This morning, I was explaining the day’s plan to Claire. It seems to help her to know what to expect. I started with the basics: it is Sunday, so it is not a school day; it is a Mommy & Daddy day. Claire corrected me and explained that today is actually a Mommy, Daddy, and Muffin day. Then I went on to explain the errands for the day. First we would go buy some shampoo, and then we would go to the bookstore and get some new books for Mommy. Claire glanced up at the 12-foot tall bookshelf in the living room, half covered in books, and looked a little confused. After a few seconds, she said, “Are we running out of books?”
Music Update
Claire always loves her kids’ music. She loves to hear anything from the Countdown Kids. She will listen to them sing Take Me Out to the Ballgame or I’ve Been Working on the Railroad over and over dozens of times. She is also enjoying a Backyardigans CD I bought her recently. They sing so high and squeeky, but the music itself it not half bad.
Normally Claire is not a big fan of “real” music. When I play my own CD’s in the car, she’ll say, “That’s one of your songs, Daddy. Is it time to listen to one of my songs?” But occasionally she actually likes grown-up music. Her current favorites are the Fleet Foxes. They are a very strange group, combining folk, progressive rock, and lots of vocal harmonies that sound kind of folksy and choral at the same time, along with a little Beach Boys tossed in for good measure. It is weird stuff, but Claire likes it. She asks what the songs are about, and s
he asks to hear them again.
Her other favorite is Christmas with Weezer. She just cannot get enough of the perennial geek rock band performing We Wish You a Merry Christmas. She has enjoyed Weezer in the past too. There was a period about a year ago where she seemed to enjoy The Sweater Song. She even noted, “That is a gooood song.”
Kid Hug
This afternoon when I picked up Claire from school, all the kids were running around and playing in the big indoors playroom like normal. Claire did not see me at first, but another kid saw me and said, “Claire, your Daddy is here!”. Then Claire ran over for a hug. I said, “Are you ready to go?”, which a split second later I realized was a mistake. What if she said no? Fortunately, Claire had only one request before leaving. “I want a hug from a kid.” Before I could ask her to expand on that idea, or perhaps suggest a particular kid, a slightly older girl who was in earshot ran over to Claire and gave her a nice big extended hug. Then Claire grabbed my hand, and we headed out the door.
This whole transaction had the feel of being set up, like Claire had gone to this other girl a few minutes earlier and said, “When my Daddy comes to get me, come over and give me a hug. He is going to eat it up!”. Well, it worked.
Name Your Friends
In the past, Claire’s stuffed animals had names that were accurate but not very exciting. She had Bunny the bunny, Longhorn the longhorn cow, and so on. I think we actually named those for her. But she has gotten more creative recently. Her stuffed kitty is named Cranberry Sauce. I think this happened during Thanksgiving when the conversation about dinner got mixed up with the conversation about her kitty. For less understood reasons, her stuffed puppy is named Salsa Bleeze. I cannot be sure about the spelling, but that is exactly how it sounds when she says it. Her rocking horse has gone nameless for a long time, but now she has officially christened it Texas Island. This just gets weirder and weirder.
2008 in Review
Here is this year’s Christmas mass mailing.
2008 was an eventful year for us. We started the year in a house in Atlanta with a two year old, and ended the year in a townhouse in Dallas with a three year old. That may not be the most radical transformation imaginable, but it seemed pretty big to us. Fortunately, the two year old turned out to be the same kid as the three year old, just slightly aged.
Kit spent the first half of the year finishing up her pathology residency at Emory University and preparing for her fellowship at UT Southwestern in Dallas. She completed the dreaded medical boards and endless other exams, licensures, and registrations to practice medicine in Texas. On the other hand, I transferred my current software position to the Dallas office by simply filling out a change-of-address form.
Meanwhile, we prepared to sell our house in Atlanta. Although the market was tough, we did turn down a generous cash offer from an “English woman” whose email happened to originate from a Nigerian cyber-cafe. In the end, we managed to sell the house to a local person who was legitimate but substantially less generous. Moving was not easy, but with some creative scheduling and plenty of help from our parents, we eventually got everyone and everything to Texas in good shape.
We left behind great friends and memories in Atlanta. We have also enjoyed our time so far in Dallas. Claire declared upon seeing her new house, “I love it! It’s my Christmas day!” She is a huge fan of the Texas Rangers baseball team, a connoisseur of the local parks, and even a local architecture enthusiast, especially the Bank of America Tower, which is trimmed with bright green lights from top to bottom like a 921-foot tall Christmas tree. Claire insists that a prince lives in the tower, but I am pretty sure it is zoned for office space. Claire left her beloved nanny back in Atlanta but has transitioned admirably to daycare, where she has met many fun friends, learned about art and music, and developed a taste for
chicken fingers.
We are now trying to figure out what to do when Kit’s fellowship ends next summer. It is shaping up to be another eventful year.
Merry Christmas and everything else from Kit, Pat, and Claire.
Movie Mistake
Today we were looking for a fun activity to fight the post-Christmas blues. It was too cold for the zoo, and we wanted to do something new anyways. So we decided to go to a movie. This would be Claire’s first real movie in a theater!
The theater at the nearby mall had two cartoons showing in the late morning.
The Tale of Despereaux was about a mouse who lives in some sort of castle and maybe sings or something. Then there was Bolt, about a scrappy superhero dog. We leaned towards Bolt since it looked cute and was about a dog, which is always fun, right? The reviews on imdb also favored Bolt, plus it was showing earlier in the morning. So it was clinched, we would take our sweet little girl to the cute movie about the scruffy white dog.
Bolt started out promisingly enough, with the expected cute puppy playing around with a little girl. I whispered to Claire that the little girl looked just like her. She seemed to enjoy the giant movie screen and the engrossing sound, all of which really shamed our little TV at home. Her eyes and mouth were wide open.
Ten minutes later, we had witnessed roughly three helicopter explosions, a pair of bad guys being “shaken down” for information with their car dangling off a bridge, the violent deaths of several evil guys in black suits and masks with deadly electric shocking hands, the destruction of an entire dessert valley along and the entire army of evil guys populating it, and of course several near-death incidents involving the scrappy white dog and the little girl who looked just like Claire.
Claire was terrified. Well, may not quite terrified, but she was definitely scared and grasping her mom’s arm really hard. She tried to say something, but I could not hear it. I asked if she wanted to leave the movie for a while, and she nodded her head. I took her out to the lobby to get some delicious theater popcorn. We sat in the lobby for a few minutes enjoying our popcorn. When we returned to the movie, it had settled down. In the movie, all of the mayhem was revealed to have been fake — a show within a show. But of course Claire did not understand these concepts. It was just scary to her, really scary. When the little girl in the movie got dragged off by bad guys at the protests of her howling dog, who was being dragged off somewhere else, Claire calmly asked to leave. And so we did.
Uh, what was this thing rated? Oops, it turns out Bolt was rated PG, which basically means, “think about leaving your sweet little three year old at home”. Normally we pay pretty close attention to what Claire sees and hears. But not today! We had assumed that Bolt was rated G, or maybe we just hadn’t thought about it at all. Either way, it was the idiot moment of the day.
We snuck next door to try out The Tale of Despereaux, which was just beginning and really was rated G. It started out as a nice sweet movie about some soup — yes, soup. Things picked up, and eventually a bunch of people were chasing down the silly protagonist rat, who was running for his life. There were no explosions or scary evil guys. It was standard old-school little kid cartoon stuff, lighthearted and decidedly more funny than scary. But Claire’s mood for this sort of thing had already been ruined by Bolt, and she politely asked to leave.
We spent the unexpected free time getting a little post-Christmas shopping done at the mall. Ann Taylor Loft had a kid’s bench set up outside the fitting room, filled with Dr. Seuse books, which was a nice touch. I read Green Eggs and Ham and Mr. Brown Can Moo, Can You? to Claire while Kit tried on sweaters. Claire may actually enjoy Bolt in another 10 years. It’s supposed to be a good movie, at least for the right audience. But for now, Dr. Seuse was just the ticket. It was silly and colorful and very G-rated.
Christmas ’08
This year we ended up hosting Christmas at our house for the first time. It all had to do with Kit’s call schedule at the hospital. At first Kit was not supposed to be on call for Christmas, then the schedule got botched and she was supposed to be on call. Since we cannot travel or even go very far from our house when Kit is on call, we planned to spend Christmas at home in Dallas. All the grandparents agreed to come up. Sometime after that, it was determined that Kit did not need to be on call after all.
But the plans were already made, and so we still had Christmas at our house. This was a good development anyways because Claire gets so excited (read: messed up) over the holidays with all the grandparents and presents and being out of school and off her routine. She gets so worked up that she has trouble sleeping or even just settling down. Staying at home also saved us a potential 16 hour round trip in the car with the kid and the dog. I am sure the first 4 to 6 hours would have been fine; it was the other 10 to 12 hours I was worried about.
Well, I learned one thing from Claire’s recent birthday blog entry. I could go on and on about every little thing and try to tell a nice involved story about the holidays, but frankly that approach is going to wear me out and would probably do the same to you reading it. So I will keep it short and sweet (just like Claire?). How about a bullet list of highlights?
- We had seven people and three dogs in the house, which was a little tight but not too bad.
- Christmas dinner was a festive affair coordinated by my mom and Kit’s mom, served early (ie, normal lunch time) in hopes of accommodating Claire’s nap schedule. Claire still had trouble with her Christmas nap, as expected.
- Claire charmed the socks off of everyone, singing songs, telling stories about trains and princes and the kids at school, or pretending to be a waiter taking our lunch order, or a Little Einstein.
- Claire is learning the Christmas music, but she does not have it down perfectly. She is very insistent that on the first night of Christmas, my true love gave to me a pirate in a pear tree.
We were all determined to cut back on presents, but with me & Kit, the grandparents, an uncle and aunt, cousins, and oh yes — Santa! — it was a very good haul for Claire. For posterity, the list included a kid’s art easel set, a treasure chest full of princess stuff, a deluxe play-dough set, a giant teddy bear, something called “connectagons“, and a kid-sized shopping cart full of fake food goods to collect and distribute.- Claire gave everyone hand-made items, in one case quite literally. She gave Kit and me a framed handprint with decorative paper cutouts around it.
- Many hours were spent, mostly by the ladies, working on a jigsaw puzzle. It was a tricky puzzle portraying a dog and cats made up in holiday cheer with no straight edges or corners at all. At the end of the holidays, part of a dog’s head could be recognized.
- We took a driving tour to see the fine holiday lights on Armstrong Parkway, and also swung by George W. Bush’s future house, just out of curiosity. The “W” house was nice but not nearly as fancy as the houses on Armstrong Parkway. Some people in the neighborhood had street signs that read “Welcome home, George and Laura!”
- Claire freaked out pretty bad when the last of the grandparents left, screaming that she wanted to go too. Kit’s theory is that Claire knew that was the end of the fun.
- Three days after Christmas, with everyone gone, Claire is still having trouble getting to sleep. Her refusal to sleep has driven most of us to madness at one point during the holidays as we tried to lure her to rest.
- After Christmas, we were getting together some things to donate. We wanted Claire to pick out an old toy to give away, but she resisted stubbornly. She was adamant that she would give away any brand new toys from Christmas, but no old toys!
Finally, here is a video montage showing Claire getting more and more excited as Christmas day goes on, and into the next day.
Sleepy Time
Claire has been pretty good about taking her naps the last few months. But today she was extra wired up around nap time, maybe because she was over-tired. When Kit put her down to nap, Claire came right back out of her room and declared that she wanted to play instead. Then Kit did her trick where she sets a timer for 20 minutes and tells Claire she can come out when it beeps. Claire begrudgingly agreed to this plan and disappeared into her room. Within a couple of minutes she was quiet.
Three hours later.. Claire showed up on the stairs outside her room, a little confused and rubbing her eyes. She asked very sincerely, “Did the timer beep yet?”
We said yes, and she could come down and play now. Her hair was soaked with sleepy sweat. She motioned toward her room and said, “But my pillow is sweating, We need to clean it up.” She may have gotten too much of a nap, actually, because she woke up pretty early the next morning, and that darn pillow was sweating on Claire’s head again.
First and Last
Kit, her mom, Claire, and I were playing a game called “First and Last” from a deck of cards called “52 alternatives to TV”. This game read as such…
Someone says the name of an animal, and the next person says an animal that starts with the last letter of the name. So if you said “elephant,” the next person might say “tiger.” Take turns saying animals without repeating any until someone can’t thin of another one. The last person left gets to pick the next category (countries, people’s names, etc.).
This turned out to be a pretty fun game. We did not make Claire play since she, uh, cannot read or spell, but she sort of hung around and watched. The game was pretty tough, actually. It went something like this…
Kit: Elephant
Joyce: Tiger
Pat: Raccoon
Kit: Nene (this is a Hawaiian bird from a book Joyce brought back from Hawaii)
Claire: Eagle!
Yes, the three year old jumped in with a good answer. She even said it with real conviction, like she just knew “eagle” was right. We cannot say how Claire knew “Nene” ended in an “e” and “Eagle” started in the same letter. She may have gone by the sounds of the words, or it may have been a lucky guess, or maybe she actually knew what she was talking about. We’ll give her the benefit of the doubt and go with the last one.
McG Kids 