Sunday evening found us driving home from Forest Lake, a bit after Essie’s bedtime. She still tells me “bach seat, Dada” if she wants some company on these longer drives, but this time she seemed just fine with Mykala and me in the front, and her in the twilight in the backseat. Now, Ess talks a lot lately, most of it narrating or monologuing about what she is doing and what she is imagining as she plays. A lot of diapers changed (“put onna keem”), a lot of tucking in and napping. More recently, she plays mama and baby (pig/giraffe/monkey/spoons/pair of shoes), and one of them says “I love you” and gives a kiss. But during the drive, she wasn’t playing with anything in particular, so instead, we hear this:
Up and down, up and down, up and down, up and down
People on the bus go up and down up and down
I felt a feeling of accomplishment (hers, ours, mostly hers) where two years ago she could barely move, had no teeth, couldn’t understand us. And now she’s singing “Wheels on the Bus” as we drive home. We are not yet at a stage where her learning and changing are any source of melancholy for a passing phase we’ll never see again. Instead, her transformation from helpless to thoughtful and willful produce unalloyed joy in her parents.
We’ve been teaching Ess that people have more than one name. For example, her grandpa Bop’s name is Michael. “I know a Michael, I know a Michael!” she explains, riffing off her book I Know a Monkey. So, my nickname for Mykala is Bun, which we told Ess kind of in passing, not intending to or even trying really to teach it to her.
So, of course I always prompt Ess with “say goodnight to Mama” when I am carrying her to bed, but tonight she goes “Goonight Bun! … I love you, Bun!”
Mykala accidentally dyed her hair orange today, which kind of sidetracked our movie plans. (After some corrections, it’s currently more of a henna shade.) So, Ess and I headed over to my parents for a visit. She was unusually quiet in her carseat, watching the big drops hit her window. At my parent’s, I got to see how Ess is trying to figure out how to go to the bathroom not in her diaper; she’d tell use she wanted to sit on her potty chair, and then absolutely nothing would happen. The stages of connecting the urge to the action to the result are interesting — like the animal and human parts of the brain are learning to communicate for the first time.
We drove home in the dark, the rain still steadily falling. Pulled into the garage and I gently lifted Ess out of the car, pecking her on the cheek as I did so. “Love you Dada” I heard her say unprompted, for the first time she ever has. Then, she immediately began commenting on the color of the lid of our trash can.
“Wait, what did you say?”
“Green top onna trash can.”
“No no, before that.”
“Trash can.”
“Oh, Ess.”
Paul McCartney, 1965: “Yesterday came suddenly.” I don’t know what that means, but if I squint, it looks like he’s saying time passes quickly.
So, yesterday: I got done with work and went to my parent’s to pick up Ess. She now knows how to put her little shoes on. They look like this:
So she showed us that. It was cool out, in the 50s, and Ess told us all she’d like to go outside. She ran off to find her sweatshirt, and Nannie zipped it up for her. (Later that evening Ess told me: “Dada has a zipper. Baby has a zipper. Mama has a zipper. … Everybody has a zipper!”) Then, we went outside to see the neighbor’s painted rocks. And the wildflowers. And the birdbath. And the carved bear in the corner of the yard. And the plane in the sky.
Ess wants to be picked up (“uppa dee, Dada”) or very much not: “No, own-baby walk.” She wants someone special to feed her (Mama) or her highchair to be in a very precise spot. When she tripped over and displaced the picnic blanket last week, I told Mykala “she’s going to put that back now.” But I underestimated her care and patience in placing it precisely how she wanted it to lay. Her mind is filled with thoughts and we get to hear them; this is a source of boundless joy. We’ve waited so anxiously and impatiently to hear those thoughts!
So I brought Ess home through the cool, slightly rainy early fall evening. We watered the plants. She ran inside. Took off her own shoes. I turned on my auto-generated iTunes playlist of 2,028 songs I have played ≥5 times since 2005. And in that random collection I heard, while we were feeding George, Ingrid Michaelson’s Somewhere Over the Rainbow. Try to listen to that song with your child and do anything other than cry. I remember it clearly, Ess had requested I “ohpee up” the closet door, and just as she was reaching her tiny hand into the big cat food bag, and as I reached to help her find the scoop, big tears jumped out of my eyes.
And Mama came home: “MAMA!” Ess squealed running toward the back door and throwing her arms around the middle of Mykala’s thigh, smiling big as she squeezed tightly. Ess watched Mykala cook, and ran around, reading Make Way for Ducklings while we ate. I worried aloud if us eating at the table and her running about was a bad precedent, but watching Ess run out of the kitchen and throw herself onto the couch and then run back to us with her update from the living room was just too good to interrupt.
As we read nighttime stories like Dinosaurumpus and I Know a Monkey to Ess, the cool air made the blankets of our bed more comfortable. Her big compliment right now: “good book.” Then, once we had put her in her crib for the night and turned the monitor on, a little voice sang over the speaker: “Baby Beluga in the deep blue sheee. Oh!”
Mykala and I were lucky enough to see another little sliver of Essie’s personality recently, and it started with a cookie. I was in the kitchen, Mykala was in the living room, and Ess was running back and forth between the two. I’d hand her cookie pieces: one for her and one for mama. She would then propel herself with a little bouncy toddler run into the living room where she and Mykala would eat their cookies. A few minutes later, Ess would reappear, requesting I fill her hands again. After a while, though, the routine was broken: Mykala watched Ess absentmindedly begin to eat some cookie, which caused Mykala to comment: “Oh, Ess, you ate my cookie piece.” It was merely a statement of what had transpired: no judgment or shaming could I detect in Mykala’s voice. But the effect (doubly unexpected given our toddler’s barely two years), was profound. Essie’s face immediately crumpled and her chewing slowed, when she realized that she could not un-chew what had been chewed. She could not, though her motions suggested she considered it, remove the cookie, dry it off, and put it into her mama’s unsuspecting hand. Realizing a decision gate had slammed behind her and lamenting Mykala’s loss, Ess began to cry, loudly. She cried and cried and cried until her eyes were bright red, holding Mykala as she did; a reaction totally disproportionate to what we had expected, yet only explainable by our daughter’s sadness at her mama’s loss. Small loss, big reaction.
The case is made difficult not because the principles of
its decision are obscure but because the flag involved is
our own. Nevertheless, we apply the limitations of the
Constitution with no fear that freedom to be
intellectually and spiritually diverse or even contrary
will disintegrate the social organization. To believe
that patriotism will not flourish if patriotic ceremonies
are voluntary and spontaneous instead of a compulsory
routine is to make an unflattering estimate of the appeal
of our institutions to free minds. We can have
intellectual individualism and the rich cultural
diversities that we owe to exceptional minds only at the
price of occasional eccentricity and abnormal attitudes.
When they are so harmless to others or to the State as
those we deal with here, the price is not too great. But
freedom to differ is not limited to things that do not
matter much. That would be a mere shadow of freedom. The
test of its substance is the right to differ as to things
that touch the heart of the existing order.
If there is
any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is
that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall
be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other
matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word
or act their faith therein. If there are any
circumstances which permit an exception, they do not now
occur to us.
Think about how large World War II must have loomed in the minds of those deliberating, making, and contesting this case. When I imagine the historical context and see that the Right decision was still made, I have hope that the logic of freedom articulated in poetic prose above can move from government (where the stresses and strife of plebeian living is, however compassionately, imagined), to become the bedrock of the national conscience; not as a trickle-down but rather a river with many tributaries.
Rash decisions always feel like sure bets before you act on them: I recently went “you know what, upgrading this server’s Ubuntu LTS won’t be a big deal — I’ve done all these package updates for the past few years with nary a hiccup… I think I’ll just purge my PPArepo (since ffmpeg is officially back in16.04.1), open a screen session, and get going! And, for a multitasking win, I’ll do it in between seeing patients!”
That did… not go well.
Of COURSE I ran into a package bug that caused MySQL to fall over during the upgrade. Normally, MySQL dying wouldn’t be an issue, since my site is served from either an APCu or memcache cache, but HEY what’s this, PHP moved over to 7.0 and none of the extensions it wanted had been installed yet. So, the entire site was down.
Suspecting anything and everything was borked up, I did some diagnostics (aka panicked which commands to see what was still installed) and found it wasn’t too bad. The upgrade had completed with one exception, and had some unintended, un-researched complications. So, it wasn’t as bad as when I tried to upgrade my Joyent Accelerator years ago (Solaris… and the last time I’ll pick the obscure OS option) and was left with only the shell session I was currently running, trying to figure out how to get wget back on the machine so I could get gcc so I could START to reinstall things. Leaving my laptop powered up, connected to that one SSH session, praying the internet didn’t hiccup while I went to dental school classes, then rushing back home to debug some more—THAT was truly un-fun. So this was better than that.
But wait, the DSA (ssh-dss) keys I generated years ago were now disabled by default. Which, of course, that’s the last thing I would ever think of when trying to debug ssh problems. In this case, LISH saved me as I was able to generate new keys, add them to the server, and once again establish new SSH connections.
Then it turned out my stats program Mint was totally disabled. It was written like 12 years ago, last updated some years ago, by a great programmer who is now a busy father and has moved on to other things. It was time to dig in and fix someone else’s PHP, only to learn that MySQL’s default sql_mode is now far more restrictive than it used to be, which caused queries that used to run perfectly to fail. That took a little while to figure out.
The easiest were the fixes to my own code, because I know where (many, not all) of the gremlins live. Sometime in the middle of it all, John left a comment on this site, so that was a good sign. Luckily, it must not have required him to answer the security image challenge, because I found out that was broken, too. Fixed!
Looks like I won’t have to upgrade Ubuntu until 2021. If I do it before then, I’ll make darn sure to research it first.
Our little family took a trip last weekend. Essie’s longest road trip thus far, to Wisconsin Dells, to the Kalahari Resort. Mykala had dance competition obligations, but since the hotel was connected to the convention center where the competition was held, we got to see her on each one of her breaks, and got to see Ess go to a waterpark for the first time. We expected a reaction from our nearly-two-year-old when she got in a giant kiddie pool full of swings, a miniature lazy river, giraffe sculptures, baby elephants squirting water out of their trunks, and colorful slides with water running down them. Ok, we thought, this could go one of two ways: she’s going to let loose and splash everywhere, analogous to her at home when she goes “run run run!” and then just runs around. Or, in contrast, she’d get really chatty, like she does when she’s sitting on the front of Mykala’s bike and watching the world go by. Hidden option C: Ess did neither of the things we guessed, instead going into some kind of Zen state of total focus and relaxation. Just staring out, happy but not gleeful, calm but not sad. We were taken aback. Then, Mykala took her down a slide. Did she like it? “MOEMOE” she said, and when I picked her up “NO-MAMA”, her favorite way to specify whom she would rather do the thing at hand with her. I think Ess had fun.
We slept Ess in the same room as us, but the pull-out couch squeaked every single time we moved. It was a series of naps strung together, which is what they say the first night you sleep somewhere new (something about how only half your brain sleeps at a time the first night in a new place). However, Ess made it all the way through the night, probably owing to her extremely short nap in the car on the way. We’re thinking Ess could come with us to Chicago sometime soon. This is exciting.
So, anyway, we got home and now it is time for Essie’s second birthday party very soon. We left to find a patio umbrella recently, and I got to sit in the back of the car next to Ess on the way home. She sometimes demands this, and there’s nothing like being greeted by an excited toddler when you get into the back of a car. Typically, she quickly goes back to what she was doing before I got in the car, and I get to see up close the way her mind is turning over and fitting and re-fitting pieces of the world together. She’s combining thoughts and experiences and colors and numbers and injecting the mix with her own creativity. She thinks sometimes we should call her “wiggleworm” so we do. She thinks every stuffed animal needs a nap and/or a potty-break diaper-change, so we tuck-in and ‘clean-up’. She thinks pats are very important to help you fall asleep, so we pat. She thinks her mother goose should have a salad of Ikea stuffed vegetables, so we put a bib on her and lay out a meal. And when you are doing something right or just-so or aren’t coming quickly enough to see something, Ess can get pretty upset. Then you find yourself feeling exasperated, like, I’m trying her kiddo, give me a second! And then she tucks herself in and you say ‘you can close your eyes’ and you watch as she squints them shut, still learning how to get them to hold closed, and she holds them this way for a moment or two until she cries ‘wake up!’ and she sits bolt upright and runs off to do more stuff.
