Month: October 2006

It is, of course, almost Halloween. What was once perhaps the most bitchin’ of holidays became, as I got older, utterly trite has once again become totally awesometacular again simply because we now have a child. Sam is finally getting old enough that we can dress her up, and unlike before, she can actually enjoy it. This we had two costumes again, the first of which we strapped her into so that I could take her to this little kiddie party at the local community center. I give you Purple Fairy Girl:

Sam was totally stoked to go to this thing, and since Ger was at a yoga class that night I got to take Sam by myself. It was mostly little games and crafts that were done in exchange for fun-sized candy bars. I guess when you’re two years old a rousing game of “Drop the Bean Bag in the Bucket Right There In Front of You” really pushes your nascent dexterity to the limit.

They also had one of those inflatable structures that you can jump around in, kind of like a trampoline only marginally less dangerous. Sam was initially dubious of this gas-filled behemoth, but when she eventually asked to try it, I took off her shoes and tossed her in there. There was a big sign on the side of the thing that very clearly said “WARNING: ONLY TWO CHILDREN AT A TIME” but that really didn’t stop parents from just flinging kids in there by the dozen. Soon the laughing, undulating mass of costumed kiddies was so thick so as to preclude any sense of safety. I saw Sam totally clobber no less than three kids before I could get her out of there.

The other Halloween related activity for the weekend was a visit to a farm owned by, inexplicably, a major dog food manufacturer. There were, of course, dogs and dog food to be seen. But there was also a hay ride and a haunted house that Sam seemed to enjoy. Some stuff in the latter scared Sam or utterly confused her, forcing me scoop her up let her bury her face in my neck while I hurried her towards the exit, but she actually asked to go through it twice. My daughter the fear junkie.

On the whole, though, I have to say that Sam is an easy going kid –sometimes a bizarrely easy going kid. She rarely throws fits and follows our shrill advice about staying away from hyenas most of the time. Still, she’s entered into the years where this part of her nature has to compete with the forces of basic biology and childhood development that help her push back on the world and learn to get through parts of it on her own.

Take the other night, for example. Ger was out and I was one-on-one with Sammy, having just gotten her out of the bath and trying to get her ready for bed. Sam wasn’t exactly going with the flow, probably thanks to the Halloween sweets she’d snarfed just an hour earlier. When Sam is in such a mood she’s apt to bellow “I’M NOT COOPERATING!” and then proceed to illustrate her point in every way she can come up with. Think Ghandi, but more aggravating and not quite as motivated by concern for her fellow man. I had managed to get her dried off, diapered, and half of her pajamas thrust over her flailing torso, but when I tried to put on her pants she broke away from me and bolted for the bathroom.

“I want to brush my teeth first!” she said, scrambling up her stepstool and reaching for the toothbrush that had been prepared with a healthy dollop of unnaturally blue gel.

“Sammy, come on. Put your pants on,” I protested. “This is the drill. You know the drill. Respect the drill!”

“Nooooo! I want to brush my teeth first!”

For what seemed a long time we stopped there, locking eyes with each other. She in the bathroom with her toothbrush, cocked and ready to be jammed into her mouth, and me crouching on the bedroom holding a pair of pink pajama bottoms at the ready. We were like two substantially ridiculous cowboys, all tensed up and facing off, but with stuffed animals as our audience instead of good townspeople.

“Samantha,” I said, using her full name and that certain tone, just the way my mother had always done with me, “put on your jammy bottoms first.”

“No,” she said, locking eyes with me and leaning closer to the glistening toothbrush.

A lot flashed through my mind at this point. This had nothing to do with Sam’s love of dental hygiene and everything to do with a power play. She was deliberately pushing the limit and testing my authority just to see if she could get away with it. And I, in turn, was faced with a parenting problem that could not be solved by simply loving her, keeping her away from hyenas, or doing anything else that was obviously in her best interest. If I wanted her to accept my role as an authority figure in her life, I would stop her, punish her, and force her to do it my way. Such respect and deferment could serve quite well in keeping her safe and passing along my values to her as we go on in life.

But on the other hand, I want my daughter to eventually learn to push back on authority when it’s warranted. I want her to rely on her own judgment and instincts instead of always just rolling over and doing or thinking what she’s told. Sure, she’s not even three yet, but what if those foundations are laid early? If that were the right call, I’d let her brush away and put on the rest of her jammies whenever she darn well felt like it.

But I was stuck. I didn’t know which was the right thing to do, so we just stood there for a few more seconds, looking at each other and waiting for the other to make the first move.

I decided to compromise just as Sam decided to call the question. She thrust the toothbrush into her maw and started brushing vigorously as I sprang forward with the pink jammy bottoms. I didn’t stop her from brushing, but I grappled with her kicking legs to put on the pants while she squawked protests through gobs of blue foam. I heard the theme from The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly in my head as we did this. A minute later she was completely dressed and rinsing out the last of the toothpaste. It had turned out to be, in fact, a lot more efficient that way than doing the two activities separately and Sam didn’t seem to hold any kind of grudge.

“Come on, Sam,” I said, turning off the bathroom light. “Pick out three books and I’ll read them to you.”

“Maybe,” she said as she trailed after me, “you’ll read me FOUR books.”

And so it goes.

I’m not normally the kind of father to pay a lot of attention to milestones relative to other children, but I do tend to notice when Sam starts or stops doing things. Recently she’s made great leaps in her communication skills, what with her ability to imagine conditional situations (“I could watch a DVD if we didn’t need to go [out to run errands].”) or outcomes (“I can go outside after Mommy finishes dinner. Are finished now, Mommy? Are you finished now?”). She’s even starting to properly enunciate her F and S sounds. Sometimes, though, we still have a failure to communicate.

Take the other night, for example. All three of us were in the playroom, I on the floor with Sam and Ger sitting nearby doing some virtual errands on the computer. Sam had her Winnie The Pooh Megablocks out and was busily snapping them together. Her favorite piece of the set is a little swing that you can snap characters into, but she sometimes has trouble working it by herself. After a moment of arranging Tigger, Piglet, and their comrades, Sam looked at me and said “I think poo needs to come out.”

Now, we’re still hoping to get Sam potty trained by the time the new baby arrives, so this is exactly the kind of statement that will make me jump to action. I leaped up and held out my hand. “Oh, thank you for telling me. Let’s go to the bathroom!”

Sam gave my outstretched hand an annoyed look. “Poo needs to come out, Daddy,” she repeated without making a move to get up.

“I know. So let’s go sit on the potty!”

She shook her head. “No! Get poo out!”

My shoulders slumped and I just stood there, looking down at her. “Sammy, we have to go to the bathroom to get it out.”

“No, here!” she said, thumping the floor with her palm.

“Sammy, if you want to get the poo out–“

“You get it out!” she shouted. She was starting to get pissed.

“Me? I don’t need to go!”

“I think,” Geralyn broke in with the voice of well formed reason, “that she wants you to get Winnie the Pooh out of the swing.” She pointed to the piece of the Winnie the Bear Megablocks, which had the titular bear firmly set in the swing where little hands often had trouble dislodging it.

“Ooooh, get the Pooh out.”

“Yeah,” said Sam, looking at me like I was the Chief Engineer on the express train to Stupidville. “Get it out.”

Here’s a few pictures.

Nothing too exciting up there, as we spent most of our weekend shopping for furniture. Which, by the way, is something I recommend you not do with a toddler. Not only did Sam want to sit in every chair we saw, but she insisted on molesting every breakable nicknack the store had set out on its displays. I tried to adapt to the danger by trying to play the “Do you see something red?” game, but that just propelled her into the act of trying to break red things, which seemed to be even more expensive.

Speaking of expensive, Ger’s prenatal yoga instructor seems like a very nice lady from all I’ve heard, but she’s a bit dippy. Ger was telling me how at her last class the instructor was reminding everyone that her “natural childbirth pain management” class still had slots open. Like all of them. For just $160, she could coach you and your partner on how to employ “body centered hypnosis, in which imagery and suggestion guide the pregnant mother through the journey of labor and birth.” The flyer she handed out further promised to help you “integrate the coping skills necessary for dealing with pain.”

Now, no offense to those who choose to practice more natural childbirth, but Geralyn isn’t one of you and she doesn’t need this class for $160. She already knows all the coping mechanisms related to very naturally and organically using her facial muscles and larynx to say “I want an epidural.” When she went into labor with Sam it was like the first thing Ger said, even to the receptionist at the information desk in the hospital lobby. She then calmly repeated this hypnotic mantra over and over again until men came and threaded a flexible catheter into her spinal cord and injected a steady trickle of medicine.

The best part of the whole flyer, though is that it promises to give you “a tape of the hypnosis exercise” to play during labor. A TAPE. I mean, woah that’s too high tech. If it’s not on a metal cylindar that I can take it back to my drawing room and insert into my hand-cranked gramophone, it’s beyond me. This is 2006, after all.

Why do I even keep sponges around? They’re like little time bombs of bacteria thanks to the way we diligently moisten them and then cram them into some small, warm drawer for days on end so that they can breed new forms of life. The other night Sam cheerfully smeared some cheese spread on the carpet, so I retrieved one of these microbe magnets from the kitchen to wipe up the stain. Sam saw what I was doing and insisted on trying it out for herself, so I gave her the sponge and let her go to town. It WAS her mess, after all. Of course, I look away for like one second and then turn back to her to find that she’d crammed half the thing in her mouth and was sitting there with the other half jutting out of her smiling face like a diseased yellow tongue. Worse, she was actually sucking on it.

I, of course, shrieked like a little girl and snatched the thing out of her mouth. But sure enough like an hour later her nostrils are leaking and she’s hacking like a cat with a particularly distasteful hairball. These things worked fast. So for the last few days Sam has had a nose made red and sore by all the running and blowing. This has in turn put her in a perpetually bad mood and caused exchanges like this:

“I want raspberry drink, Daddy.”

“Okay, let me get your cup out of–“

“NOOOO! I WANT RASPBERRY DRINK! NOW!!! AAAAAAAHHHHHHH-HAH-HAH-HAH!”

Apparently she wanted me to lunge over to the fridge, yank out the pitcher, and pour it down her throat, but that would have caused a stain on the carpet and alas irony is lost on most two-year olds.

Here, at least, are some pictures of her in better moods:

There’s several shots of Sam at another pumpkin patch which I got to attend this time (hooray, weekends). I’ve often worried about becoming one of those “baby people” that look forward to doing things like the pumpkin patch and enjoying life by using their kids as a proxy, but I gotta tell you: it doesn’t bother me now. I have a blast just by soaking up the excess joy she radiates when riding a tractor or getting a new toy that fires bits of molded plastic into the air at dangerous velocities. I couldn’t imagine life without it now.

But I guess it cuts both ways. This shot was particularly nerve wracking, but as they say, sometimes you gotta just let your children go and watch them scale a massive mountain of hay bails. Amazingly, though, Sam went right to it without any hesitation or fear. I just stood at the base, cringing and making a mental note about what still scares Sam (bugs, loud noises) and what does not (heights, sponges).

There’s also this snapshot where Sam learns to use chopsticks, mainly to stab sugar packets wail on the table like a Tommy Lee having an epileptic fit. Sam’s routine in restaurants, Chinese or otherwise, is actually pretty established. She knows the drill, such that we get exchanges like this:

“Hi, folks, my name is Chad and I’ll be taking care of you tonight. Can I start you off with–“

“I want macaroni! And cheese! And lemonade! Please!”

I then apologize to the waiter, explaining that she pretty much treats us the same way and that he should totally read my blog.

Sam used to have a “pack and play” playpen that long-time readers may recognize from old pictures. She became separated from it a while back when we left it at my sister’s house in anticipation of just using it on the next visit, which never happened for one reason or another. Well, a few weeks ago I get an e-mail from my sister. It turns out that she had set up the playpen so some visiting friends could put their own toddler down to rest. Only that sleepy toddler was experiencing extreme gastrointestinal distress of the kind usually reserved for sick elephants. And it turns out that this child has a bit of an artistic streak, so short version: the playpen was befouled in a most thorough fashion –a fashion involving deliberate smearing, cramming, and grinding. So my horrified sister apologized profusely and told us to pick out a new one for the new baby so that she could buy it for us.

Seeking to save her a few bucks, Ger and I decided to try and buy a used one instead. So yesterday we went to some kind of “Baby Mania” event, and if you can just hold the words “huge baby-related yard sale” in your mind for a moment you’ll probably start to understand my trepidation going in. It was basically a one-day swap meet where people could take the dried up husks of their old parenting equipment and sell them for pennies on the dollar to people like us who didn’t want to pay full price.

As we pulled up to the event and saw the ocean of penny pinching parents swarming over the second-hand goods, I started to worry that once we got in there some crazed, new mother in a faded jumpsuit would grab Samantha, hold her up in front of me and scream “HOW MUCH FOR THIS? HOW MUCH?” And I’d be totally speechless, because I’ve never given the question adequate thought. It’s also the kind of event where you have to assume that everything has at least trace amounts of other kids’ filth on it, but you have to think “How much poop is too much?” because poop or no that exersaucer is a steal at five bucks.

But actually, it wasn’t that bad. We walked out with a number of things, including a little fire truck that represents the best $0.75 we’ve ever spent judging from Samantha’s enthusiastic enjoyment of it. No playpen, though.

Here’s some pictures:

I like this one because of the precarious mounting of the tire swing and the way she looks like she’s about to launch herself into disaster. This one also makes me smile, but mostly in memory of what she was doing when I took it. Ger had left one of her “Chick Lit” books on the counter and Sam picked it up to study the cover, which had a cartoon of two fish kissing. Sam then sat down and flipped through the book, stopping at each page to point at one random word and say “Fish…” and then to point at another another and say “Kiss…” She did this for like 10 minutes. Apparently it’s a book about fish that kiss, and apparently Sam found it to be a page turner.

Not a terribly eventful week this time around. I did get a new camera lens (more on that a bit later), though, and decided that I wanted to go to the zoo to test it out. Geralyn pointed out that Samantha might like to come too, so we made a day of it. After meeting disappointment when asked what kind of animal she wanted to see (her vote was an enthusiastic “COWS!”), Sam agreed to go to a little sea lion show they were doing. Sam kept calling them seals, but when I kept correcting her and calling them sea lions, she decided that “sea seal” was an acceptable compromise. She’s a uniter, not a divider.

After the zoo I was pretty much ready to get some overdue lunch, but Geralyn wanted to visit this “Arthur’s Day in the Park” thing the Public Broadcasting System was putting on for their younger viewers. She produced a clipping from one of those free magazines and noted that there was supposed to be food, games, and “photo ops” with PBS characters like Elmo, Cookie Monster, Bob the Builder, and Clifford the Big Red Dog. Sam is into each of those people/monsters/animals to some degree, so I agreed. We made all kinds of extravagant promises to an excited Samantha about visiting her favorite characters as we headed over.

After searching for a spot in the overcrowded streets for some time, we finally engaged in some creative parking and trekked over to the park where the event was taking place. As soon as we broke through the outer crowd we were greeted by the sight of lines. Lines everywhere. Just sweaty, child bearing people queued up and waiting for …what? We weren’t sure. At this point Sam and I were okay, but a very pregnant, hungry, and footsore Geralyn wasn’t too happy about seeing that half the state’s population had apparently lined up at the only food stand. She plunged through the crowds to investigate the other lines, pushing her way to the front to see what everyone was waiting for.

Turns out, it was the much celebrated “photo ops” that the clipping had promised. There were several tents set up, and inside each one some poor schmuck in an Elmo or Arthur the Ardvark costume sat in a chair and gazed out into the unending sea of waiting children, his dead, googly eyes betraying all his lost hopes and dreams. I estimated that it would take about a week to wait long enough to get a five-second visit with just one muppet, during which I’d probably get an underexposed, off-center, and out of focus snapshot. I was about to point this out to Geralyn when she snatched Samantha up and held her up at eye level. “Look! It’s Clifford!” she said, pointing at the barely visible big red dog through the pressing throng. “See Clifford? Let’s go!” She then hefted our bewildered toddler onto her hip and clomped off to the next tent.

Similarly brief and long-distance visits to Elmo and Arthur ensued (Cookie Monster was apparently out back on break). Five minutes later we were walking back towards our precariously parked car and Geralyn was chirping “Did you have fun seeing all your characters, Sammy? You saw them. YOU CAN’T SAY THAT YOU DIDN’T SEE THEM! MOMMY’S HUNGRY!”

And a brief time after that we sat in a nearby diner, making it all up to Sammy by letting her eat a huge plate of pancakes at 2:00 in the afternoon.

Here are pictures.

There’s plenty of shots up there of Sam at a pumpkin patch with her cousins, uncles, and grandparents. I think Ger was there, too, but I wasn’t. They get to do all the fun stuff, like climb on pumpkins, drive tractors, and run through drainage pipes. I also like this picture, mainly because of the sign not four feet away from child and photographer alike.

The last thing I’ll mention is an incident from this morning that made me aware of how Geralyn and I can have the same intentions and desires when it comes to parenting, yet make unique assumptions and go about caring for Samantha in different ways. I had jokingly handed Sam a dollar bill, telling her that she could totally retire by age six if she invested early and wisely. This prompted Sam to just kind of stand there and smile at her newfound wealth. We were running late, though, so Geralyn snatched the bill from Sam’s hand and tried to shoo us, her two children, towards the door. For some reason this really upset Sam, who immediately burst into tears.

Now, it may not surprise you to know that a crying Samantha will get nothing but great sympathy from both Geralyn and myself. But what surprised me, on later reflection, was the differences in what we did because of that sympathy. Geralyn immediately went to her knees, apologized for snatching away the newfound treasure, and gave Sam a big hug while making all kinds of soothing sounds. I, on the other hand, ran to the spare change jar and brought it over, making promises that Sam could pick out any coin she wanted as a replacement.

So indulge me in some naval gazing and think about that. Ger had assumed that Sam was sad, startled, and probably a little angered by the way that she, Geralyn, had taken the new possession away. The appropriate response wasn’t necessarily to solve some problem, but to empathize, apologize, and reassure. To mend hurt feelings, in other words. I, on the other hand, assumed that Sam was just pissed over the simple reality of not having her newfound treasure anymore. And the logical, appropriate response to that was to solve the problem by replacing the bill with something more durable, less valuable, and altogether more pleasing to a two-year old’s senses. I wanted to fix the situation so that the source of her unhappiness was gone.

I don’t think it’s a guy/girl thing (I’ve known women who probably would have done what I do and men who would have done what Ger did), but it does bring to mind how we do differ, even when the situation and the desired outcome (i.e., a happy Sammy) are the same. And I guess that’s a good thing, since it increases the odds that at least one of us will be right. Like in this situation; Sam was fine after a moment of hugs with Geralyn and a dip into my change jar.

Well, she was fine until we looked over and found her shiny new dime in her mouth. Then we took that away from her, thinking along exact same lines of how neither of us wanted to spend the next few days watching for “buried” treasure should she swallow it.