After hearing on the radio that the Powerball’s jackpot value had climbed to something like $900 million, we found $2 in the car and picked up a ticket when we were getting gas yesterday. We had no idea what the rules were, so imagine our surprise when we discovered that our four matched numbers were worth $100! What a return on investment. It also gave me insight into the twisted psychology of the lottery — there’s this impression that we were “just” one number away from the next prize up, when in reality you are 320 times less likely to match five numbers for one million dollars than the four numbers required to win the $100 we did. Best case scenario, the lottery makes you happy to have what you have.
Ess has been super-interested in putting things back lately, or as she says “bach”. Pick up something, bach. Walking around with something… bach. Holding a diaper, bach. Then, when you sit on the couch, she toddles up to you and goes “up UUUUPPP” which, when you’re standing, means she wants you to pick her up. When you’re sitting, though, it means she wants you to stand up and play with her.
In my case, that means chasing Ess with Dante Fiero the dragon, or as Ess knows him, bee-lah. I spend a fair amount of time walking around the house, saying “blaaah” at Ess, with my hand working the dragon puppet. Inevitably, she runs over to our curtains and stand behind them, her shearling-slippered feet sticking out from behind, shuffling around until Dante peaks in and gently clomps her face with his fabric teeth and 5 inch red felt tongue. She laughs, runs out from behind the curtain, and then behind the next curtain. If I try to go sit down, Ess will bring Dante over to me and push him into my hands. She won’t take no for an answer, and insists on being chased. She’s particularly fun to watch when she’s moving at top speed, because her little legs haven’t yet learned a full running stride. So, she’ll bobble along for about three to four paces until she kind of takes a double skip-hop beat to get her feet back under her. It’s the kind of movement kids only have for a little while, and I feel very lucky to be able to have so much fun playing with Ess at her age right now.
She’s also learning the slide we got her for Christmas; Mykala has succeeded in showing her how to use both of the steps on the ladder side of it, and then to actually put her feet in front of her before she goes down the slide. This makes us a lot less nervous, seeing Ess go down the slide feet-first instead of head-first. Occasionally, though, she’ll only get one foot in front and will slide down in a full split. She’s always been very flexible, so this doesn’t seem to bother her in the slightest.
Let’s see, what else? Ess is still getting up two times per night on average. She goes to bed perfectly, and goes back to bed just fine at night as long as she gets to nurse with Mykala. Neither one of us, but Mykala in particular, have been ready to let Ess cry at night for the nights in a row necessary to extinguish the behavior of nighttime awakenings. Mykala posed the question to me: how exactly would extinguishing that behavior of waking up at night be about anything other than our needs and our convenience? Does discouraging this natural behavior help Ess in any way? I’ve read of nothing and come across nothing that says getting a baby or toddler to sleep through the entire night is about the baby’s needs. I think when one is anticipating another child, though, it does become a major issue. I can’t imagine two children not sleeping through the night. This, however, is not something we are anticipating or planning for. So, we have the luxury of not having to “sleep train.” There have been a few nights where I have felt hopeless, that Ess will never sleep through the night, but I always feel more optimistic in the morning. It helps that Ess nearly always wakes up rested and happy and ready for the day.
Also, I napped when Ess did today, for I believe only the second time ever. I feel so well-rested and optimistic that it is probably coloring the tone of this post. Oh well, I’m enjoying the rested-ness!
I’m drinking wine and watching a 29 minute YouTube video about how to install a garage door opener. ANDAMHAVINGTHETIMEOFMYLIFE. Adulthood is different and better than I expected. Harder. But better.
The disrepute into which Formal Logic has fallen is
entirely unjustified; and its neglect is the root cause
of nearly all those disquieting symptoms which we have
noted in the modern intellectual constitution. Logic has
been discredited, partly because we have come to suppose
that we are conditioned almost entirely by the intuitive
and the unconscious. There is no time to argue whether
this is true; I will simply observe that to neglect the
proper training of the reason is the best possible way to
make it true. Another cause for the disfavor into which
Logic has fallen is the belief that it is entirely based
upon universal assumptions that are either unprovable or
tautological. This is not true. Not all universal
propositions are of this kind. But even if they were, it
would make no difference, since every syllogism whose
major premise is in the form “All A is B” can be recast
in hypothetical form. Logic is the art of arguing
correctly: “If A, then B.” The method is not invalidated
by the hypothetical nature of A. Indeed, the practical
utility of Formal Logic today lies not so much in the
establishment of positive conclusions as in the prompt
detection and exposure of invalid inference.
And the conclusion:
We have lost the tools of learning—the axe and the wedge,
the hammer and the saw, the chisel and the plane— that
were so adaptable to all tasks. Instead of them, we have
merely a set of complicated jigs, each of which will do
but one task and no more, and in using which eye and hand
receive no training, so that no man ever sees the work as
a whole or “looks to the end of the work.”
A cogent case for reinstating the Trivium in education. Plus, the author, Dorothy Sayers is a super interesting person. She copywrote the most famous Guinness ads, wrote the slogan “It pays to advertise!”, wrote crime fiction, translated, hung out with as some of the Inklings, and translated The Divine Comedy.
Essie’s word for bug is “bugah” or I suppose “bug-ah” but those two sounds blend together so seamlessly, and she so rarely says it once, that you really get bugahbugahbugahbugah. So that’s anything small and colored dark. Most things requiring a pincer grip. “What’s that?” we ask. “Bugahbugah. BUGAHBUGAHBUGAH.” comes her reply.
The other day Ess had poppyseed bread, a few tiny pieces of it. She was just convinced it was filled with bugahs. She ate it anyway. We should be excited about knowledge transference? We should be concerned about her willingness to eat things which she believes to contain hundreds of tiny bugs? Both? Parenting.
I’m walking through the mall, with Ess riding in the Björn, and her little left hand is holding mine. I realize she’s been holding my hand for five minutes straight. Her whale spout pony tail on the top of her head swishes back and forth as she looks around.
—
I’m lying on the kitchen floor when Ess walks over and, uncharacteristically, lies down next to me, resting her head in the crook of my elbow, and just stares into my eyes for thirty seconds. Satisfied with what she saw, or what she communicated, she gets up and toddles away.
—
It’s bedtime and dark. Ess finds her stuffed monkey as I pick her up and carry her to her room. She rests her head in the crook of my neck, and her tiny little cheek feels cool as she snuggles in. I pause in front of her crib, holding her, willing myself to somehow remember everything about this moment. I lay her down to sleep.
This post marks the beginning of a new theme here, one to which I’ve given little attention in the past, and one that, shamefully, I’ve only really begun to understand with the birth of Essie. It begins with a story…
We took Ess along to see Out on a Limb’s Nutcracker show at the Rosedale Mall. Mykala was occupied running the music, so Ess was my charge for the evening. Just the sight of her mama, without the ability to run over and get a hug was a challenge for Essie, so after feeding her, she and I began doing circuitous laps around the first level of the mall, biding our time, on each lap showing Ess the dancers while avoiding sightings of Mykala.
It was on one of these laps that Ess began going “booba booba booba” which I thought was a bit odd since (1) Ess only says that around Mykala and (2) Mykala was behind many storefronts about 300 yards away. Why was my 16-month-old daughter saying booba? I knew it wasn’t anybody in the area, so I began scanning shop fronts. You’ve probably guessed it already: mannequins. At Gap. Wearing sweaters. That’s how obnoxiously out of proportion these lady mannequins were: Ess perceived obvious, beat-you-over-the-head breasts on them through winter sweaters. As the father of a young daughter, this grated. What was worse was the men mannequins: you’re probably thinking they were overgrown steroid-adled gladiators, right? Wrong! They were, for all practical purposes, slim, humanly-proportioned individuals.
Sexism is awful. Double standards dump salt in the wound.
I’ve always been respectful of women to the point of obsequiousness, though that has been more an outgrowth of my personality than any true understanding of what it is like to be a woman. Recently, with the help of the Twitter stream of John Siracusa and, in turn, his following of Everyday Sexism, has the concept of what it is like to be a woman in the world begun to sink slowly into my thick head.
It probably began in earnest with my viewing of a video of a woman wearing a bog standard black t-shirt on the streets of New York, surreptitiously filming the amount of harassment a woman endures in public. Then a few more anecdotes expressing similar experiences. Slowly, slowly, these anecdotes strung together in my mind into a theme, a theme of outright and implicit verbal and physical abuse. Then, under the overwhelming weight of countless recollections and summaries of double standards, tacit gender norms, molestation by the male gaze, more double standards, violence, parking lots at night, walking in the city, walking anywhere, interviewing for jobs, keeping jobs, makeup, subtle sexism, overt sexism, snide comments, rude implications, the heartbreaking stereotypes endured by women bosses, OFFENSESDISMISSEDASJOKES, minimization, accusations deflected as overreaction, more parking lots, more city streets… well, this theme then became generalized into universal experience. It is not one type of woman that endures this hell: it is all women.
It was upon finally arriving at, and trying hard to empathize with, this shared female experience, that I felt like I finally began to understand being a woman in this world.
A seven foot white pine Christmas tree, grown at the Kroeger’s family tree farm from which you pick it up, freshly cut for you, baled, and drilled plumb for a tree stand is $59, which I believe is an excellent deal. We went to get ours yesterday and marveled at the difference a year makes with Essie. Last year, Ess was in the Björn, reacting a tiny bit to things, and generally kind of just along for the ride. This year she is 16 months old and far more interactive: riding on my back in the Kelty, reaching out at trees she likes, drinking sips of apple juice in the warming house, beaming at people she sees. The long-needled trees like our white pine feel soft to the hand, and, as with anything she feels that is thick and soft, Ess says “maoww”, meaning that it feels just like her cat at home.
I popped the tree into its stand as Mykala put Ess down for her nap. In years past, we would get the tree, put on the lights, put on the decorations, do it all at once in one marathon decoration session. This year, by necessity, we do a little Christmas at a time. Some decorations one day, the tree another, the lights today. We consider things like strands of lights without lead in them to be far more important than we ever did before. We take precautions against Ess knocking over the tree or drinking the tree water. It is a lot to think about, and that extra mental overhead, the thinking of someone else before you, is the next stage of Christmas we are growing into.
Mykala and I were talking a few days ago and we agreed that there’s a point where Christmas loses some of its highlight-of-the-year quality; sometime between high school and the end of college. Your peer group expands, you start interacting with the world differently, your mind and efforts are distracted by an entire other social sphere, even when you are home with family at Christmas. Your attention is divided. Then, out of school and into a job, before you have kids, and there’s this odd feeling of remembering how special Christmas was, but realizing it will never be that way for you again. For the first time, it is tinged with a little melancholy, if only a little. Then, as suddenly as something so profound can happen, you jump into the world of parenting and your attention turns to your little one, and your efforts become about making their Christmas the highlight of their year. It has been said and described by a thousand authors and observers, but you really do see the season through the freshness, the newness of your children’s eyes. It is something you read about, but a quite a bit more memorable and lovely to experience yourself. It makes the child-proofing of the Christmas decorations incidental, just a little speed bump on the way to your non-stop efforts to make the world a gentle, special, loving place for your children as long as you can.
It’s a sunny 42° outside and Mykala graciously extended what was already a long week of parenting through this morning so I could go workout at Lifetime. I came back and jumped into the unfolding morning: Marge had juice spilled on her and Mykala had already washed her; she was damp and drying. Ess had dismantled a few areas of the house, and was ready to play more. Mykala had to leave. With the cutest little repetition of “bye” you could possibly imagine, Essie wished Mykala well, and then it was the two of us.
I love how I can ask Ess to do things: put the magnet on the cabinet, let’s count the socks and then put them in the basket, those clothes are already dry so lets take them out of the dryer. Oh, and: don’t climb in the dryer, even though it looks fun.
Then, we came across a rogue pair of Dad socks, and Ess knew she wanted to put them in the dresser. She walked right over there with me, and I picked her up, and she dropped them right into the drawer. It is such fun to feel our communication developing. Ess can’t yet form sentences, but her cognition, understanding, and even sense of comic timing are remarkable.
Essie selected the still-damp Marge and a rabbit to take a nap with, and she drifted off after a few minutes of frustrated cries. She’s napping now as I write this in the sun of our dining room, sipping some coffee Mykala made and eating my morning oatmeal. “A Baroque Christmas” is playing in the background. I feel I will look back at this time, rough edges worn away by the retelling, with great fondness.
Currently sitting next to Mykala, listening to “A Charlie Brown Christmas” in my headphones, finalizing the video transcoding additions I’ve made to the site. She’s watching a little light television, eating popcorn. Our first round of Christmas decorations is lending a soft light to the living room as candles flicker. George is waiting to eat some popcorn, sitting on the Christmas plaid wool blanket on the footstool. Essie is upstairs, sleeping soundly after an evening of joyfully running around. It’s supposed to snow tomorrow.