Month: January 2008

Big event this week was Sam’s 4th birthday and ensuing extravaganza. Much like Christmas, she has gotten old enough to go completely ape over everything, yet young enough to insist that her birthday spanned the entire weekend from Friday morning to Sunday night. When told she could choose where we went to dinner on Friday night, she initially chose Sweet Tomatoes, which is one of those super soup and salad bar places. We jumped on that, and when Sam later said “No, maybe I want to go to Chuck E Cheeses instead” we were adamant that, no, by the ancient laws of birthday celebrations, she was not allowed to change her mind and there would be no fricking mechanical rats trying to sing Happy Birthday to the birthday boy or girl.

As you may have noticed from those pictures, Sam’s big birthday gift was her first bicycle! We had actually won it in a raffle back in October and kept it hidden in the basement this whole time. Geralyn had snuck it into the living room and put a big bow on it while the kids were strapped in the minivan outside waiting to depart for dinner, so when we returned Sam cluelessly marched inside and was astonished by her last treat of the day. I made sure I had a good view, and let me tell you that the look of pure, astonished joy was totally awesome.

Since the weather has been so cold, Sam has had to ride the bike around our kitchen in tiny circles, but she doesn’t seem to mind. At first she had a bit of trouble, though. The bike has training wheels, but it still wobbles a bit from side to side, presumably so kids can learn to balance for themselves but won’t fall over while they’re doing it. When the wobbling started, though, Sam’s first instinct was to DIVE, DIVE, DIVE and lurch –or attempt to lurch– off the bike with a kind of panicked, end of the world kind of expression on her face. This quickly led to the “Yes you have to wear the helmet, even indoors” rule.

She apparently practiced in her sleep, though, because the next morning she was riding like a pro.

We took a bit of a breather on Saturday, then on Sunday we had a small birthday party with some family. Sam got more gifts, including a working digital camera from her Aunt and Uncle that she has since used to take several hundred pictures of the floor. Also, there was cake, with a little Curious George diorama that reminded me of that one scene from King Kong where the giant monkey eats the lady.

Lest we forget Mandy, she hit another big milestone for herself this week –she walked! Well, I’m not sure if you can call it “walking” or not, it was more of a falling forward motion while desparately trying to keep her feet moving and under her, but whatever she did she took like 5 steps. And the amazing thing is that she keeps trying despite constantly falling down. She just shouts “Bum!” (her version of “Boom!”), gets back up, and tried again. This kind of built-in determination and placidity in the face of impossible odds really makes kids amazing. If we could retain more of that into adulthood, ther would be casinos and fast food places on Mars by now.

Here’s another milestone marker: Mandy stood up by herself this week. As with most great accomplishments in the history of mankind, she did it by accident. She was using one hand to lean against something while holding a toy in her other hand. She then let go with her supporting hand and reached for a second toy, then stood there inspecting it for a moment before realizing that ZOMG I’M STANDING UP! The weight of this realization made her spaz out and do a face plant on the carpet, but we were both still delighted. And for once I was right there on the floor with her when she did something for the first time and I got to see it first. Before her, even. For me, this is a highlight, and if she never learns to walk I’m fine with that, because hey why push it?

Sam hasn’t hit any milestones, though she has been back to preschool for a couple of weeks now and continues to bring home all manner of clever art projects. One day it was a little clock, the next day it was …well, something I’m still not sure what it was and Sam doesn’t seem to want to tell me. Most recently, though, they were studying squares (which seems a little remedial for today’s 3-year olds, but what do I know) and Sam created this little guy out of craft paper:

Upon coming home from work and seeing this out on the counter I burst into gales of laughter. If you don’t understand why, I assume that you’re either a) not a native English speaker, or b) don’t have the vestiges of your adolescent sense of humor. For help with option a, click here. I can’t help you with b, but I wish you luck in your career as a schoolmarm.

Perhaps I’m making too much of this, and the labels upon this little robot’s chest are not as lascivious as I first took them to be. At any rate, I explained to Geralyn that the whole double entendre could be eliminated with the strategic placement of the world “The” to make things more clear. She agreed, but I suspect that she was thinking of putting the “The” after the word “Randy,” and I was thinking of placing it before.

At any rate, Sam does seem to be developing a fascination with the bad boys. For a long time she would want to reinact the various movies that she’d seen as a form of play. I was usually ready to participate in such charades, but Sam had a habit of of picking odd roles for me. She was always Flounder while I was always Ariel. Or she was the mouse while I was Cinderella. Or she Boots to my Dora. Sensing a pattern here? Couldn’t I be King Triton instead and she could be the pretty little mermaid? Wouldn’t that make more sense since Triton was the daddy? No! I had to be Ariel. And so I practiced my falsetto and went along with it, because that’s my JOB.

Since we checked out Disney’s Aladdin from the library the other week, though, she has changed her tune. Aladdin, the golden hearted hero of the tale, gets barely a scornful mention as “that boy’ from sam. Instead, she wants to pretend to be the parrot Iago and I must be the villainous sorcerer Jafar. I must caper about and try to do all manner of wicked things to our heroes –and, I should mention, succeed far more often than was the case in the movie. I’m not exactly being a positive role model, but it beats talking to mice and pretending to sew dresses in time to fall in love with some prince, doesn’t it? Doesn’t it?

Well, it’s more fun for both of us at any rate.

Sam and I have recently modified our weekly Saturday ritual to include the swim class that Geralyn signed us up for. Well, she really just signed up Samantha. I just sit there with the other parents and hope nobody drowns. Or, if someone absolutely HAS to drown, that it’s that kid with the huge forehead and Power Rangers swim trunks who totally just shoved Sam out of the way. Watching these swim lessons has brought to light one thing about my eldest daughter, though: she still has a lot to learn about operating in structured environments.

Sam is as friendly and outgoing a kid as I’ve ever seen, but a few minutes in to the first lesson I was having flashbacks to my own childhood, where my grade school teachers would routinely tear at their hair when I traipsed off in my own la-la land, even if that meant standing up and walking across the classroom –between the teacher and the rest of the class, even– to inspect the hamster cage in the middle of a lesson while everyone sat still at their desks and gaped at me. In short, Sam displayed an amazing ability to completely not pay attention to what the teacher was saying and instead jabbered at the alarmed little girl next to her, else she delighted to flailing and splashing in the water around her. I would have been more concerned if the water were more than a foot deep and the poolside weren’t lined with a platoon of lifeguards perched on the balls of their feet. So I was just bemused and Sam was thoroughly happy.

Later that afternoon, though, we got a special treat. I was just getting ready to get Sam dressed to go out to dinner when the doorbell rang. Since it seems like the only people who ring our doorbell are entrepreneurial neighbor kids who want to sell me candy bars so their school band can go to Tunisia or something, I have been asked by the rest of the household (read: Geralyn) not to answer the door because apparently telling these little swindlers to take a hike reflects badly upon us as neighbors. As a result, we have a lot of candy bars sitting around if you ever want any.

This time, though, Geralyn called me down a moment after answering the dor, saying that I needed to see this. There were indeed kids on our front porch. And our sidewalk. And our yard. There was a veritable gang of children before me and my first thought was that I was going to have to buy a hell of a lot of chocolate bars with almonds.

“Dude,” said the nearest tyke, who for some reason was holding a loaded squirt gun, “you got a dead deer in your flower bed.”

This was, I admit, one of the last things I expected to hear. But I only had to glance over to the right of the front porch. There, with its neck unnaturally bent so that the top of its nose was touching the top of its back, was a very dead deer.

Samantha tried to dive past us to see, but with some frenzied footwork and door slamming, we were able to keep her from seeing it. I looked again, and the contorted deer had not gotten up, shook it off, and bounded off. On the plus side, this had made us wildly popular with the neighborhood kids. It seemed like there were 20 or more youths standing in my yard, all staring slack-jawed at the fluffy-tailed corpse in my flower bed. I hoped it would be enough to get me out of a few future fundraisers.

The down side, of course, was that there was a carcass in my yard. Geralyn started frantically calling places trying to get someone to cart it off, and when the first place wanted to charge us $300 I offered to roll the deer up in a tarp, dump it in the trunk, pop in The Soppranos soundtrack, and drive it to some ditch off a back country road. THIS WAS NEARLY THE PLAN THAT WON OUT. Animal Control told us that one of their “Carcass Removal Technicians” (I almost called them out just to get one of their business cards) could dispose of it, but not if it were on private property. So, they said, if the carcass could “somehow find itself out to the middle of the road…” I had brief vision of my grabbing ahold of one hind leg and dragging the diseased corpse to the middle of the street with one hand while cheerfully waving to our gaping neighbors with the other, but even I knew that this might prove a wee bit too unpopular amongst the townfolk.

In the end we found that, ironically, the State Department of Conservation said they would come and remove it for free. As of the time of this writing, they haven’t actually shown up, but we’ve managed to distract Samantha by letting her letting her make mashed potatoes.

Finally, let I forget to mention her this week, Mandy was also spared the spectacle of seeing the deer succumb to its natural predator the suburban soccer mom in a SUV. She seems relieved, though she also seems to be practicing how to run into things in her little car walker thingie. She also had a 1-year checkup at the doctor’s recently, and we were surprised to find out that she’s at the 50th percentile for both weight and height, which suggests that she has grown into her weight a bit.

Unwilling to leave us with a sense of normalcy, though, the doctor just had to throw in that she’s only at the 48th percentile for skull circumference. This fact doesn’t worry me so much as it just sits on my mind, never leaving me be to neither forget about it or obsess over it. So I’ve put Mandy on some skull stretching exercises, which Sam is happy to help out with.

Some days I can’t believe how quickly Mandy is changing. I swear that she literally looks a little different when we go to get her out of bed in the morning than she did when we put her in there the night before. I can hear stretching and popping sounds coming through the monitor at night. She’s still trying to talk, but her newest thing is imitation. The other day she was sitting in her high chair and I was sitting next to her at the kitchen table. I looked over to see that she was peering at me, with the palm of her hand tucked oddly underneath her chin like she was trying to push her jaw through the top of her head. It took me a second to realize that I had been sitting there with my elbow on the table and my chin resting on my upturned palm. She was trying to imitate my pose. We both laughed, and then I discovered the limits of her mimicry abilities when I did some jumping jacks.

Sam is also developing nicely. One thing that she’s gotten into a lot lately is drawing instead of just coloring. Specifically, she’ll draw picture after picture of what she identifies as “people holding balloons.” She says this with more than a little indignity if you ask, because apparently you’re just supposed to KNOW what that is. You idiot.

Here’s a recent example of her work, with some helpful notations added by me:

Sam has also started to key in to the idea of jokes, or being silly. As you can imagine with me in the house this is quite useful. We share jokes all the time, though her own contributions seem to revolve around affixing the word “banana” to everything in sight. Banana hands, banana head, banana plate, banana cat, banana banana, et cetera. Beyond that, however, she seems to have misunderstood this concept of joke-telling as a way to write off whatever she doesn’t want to take seriously. So if I tell her to pick up the five thousand toys that litter our living before she can go upstairs to take a bath, she’ll just head for the stairs, dismiss me with a curt wave of her hand, and say “That’s funny, Daddy. You’re just being silly.” Once again, I am tempted to try this strategy out at work the next time someone tries to delegate some odious project to me and see if it works out any better than it does for her.

Sam does seem interested in learning, though, and like most toddlers she displays an amazing ability to just soak in information and an insatiable curiosity about everything. And her retention is often surprising, not only for its depth but for the non sequiturs she often introduces to otherwise normal situations. Yesterday we were driving in the car and she pipes up, “Daddy, the hard parts on your body are BONES.”

“Yes! That’s right.” I decide to push the conversation forward: “Sam, what do you call the bone in your head?”

“Your skull!”

“That’s right!” She seemed to be doing okay, so I figured I’d escalate things. “Sam, do all animals have bones?”

She paused for a minute, here, perhaps searching her databanks. “No,” she said, “octopuses don’t have bones.”

“Hey, that’s true!” I’m delighted at this point, because I had told her about the octopus thing a couple of weeks ago and I didn’t even think she heard me at the time, much less remembered. So I decided to see what else I could cram in there.

“Sammy,” I said, “did you know birds have hollow bones so that it’s easier for them to fly? And some animals like ants or crabs don’t have bones, but they have their skeletons on their outside. They’re called ‘exoskeleton’ and they’re not made of bone. They’re made of something called ‘chitin.’ It’s like bone, but different.”

“Daddy?”

“Yes?”

“You’re just being silly. I don’t want to talk about bones. Don’t talk about bones any more.”

“Okay, Sam.”

We’ll see if she remembers the chitin thing, though. I bet she does.