Flags and Flowers

We enjoyed a warm last day of November at Pullen Park.  Simon is really enthusiastic about the words he knows, and so the whole way there he was shouting, "Clouds!" and "Sky!" as he looked out the van window.

Once we were at the park, he was excited about the flag and the flowers and leaves and the choo choo train.  It's so fun to have long conversations with him where he repeats the same word over and over exuberantly, as if he just wants to make sure we understand how truly awesome flags and flowers are.  His other favorite words are sunshine, flashlight, star, moon, butterfly and balloon.  I think he's a happy kid.

The Long Walk

Simon has really turned a corner on walking.  He will now self-launch from the couch and try walking longer distances--like clear across our living room.

I'm not sure what he was thinking here, but instead of coming to me, he turned a corner and headed to the steps.  When he fell, he bit his lip and it was quite bloody.

Swinging

Alice is a pretty nice big sister sometimes.

Christmas Tree

We bought our Christmas tree with the kids this morning, then Zac put the lights on it and installed it in the living room while the kids were napping.  Here's a video of them seeing it lit up for the first time after they woke up from their naps.  I love Simon's reaction.

Thanksgiving

We spent Thanksgiving with Amy and David and their friends and family for the third year in a row.  It's always really fun, but a bit nerve-wracking since we are the only ones with small kids.  But the kids always manage to be on their best behavior (aside from eating virtually nothing) and usually make a good impression.

This year, Simon decided his party trick was going to be walking back and forth.  Recently, he has not been very interested in walking and would get distracted after a couple of laps.  But tonight, maybe it was just the right time, or the lack of toys, or the tunnel effect of the chairs and couch, but he decided he needed to walk back and forth dozens of times.

Simon was pretty shy most of the time, but he did let David read him a book for a few seconds, before squirming away to continue walking.

Alice's party trick was making friends with everyone.  I think she struck the right balance between being social, but not too needy.  Although Alice gets super shy when she feels like a bunch of people are looking at her (upon entering a party, or her birthday celebration, for example) but she thrives on one-on-one attention.

Amy and Alice upstairs reading The Snowman book (we saw the film version yesterday).

Alice watching phone videos with the college crowd.

Alice enjoying a book with Amy and David.

After supper, she started to get wound up, but then it was time for the traditional post-supper, pre-pie walk, which helped her burn off her excess energy.  She also enjoyed a swing on the porch with Amy afterwards.

Playing cards with Amy's nephew, while all the other kids are engrossed in their phones.

Alice even got Amy's brother-in-law to read her a book.

The piano is always a great attraction for Alice, but luckily we manage to keep her usage minimal.  This time she entertained people while they got pie from the dining room.  Below, here she is two years ago on her first Thanksgiving at Amy and David's (Simon was already a little zygote at this time, so I guess this is technically his third Thanksgiving too).

As in years past, I was thankful for many things this Thanksgiving, but mostly for kind friends and well-behaved children.

Back and forth

The Snowman Moment

I'm sitting in the balcony at Meymandi Concert Hall, watching The Snowman, and tears are trickling down my face and onto Alice's ponytails.  I'm crying because the moment is so perfect.  I've got my lovely little girl on my lap, my good friend, colleague, and mentor Amy is sitting next to me, the boy soprano is singing beautifully, the North Carolina Symphony is playing, the snowman and the boy are soaring, and I'm just thinking, "This is it.  This is a moment." I often tear up when I recognize a "moment" in the lives of others: an Olympian getting a medal, gay marriage being legalized in NC, a photo of my parents holding their first grandchild, even a character in a novel losing someone they love or a poignant moment on StoryCorps.  When I have my own moment it is often on a less spectacular or poetic scale, but it's when I take a step outside myself and notice the poignancy of a moment in my own life.  So this was a moment.

Why was this a moment?  Let's start with the location.  I associate Meymandi Hall with the graduation ceremony my school has there every year. The first graduation I attended was at the end of my third year teaching at this school, when the students I had taught as sophomores were graduating.  I sat up in the balcony, nine months pregnant with Alice, and thought what a mixture of sadness and happiness it must be for all the parents to see their own little babies graduating from high school.  Parenthood was a journey I had not yet experienced, but sure enough I shed a few tears imagining what this moment must be like for them.

Meymandi Concert Hall signifies my job, in a way, as did Amy sitting next to me.  I have always felt so grateful for being able to teach at such a fine school with such wonderful administrators, colleagues, and students, having taught at dysfunctional schools before.  I often consider this job as the knight in shining armor that came in and saved me from the dragon of doom at the last minute, as I was so miserable at my old school that I was seriously considering giving up teaching.  So every year, when the student graduation speakers talk about what a very special place our school is, I don't feel so much proud to have contributed to that experience, as I feel lucky to be a part of it.

More about Amy.  So you know that type of film where there is some loner who is slightly socially dysfunctional and some kind soul befriends them?  I always identified with the loner and wished that I was surrounded by jolly people wanting to be my friend.  But it occurred to me that I was being unfair, because I have been fortunate to have few, but good, friends over the years who are undaunted by my social ineptness.  Amy falls into this category, as she took me under her wing as soon as I arrived at my school (it helped that we both taught 10th grade English) and I could not have hoped for a better ally in the world. She helped me with lesson plans, taught me the lay of the land at my new school, and she also invites us to Thanksgiving every year.  Her husband, David, plays the viola in the NC Symphony, so she got free tickets for this show and invited me and Alice.  So sitting next to her is a reminder of her kindness and generosity of spirit, and that she has included me in her circle.

Then there was the music--at this particular moment the orchestra was playing and the young soprano was singing.  It was beautiful. It lifted the soul, so that we were all flying above the snow that night.  I'm incapable of writing anything profound about it due to my musical impairment, but I can say the music transcended words. I thought about all the effort that went into creating the beauty: the composer, the musicians, the vocalist, their teachers, their countless hours of practice to master their art, all to give us this fleeting gift of beauty.

And the movie itself was incredibly beautiful, and I thought of the author and then the animators whose efforts also brought us to this moment.  The Snowman is a short animated film from 1982, but somehow I had never seen it before.  I think that sometimes art can reach us at our core in ways we are not entirely conscious of until we choose to articulate it.  The story of The Snowman turns out to be an apt metaphor for this moment.  The boy has one great night with the snowman he made, who is new to the world and filled with wonder at the simplest things, yet clever (he can ride a motorcycle and fly), and he transports the boy to a new world.  Through the experience, the boy is also filled with wonder and joy.  The boy is so happy, but of course the warm sun comes out the next day and the snowman melts, but the boy still has the scarf that Santa gave him on their journey to the North Pole, so he knows the experience was real.  This is symbolic of both the exact moment (the concert soon ended; we walked to the dreary parking garage), but also the larger moment, which brings me to the girl on my lap.


Alice is like that ephemeral snowman.  We created her, then one magical night she came to life, and is taking us on this incredible journey, where her wonder allows us to also see the world as new and fresh.  This was Alice's first concert, and as I sat there, with her on my lap, her pony tails brushing my tears away, I thought of all the magic she has brought into our lives, and how incredible it is that it will keep going, that this is one first, but that there is still so much fun awaiting us, and that we get to have this joy twice, because in a couple of years we'll take Simon to his first concert.  I know that someday our children will be teenagers and then adults, and the warm sun will come out, and the magic will melt, but I'll have these memories, these moments, to come back to and know that it was real.

Jumping spider

Simon was laughing hysterically the first time I did this with him.  A day later, it was still mildly entertaining.

After supper, I thought I'd try to relax on the couch for a few minutes.  No such luck.  Simon was soon digging in my hair with his glowstick, and Alice was climbing all over me.

Three weeks of walking

Simon, 16 months old, still getting the hang of walking.  The problem now is that although he is getting better, the novelty has worn off and he gets easily distracted.

 

Sunday afternoon in Burlington

Alice gets along really well with her aunts and uncle and their toys.

Alice and Julian "painting" the naan bread with melted butter.

Simon is still a little shy of strangers, but Mia persisted and sort of won him over.

Glow stick balloon battle

Glow sticks Saturday

The first thing I heard as I stepped out of the shower this morning was Alice saying, "Daddy, I want to keep my life jacket on." And so the day began.

Every day, Alice asks, "Where are we going today?"  She loves going places, and on the rare occasion when we have no plans to go anywhere, we just tell her, "We're going to the living room, and the front yard, and the bedroom..."  To which she responds, "No, we have to get in the van and drive somewhere far away.  How about Marbles?  Marbles is fun."

But today, we had no plans to go anywhere.  The weather was chilly, and although Zac and Alice did some yard work, we mostly stayed inside all day.  I did a round of clothing updates, which consumed most of my day.  Clothing updates are where I get rid of clothes that are too small (or will be by the time that season rolls around again) and I go through the bags of hand-me-downs stored in the attic to find the clothes that will fit the current child size and season.  Then I do a bunch of laundry, and make "outfit packets" for Simon (matching shirt and pants folded together).  Alice just wears jeans all the time now, so I don't have to make outfit packets for her anymore.

But in between bouts with the clothes, I was able to enjoy life at home with the kids.  The day was a lot of fun; here are a few of those moments:

Alice ate her breakfast quickly, and then played with the blocks really well by herself for a while.  We're glad she is interested in building things (she wasn't for a long time).

Simon loves practicing on these steps.  As always, he did it a bunch until I had the camera rolling, then he decided he was done. But you get the idea.

Alice likes to look in the mirror this way, then laugh hysterically and say, "I"m standing on the ceiling!"

Simon taking a nap with his beloved glow-stick.

Simon loves bread, and gets really happy when we give him a big piece to gnaw on.

Just a few seconds of the kids playing with their glow sticks.

Thanksgiving at Daycare

Alice's daycare had their Thanksgiving lunch for all the parents to come and eat with the kids.  This is our third year doing this with Alice.  It gets a little easier every time: She is more capable of eating and she didn't cry when we left again.

It started as these things always do, with Alice clinging to us in fear as her classroom has been invaded by parents (who she sees every day, but not all at once).  Then all the kids and teachers sing a few songs while Alice cowers in terror and doesn't sing a word (even though she sang the song perfectly at bedtime the night before).

Then we get to eat.  It was a potluck, with all the parents contributing a dish. The food was really delicious and this was the first year we could actually enjoy the food and converse with the other parents, rather than deal with Alice being squirmy the whole time.  Things are looking up.

After lunch, the teachers ushered us all outside, where we were to say goodbye to our kids while the room was cleaned up.  Alice wanted us to stay, but we had talked about this for a while in advance warning her that we would have to go back to work.  After a minute or two, she was ready to kiss us goodbye.

Then we went back to work, and the lunch with a bunch of 3-year-olds seemed like a bizarre dream.

Hot dog boy

Simon loves this plastic little hot dog.  He really likes anything that is a stick shape that he can carry around.  Here are a few of his favorite things.

"Daddy, tell me about the deer."

While waiting at a red light on the way home from school a few weeks ago, Alice, Simon and I found ourselves behind a truck pulling a trailer.  I didn't pay much attention to it until Alice, ever vigilant for new and exciting bits of information, asked what it was.  It can sometimes be difficult to identify what she is looking at when she says, "What's that?" from the back seat but this time is was pretty easy.  The trailer had two huge reflective triangles and large sign reading "DEER FOR TIGER RESCUE."

Now, Sera and I have adopted a parenting technique where we usually give answers as they are, and in plain language.  There is usually a reason for all the things that happen in life, maybe especially around small kids, and if at all possible this is where we begin in our various explanations.  I think it started out as an inside joke for Sera and I when Alice was very little, but it quickly became clear that she was probably picking up more than we knew and it also saved us the trouble of making up a dumbed-down version that might (or might not) make more sense to her. 

So in the van that day I told Alice that the trailer was used to carry dead deer, that the dead deer had been hit and killed by cars, that the deer were picked up from the side of the road, and that they were fed to tigers.  When we saw the trailer, it was empty.  She may have asked a follow-up question or two but we were almost home and the exchange was lost to the usual commotion of the daily routine.

A week or so then passed without any more talk about dead deer being fed to tigers.  I forgot about the incident but it must have been stewing away in Alice's head because she recently started to ask me to tell her the "story about the deer" or just "tell me about the deer." At first I had no idea what she meant but I eventually figured it out that she wanted to hear about the need for that trailer.   For the last week Alice has asked for the story about the deer at least twice a day.  So here is the story of the deer in bullet form:

• There are deer walking though the forest
• They are eating leaves and plants
• There is a road going through the forest.
• They eat all the food in one area and want to cross the road.
• They are not smart enough to look both ways before they go across the road
• BAM!
• A car hits the deer and kills it
• Someone calls about a dead deer on the side of the road
• The trailer comes to pick it up
• The dead deer is fed to tigers

The story now has a life of it's own and is gaining new features and activities.  After completing the yard work on Sunday, Alice wanted to draw with chalk on the driveway, and I illustrated the deer story.  On Monday night, I invented a new game where the bear is the deer trying to cross the road, Alice is the oncoming vehicle, and the baby doll is the tiger that will eat the dead dear.  Alice was mostly interesting in the part where she slams into the deer.

Sera insists these files will be useful documents for when Alice gets referred to the school psychologist for being too morbid. 

Here is an article about the actual trailer we saw. The writer of the article also has a morbid sense of humor, so maybe there's a place for people like Alice in society after all.

Two weeks of walking

Raking

Alice loves doing yard work, so while Simon napped, Zac and Alice went out to rake some leaves.  Although she has a little yellow rake, she always wants to use a big one.

Fossil Fair

We went to the science museum today for the fossil fair.  Alice had a lot of fun seeing all the dinosaur bones.

Alice holds up a toe bone from a dinosaur.

Alice cowers in fear from an Allosaurus claw.

Simon has a good look at a freshwater fish tank.

 

Alice wears a dinosaur mask she colored.

In front of a skull (part of the permanent collection).

Alice in a dinosaur footprint.

Simon loved seeing the butterflies in the conservatory and kept saying "fly" over and over.

Looking down on the Acrocanthosaurus skeleton from above.

At one of the fossil stations, they gave kids little bags of of shark teeth.  Back at home, Alice got right to work studying them (after putting on her ballerina dress).

Water and sunshine

We love Simon's own version of the word "water" (lots of tongue wagging) and his attempts at other words.  He's still pretty hard to understand when the context isn't clear.  He often looks at us and says the same thing over and over very intensely and we'll have no clue what he's saying.  But he's definitely trying.

Fish

While this may appear to be a yellow bottle cap to us, to a 3-year old with an imagination, it is a fish.  Who knew a plastic sandwich bag could provide so much entertainment?

Twirl

Alice spilled milk on her dress during breakfast. When Zac reprimanded her for it, she said, "Don't worry, I can still twirl!"  Because a dress if fine as long as one can still twirl in it.

Table trolls

I picked the kids up early from daycare since the weather was rainy and miserable (meaning I couldn't take a walk after work and that they'd be going bonkers from being cooped up inside at school).  They did a pretty good job entertaining themselves with a container of cheerios while I cooked supper.  They were down there for a while before I turned the video recorder on.  Under the table isn't exactly the cleanest place in our house, but we subscribe to the theory that dirt is good for you.

Sunshine

As I carried Simon out to the van in the morning, for his commute to daycare, he looked up at the sun peeping through the fall tree leaves, and said, plain as day, "Sunshine!"  What always blows my mind, when observing my children learning language, is how they can identify something in real life from a cartoon picture in a book.

Pink Streak

The latest superhero to fly around our living room: