Snow Rules

Q and The Boy have been like elite athletes — trained, equipped, ready. They’ve thought and re-thought their strategies, drafted elaborate fort plans, contemplated the proper packing of the snowball. They’ve revisited, over and again, the Calvin & Hobbes snowman strips for macabre inspiration. For Christmas this year, a California aunt gave The Boy two WHAM-O! Snowball Blaster Solos™ and one WHAM-O® Snow Tracball™, each package picturing an ecstatic boy firing a perfectly round snowball at someone unfortunate and unseen. But for the last two years, snow in New York has never gotten past the possible, and Q and The Boy have remained on the bench.

This year “Winter Storm Nemo”* brings them both into the game. Though the projections shift nearly every time we consult them (anywhere between 6”-22” expected, the graphic tells us), we watch the possibility of snow become a promise, and not the thin inch about two weeks prior that came down like fine sand and, in the bitter cold, stayed that way despite all our pressing and packing.

Nemo makes the weekend a vacation. The storm comes in on Friday as rain and wind, and remains indecisive most of the day. Then with the sun down and the kids in bed (though probably not asleep), the clouds get serious about themselves, and the city becomes a celebration of snow.

Q and The Boy are up early that Saturday morning, turned out of bed by their expectations and ideas. We eat breakfast, something heavy (eggs and hash browns), and put extra layers between us and the world. Then, finally, outside.

About a foot has fallen in the night and together with the wind has re-landscaped the park. The benches have become easy chairs; the long slide is a trough full of white. Everything is new, but we are not the first. Though we get out fairly early, the park people have been out a little earlier, clearing the main walks with the red Toro tractor and its brush attachment throwing up a scarf of snow in a much smaller impression of the storm. Still it’s new enough.

All the park lawns have been fenced off for the season, as usual, to let the grass rest and come back in the spring. Normally our neighborhood fastidiously keeps to the rules. But in this new park, someone discovers a way into the smaller but steeper patch of ground through the leafless bushes on the side, and suddenly uncountably many kids are laughing down the grade on sleds, some official but most improvised—storage-container lids, cardboard boxes, boogie boards used to the temporary hills that come and go against the local shores. Q and The Boy find friends immediately (nearly everyone was out), which we eventually identify and track by their winter plumage:  Suzie in purple, Scarlet ironically in all cerulean. Soon the hill gets sleighed smooth and fast, with the downhill fence checking the kids just short of the path where the parents stand holding cameras or coffees or both.

Then someone loosens a post and brings down a six-foot stretch of the big lawn’s fence roll, and in something like a moment it, too, fills with kids sliding on all manner of things, some pulled by adults to help out the smaller grade.

The Boy and his best friend T experiment with his snowball launcher, which turns out to shoot better in the picture, but its cup and lever attachment produce snowballs so round they would have made Plato blush. Q quickly gets good at making them herself and then wows her friends with their frequency and perfection. She ends up with a constant line of kids asking her to make ordinance to deploy mainly against their dads and brothers.

We spend as much of Saturday and Sunday outside making and destroying as we can,** knowing that time is against us. The parks people, to their credit, leave the fence down all weekend — never even appear to trigger guilt let alone end the play, come to think of it. It’s not until Sunday night, about the time when the neighborhood kids enter baths and beds and when lids have gone back onto containers and exhausted boxes have been put out for recycling, I stand at the window and watch workmen out resetting the posts and wiring back up the fence roll.

What is it about snow that overrules? It’s a serious question. I’ve heard a poet say that it’s a way to walk on water, but I find that no more an explanation than saying a kid’s love of sand comes from being able to fill buckets with glass. I do think there’s something to Bill Watterson’s idea, brilliantly realized again and again, that snow turns the world into a blank page that we are called to fill with the writings of our being.

Still, Watterson’s metaphor misses something important. It’s not just that snow erases the world’s full slate; it forgoes the slate altogether. Imagine if you could, just anytime, easily fashion the ground into a chair or a (relatively) harmless ball to test your arm on a sign or a sibling. Or if you could roll up a fort, tall as you like, and trigger a battle that will end (relatively) peacefully in a hot, marshmallowed drink inside. What if you could at any moment push the world into a new shape, and it would stay?

Then again, it never stays — can’t, at least for us. Metaphors tend to drift up. Sleds aside, the going’s harder in the snow, the cold always looking for your fingers and toes and always eventually finding them. But despite the struggle and the cold — and unlike in spring — in the snow you can reintroduce yourself as an explorer and can look back to proof of where you’ve been. And then, inevitably, you can’t tell your footsteps from all the others.

_________________________
*It seems the Weather Channel figured out that they could name storms, too. Why not? Right?
**A friend of mine and I made an outstanding snow monster that was destroyed by someone less than an hour later.

Ornaments

Q recently got her ears pierced. Several of her friends have had earrings for a while now (some pretty much since birth, as one and another cultural tradition dictates), but she has usually opted otherwise. When two friends went through the procedure recently, though, she thought it was time.

Finding a place to have holes punched in her head turned out to be a little more difficult than we expected. New York has a famously vibrant and inventive piercing industry, of course; a walk through the East and Greenwich Villages or a Google search for “ear piercing near me” will make that clear. But however good of a story that might make, we thought we should leave Q to put herself in the (probably filthy) hands of those places on her own in her twenties. We heard from friends that pediatricians, or at least the one we currently use, stopped doing this kind of thing before we discovered that they once did this kind of thing. We also learned that plastic surgeons will pierce ears — even prescribing numbing cream in advance, too — but we thought we might first try to find an alternative with a narrower expertise and smaller price point. Unfortunately, the few jewelry shops in our neighborhood don’t look particularly trustworthy with needles. What we really needed was a mall.

NYC is fairly light on malls, so we settled for Claire’s Accessories in Chelsea.* My lovely wife took her while The Boy and I stayed home and (among other things) thought male thoughts.** I was willing to go and to make The Boy come along, but a bigger audience usually makes the show bigger, and I didn’t want to give Q more people to pretend not to be nervous for.

When Q’s turn arrived, she didn’t shy, didn’t need talking in or out of it, didn’t cry. My wife said she did shake noticeably just before, something Q explained away on the sidewalk after the store as her shivering because of the cold. She can be a little too tough sometimes.

The Boy and I met them back downtown to choose a Christmas tree. Q had her hair braided out of the way, and as we approached she turned her head slightly to ease our noticing, in the last of the day’s light, the new tiny gold balls. We made sure that Q noticed our noticing. Together, we settled on a tree, an eight-foot Douglas fir with needles like rabbit hair, and took it home to the corner that The Boy and I had cleared for it, the same corner as last year.

A thought lit always lights up a string of others. Q’s first earrings are for other girls and for herself — not yet ornaments of attraction — but this will change, of course. Each year as we take out the dry tree, I see how sap has sealed the trunk, how the pine has healed itself to death. A lesson there. The Boy will turn 10 in about six months, an age that, after his sudden arrival, we didn’t permit ourselves to imagine. Now our imaginations give out before he does.

We had most of the lights and decorations up on the tree in no time, The Boy and Q in Santa hats moving things around until just so, my wife taking great photos that showed us how to properly see it. All as usual. The Boy has gotten tall, but not as tall as he wanted to be to hang the disco ball ornament we’ve had longer than the kids. I picked him up to let him reach the top himself, something, given his age and mine, I won’t be doing much more of, either out of necessity or possibility. Q asked for a boost, too. Her mom had picked up a pair of matching blue snowflakes for the tree. Their resemblance to earrings was not lost on Q, and she wanted to loop their gold threads on either side of the disco ball. Unlike her brother, she’s still no real struggle for me to lift, but as she sat on my folded arms I noticed that her toes somehow brushed my knees.

I like this time of year because our Christmas and New Year’s traditions reveal themselves as a kind of logic, a structure designed to preserve truth and to provide generously for its expression. To get at the point another way, I like that we keep traditions and that they’re never exactly the same:  in the new lies the old, and the old leaves room for the the new. This-year’s tree will come down; the new ornaments will be boxed with the old and slid onto the hall-closet shelf next to the suitcases until next year. And next year, whether in the same corner or somewhere altogether different, we will together make a Christmas tree. Q and The Boy will be taller, a little more themselves, but ornaments will still need to be hung in the usual places. The gifts will change, but the giving will not. I will get older and maybe a little wiser, but not much of either.  That sort of thing.

The calendar has again come around to 1. Let’s see what we can make of this year, and what we can keep.

Happy & Merry, everyone.

_________________________
*Which, if you think about it, is like a whole mall distilled to a single store.
**Okay, quickly: Male thoughts presumably consist of how we can use our bodies to hurt things, including other bodies. I presume that female thoughts involve how a body will hurt on behalf of others. (I’m probably kidding.)

Sweet Relief

It was all Q’s idea.

Lately Q has been reading the Cupcake Diaries books, a series of stories about a set of middle-school girls (the Cupcake Club) learning to navigate increasingly complex friendships, and on the way coming to themselves. Most books involve the Cupcake Club baking for some special event, and when my lovely wife and I talked with Q and The Boy about how hurricane Sandy left so many lives in our area so precarious, Q suggested that we have a bake sale to raise money to help out. She could invite some friends over to help her make cupcakes and sell them in the lobby of our building. Great idea, we said. The Boy was on board right away, too, and offered to help with everything.

Q wanted to make the sign right away. She ran to her room and somehow came back with a five-foot stretch of paper. We pushed around ideas for while, and settled on calling the fundraiser “Sweet Relief”:

Note the cupcake parachute and biscotti rescue boat

Q asked her mom to contribute her signature (super-labor-intensive) apple-ginger biscotti, and she, of course, agreed. In working out a time for girls to come over for cupcake baking, several moms volunteered to bring sweets to sell and lent us pans to increase production. We were in business.

Baking day, we set out the pans and the ingredients for them (eggs that they each could crack), the sparkly bottles of sprinkles, and the cupcake liners with the classy pattern. Q taught her friends how to neatly pipe on the frosting using the equipment she received as a gift from her aunt who loves to bake and decorate. The girls made huge fun out of it all, along with some cupcakes, a few of which they ate themselves. As expected, Q’s mom eventually finished up after the girls, who couldn’t resist being seven-year-olds any longer, laughed their way into Q’s room to play.

The sale went even better than expected. Our building always supports these kinds of activities:  The building manager sent out an email about the fundraiser to all residents, and he lent us one of the building’s tables and tablecloths. Everyone contributed. One of the moms brought crazy amounts of cookies and brownies and cupcakes, which the girls sorted and arranged (and resorted and rearranged) shop-like on platters and plates. The Boy handled the money and the promotion — “I highly recommend the biscotti,” he’d say as people approached. The table of kids made customers of most residents, many of whom paid way more than they needed to. Some of the kids’ friends came by with their own wallets and purses.

After a couple of hours the inventory dwindled, as did the young girls’ attention. Q and her friends took a break to play at house, which I thought fitting given that they were raising money to help those who had lost theirs. The Boy stayed at the table through the end, including sweeping up with an older sister of one of Q’s friends, once we called the sale. Altogether they raised around $500. That morning we learned that a person who works in our building and who has helped us out many times lost his house and car in the flood. We decided to donate some of the money to his family and to let the rest be doubled by the company my wife works for.

As far as stories go, this really isn’t a very good one. It has nothing going for it apart from its truth: Q had a great idea, pure in its kindness and intent, and we executed it with selfless help and without surprise or drama. We confirmed the generosity of our friends and neighborhood, something that was not in question. Q gave no particular indication of dedicating her life to service from here on out; we saw no real transformations of any kind, in fact, which every good story requires. If anything, this post amounts to an extended expression of pride in Q and The Boy and — and, well, ourselves. Such things are usually, and totally, annoying.

We try, as all parents do, to encourage our kids to value the valuable and to find ways of releasing the unimportant’s grip on them. We struggle with this ourselves, always will, in no small part because the valuable does not often reveal itself. And when it does — as when so many lose so much of their lives so visibly and suddenly — the sense of duty accompanying it can paralyze and crush. It becomes easy to sympathize with Alvie Singer in Annie Hall, who says, “I can’t enjoy anything unless everyone is. If one guy is starving someplace, that puts a crimp in my evening.” New York and New Jersey were hit very hard by hurricane Sandy, sure, but Haiti was devastated. Why not another sale for them? Or for the street kids in Brazil who need no hurricane to have need, or the displaced in Afghanistan or Syria or Sudan or so many other places, or the homeless and forgotten in our own city? No amount of baking seems enough.

But here comes the story: Q and The Boy themselves came up with a way to help and made it happen. And they enjoyed themselves while doing it. They began to find, in a cupcake, a way to something larger than themselves, though even now no part of us can contain them.

Q = 7, or as clever as clever

Our daughter, Q, had her 7th birthday last Sunday. My lovely wife has, as usual, been working for weeks on parts for Q’s party, the theme of which this year is designing for dolls. The whole idea can be described as Extremely Girly, but all of us like to make and to encourage the making of things, even if that means inviting 8 girls over to make their 18"* dolls pretty.

And how they did prettify those dolls. We’ve found a guest list of around 10 or so manageable in our apartment, so we set and hit that target this year, too. My wife knows the fabric stores just south of Canal Street well, and she came back from one of them with a roll of elastic that she cut and sewed into rings. To those she tied strips of colored tulle (also bought in bulk at the fabric store and disassembled) to make great doll tutus in a variety of colors. She also ordered doll-sized plain-white t-shirts for each girl to decorate during the party with fabric markers and an iron-on flower positioned as each girl liked. My wife had their feet covered as well. Q asked each girl ahead of time about her footwear-color preference and made a list with the results, which we then used to cut craft-foam soles for sandals. During the party, the girls chose ribbon to loop over their doll’s feet, which my wife then hot-glued together with the foam. The girls could then affix sequins and other shiny ornaments to the ribbon to complete the bespoke shoes. Even the parting goody bags were for the dolls — little wrapping-paper shopping bags containing a miniature composition notebook and a toothpick pencil, all handmade and clever. Overall, the craftwork was basically insane in its tediousness, but the results (pictured above and below) truly amazed.

Note: To grasp scale, the pencils are made from toothpicks

At this age, the parties tend to be drop-off, and we kept the girls busy.  The Boy, who expertly helped make the tiny pencils, fled the house early to a series of friends’ places, and he made me swear that No Girls Be Allowed In His Room.**  Q more or less floated to the door when the bell rang, and the just-arrived guest then accompanied her to the door at the next bell, building the greeting with each newcomer.  Once they had all come, dolls in the crooks of their elbows or fastened into little carriers with cutouts for their faces, the girls set to work decorating their shirts.  My wife set up a hot-glue station on the far side of the room, which the girls took turns visiting while they waited for me to iron flowers onto their doll shirts.  I kept the snacks and drinks fresh; Q did the same with the overall atmosphere.  After the girls had made shirts and sandals and dressed their dolls in the new tutus, we had them all sit and eat.  Originally we thought we’d order pizza (like nearly every kid party ever), but we offered the group a choice between that and dumplings, and it was no contest.  And, man, can 9 seven-year-old girls put away the dumplings.

Then it was cake time. My wife now has a well-earned reputation, inside our house and out, for great birthday cakes. This year she made a two-layer lemon number with sky-blue frosting and purple-sugar accents. The only decoration (besides Q’s name and the requisite wish piped at the bottom) was a tiny feathered gown and handbag hung on a miniature clothesline. I know my wife thought it fell short of her best efforts, but I thought it was, like her, elegant and beautiful.

We asked the moms to come back a little before the party’s end for a doll fashion show.*** Once the audience was in place, we lined the girls up in our apartment’s hallway and put on some music. They took turns looping through the living room, showing off the clothes they just made as the adults clapped. The girls themselves wore big smiles of fun and a little embarrassment, but most of them wanted to do it again. Q had a great time, and we hope that everyone else did, too.

A. A. Milne’s poem “The End” from his collection Now We Are Six goes:

When I was One,
I had just begun.

When I was Two,
I was nearly new.

When I was Three,
I was hardly me.

When I was Four,
I was not much more.

When I was Five,
I was just alive.

But now I am six, I’m as clever as clever.
So I think I'll be six now for ever and ever.

This poem is one of Q’s favorites, and mine too, but for different reasons. She likes the short, smart rhymes and the little story it tells that we can easily add on to as we walk to school or wonder about the bus.**** I like that, too, but also how Milne captures the way kids sometimes treat time as just another choice to be made while he himself participates in that choice. Milne calls the poem “The End” and hands it to his reader on the way out of the book, and in doing so gives the last line a type of truth, though Christopher Robin eventually left the nursery and the Hundred-Acre Wood and, ultimately, this earth. In a sense, then, Milne also wants his son to be six now for ever and ever. I understand the impulse.

That evening, after Q and The Boy had come down enough from the day to give in to the night, the house gets still. It’s been raining solid and hard all day, the storm knocking on all the windows at once, wanting in.  Quiet comes on, at first before it’s noticed, like a brush of breeze that stands out once the air goes calm. These are times when it’s hard to believe that quiet is like cold — an absence of something rather than a thing in itself. Outside, the Hudson River slows and smooths, then stops altogether, the ferries frozen at the tip of their wakes like brushstrokes. See a dog caught mid-bark just off the park, its owner in a swipe at his phone; the trees bent by the wind stay bent.  I can take this world and turn it, can find Q in every corner.  At her desk in her room in a book, then making lists with a pencil that needs sharpening.  Out front with her hands deep in the sand, looking to see if I’m looking at her.  On line for Italian ice from the man on Chambers Street who knows her well now, both of them wondering which flavor she wants this time.  Hanging upside down on a playground bar and showing someone how it’s done. Always everywhere there’s that face of hers, the one where she half-closes her eyes and half-smiles, meaning she’s seen through a joke or an attempt at a tease.

Q, asleep, exhaled.  The Hudson wrinkled itself back up, and the ferries aimed for their slips.  I thought I heard the dog finish its bark, but it was hard to tell over the rain.  

Happy birthday, Q.  Now you are seven, still as clever as clever.  We will love you forever and ever.

_________________________

*I’m deliberately being general here.  American Girl used to own the 18"-doll category pretty much outright — every girl but Q brought one of these to the party — but some compelling newcomers have recently moved in on AG’s territory.  Q (now) has two Journey Girls dolls, which do look slightly different than American Girls, only noticeably so when the two get put side-by-side and a person really looks.  Other differences exist too, but they trigger thorny questions about class and feelings of inadequacy that can extend into adulthood, so I’ll stop right about here.↩

**Sorry, son.  I tried.  (Sort of.)↩

***Yes, I know, very girly.  But remember, they were showing off what they had created.↩

****We’ve decided that it should now go:  “When I was six / I learned some tricks. / But now that I’m seven, I’m as clever as clever…”  Now you try.↩

Q = 6

This past Earth Day, our daughter Q turned 6.  The date merely made official the changes we've been witnessing lately:  Q has stretched up out of her old clothes and into a whole new set of adjectives:  willowy, lissome, striking — words at ease around women. I probably see those words coming for her long before others do even as I resist them (and will likely do so long after I need to).  But Q is, I suppose, all of those and more besides, which is to say herself as we've come to know her, still sharply funny and clever and resolute.

Because her birthday proper fell on Good Friday and Easter weekend, we've set her (again, small) party for this weekend.* Still, we celebrated her on her actual birthday, too, just the four of us.  My lovely wife had a wonderful suggestion for a new tradition to launch this year:  The birthday boy or girl chooses a restaurant for his or her birthday dinner, and both Q and The Boy got quickly behind this idea.  It's genius, really, given that it's a great and not unsubtle way to privilege experiences over things while giving us a chance to do a thing we all love, which is eat. Q has been extremely fond of sushi lately,** and we were a little surprised when she picked Indian food.  But we all like that, too, and together we settled on a local, slightly nicer place than our go-to Indian restaurant that we've walked by countless times over years but have never been to.

Q made an event of it, as we knew she would.  She wore one of her favorite dresses, the aquamarine silk one that ties in the back, and patent-leather Mary Janes. Hair was braided.  My wife and I also fancied up when we came home early from work, she with a dress of her own and me with a tie of Q's choosing.  The Boy even easily agreed to a collared shirt.

The restaurant was likewise properly dressed, with heavy cotton napkins and pounded-copper chargers at each place setting, and a latticed candle centerpiece that threw small stars on our faces. The ceiling was crisscrossed with runners that reminded me of a howdah.  Apart from a couple up front and a family a few tables over, we had the place to ourselves.  (Most Indian and Chinese restaurants in our neighborhood make their business through delivery.)  They had the waitstaff for a full house, though, and we felt well attended to, especially once the head waitress learned that we had come because of Q's birthday.  At the end of the meal, they brought out a special candle-lit dessert — a disc of something tasting like carrot cake orbited by bits of fried, honey-soaked dough — and all sang "Happy Birthday."  Q found it hard to stop smiling long enough to blow out the flame.

As we crossed the streets back home, she fit her hand, a thing as quick and alive as she, into mine.   Six will too soon become seven, then we'll stop counting years on fingers, then she'll cross streets on her own, then she'll likely hold hands with someone new for different kinds of crossings.  Knowing her as I do, I can picture roles for her adult self — first ever Supreme Court Chief Justice/Gold Medal Gymnast, e.g. — but however she realizes herself, these are days I will return to.

Happy birthday, Q.  We love you and are proud of you.

____________________
*Theme:  origami and candy sushi party. More about same later.
**See note above and our growing stack of receipts from Junior Sushi 2.

Let them make cake

Two days before Q's party, a classmate of hers asked how many birthdays Q has. I know the feeling: First it was her birthday proper, with gifts wrapped in Amazon boxes and (from us anyway) in the New York Times.* Then my wife made blue-frosted cupcakes for Q's Pre-K class, enjoyed by all except for that inevitable classmate with the egg allergy.

And then there was Q's actual party. My wife has earned a solid reputation in the neighborhood for executing great parties, and this one wasn't unusual. What was unusual, though, is that unlike past years, we decided to have the thing in our (little) house instead of in our apartment building's playroom. This meant having fewer kids than usual, but some sacrifices just had to be made.**

A smaller guest list made more intensive activities possible. Q liked the idea of a cooking party, and so did we. Each guest was greeted with a paper chef's hat (individually sized and stapled) and an apron to decorate. Instead of ordering pizza, we gave them their own ball of dough to stretch and roll and sauce. While their early dinners browned in the oven, the kids made animal cupcakes to accompany the barn cake my wife had made. The results were, as you can see, lovely.

Cupcakes done and corralled, everyone ate the pizza they made. Interestingly, almost everyone had leftovers—and everyone wanted to take them home. (As far as we can remember, that's a first for any party.) Guests also took away their cupcake in a special box, their hat and apron, and a cake and cookie recipe book. Little was left.

Q smiled the whole time.

Until that night. After opening all the wonderful presents from those who came to celebrate with her, she slowly slid into tears. Q almost never cries about anything. My wife and I asked her why she was sad. She said she didn’t know, and I believed her (and I don’t always believe her). The day had meant a lot to her, but, unlike her brother, she struggles with attention. It’s as if she can feel the weight of all those thoughts of her, and they finally got too heavy. Or at least I think that's what it was; it's hard to say.

I suppose it's now an old story—at least 300 years older than the philosophers who first told it (and as new as the newest science)—that we arrive blank and are written on by the world until we leave. This picture suggests that the longer we go, the more we're taught, the more we understand. But I think it's something like a half-truth. Childhood has all sorts of knowingness—of cruelties in particular—and adults often find themselves bothered and saved by mysteries. No matter how old one gets, there are always puzzles, and the pieces keep getting smaller. I hope that I can help her appreciate not understanding, and that she can do the same for me.

Happy birthday, Q. We love you.

________________________
*Never too early to introduce a little liberal bias, right?
**[Smile.]

Q turns 5

NOTE: Sweetest thing not pictured above.

Today Q, our little one (who's never really seemed all that little), turns 5. We will celebrate her in a week or so with a house full of her friends, and therefore with madness. She sleeps now, after a day of wishes, and we wonder what the next year means for and to her.

I'm sure she'll let us know.

Happy birthday, Q. We love you.

Who's your favorite princess?

When Q told us that she wanted a princess birthday party, we were of two minds. We want to make her happy, of course, and pretty much every store everywhere makes something princess related, making it pretty easy to pull off. On the other hand, we're not huge fans of the main princess narratives, which usually have to do with some preternaturally beautiful girl giving up a central part of herself for some guy (see Ariel) or waiting for some guy to come rescue them (see pretty much the rest of the Disney Royalty).

We're also not sure where her princess fascination comes from. My lovely wife embodies the strong, contemporary woman — much more Queen Rania than Sleeping Beauty on the monarchy scale. My wife rarely wears dresses (or color, for that matter), is always beautiful but not girly. But we suppose princess is in the air around all little girls and is therefore unavoidable — at least until she grows up into an atmosphere with less pink. Anyway, we have no doubt that it will make her happy, and since that's our ultimate goal, we go with it.

As usual, my wife has been thinking about/researching this for a long time. Our party ideas tend to start with the cake and then expand outward, and my wife has decided to make a jewelry-box confection, complete with a lid and separate compartments filled with candy bracelets and ring pops. She made some even more amazing sweet sushi appetizers out of rice crispy treats, Swedish Fish candy, and fruit roll ups:

As for activities, we borrow fancy dresses for dressing up from good friends next door — though it turns out that each girl has and brings her own ensemble. For Q, my wife scoured the Easter Dress sales and found a rather beautiful cream number with soft flowers and a silk, pink ribbon on the waist, which Q inhabits with grace. My wife also had the idea of cutting out paper dolls, affixing them to sticks, and adding a photo of each girl so that she could dress herself up in a gown she colored herself.

As you might expect, these were definitely a hit with parents and kids alike. My lovely wife again does a great job of making the party our own. (You better thank your mother, Q.)

The party itself is small. In asking who she wants to celebrate with, we settle on ten girls. And it will be only girls — The Boy and his friend are somewhat invited, though they willingly exclude themselves from the dressing up and general prettification. Unfortunately, two girls had to cancel at the last minute — two that Q definitely looks up to — because of illness.* The eight girls get their hair pulled up and done, and suddenly, their faces so revealed, I can see more clearly than I have in a while our friends re-mixed and re-made in their children. Then the girls get glittered nails and generally just move around the room on clickety heels. Because summer seems to have arrived, it's nearly 90 degrees in fact, we go outside to the full park for some sun and photos. The girls draw all sorts of looks and cameras from people lolling on the grass, particularly when they decide to take a stroll (best way to describe it) along the path that rings the lawn in back.

After just a little while, Q abandons her plastic shoes to race down the hill in her bare feet and smiles.

Myself, I like princesses when they run.

Then it's back inside for pizza and for cake. While they eat, a good friend of ours asks everyone in turn who her favorite princess is. We hear all the regulars — Cinderella, Ariel, Snow White, etc. When it comes to me, I say "Princess Q, of course," and I mean it.

We always forget more than we remember. But for her much of her remembering starts about now, a long ribbon of being unrolling out behind her that she makes and that makes her. The person** who savors her cake now is the same as the one who yesterday fashioned a contraption out of a jump rope and fruit bowl, and she will be the same as the one who tonight will link hands behind her mom's neck, asking for just a little more time before she must call it sleep.

As she grows and goes, I will hold that ribbon, use it to make a gift of everything.

Happy Birthday, Q. We love you.

__________________
*Not swine flu related, if you must know.
**!

Q at 4

Q turned 4 today.

Because my lovely wife had an absurdly early meeting this morning, I was the engine that cranked out breakfast, snack, lunch, and (eventually) dressed and brushed children. Which also meant that I got to wish Q a happy birthday at the very beginning of her fourth year. A few hours later, my wife left her work to bring cupcakes for Q's class, which Q passed out proudly and without assistance.

And in a little taste of what is no doubt to come, my wife and I both came home from work to an empty house. Q and The Boy have what they call Date Night each week with their close friends where they eat dinner and watch a movie, usually at their friends' house, and tonight happened to be Date Night. We busied ourselves with pictures from the day and by fielding calls from her aunt in California, her uncle and aunt and cousins in Minnesota, and her grandparents, until word came that our kids were ready to be retrieved. After the door swung open from my knock, Q practically floated out of their building and into ours. After her bath, she opened presents from us, from grandpa and grandma, her babysitter, and her aunt, and she showed us all how to enjoy ourselves.

We're having a party for her this weekend (princess-related, natch), so more to follow. In the meantime, I leave you with some words from her. When asked by her teacher today what she wanted to learn now that she's four, she replied:

I'm going to work on my letters and numbers and I'm going to learn to read.

If you ever read this, Q, you will see the size of your story.

Happy Birthday, Big Stuff. We love you and are proud of you.

Q Bits

I've come to really like Twitter.* (You can follow us on Twitter here, by the way.) It's got all the jazz of social media/Web 2.0 (or whatever) without all that "friendship" business imposed by Facebook or Myspace. And the added trick/benefit is that posts can be at most 140 characters, which makes it a challenge to do well.

Q and The Boy say so many wonderfully odd things, so I particularly like to use Twitter as a kind of online memory for their bite sized bits of funny. Looking back over my timeline, I see several great Q quotes in particular worth passing along.

Here are just a few of my favorites:

Bonus: Here's a great one from The Boy:

Now if you excuse me, I've got to mention this post on Twitter.
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*For some reason, many people seem to enjoy worrying about what Twitter is exactly. I'm happy to provide a fairly straightforward answer for the curious.

I lic school

Though it contained little spring, last week was officially Spring Break. I earned a little time off from teaching, and Q and The Boy were intermittently off for parent-teacher conferences. (My lovely wife, as always, soldiered on in the Real World.)

Parent-teacher conferences for preschool always strike me as a little odd, and not just because we all sit on and around undersized furniture. What is there to talk about, really? And why do the report cards always have to be printed in Comic Sans?

Turns out, a lot — or at least in the little bit of talking much is revealed. Q has always been quick* to pick up just about anything, but she's a pretty solitary soul. As we learned in our conferences last fall, Q has grown more comfortable working with others, and this time around we hear that she's opened further still. (We did notice, though, that The Boy's first "high mark" at Montessori was in "Greeting" whereas Q still is "Working toward" this skill. Typical. Also typical, though, is her eclipsing his scores in just about everything else.) Overall, she's just so solid — she tries all the projects available to her, and will work them until she achieves something like mastery. She has even started to write the letters and numbers. And she's proud of herself and likes school, which is all that we're really going for at this point.

The Boy also continues to astonish. As I said before, his Kindergarten actually delivers academically, and since neither my wife nor I had similar experiences, we don't really know what he should be capable of. We also mainly see him at the end of a long day when he's tired all the way through and not particularly interested in reading. It turns out, according to his teacher (whom we like a great deal), that he's reading (above grade level) and doing all sorts of math. And he's writing so much.

My wife and I love the writing in no small part for selfish reasons. I fancy myself an author of sorts, so I like to see how words come out of his head. There's that time where my wife was joking around with The Boy, and he jetted away, wrote a little something on a piece of paper, rolled it up, and handed it to her. She unrolled a message that read: "I love the Red Sox," which, since my wife is a Yankees fan (or used to be, anyway) is about the funniest/cruelest thing her child could write. And then we find ourselves coming home to things like this:

To translate for those of you who don't easily read Kindergarten: "Stuff I like to do with my mom and dad. I love my mom and dad. I love to play with my mom and dad. I like to build with my mom and dad. I like to go on the train, sit on the train. I like to go to the park. I like to go to the zoo and look at the animals. I love the Star Wars Wii."

I haven't got much to add to that.

Sometimes I think we forget how much we ask of them. Writing, Thoreau once himself wrote, is our "father tongue, a reserved and select expression, too significant to be heard by the ear, which we must be born again in order to speak." Not all that long ago, very few could read and write, and now we have our three-year olds muscle-memorizing the shapes of letters. How amazing that is.

Their bodies and brains constitute and confound them (though that doesn't really go away, I suppose). As they spurt and stretch in countless ways, we set walls to press them into pleasant shapes. I'm not sure how they do it — or how we'll do our part — but I'm glad that I get to watch and to participate. They make me want to be better.

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*Sometimes we think that's what the 'Q' stands for. Goodness.

Best joke ever?

We've been telling lots of jokes around our house these days. Most of mine are repeats of some I heard as a child (and must have found funny). But lately Q has been making up her own, including what might be the Best Joke In The World:

Q: Why did the cat turn off the light?

Me: I don't know. Why?

Q: Because it's dark.

I'll just let that one sink in for a bit.

Well, I guess you can't spell 'Dada' without 'dad'.

Chips and blocks

Last week the cold came in and sat down. With fall all but over, the trees in the park crook up bare like dendrites and, like what they look like, are probably busy memorizing the year.

The ending of fall means parent-teacher conferences, and this year we sat in two sets of miniature chairs. And we discovered that both Q and The Boy are doing better at school than we imagined, mainly because they're confounding the types we imagine them to inhabit.

If you've been reading this blog for a little while now, you'll know how we think of Q — which is to say tough, quick, and a little stubborn (or, if you prefer, resolute). Being second born, she's also content to play and do by herself, and fiercely so. We therefore thought that she might not enjoy being in a classroom with sixteen other kids while being told what to do. Turns out that her independence has been a gift of sorts: she dedicates herself to all kinds of work until it's finished, and she isn't distracted by the doings of others. She's also grown more social; we hear she completes a puzzle every day with a friend, for example. And she does actually listen to her teachers. In fact, we hear that she listens intently, and I know the look her teachers are talking about — the one where Q fixes right on you, and you start wondering how soon her thinking will lap yours. Oh, and she knows the sounds all the letters make.

We also saw great parts of The Boy revealed in our conference with his teacher. We've been reading with him at home,* and he'll be reading quite well on his own pretty soon, I'd guess. But we didn't know that he can draw a diamond (and, for that matter, that that's rare at his age) and can recognize numbers up to 100 out of order. Okay, before I go on too long as a proud/bragging parent, here's the point: The easily frustrated and distracted perfectionist kid we knew him as while at Montessori somehow remained there. The Boy who shows up to PS 89 tries new things on his own, crosses out mistakes and moves on, teaches other kids how to draw and fold jets, etc. At one point in the conference, after The Boy's teacher said some extremely nice things about him and his place in the class, she offered, "I wonder what he's going to be when he grows up." My lovely wife responded (and I agreed), "As long as he doesn't become a lawyer or professor..."

Times like these it's hard not to look for yourself in them, but here again nothing is straightforward. The Boy looks more like me than Q does, and he obviously inherited my perfectionism and love of words. But he's also much more social than I am and more dynamic. Q is the spitting image of her mother and has an equally analytical mind, along with the same drive and determination, only more so. But Q also has my second-born independence and comfort with solitude. And surprisingly she has my even temperament (that is, when she's not wringing out the new babysitter in the mornings before school). We thought Q would be the artist, but The Boy has lately shown that he can draw out his imagination in some really clever ways.

Q and The Boy really are our better selves in many respects — or, to put it better, the better way to mix the good and bad of ourselves. It's been nice to see how others see them and to see what they're becoming, whatever it is.

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*This is not my Naps And Milk Kindergarten — they read and write and do real math and the year isn't even half over. Sheesh.

Mom's home

Once she purchased her ticket, I told Q and The Boy that mom was coming home, and they immediately set about making a sign. I helped The Boy work out the spelling of 'welcome', and he wrote the rest on his own. He added hearts and flowers, and Q added some flair of her own, including (inexplicably) carrots. She also asked me to draw some flowers and hearts for her to color in, and, though it's a little hard to see above, she added a 'Q' for good measure.

We taped the sign to the front door of our apartment, which triggered the less rosy part of The Boy's imagination: What if it falls down? What if someone takes it away? We had to check before bed that it was in fact still there, and I had to promise that I would check again before I closed my own eyes for the night. My lovely wife was taking the red eye back from San Diego so that she could maximize her time with Q and The Boy before returning for Ba Ngoai's services, so we all had to have faith in the strength of the tape.

She came into the bed just before the sunrise; I would take her over it every time. I hadn't been able to sleep myself, and moved to her to be something quiet and warm. She was tired from the five-hour flight and two weeks of tragedy, and, saying nothing and not needing to, we slept.

They both got up early. I was already in the shower so that I could start on breakfasts and lunch and get the kids off to school on time. The Boy whooshed into the bathroom and swept aside the shower curtain, letting out an inarticulate noise of disappointment when he saw who it merely was. I told him to look in our bed, and he whooshed back out and onto his mother. Q came in not long after with both her blankets and piled on, too. Mom's being home unclenched the fist of things.

We both took the day off. We both dropped off and picked up both kids from school, in part so that I could draw the children away while my wife told each of the kids' teachers about Ba Ngoai's passing in case they needed context for unusual behavior. And though I had told Q and The Boy that Ba Ngoai was very sick — and that not everyone who gets sick gets better — we had yet to talk about her being gone.

That conversation came later that night, and it was a difficult one. At first we couldn't get The Boy to pay attention, so we focused first on Q. We explained that Ba Ngoai didn't get better, that she died, and that we can't see or talk to her any more. Q perhaps gave Ba Ngoai the most joy of anyone — the two of them were very much alike in many ways, and every time they were together, they would play private games and laugh and just generally give off sparks. But Q is just three, and she deeply furrowed her brow at the news in an effort to understand and didn't say much of anything. Telling them brought up gushes of sadness in us that weren't very far down to begin with, and Q hugged mom's arm hard with her whole body and didn't let go, as my wife sobbed. The Boy began to catch on and himself exploded into sobs. It's okay to be sad, we said, but he was all questions: How was she sick? What stopped working? Where did she go?

Q looked pretty puzzled and anxious, so I took her for a bath while my wife tried to answer The Boy's questions as directly as she thought she could (which was pretty directly). In the end, she quieted him by reading a book with him and by laying down beside him in his bed, by caring for him.

They were back to their regular selves the next morning, though I can't quite say the same for us. The kids have definitely been a tonic while my wife was away, and even now — it's hard to remain sad when tickled by tiny fingers or when Q keeps trying to jump on your shadow or when softly kissed on the cheek. The Boy has not forgotten; he declared to his teacher that his grandmother was very sick and died and that now he has only one left. He says he's sad (and I believe him), but what happened has become a fact for him, a step that still eludes me.

My wife left again today for California to help with the preparations for Ba Ngoai's funeral. I follow her out tomorrow to help and to pay my respects to someone I have known so closely for 17 years. Q and The Boy will remain here with friends and then with family. I will be the first one they will find in the bed on Monday morning when they wake. After the difficult weekend to come, we could use some welcome signs on the door and the touch from the small hands that made them.

Boo, scared you

Our favorite time of year, usually.

As I type this, the weather is practicing its winter meanness via a respectably heavy snow, believe it or don't. But last Sunday was an ideal fall day, perfect for celebrating Halloween.

Each year our building hosts a Halloween party for its residents, decorating much of the lobby and all of the playroom in inflatable spookiness. This tradition started about four years ago and has gotten a little smaller each year (no edible treats or building staff dressed up as Darth Vader this year, for example), but it's always the first official occasion for Q and The Boy to wear their costumes. As you can tell from the pic above, The Boy is eyebrows-deep into Star Wars and wanted to be a clone trooper this year. Q took a while to come to her costume — first she wanted to be Chilly Willy, then a witch. Once The Boy started playing Lego Star Wars on the Wii, though, she decided she wanted to look like this:

which is a little hard to pull off, as you might imagine. And though I think Q would have made a fabulous Darth Maul (maybe next year!), we managed to convince her that she would make a wonderful witch. And she is. (A wonderful witch, that is).

Halloween proper is this Friday, of course, and the kids can barely contain themselves. The Boy has posted an October calendar, largely of his own making, on the fridge and dutifully crosses off the passing days in red pen. Q stands next to him as he does this each day and counts off the uncrossed date boxes to the end. (My lovely wife and I look forward to Friday, too — we like to eat around the edges of all that candy.)

To be honest, I'm hoping that for us Halloween reverts to the ancient traditions. On October 31, evil spirits became dangerous for the living, and people dressed in costumes and masks to propitiate them. November 1st, though, marked the beginning of the new year, and the spirits retreated to the underworld, leaving the living to the business of living.

We have seen more than our share of demons this October. May Q The Witch and The Boy The Clone Trooper — and Darth Maul himself, if it comes to that — usher them home and us into a new year.

Pick the perfect one

What I wanted to say v. what I did say

When I visited The Boy's Kindergarten classroom recently to see him at work and to help him paste together a picture of his family. The teacher asked all us parents to leave, and he went into a slump that slowly rolled into a sob.

What I wanted to say:

Don't cry. This is the smallest of moments. Growing up and older has a lot to do with figuring out the true size of things (which I myself am trying to get better at even now), and what may seem monumental at the moment will not be worth remembering, let alone forgetting, just a little later. Once I leave this room to go back to turning the smaller gears of our life, you will come back to yourself. You will have a snack and make things that we will marvel at. When I pick you up, you will tell me how much you enjoyed being here without me.

What I did say:

It's okay, it's okay. Your teacher said that I've got to go now, but I'll be back to pick you up soon. Have a good day.

When Q and the boy were fighting over the K'Nex building tools a few days ago, mainly because The Boy said they were playing spaceships and Q insisted they were playing guns.

What I wanted to say:

Look, son, she's just pushing you around because you're an easy mark. She's got you figured all the way out already and can move you around the house almost without effort, like you're on those Moving Men things from TV. Take a look at what she's doing — using your belief in rules and Truth to flip you over — and learn that belief can be bigger than both of you. Do that and she loses her power over you. Besides, Q should be reminded that there are other wills in the world besides hers (though good luck with that).

What I did say:

Stop it.

When Q simply refused to go to sleep last night (like most nights).

What I wanted to say:

Come, get into your bed, it's late, time to relinquish the day. But this isn't surrendering, there's no need to fight the night that's here. Dreams are for stringing the shiny bits of the day just past into a Queen's necklace. And pick your battles. I love that you're resolute, but you need to make out the line between resoluteness and stubbornness, and that line has to do with object, what to be resolute about. My father taught me that mules are misunderstood — they, unlike horses, know their limits and won't overwork themselves. I know that this regular struggle is you discovering the shape of limit and that it's our job to be something firm for you to push against. Which is why we keep putting you back in your bed, and will do so pretty much forever. And good luck with the pushing. Have you not met your mother?

What I did say:

It's late, Q, time for sleep. I bet if you ask nicely, mom will lie down with you for a while.

Because I like it

This picture is a little old (from around our wedding anniversary), but I couldn't find a swell spot to drop it in. I like it, though, so here's Q looking over our wedding album. (Afterward, we asked her if she was going to get married. Her response? "No.")

We're sick of all this

This past week has been healthcare week — or rather sick-care week. Q's breathing worsened last Monday, so much so that a quick call to the pediatrician sent me carrying Q in her pajamas and stocking feet out to a cab to NYU Medical Center, while my lovely wife stayed home with The Boy who was sleeping unknowingly. Q and I spent five first worrisome and then boring hours trying to get people with medicine to pay attention to us. In the end, everything worked out — a steroid shot released her throat and cheered her up enough to play silly games in our ER bed until I bothered them enough to let us go. On the way out at 3 a.m., they gave her a little blue teddy bear as some sort of bizarre parting gift, which she cleverly named Bluebear-y.

Soon after, we heard that Grandma's root canal (which is something bad enough as it is) went awry, and the stuff they put into the hollowed-out tooth — and I'm cringing even as I type this — leaked into her jaw. So she's basically waiting for her body to reject it and for the necessary surgery to scrape out — again, cringing — the whatever it is.

Then we heard that Ba Ngoai went to the ER with severe liver problems, the extent of which is still unknown. The entire family sprang into action to find her the best care (my wife's sister is an administrator for Scripps, so that really helped), and she's doing much better. Even so there's been serious talk of a transplant, which is serious talk indeed.

The health of our healthcare system is questionable, too. Without her daughter's inside help, would Ba Ngoai still be sitting in the first Emergency Room? What if we didn't have the money to cover the insurance or the co-pay for Q's hospital visit or The Boy's cast? What if the recklessness of financial institutions and fecklessness of government has now made responsible overhaul of U.S. healthcare all but impossible, even if Barack Obama wins the presidency?

On the brighter side, Q and The Boy also went to the dentist last week. The Boy is a real champ at these kinds of things (general checkups, that is), but Q is a wildcard. After her ER experience, we didn't know what to expect. She watched her brother in the chair and, holding her mom's hand, took after his example. I'm happy to say that they both did very well.

Now if we could just fix healthcare or something, they'd have a lot more to flash those great smiles at.

(Photo by Flickr user gaultiero used under Creative Commons license.)

Breathe

It started yesterday morning with a raspy voice and the characteristic barking cough. Q seemed in good spirits for the most part, if a little tired. After a day spent mainly inside, we steamed up the kids' bathroom with the shower and gave her a bath in the mist. We played boats and drew jack-o-lanterns on the fogged mirrors, anything to keep her in there. We suspected she had croup and put her to bed early. She appeared fine.

Then night begins. First at 9 p.m. — then at 11 p.m. and 2 a.m. and 4 a.m. and 6 a.m. — we come to her crying in her room and fighting for air. The virus has closed much of her throat, which scares her awake, and crying makes it worse.

When I was a young, we had formaldehyde foam insulation put into our house. Formaldehyde itself is old, but its use as an insulator was new then, and it was supposed to be miraculous. Men came and drilled hundreds of holes in the siding and filled the walls with foam from a truck. Later we (and everyone else) discovered that it made us all sick, particularly my mom and me. My breathing eventually became so difficult that I was moved out of our house to a hotel room across town. Sleeping there one night on the high old bed, I remember dreaming that water came rushing under the door, slowly filling the room. I remember reminding myself in the dream to breathe.

In our small bathroom with the shower running hot (for the fourth time this night), Q struggles to cry and to breathe. The air can't come in full and fast like it should — some flap in her throat seems to snap when she tries to inhale, and her crying quickly spends whatever air she manages to draw each time. I catch myself inhaling deeper and deeper in the dark, to breathe for us both, I suppose. Q rarely gets sick and almost never cries, so the way she sounds truly unsettles my wife and me. I'm glad it's hard for Q to see our faces. The doctor will confirm that we're doing what we can and should to help her. There are no drugs to give, nothing for us to do but soothe and wait for the virus to lose.

Slowly, she calms in the steam, and her breathing returns to the regular, smoother rattle. I ask if she's ready to return to our bed, and she nods. She's loud and hot on the pillow between us for the rest of the night. I rub her back because it's all I can think of to do and because it keeps me convinced that her lungs are still working away. How do you remember to breathe? How do you do it? How do you breathe for another?

The light comes up this morning, and Q climbs out of our bed and into her old self. She makes jokes and laughs at them, bothers her brother a little, and pretty much bewilders us with her mood. We begin to hope that the next night will be better.