangers easily, at least for now, and exhibits deep concentration when taking in a new person, as if committing the face to memory. After an initial orientation, she smiles easily and interacts playfully. When we go to parties, or anywhere, really, people mostly want to see CJ. Clearly, she got her charm from her mom’s side.
But I think I remember a time when I was able to converse intelligently, or at least coherently, about a wide variety of current events. I could prognosticate on the prospects for the Cleveland Browns this season. I had an opinion about the effectiveness of various modern political survey methods. I kept current on the comings and goings of various local chefs, and the openings and closings of local restaurants. The old me would know the differences in the health care proposals of Tommy Thompson and Fred Thompson. The new me can’t tell the difference between paper and plastic.
And even if I could, the only thing folks want to talk about is the baby. Sigh.
Things that I missed in the week that CJ was down in Baton Rouge:
As the above picture indicates, she now has a Michael Jordan-like penchant for sticking out her tongue. Just like MJ, when CJ gets really excited, out it comes.
She has upped the volume on her crying. I mean, we’re talking Brünnhilde-quality cries.
She rolls over in bed regularly and with abandon. Apparently, she fell off the bed in the middle of the night at grandma’s place. Now, we have a bed rail at home. Apparently, she is still testing to see if gravity works here, too.
Tonight’s dinner is on the cutting board on the right. Tomorrow night’s dinner is on the plate on the left.
Unfortunately, I didn’t think of writing a post about dinner until I had chopped up half of it, but the dinner on the right is the tongue of a pig, and tomorrow night’s dinner on the plate is its heart. Every year Becky and I buy a big and have it butchered and we put it in the basement freezer. We highly recommend it, if you can find a small local pig farmer (“small” describing the farm, of course, not the actual farmer). The Web is fabulous for this sort of thing.
Anyway, this is what I eat when Becky is out of town. I love it; Becky prefers to do without it.
Culinary adventuresomeness is something I hope to hand down to CJ, but I get the feeling that I won’t have the ability to choose which characteristics she picks up and which ones she leaves behind, when she follows my lead, when she follows Becky’s, and when she carves her own path. Will she pick up her mother’s abilities to empathise or my soul-deadening cynicism? Mom’s smile or my tightly-drawn lips?
It is kind of nice that we don’t know which characteristics she’ll pick up from whom. It gives me plausible deniability for when she ends up defiling everything we hold dear. Whatever those things are.
One of the more frightening/amazing elements of parenthood is the notion that children reflect their parents. Some things I just don’t want reflected back to me.
Of course, she’ll suffer from severe clinical depression. With us as parents, she doesn’t have much choice. (Thanks go out to the wonderful people at Pfizer for de-funking us long enough to procreate).
Oh, and the answer is: braised with the red bell peppers on a bed of hash browns.
As in the movies, blog sequels aren’t as good as the original either. This time, it’s not Becky leaving me alone with CJ. It’s Becky and CJ both abandoning me for the week. They left on Tuesday morning and today is Thursday.
Today, I noticed what a big house we have. We’re having a bit of a heat wave here and I don’t sleep well in air-conditioned rooms, so I’ve been spending a lot of time in the basement, where it’s a lot cooler. The basement is a very livable space with plenty of room. We moved a futon down here a few months back, and there’s a stereo, bathroom, shower, and office, where I tend to work in the summertime anyway. I go upstairs to the kitchen, but that’s about it.
I think I’m beginning to take on troll-like characteristics.
In the past two days, I have been up to the house’s second floor once, just to make sure everything was turned off. The living room, dining room, sun room, ground floor office? Why do we have such a big house?
But bacherlorhood isn’t what it was. I still got to sleep by 10 p.m. Yesterday, I woke up at 4:45 a.m. to go for a run. Today, I woke up at 5:30 a.m. and took the dog for a walk. I might as well have had CJ to wake me up.
I clearly did not plan this well. No poker games set up, no wild parties. I did, however, stay out past 7 p.m. the past two nights, something otherwise not possible with CJ.
Thanks to Rocky for the idea for the new ringtone on my mobile phone. Don’t worry, it only plays on my cellphone when receiving a call from either our home phone or Becky’s cellphone.
CJ just started eating something resembling food, and, at 5 months old, she’s a pretty good eater. Here, it’s avocado mashed up with breast milk. Mmm. Actually, several weeks ago, I started her on the occasional banana, and then an apple slice. Limes, she no likey.
A few days back, we began feeding her food in earnest. Becky started with some rice concoction and, while CJ loved it, it was, of course, a mess. The table was a mess, CJ was a mess, CJ’s clothes were a mess, Becky was a mess.
Yesterday was my turn. I undressed CJ, put her in her plastic seat, then put her and the seat in the shower in the downstairs bathroom. Unlike the upstairs bathroom shower, the downstairs one has a handheld shower head. Feeding was still a mess, but clean-up was a cinch.
When I initially told Becky of my plan, she thought it was a mildly amusing jest that, like others, was not to be taken seriously.
I have to do a better job of indicating when I’m joking and when I’m not.
Before rumor festers into fact, I want to point out that I did *not* drop the baby. She fell onto the kitchen floor by herself. I just happen to be with her in the kitchen. She was in her chair on the floor, she reached down to pick up an errant piece of paper, and she tumbled onto the floor. She laid still for a moment. Thought about it. Then began wailing.
To think, we made it quite a ways without so much as a bump into a door jamb. Just one more day and it would have been five full months. Actually, she hasn’t had so much as a sniffle or a low-grade fever. Of course, we haven’t ventured into daycare, yet.
Becky and my reactions to CJ’s minor fall (she did end up with a red spot on her forehead that persisted for a couple hours) were pretty stereotypical. Becky blew on CJ’s forehead while making soothing sounds. I told her to shake it off.
Becketwood is a 210-unit senior housing community along the river, about half a mile from our home. The place has a bit of an English-castle air to it, with its gates and expansive lawns, and its proximity to the river parkway makes it especially attractive.
On a walk around the neighborhood the other day, Becky, CJ and I passed by Becketwood.
“Someday,” I intoned to CJ, who ignored me, “Mom and dad will live here, and you will get to live at our house with your family. If we’re lucky, you’ll come visit us. If we’re really lucky, we’ll recognize you.”
The thing about having children….well, *one* of the things about having children, is that it’s pretty much your life’s last nice milestone. You’ve graduated from college, bought your first car, got married, and bought a house. Most of the rest are pretty much downers. There’s retirement. Paying off the mortgage on your home. My first layoff. My third career. For half of us married folk, there’s a divorce.
I’m not complaining, I’m just sayin.
So that relegates us to celebrating the milestones of our children. In Chinese families, there’s a quirky balance struck between bragging about your children and putting them down. On the one hand, your SAT scores were never good enough and how come you didn’t go to law school. On the other hand, the parents brag about their children’s exploits to their friends, but only after an appropriately polite amount of deprecation. As a child, it’s very confusing.
Recently, Becky and I toured a daycare center for CJ (Some day, we’ll tour a daycare center for Becky and me, but that’s another posting). Everything went swimmingly, until we got to the end when the director told pointed to some pictures in her office of a recent graduation ceremony for some of the students. Yes, graduation. From daycare. I suppressed a cough, and Becky patted my hand.
Working at a nearby coffee shop the other day, I overheard the conversation of a young woman on her cell phone. None of the conversation made an impression on me, just the high-pitched, sing-song quality of her voice. Having spent a good part of my life in Southern California, I’m particularly sensitive to this type of voice, and I find it particularly grating. No doubt, CJ will speak this way.
Later on that day, Becky, CJ and I took Heidi for a walk through the dog park. It frequently happens that we would meet strangers at the dog park who would talk to CJ, and such was the case this time. The woman spoke to CJ in a high-pitched, sing-song baby voice, and I suppressed a cringe.
It got me thinking. Becky had introduced CJ as “she.” Would strangers use a different voice if they thought that CJ were a boy?
Of course, we treat infants differently based on our perceived gender of the infant, and the children, in turn, alter their behavior in response. But I’d like to give CJ a chance at some of the “boy” attributes. I’ve decided that, on occasion, we’ll introduce her to strangers as a boy. See what happens. Maybe we can get people to use deep-voiced baby talk, instead of high-pitched baby talk.
So, for those of you who actually have a life and don’t feel the need to blog about it, a quick lesson on one of the facets of these online journals.
Most of the blogging services (in the case of this blog, I use WordPress) give the writer tools and statistics about the blog. How many people came to visit, which links did folks click on, what entry was most popular, etc. And, of course, the search engines, like Google and Yahoo!, scan the blogs and make it so that someone searching for things might be able to find them.
WordPress also tells the writer how people got to the blog. Did they click at another Web page to get here, did they type in www.cjgaw.com, or how?
The other day, WordPress told me that a visitor got to my site when they were searching for a particularly, um, icky phrase. And when I Googled that phrase, I found that, on the whole wide Web, this entry on this site is the only one that contains that phrase.
Ew.
Now, I’m not sure what to do. Do I delete or edit that entry, all because of one errant Web searcher somewhere in this great wide world? Or is that just giving in to the bad guys? I work in the tech industry, and I know what’s possible and I know what’s likely…or, in this case, extremely unlikely.
Becky and I have different thresholds for acceptable risks. I like riding my motorcycle. I’d like to take CJ riding. This weekend. I have little understanding of the choking hazard posed by chunks of banana or the allergy threat posed by a variety of peanuts. Once I used the plastic bag from a newspaper as a hand puppet, before realizing that was probably a bad idea.
Becky wants to swaddle CJ in bubblewrap.
“No I don’t,” Becky says, reading over my shoulder.
But anyway. Acceptable risk. More things to think about.
CJ takes to the swings as she does with most new things. First, there is trepidation towards the unknown. A hard stare, followed by a furrowed brow. She weakly reaches out to her mother. Then it dawns on her that perhaps it’s more enjoyable than frightening. A smile ventures from her lips. And then a full blown grin.
It’s a nice show. Kind of like one of those flip books that I used to play with as a kid.
So, upon further review of my previous blog entry, I’ve come down from the ledge a bit. Clearly, I’m not going to be the perfect role-model, and you can only take on so much responsibility for your child’s development.
It reminds me of an episode of “Taxi,” the late 1970s sitcom, not the 2004 Jimmy Fallon/Queen Latifah vehicle. Louie De Palma, the masochistic dispatcher played by Danny DeVito, is really concerned about his upcoming gallstone surgery, and promises God that if he pulls through that he’ll be the best person he can be. When the surgery goes well, a transformed Louie emerges, kind and unfailingly polite. The old Louie is obviously bubbling just beneath the surface and, eventually, it bursts through. He is distraught that he couldn’t keep his promise to God, but then Alex reminds him that his promise wasn’t to be the best person, just the best person that he could be, and maybe that person isn’t all that kind or polite.
Let’s hope that the best father I can be is somewhat better than the best Louie De Palma out there. I’ll do what I can and let CJ’s therapist clean it up later.
Today marks four months of CJ, which is the official start of counting months instead of weeks, as in, “CJ is four months old,” as opposed to, “CJ is 16 weeks old.”
In celebration, CJ gnawed on her favorite food, banana. Actually, she rather frequently gets to gnaw on her favorite food. Come to think of it, her exposure to food has been limited to milk and, um, bananas. And the occasional apple. I guess I have some work to do on that account. There seems like so much to do, so many things that need to be taught, so many characteristics that need to be massaged. It’s an impossible task.
The other morning, while brushing my teeth, I glanced at the bathroom mirror, only to see CJ staring at me, taking in every stroke of the brush. I made sure I did an extra round of the insides of the back teeth. Then I flossed.
I can’t take this kind of pressure for the next 18 years. I can’t be that good of a person.
CJ’s best time of day is around 6:30 a.m. She wakes up, and wakes us up, with eyes ready to take in a whole new world, marveling at the wonders that her parents unfold to her, waiting for the wisdom that drips from their mouths like manna from heaven. Milk! For breakfast! What a deal!
But by mid-afternoon she threatens to descend into meltdown mode, the joy of the morning just a waxy memory, and she’s done for the day.
“That’s just like an adult,” says my wizened friend Larry. “She’s learning remarkably quickly!”
Yes, she’s a quick study. Aren’t they all?
She’s been drooling a lot, probably a sign of teething, and it reminded me of the circularity of life, prompting me to calculate the number of years before I will no longer have teeth and be drooling on my shirt-front, waiting, or perhaps not waiting, for an attendant to change my diaper. It won’t be long.
Whenever we take CJ out, people invariably note that she resembles me. They too quickly also reassure me that she’s a very attractive baby. As Becky suspected, there apparently is an evolutionary push to have the child look like its father.
The authors offered an evolutionary explanation for their findings: the phenomenon is a natural paternity test.
A father, unlike a mother, cannot always be sure a baby is his. If he spots a resemblance, the authors argued, he will know the child is his and will be more likely to protect and care for it, benefiting both mother and baby.
The two studies that were presented are interesting for both their results and their techniques.
The researchers took head shots of a group of people and morphed them with photos of baby faces without the subjects’ knowledge.
When they presented the subjects with the faces, the men were more likely to indicate they would adopt or spend time with the babies, male and female, who had more of their facial characteristics.
No word on whether there is hope that CJ will grow out of it.
Last week, CJ discovered her tongue and, as with a lot of discoveries, began to dwell on it, sticking it out for no apparent reason, with no prompting, and as a ploy to get others to say, “Oh, how cute!”
But it doesn’t exactly pay the bills. So I tried teaching her how to blow a raspberry. She’s been working on it every morning ever since. It’s nice to see that she’s willing to apply herself to the important things in life.
Births are one of those seminal life moments that marketers love. Like weddings and graduation, birth is one of those opportunities to sell you something…usually, lots of somethings. For digital camera marketers, every birth is a selling opportunity, probably one of their biggest.
This picture was taken by the digital camera that is embedded in my mobile phone. Like most camera-phones, it’s a mediocre camera, but its the newest one we’ve got. But the birth didn’t propel us to buy a new camera. We seemed to have bought one of just about everything else. But for some reason, we stayed with our three-year-old digital camera (an eternity in the development of digital cameras these days). And we didn’t get a video recorder, even though we don’t have one. I don’t really envision us watching movies. It just doesn’t seem like us.
When it comes to pictures, I figure the photographer matters a lot more than the equipment. But people are meant to covet, and I’m sure that I will be failing to meet my life’s full potential without a new camera.
There are no bad children, just bad parents. I, for one, am aiming at the Chris Rock threshold for parenting. “My responsibility is to keep her off the pole. If your daughter is a stripper, you f***ed up!” Okay, so it’s a low bar…okay, so maybe the bar is set on the ground. But at least it’s a bar.
But other than seeing your daughter walking Lake Street in clear high-heels, how do you know if you’re a bad parent? Is it even possible to recognize that you are a bad parent? Even people who have had their children taken away because of neglect or abuse usually believe that their case is an anomaly, the government bureaucracy gone wild, that, yes, there are people who deserve to have their children taken away from them, but not them. No, this was all just a misunderstanding. A teacher who sends a note home that your child is unruly in class? Clearly, that teacher doesn’t recognize your child’s genius. Sometimes she needs a spanking. Sometimes, that spanking means a switch. That I made her pick out.
Can a parent even countenance the notion that they may not be suited for this particular endeavor? After all, you’re so vested in the plan and it’s not like you can back out, so why even bother considering that you might be less-than-prepared for the job? And, besides, as long as I love her, I can’t be a bad parent. Right?
CJ’s best times are definitely in the mornings. She’s rested, playful, and ready to explore. And, then, without a moment’s notice, she does this Jekyll-and-Hyde thing.
These two pictures were taken within two minutes of each other:
A CJ crying jag is an ever-changing puzzle. It used to be, she was either hungry, tired or had a soiled diaper. Now, her lists of don’t-likes grows with each passing moment. Getting into the car seat. Getting out of the car seat. Getting wrapped to go to sleep. Getting unwrapped from waking up. She won’t take a bottle any more. She wants to be in the swing. She doesn’t want to be in the swing.
It used to be the crying was for a few minutes at a stretch. Now, it can be an unbroken 45 minutes, if Becky’s not around.
My first trip away from CJ is just about over. I’m at JFK airport waiting for my flight to board. It’s been two days away and, sadly, I’m not sure that I could definitively say that I have missed her in that bone-crushingly agonizing way that I hear is common among new parents. It’s not that I needed the extra sleep. After all, at home, I sleep in the spare bedroom as it is, which means I generally get a decent night’s sleep anyway.
Do I not care enough?
I took two weeks off from the blog, but only part of it was because of fatigue. We went on another trip, this time to Louisiana, in part to see Becky’s family in Baton Rouge, but mostly to go to Jazzfest in New Orleans. After changing planes in Memphis and arriving in Baton Rouge, CJ has now had bowel movements in five states. Not bad for an 11-week-old. At this rate, she’ll have defecated in every state by the age of 2. Becky may travel to Philadelphia in June…hmmm…
While I can talk about the fabulous time we had at Jazzfest, how CJ loved the crowds and the music and was, for the most part, absolutely charming, the most interesting thing was the realization that I took no pictures of her while there. Not a one. Her first big event and I couldn’t be bothered. (My friend, Rocky, did manage a few shots, though. Click here.)
Life is what happens when you put down the camera, I guess. But doesn’t 11 weeks seem like a little early for the bloom to be off the rose? For the first month, I don’t think a day went by that I didn’t take a picture of the offspring. Today, I’m not even sure the camera’s batteries are charged.
Earlier this week, I was talking to two dads with small children, albeit several years older than CJ. I asked them when the children stopped crying. They couldn’t say.
Well, the grandparents and siblings are gone for a week or so, and it’s just Becky and I to take on CJ. The above picture, obviously, is more of a forward-looking image, rather than a current one, but I think it does a good job of capturing the dichotomous nature of child-rearing. At least, so far.
Of course, we’ll miss our grandparents’ help. Nothing is quite so comforting as the knowledge that there’s another set of hands ready to step in when you want to take that much-needed shower. But it’s also a little relieving, knowing that there aren’t grand-parental expectations to meet at every moment. And, of course, no matter how hard you try to feel like they are just another member of the household and no matter how hard they try to put you at ease that you don’t need to go out of your way, you impulsively feel like they are guests and need to treat them as such.
So, here we are. And, as Kurt Vonnegut so succinctly put it, so it goes.
I can tell already, I’m going to be the dad that lets the baby cry. I’m going to be the dad that says no. I’m going to be the dad that gets tired and fed up. Sigh.
When most people hear a baby cry, their reaction is to soothe and comfort. I’ve gone past that stage and have become inured to it. I’m totally ready to let her cry it out.
Already, I understand why fathers putter in the garage working on nothing in particular. The hassle, the incessant crying, and the unending, immeasurable and all-encompassing burden that stretches out for as long as I live.
Tomorrow, CJ will be 9 weeks old. Lord, hear our prayers.
Becky’s dad, Vern, left on Tuesday, and my mom, Sally, came in on Wednesday. Obviously, Becky and I have been very fortunate to have a parade of family coming through week after week, and we’re very grateful.
In other times, when people didn’t move so much or so far away, parents and other family members were much closer at hand, usually in the same home. CJ’s arrival highlighted for me how far Becky and I have moved from our families, and how much more we rely on the network of friends we have made. Neither of us grew up here or even attended college here, but, yet, here we are. I’m not sure how the displacement impacts things like familial attachments or community involvement, but I doubt it can be incidental, particularly on an inter-generational level.
Call it her blue phase. Maybe she feels that life has done her wrong. Maybe she has come to the realization that life isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be. Or, as great-grandpa has said, maybe her mother should stop pinching her.
Yesterday, CJ turned surly. Apparently, grandpa isn’t good enough for her any more, and she insists on being held by parents, and even then only if her preferred music is playing.
Her preferred music: Standards (Sinatra, Dean Martin, Mel Torme, etc.), Motown, blues/soul, Elvis (Presley, not Costello).
Her un-preferred music: the B-52s, U2, REM, Elvis (Costello, not Presley).
She likes Beethoven and Mozart, but not Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff.
Putting CJ to sleep takes a lot of pacing, swaddling, and cradling. And talking. She likes it when there’s a voice speaking. So what do I talk to her about? A few recent subjects:
Four. Four is a very important number. In Chinese, it’s a very unlucky number (has the same sound as “death”). Lots of things come in fours. There are four Gospels in the Bible (Matthew, Mark, Luke and John); four Beatles (John, Paul, George and Ringo); four food groups (fast, frozen, canned and junk).
Retirement. Becky and my retirement, that is, and how CJ is going to help pay for it. We aren’t looking for much. Just a very small villa in Tuscany to winter in. With a caretaker. For about 30 years (35 for mom, because she’ll live longer).
Daughters take care of their parents. Sons, particularly left-handed ones, can be taught to play baseball and throw a sinking slider (hold off on the curve ball until at least high school). That’s why we have sons. We have daughters because daughters take care of their parents.
Arab-Israeli conflict. The beautiful thing about this topic is that it is centuries-old, so there is no end to how much you can talk about it, and even after she has grown up and gone off to college, it will still be on-going.
Elvis (Presley) v. Elvis (Costello).
If you have suggestions for bedtime lecture subjects, I’m looking for more. We have a lot of bedtimes to go. Just click on the Comments link below.
While Becky has returned to her pre-pregnancy weight, CJ is growing in both weight and length. This lavender number, from Becky’s co-worker Trudi, didn’t make it to the threetwo-month point, and marks the first time that CJ has out-grown a set of clothes. Shortly after this photo was taken, the outfit was soiled. Ah, well. It went out with a bang.
