Sass

When a friend from Sophie’s daycare came over this weekend, I told his mother that Sophie likes to recite his name in a litany of friends whom she names before falling asleep each night. It’s an adorable prayer-like ritual that she does, and it surprises me, because we don’t do prayers.

“Oh,” she said, “but they do prayers at daycare, you know. Just before naptime.” I didn’t know. Apparently, they also say grace before meals. My friend performed one of the daycare songs for me: “Open your heart to Jesus,” sung with arms high overhead, opening and closing like a door (or like an Abba YMCA singer). My friend was laughing lightly, telling me that I’m lucky I haven’t been subjected to multiple recitals of this Jesus song — or, as my friend’s son pronounces it, Deeesus.

But I’m a bit disturbed. I knew that daycare was Christian. An NPR-like talkshow of Biblical exegesis is often on in the background, and the teacher likes to read the Bible every free moment that she gets. That wasn’t a secret. I just didn’t realize how much she is teaching Christian ritual — and I’m a bit disappointed that Sophie never told me about it.

So I asked her, “Sophie, what do you say at daycare before lunch?”

Sophie looked at me for a moment, then announced, “I give thanks to my butt.”

I love my daughter. Her sassiness will preserve her from all the indoctrination of the world.

The sorry-it’s-been-so-long post

Maybe I’m more comfortable with toddlers than infants, so I have less need to blog about the mysteries. Sophie is still fascinatingly complicated: we’re in napping war right now (she won’t nap, but she will get moodily exhausted without sleep, so it’s a struggle), and we’re also working on using her nice words instead of tantrum-screams — but I used to babysit toddlers, so I don’t find any of this as novel or as interesting or as blog-worthy, I guess.

Maybe Sophie’s stories are already starting to feel like her own stories and not mine to blog about here. “I didn’t wake the kids up today!” she announces gleefully, each daycare day that passes without her disturbing the sleep of her napping friends. She’s very proud of this accomplishment. The other story she likes to tell is that I introduced her — a bit prematurely — to internet shopping. “The mailman is going to bring my boots,” she keeps saying. She’s wonderful, really, and that doesn’t make for much of a blog post.

Maybe I’m just distracted with academic work, and yoga, and parenting, and life.

Maybe, oddly, the 140 characters of facebook status-updates have come to feel like enough public announcement of my life, so I don’t write longer stories here.

Maybe my best stories come out on my friends’ blogs.

Or maybe I’m extra-cautious, because the friend I blogged about here has refused to phone me since that blog post. Sophie asks about that friend nearly daily. She invented an invisible M, along with M’s mom T, who tend to knock on our door a lot. Sometimes, M’s dad also arrives, invisibly, at our house in Sophie’s fantasies. It’s been almost four months, which is an eternity in toddler-time, but Sophie keeps begging to see M. Really, M’s mom was lax about returning our calls before that blog-post, while M herself had spent months ignoring Sophie and hurting her feelings — but, still, it disturbs me that by posting that Sophie’s favorite person was independent, I apparently hurt that person’s feelings so much that she won’t talk to me any more.

Really, I don’t know why I haven’t blogged in a while. I don’t want to neglect you, my readers.

Christmas Photos

Ben just uploaded some incredible photos of our trip to his grandparents’ house (Sophie’s greatgrandparents!) in Colorado Springs. Here we are making Christmas cookies:

Here’s beautiful Sophie playing with her Dad while I graded final exams:

And playing legos with Grandma Josie and Dog Janna:

Passing out presents to her great-grandparents:

Making her first snow angel:

And reading “Going on a Bear Hunt” for the hundredth time:

Finally, here is some of the surreal moonscape of the 18-hour drive home, past Vail and Colorado’s mountains, through snowy southern Utah, past Las Vegas, to home:

Beautiful, huh?

Perfectionist Child

Sophie was at a grown-up dinner party, leaning in to blow out the candles for the third time. The grown-ups were enjoying her candle-joy, but then someone told her, “Oh, honey, be careful not to get your face too close to the flame.” Sophie’s eyes welled up with silent tears and her whole body shook, as she sat back on her chair and refused to speak for ten minutes.

The next day, at the park, when an older girl told her to be careful on the bars, Sophie lay herself down, trying to bury herself, quietly, in the ground.

It happened again when her grandmother gently asked her not to chase the dog. None of these were harsh scoldings, at all, they were more like loving offerings of information. “That dog lived with some scary people before he lived with me, so he still gets easily scared,” Grandma told Sophie. And Sophie felt badly for more than an hour.

I have a perfectionist child.

She is incredibly sensitive, even sometimes with people whom she’s used to — like me, Ben, or her daycare teacher. This isn’t a normal tantrum from not getting her way. This scares me more than a loud tantrum. Sophie hides her face and hides her tears and just retreats into herself, so deeply hurt at not being absolutely perfect. It makes me worry that Sophie may eventually develop anorexia, or ulcers, or some of the many other stresses of perfectionist girls.

It’s okay, I tell her. No one’s perfect, I tell her.  And then I don’t know what else to do except hug her.

Ballerina

0102001853

Originally uploaded by Ben Love

Inspired by her good friend Gracie, Sophie has started insisting that everyone in the house put on twirly skirts and dance. This video is worth watching just to see Ben’s skirt.

First Mountain-Bike Ride

1st singletrack

Originally uploaded by Ben Love

This afternoon, Ben led Sophie on her first mountain-bike ride. She forded a river. She insisted on veering off the fire-road onto single-track. And, when she was scared by a hill, she decided she wanted to ride it again. I’m so proud of my girl.

Not Napping

“Sophie, what happened here?”

“I was sleeping. Then I was, ‘Where’s my sparkly shirt?’ Then I was, ‘Good idea!’” That’s what Sophie said.

Her entire dresser had been emptied out onto the floor of her room, in a glorious pile of clothing. This happens almost every “nap”-time. Sometimes I can get her to actually sleep in her stroller, or sleep in the car, but sometimes that doesn’t work, so we resort to the bed, which really means only that she will play quietly in her room for about an hour, and that I will then spend the next 15 minutes helping her to put all her clothes back away.

San Diego Car Chase

Driving home tonight, on the southbound I-5 near San Onofre around 9 pm, four cop cars passed me, all in a row, pursuing a single pickup truck that was speeding in the right-hand lane. Oddly, the pickup had its hazard lights flashing. Was this a police training exercise? An out-of-control vehicle that had politely turned on its hazards? A vehicle that had just failed the immigrant check-point at San Onofre? It was just a single pickup truck, but there was a helicopter up above, beaming its searchlight down. Gradually I noticed four more aircraft up above, hovering. They might have been military aircraft, or news helicopters, but it seemed to me like a massive use of police resources for some kind of giant manhunt.

In the next few minutes, at least three more cop cars passed me, speeding, but without using their emergency lights. I saw two of these unlit cop-cars, around Las Pulgas, waiting to make a u-turn to return north on the 5. Before I got to Oceanside, at least four more cop cars sped past me, southwards, all with their lights on and sirens blaring. And then it all disappeared.

This makes my commute far more interesting, but I can’t find anything about it on the internet. Why this huge police presence? If I counted right, there were at least eleven cop cars and up to five police helicopters. Is Osama Bin Laden lurking in northern San Diego County, around Camp Pendleton? Is there another OJ-Simpson-like car-chase that I’m just unaware of because I have no tv? I have never seen every car on that stretch of highway all obeying the speed-limit, and even keeping the left lane open for the cops who just kept on speeding by.

Maybe I’m just finding reasons to be fascinated by my commute, because, finally, the semester is over so I don’t have to make that overly-long twice-or-thrice-a-week 70-mile drive for at least another month, now.

UPDATE: Mystery solved. San Diego’s newspapers tell me it was a carjacker, fleeing from Lynwood, who was finally pulled over at a prison near the Mexican border. Since it was a 2-county car-chase, I guess I got to see some of the cops from LA heading home while the cops from San Diego took over. It felt odd to be inside a tv movie.

mmmm pasta

mmmm pasta

Originally uploaded by Ben Love

Now that Ben’s home, we have lots of cute videos. Here’s Thursday-night-dinner, just before I got home, and just after their regular burrito-shop closed, so they had to alter their traditional Thursday-bean-and-cheese-burrito ritual. They altered it pretty well, I’d say.

Why is a pencil sharpener

I thought that the “why” phase would be fun, but I have to admit, I’m getting easily stumped.

- Momma, what is that?
- It’s a pencil-sharpener.
- Why?
- Because sometimes pencils need to get sharper.
- Why?
- Because pencils wear down, they start to write messy, and then we use a pencil-sharpener to make them write better.
- Why?
- Because it’s good to have sharp pencils.
- Why?
- Hey, Sophie, do you want to build a tower now?
- Momma, why is a pencil sharpener? Why?