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.

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*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.

Family Friday: The Boy in Action

The Boy's school dedicates at least one Friday a month to what they call "Family Friday." On these Days, parents are encouraged to come into their child's classroom and join in on a project with their child, whether building something, artwork, reading, etc. — basically whatever their current curriculum consists in. My lovely wife and I work (a lot) so we take turns going, and my wife went to last Friday's festivities. Which was good, because the topic was (ostensibly) math, and that's squarely within her wheelhouse.*

Not long after she arrived at her work, my lovely wife sent me the following description of the morning.

THAT'S MY BOY:
Kid 1: "Is your dad coming to make paper planes today?"
The Boy: "No, he's not here today but my mom is here and she's really good at art and math."

TEACH A BOY TO FISH:
Kid 2: "Can you make one of those cool paper planes for me?"
The Boy: "Watch me so that I can teach you how to make it and you don't always have to ask me to make you one."
Kid 2's grandfather to The Boy: "Is your dad a plane engineer?"
The Boy: "No, my dad teaches but he teaches me lots of things. Now watch me — this is the tricky part of the plane."

COFFEE TALK:
Mom 1: "Did you hear the "B" word was used yesterday during recess? Yes, two boys were fighting and one called the other the "B" word. The teacher had a talk with the whole class telling them it was a bad word and disciplinary action was taken."
Mom 2: "Gasp."
Mom 3: "Oh my god."
Mom 4: "Well, that happens."
Mom 5: "We know it's probably not [The Boy]; he won't even eat McDonald's without calling his mom."
Lovely Wife: "This coffee is good."

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*I mainly stick to making the most awesome paper airplanes I can, thereby solidifying my Cool Dad status with all the five-year-olds.

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.