The Trooff About the Tooff

We'd been expecting it since well before Christmas.  There was the slightest of a wiggle in mid-December.  By the height of the holiday it was jiggling back and forth.  Over the last week or two it was either flopped forward or back, as the tongue dictated.  L's loose tooth has been the subject of much speculation, anticipation, and (dang it!) procrastination.  Surely it would come out while Mimi and Grampy were in town over Christmas - but no.  Before school started back, no doubt.  No go.  Why the dental delay?  What's with the incisor indecision?  All of her school friends have been lisping for months!

Well all the waiting and worrying over tentative teeth has finally come to an end.  I got home late tonight from a church meeting to find a little girl who should long have been a-bed up bouncing around with an enormous grin wrapped around her face - a very revealing grin at that.  My little angel now looks more like a prize-fighter.  You take one look and wonder how bad the other kid fared.  But contrary to popular opinion here in Los Angeles, looks can't buy you happiness, and I have one happy girl.  But then again, money can buy happiness, and I think someone is banking on a good haul from the dental recycling fairies tonight.
 

Just days ago...

Bracing for Disaster

If you are the owner of a china shop and have in recent months noticed you might have misplaced a bull, please contact me.  I'm pretty sure I've found it.

I'm not sure exactly when the transformation occurred.  I trust it must have been gradual, but it sure seemed to be rather instantaneous from my perspective.  I used to have a sweet, demure, gentle, kind, loving and compassionate daughter.  Now I provide food and shelter to a small cataclysmic force of nature that an insurance policy would likely refer to as an "act of God."

Disaster with dimples.
Destruction in dungarees.

If this is what the global climate change people are trying to warn us about, then they've way undersold their case.  L is the perfect double-threat:  she's developed a dense little athlete's body that is solid muscle and gumption, which diabolically aligns with an absolute and truly stunning clumsiness, the description of which can't be done justice with mere comparisons to new-born deer.  (More like a new-born John Deere.)  Don't get me wrong; I suspect there's still love and affection buried in there somewhere, but it can't seem to express itself unless it's driven home by an across-the-room full-body tackle.  N spends most of his waking hours crying from some onslaught, or hiding from the next one.

I'm sure at some point grace and poise will once again assert itself in her otherwise randomly oscillating collection of knees and elbows.  It's just going to be a trauma-filled race between her motor-mellowing and our encroaching osteoporosis.

The Best $1.29 I Ever Spent

Feeling lazy we ordered Chinese take-out a couple of nights ago.  The place is only a couple of blocks away, so when I grabbed N and headed over to pick it up, they still needed a couple of minutes to pull it all together.  Fortunately for us right next door there is a "Bargain 2000!" store - yet another instantiation of the generic and otherwise ubiquitous "99¢" store genre.  I'm not sure exactly what the "2000" is supposed to represent, but it does look a little like its best years were a decade or so behind it. N and I wandered over and poked around.  It was oppressively empty, except for the significantly shady-looking man behind the wire mesh surrounding the cash register.  We threaded the aisles, admiring all the candles of the Virgin Mary, the dishtowel prints in a hundred forms of plaid, and the reams and reams of spiral-bound notebooks decorated with pictures of Justin Bieber and whoever took over for Menudo. I had no intentions of spending anything but time, but then, as we wandered through the brittle plastic toy aisle, it struck us. I think we both saw it at the same time and realized that the discount gods were smiling on us:  there, mounted on the far wall, a cheap plastic bow, complete with a set of three cheap plastic suction-cup arrows! Throw-away toy Nirvana!

We quickly rushed over and snatched one up, knowing the steal might not be there when we got back if we tarried to first circle around the aisle with all the cans of hominy and picked radishes.  Clutching our discovery with the death grip of a trained one-day-only sale affectionado, we hurried to the up to the cash register and its attendant, who I think might have been the original inspiration for the bad guys in all the truly old Mickey Mouse cartoons.  As I handed him the treasure I knew there had to be a catch, and I wasn't mistaken.  I was soon shocked to find that this toy, unlike the rows and rows of cheap plastic abominations hanging on all sides around it, was not the standard 99¢, but a scandalously whopping $1.29. I cringed, envisioning all my future retirement goals falling short, yet begrudgingly shelled out the extra thirty cents. (Why do I suspect if I'd selected that cheap plastic Little Mermaid back scratcher instead, that would have been the only marked up item.)  Having victory in our hands we fled the store before all the other jealous patrons realized our score (assuming some showed up), and headed back to the Chinese restaurant.  Our food was ready and when the lady behind the counter handed over the bag I know she saw and coveted our priceless acquisition.

We got home and had to fervently restrain ourselves to leave the bow and arrow unopened until after dinner, but then, when we finally declared the meal complete, there was a small flurry of plastic wrap and wire twisty binder thingies, and the weapon was out and available for all the laud and admiration from Mommy and L that it clearly deserved.  (It turns out the women-folk have a seriously deficient sense of appreciation for fine combat systems.)  N and I set to play and soon we were shooting spit-slicked sucker-cup arrows at anything that didn't move (and a few immediate family members that did).  Stacy seemed to disagree that her china pitcher on the mantle was the perfect size, height, and range for competitive target shooting - she's such a spoil sport - so we had to find something else to shoot at until Mommy wasn't looking.  It was the most exhilarating thirty minutes we've had in a long time, which is just about the time it took to break the third and final arrow.  My retirement may have suffered a blow, but all in all, I think it was a buck twenty-nine well spent.

A Stellar Encounter

I had to run out to my car for something last night and on my way back up the driveway I was greeted by an old friend - he was standing on my garage.  Fortunately this was more of a celestial visitation than a terrestrial one.  No, none of the heavenly host had been dispatched to assure me I was greatly favored (which was perfectly fine with me).  It was my sentimental favorite winter constellation, Orion, making his early evening debut in the low east.

I'd seen Orion a couple of times late last year when I would get up particularly early and go into work in the dark.  But then he'd always been slumped over the western horizon like he'd been on an all-night bender.  But now he was crisp and alert and very personable.  We spent a moment or two getting reacquainted, but it was chilly and it seemed to affect me more than him, so I left him to pirouette on my garage roof and went inside.  I'm sure well be getting many more opportunities to hang out in the months to come.

'You know Orion always comes up sideways.
'Throwing a leg up over our fence of mountains,
And rising on his hands, he looks in on me
Busy outdoors by lantern-light with something
I should have done by daylight, and indeed,
After the ground is frozen, I should have done
Before it froze, and a gust flings a handful
of waste leaves at my smoky lantern chimney
To make fun of my way of doing things,
Or else fun of Orion's having caught me...

Excerpt from "The Star-Splitter" by Robert Frost

Returnus Normalicus

It was a misty moisty morning and cloudy was the weather, but that didn't stop L from having to go back to school this morning.  (Though fortunately not clothed all in leather.)  Leftover New Year's Day waffles are the perfect fortifying breakfast before a tough day of Kindergarten.

N and Daddy will being serving their sentences tomorrow and I think we're both quite ready!  Mommy has been shedding no tears of grief either, now that I think of it.

Over Hill and Dale

Over the last two months or so I've been reading The Hobbit to Stacy and the kids before bed and over Christmas break we finished it up. Though the movement in our reading selections has been steadily trending in this direction, this was nevertheless a watershed book for us -- a book I enjoyed reading just as much as they enjoyed hearing it. As I said, it's been a positive-trending progression and the convergence was becoming more clear. We'd been reading a lot of the Boxcar Children series, which the kids love, but I'm getting way tired of. Alice in Wonderland, a book I've always enjoyed, was lukewarmly received by my finicky audience a few months back. (Still a little too weird, I guess.) The first two Narnia books were big hits with the kids, but I've read them so many times that, while I still enjoyed them, they weren't as exciting for me as for them. Things started to warm up for both of us with The Wizard of Oz this fall, and finally, with jolly old Bilbo, things burst into flame.

It wasn't an immediate score. We read in fairly short snippets. If we can read an entire chapter in one sitting, that's great, but all-in-all rare. Our bedtime schedule usually dictates that we divide chapters up into two or three chunks. The first chapter of the Hobbit, where Bilbo meets Gandalf and they pretty much just sit around blowing smoke rings was a little light on adventure, and even when the dwarves started showing up the kids didn't seem to be locked and loaded. I contemplated a year or two's shelving those first couple of nights, but luckily once Tolkien's dwarves started making mayhem on poor Bilbo's pantry, the squawks and squeals from our own dwarves told me we were set for take-off.

What a great adventure it was! N is proving to be a map-fiend like his father, so every night we'd pull out the map and retrace our steps. Mr. Navigator N would remind us all of the paths trodden and speculate on the paths forward. L was always piecing together the plot twists and turns and would inevitably come to some conclusion as to what would have to happen next a paragraph or two before she was to be proven right. (It was a little unsettling actually. She's going to find Agatha Christie quite dull, I'm afraid.) I'm not sure if I inadvertently spilled the beans, or the cobwebs shown on the maps tipped them off, but the biggest anticipation of the entire book was the meeting with the giant spiders in creepy Mirkwood, and it did not fail to deliver its expected delight. The kids suffered through a week of nightmares, yet I believe they would still hold that to be their favorite part of the book. N still screams "Attercop" (Bilbo's taunt to the spiders) at anything and everything he wants to infuriate (and that's a pretty long list).

Side note: I did some research on "attercop" and found out it wasn't just a made-up word that Tolkien created for Bilbo to tease the spiders. Though now archaic, it comes from Old and Middle English words for spider, being made up of the pieces "atter" or poison, and "cop" or head. Evidently attercop was not an uncommon word and was still used until recently in rural areas of Yorkshire. (Supposedly the Norwegian word for spider is still very similar -- "edderkopp.") This is were we get the "cob" in "cobwebs." Sorry for the digression, but I found that fascinating.

But to make a long story a little less long, the kids were drawn in and focused for the rest of the story. They were thrilled by the spiders, fascinated by Beorn and the eagles, and positively in awe of Smaug, the dragon. They contemplated aloud whether Bilbo did the right thing in taking the Arkenstone, and were quite upset at the final demise of the dwarves Thorin, Fili and Kili. (From the very beginning Fili and Kili were N's favorites because "they were the youngest.")

I'm not sure how to follow up this one. We cracked open Treasure Island last night, but I think we may have bitten off more than we can chew with that one. At the end of the first chapter N was ready to continue; he just bounces over the general concepts, so the details of the prose don't concern him too much. But L was frustrated; she's following word for word now, and there were a lot of details and nuance that she just couldn't get. Heck, I don't get half the nautical lingo. I'm thinking a shelving might be in order, though I don't know what to pick up in its place.

Any suggestions?

Carpe Diem

L turned 6 and a half yesterday.  I realized grimly this morning that this means she is now closer (timewise) to being a teenager than to being born.  That was a blow that's left me reeling.

These 6.5 years have been fleeting, to say the least.  Can I afford to go to bed tonight?  Surely if I do I'll awake and she will be that dreaded teen.  I'm not prepared for that.  And at this rate, another six years won't cut the mustard.

I suspect I'm going to be someone who dreads my kids' birthdays more than my own.  I'm not too terribly traumatized about getting older.  In some ways it will be a relief (and already is) to have old age as an excuse for not doing all the things I didn't really want to do anyway when I was younger.  Getting older for me is more than just the cliché of being "better than the alternative."  I've enjoyed it and expect to continue to.  But watching my kids get older is a thoroughly different story.

I'm a good Dad, or so I allow myself the self-flattery.  But I suspect I have a niche.  I think I'm really good with the 3-6 year-olds.  Once they are old enough to interact, and they are all wide-eyed and wondering.  Babies are yucky - way too many unpleasant eruptions to make the coos and gurgles worthwhile.  (No offense to all you baby owners out there--maybe the newer models are better than the ones we had...)  I crave the blossoming intellect.  I totally dig reading them books and singing songs; it is unfathomably wonderful to have them scream at you for just one more chapter or just one more verse.  I love the unreserved bear hugs and uninitiated "I love you's."  I even, much to Stacy's chagrin, love it when they crawl crying into our bed at 2am, running from the dragon of our earlier fairy tale.  I guess it's a selfish kind of love.  I like being the one with the answers.  The one that lends comfort and confidence just by being in the room.  Teenagers scare me.  They don't want that.  At least they say they don't.

L is halfway to being a teenager.  So I'm halfway to being irrelevant.