Perfect houseguests

We just had the best house-guests ever: independent, enthusiastic, and perfect. It helps that they enjoy most of what I enjoy: fish tacos, the Sunday New York Times, hiking by the ocean, quirky ethnic food, good conversation, and people-watching in my hippie town. They managed to find touristic pleasure in the playground.

It also helps that they have a terrific sense of direction and their own favorite local spots, so they can go birdwatching in the lagoon or shopping at the Patagonia store without any guidance from me. They noticed we were out of coffee and, without any fuss, went to the organic market, bought coffee and dinner food, cooked us a gourmet meal, and left us leftovers for the week. They are the perfect houseguests.

Sophie is a pretty good hostess, too. She paid attention to what each guest likes. Gammpa, she decided, loves to blow bubbles or stack legos. She led him in long bouts of both. Gamma, on the other hand, excels at adventurous dressing, enthusiastic nonsense-conversation, and creative bathtub doodles. I don’t want to clean up the bathtub-crayon masterpieces that those two created together. It was adorable.

Sophie was just getting over her latest cold and sixth ear-infection, though. With this particular cold, she dropped from 23 pounds to 21 and a half. I think this means she was constantly hungry. Add that to being almost-two, being unable to pefrectly articulate what she wants and incapable of getting her own socks on just so, and we had a lot of tantrums this weekend.

There were fewer tantrums on Sunday than Saturday, because there was more food in her tummy by that time — but still, there were tantrums. And the perfect houseguests didn’t blink. They simply let us parent Sophie, offered her a hug when necessay, laughed at our little jokes (we often respond to a tantrum by advising Sophie to say, “Terrible twos!”), respected naptimes, and lavished praise on her the rest of the time.

Sophie’s 25 Things

I have been resisting Facebook’s “25 Things,” partly because I’m suspicious of anything overly-popular, but mostly because I already listed 65 things in the “About” section of this blog, long before I ever used Facebook.

But I have also been feeling guilty about not doing it, since friends keep tagging me to do it, and since I honestly have enjoyed reading other people’s 25 things.

So here are 25 things about me, except in this case, the “me” is Sophie.

1. My name is Sophie and I’m addicted to breast milk.
2. I can jump.
3. The English language still confuses me. Why are there separate words for “circle,” “round,” “bubble,” and “balloon”? I’m leading a new movement to simplify this language. Henceforth, everything circular will be called “ball.”
4. I used to be a much more adventurous eater. Now, it’s bean burritos, chicken tamales, or nada.
5. I just discovered that the big flat thing in the living-room can sometimes contain Elmo moving and talking and singing. Otherwise, that television is boring.
6. Baths are good but getting your hair wet is NOT NOT NOT good at all.
7. I am very fond of my bellybutton. I’ll show it to anyone who asks and some people who don’t ask.
8. I’m not quite sure why Daycare Teacher says “Don’t spit,” but Daddy says, “That’s a funny noise! Do it again!”
9. Why are there separate words for “hat” and “bike helmet”? “Bike hat,” now that I could understand, but what’s with this word “helmet”?
10. I have my parents wrapped around my very-cute finger.
11. My favorite things (other than bicycles and my own bellybutton) are choo-choo trains and the color pink. I have yet to see a pink choo-choo, though. That would be thrilling.
12. Waaaaahhhhh aaargh!
13. I’m not quite sure why I just had an outburst with #12. I’m kinda moody like that.
14. “No, kitty, no” is one of my favorite things to say. Even when the kitty is yes.
15. I can walk up the slide.
16. I firmly believe that close attention must be paid whenever we encounter one of the following fascinating items: a flower, a motorcycle, a baby, an airplane, a bird, a kite, a kitty-cat, a button, a choo-choo train, a bug, a bicycle, or a person wearing a hat.
17. I think I look good in hats.
18. Actually, I think I look good almost all the time.
19. I don’t want any help getting my socks on. Waaah arghhhhhhhh waaah. Okay, you can help me a little. Now stop. I’ll do it myself.
20. If I have to wear shoes, I prefer wearing my shoes on the wrong feet.
21. These are my best friends: Nevin, Macy, Mila, Chloe, my pink-and-white-socks, my kittycats, and, most especially, Blankie.
22. Twenty-five things is a lot to come up with when you’ve only lived twenty-two months.
23. Other foods that make me say “nummmmm”: hummus, canned beans, plain pasta with creamy yogurt, yogurt with wheat-germ, white rice, frozen mango, frozen blueberries, avocado, fish tacos, sometimes cereal, and donuts.
24. I like to peel hardboiled eggs but not really eat them.
25. Please draw me a picture of Elmo.

Sorry, No

At the park, a dad was struggling to get a bratty three-year-old to leave. He didn’t do any of the conflict-avoidance strategies I usually see, forewarning the children and giving them a false sense of control with the parenting-stalwarts: “We’re going in two minutes, choose one last slide to slide down, say good-bye to your friends now…”

Instead, he got right at her eye level and asked, “Who’s in charge? Who’s in charge here?”

She squirmed and screeched but she knew the answer: “Daddy’s in charge.”

“That’s right, daddy’s in charge. And who’s my good listener? Who’s my good listener?”

It was a bold approach. I’ve been thinking about it ever since: does Sophie know that I’m in charge? Do I even want to ask her, or is this Park Dad inadvertently causing his daughter to realize eventually that he’s actually not fully in charge?

The whole scene left me uncomfortable, really.

Sophie knows that I’m in charge of driving the car and using the stove. Sophie is so helpless that it seems arrogant to throw that fact in her face. Still, we have had a few too many battles lately where Sophie hasn’t accepted me telling her something. There have been too many instances lately where Sophie thinks that she gets to push me off the kitchen seat just because she’s decided she wants that particular kitchen chair right now immediately.

So I’ve been reading Miss Manners Guide to Raising Perfect Children. I know that sounds wimpy, but, I swear, Miss Manners is the most graciously aggressive woman I know. She is quite insistent that good manners does not mean being a doormat.

Does the neighbor ask for too many favors? Just tell her, “Sorry, no.” If she wants to know why, then add, “I just can’t do that for you this afternoon.” That’s all. It’s surprisingly simple advice.

Does an out-of-town relative show up unannounced, expecting you to drop everything? Greet her with open arms, exclaiming, “It’s great to see you! What a shame that I didn’t know you were coming, so I didn’t have a chance to rearrange my schedule for you. It’s just not fair; I wish I did have time to see you. Oh, I’m so sad I can’t spend more time with you. I’ve got to go now.” Then go.

It’s ballsy, you see, but gracious.

But those examples aren’t particularly about toddlers, and it’s the toddler politeness that I need to learn now. The chief tools of parenting, Miss Manners says, are nagging and modeling, and even with those tools, nothing happens quickly. It takes about 18 years to make a child presentable enough that someone else will want to take that child off your hands.

Okay, nagging and modeling. We have some of that down, and Sophie is actually getting quite adept at wielding “Please,” “Sorry” and even “Excuse me” to get what she wants — but even with those polite words, she’s still quite bossy, and we still have tantrums. Saying “Excuse me, please” still doesn’t allow her to push me off my kitchen seat for no good reason.

The proper response to a tantrum, Miss Manners advises, is to pretend it’s not happening. This works well for me in private, but not so well in public. That may be because I cave in too often in private, actually, reasoning that whether Sophie gets to climb on my chair hold the tube of toothpaste is not an issue worth fighting over, and hoping that too-big chair or too-sticky toothpaste will be an object lesson in why she should have listened to Momma in the first place. But that object lesson doesn’t always work, and even in the best-case it creates more work for me and danger for Sophie. Lately, I am thinking that the ability for Sophie to accept a “no” may truly be an issue worth fighting over.

The sensible response to many children’s requests, Miss Manners says, is, “Sorry, no” — with a few exceptions thrown in now and then, thrillingly. I think “Sorry, no” is going to become my new mantra, along with, “As long as you’re kind and honest, you don’t have to feel badly about saying what you want.”

But here’s one great obstacle to good parenting: “A belief in the arguability of every premise.” Darn. There goes my entire liberal education, my career, and my own childhood models. Miss Manners, always gentle, admits that my belief may help me raise a little lawyer — but she doesn’t recommend it as a pranting style. I think she’s right. And I think it may be too late to change my entire worldview.

So I’m just going to work on, “Sorry, no.”

Double

When Sophie gets sick, I have to stay home to take care of her. Then I get sick. It doubles the fun. It even makes me understand why some employers discriminate against working moms (not condone, of course, just understand).

Fortunately, my students are gracious when I tell them that I didn’t have time to grade 3 of their papers, because Sophie was too sick to go to daycare. They’re also surprisingly gracious when I tell them that 2 of the papers that I did grade have baby-scribbles on them, because Sophie just really wanted to put her own comments on their college essays.

Mismatching cute

Sophie is getting her last few teeth in, we think.

She’s been tired and flu-ish, as you can probably see in that photo — but still adorable. That’s the train station, where Ben took her for a train-ride on Sunday morning so that I could get some rest and some paper-grading.

Ben got some good photos of her.

“Aww, so cutely mismatched,” strangers commented to me. “Did she dress herself this morning?”
“No,” I admitted. “Her dad dressed her.”
“Ahh, it’s the same thing.”

Update: The thing I probably didn’t make clear is that, while his wardrobe selections may not be traditional, they’re actually the cutest outfits ever. Consistently.

And I say that even though today, he sent her to daycare in duck-covered fleece pyjamas. They were clean pyjamas and cozy, and even our daycare teacher agrees that it was a good yet unconventional outfit.

Subsuming

Today, one of the older feminist professors in my department asked me, “How are you? I don’t want to hear about Sophie: tell me about you.”

And I couldn’t think of a single story about me that didn’t also involve Sophie.

Frighteningly, I’ve allowed my daughter to swallow me up.

What can I say about me that’s not about Sophie? It all seems comparatively trivial. Yesterday I resolved to do yoga every day for 30 days, because I’m looking forward to how that makes me feel. Today I realized I’ve finally hit the point in the semester when my classes are starting to gel, when the new crop of students are starting to rise to the challenge of my quirkiness and delight me with their insights. Lately I’m worried about moving to Britain for three months this summer, because what’s going to happen to my carefully-constructed mommie routine? — and there, you see it, I can’t go very long talking about me without talking about Sophie. I think I need to work on changing that.

New Sophie photos

Ben just uploaded some new Sophie photos to his flickr page.

After all the hours we play with her every day, it’s embarrassing how much of an appetite I have for looking at even more photos of her, after she goes to bed at night. Enjoy.

Faster and faster

Today, Sophie actually colored in the lines of a picture. It was probably a coincidence, and I don’t expect her to repeat it anytime soon, but she is consistently drawing full circles. I am impressed with my own baby, nearly bewildered by how fast she is changing.

Then, at bathtime, she almost managed to take off her sweater and shirt by herself.  She told me quite politely that she’d like me to sit farther from the bathtub, tonight, since she’s starting to perceive bathtime as her own independent quiet-time. So I was sitting farther from the tub, enjoying my own independent-time to read an old New Yorker. I’m still on the issue after John Updike died, still digesting each of those gem-like excerpts of Updike’s brilliant lifetime of writing.

After a while, I looked up from one of Updike’s late-in-life meditations on mortality and I caught Sophie’s eye. “Duck water,” she told me. She had placed a small rubber-duckie in a large cup and was  pouring water on top the cupped duck, delighting in watching the duck dance around in the swirling water. She has mastered the art of keeping water inside the tub (hooray!) and was deeply involved in her experimental observations of how the duck would stay afloat under the waterfall that she was creating.

“Oh, your duck is bobbing in the water,” I said.

“Yes,” she agreed. “Duck bobbing. Bobbing bobbing bobbing.” She bobbed her hand to emphasize this, reinforcing her new vocabulary word.

My baby knows the word bobbing.

Pretty soon she’s going to reach three-word sentences. Then I’m going to blink and she’s going to be reading John Updike herself. And then she’s going to be as old as her great-grand-parents, and I won’t be around to see it, and that will actually be okay, because she’ll be carrying on whatever I’ve passed on to her, and changing still.

Watching her tell me about her bobbing duck felt like just one momentous link in what I hope will be her incredibly long life, unspooling now in a way that feels like it’s going faster and faster. She’s developing really quite wonderfully. She is bossy but empathetic, independent but adventurous, shy in crowds of new people but devoted to the friends she knows, quick to apologize whenever necessary and very quick to laugh. And she likes the word bobbing.

Learning from a two-year-old

We went to the zoo this weekend for the first time. Sophie’s great-grand-parents were in town, they can’t walk well, and we’d already done all the other activities we could think of with limited walking: driving the coast, train-ride-to-San-Juan-Capistrano, and (the best idea) a whale-watch. The zoo — with its bus and tram — seemed like the next option of a local attraction that had limited walking.

But we had to wait in line for tickets, and then we had to walk from the zoo entrance to the bus-stop, from the bus-stop to the rest-room, and back to the bus-stop. This required stopping every ten feet for a rest. This took more than an hour. The great-grandparents were quite apologetic, but, of course, what can you do? They are old; they aren’t very mobile. We were thirty feet from hundreds of exciting exotic animals that we’d just paid a fair amount to see, but we couldn’t see any of the animals, because first we needed to get great-grandma to a restroom. There was a free-roaming peacock near the restrooms, so we did get to see that, but mostly we sat on benches and tried to explain to the great-grand-parents that the bus stop was right over there and we’d get there soon, but really, there was no hurry, we were not going anywhere until they stopped panting from the exertion of moving the length of three benches. We ate a chocolate ice cream. We sat some more.

Sophie didn’t care that we couldn’t see the animals yet. Sophie, of course, didn’t really know that there were animals to see. Sophie was enjoying watching the crowds. There was a girl in a stroller with a giraffe mask. There was the sight of those tram cars swaying overhead. There were lush trees, there were many babies, and we were about to get on a bus. Sophie was enjoying the moments without impatience.

I tried to be like Sophie.

She did eventually appreciate the animals in the zoo. The San Diego Zoo is spectacular, after all. “Hi monkey,” she said to one bonobo with particularly dramatic facial coloring, and, to every smallish four-legged creature: “Baby deer!” There was one pooping elephant that particularly impressed her. “Boop boop boop,” she announced, for a long while afterwards. I have to agree that all that elephant poop was an impressive sight.

It’s great that she’s now old enough to appreciate a zoo. But as much as she liked the animals and the sight of elephant poop, I think she also liked getting to see all those humans, ride a bus, eat a chocolate ice-cream, and hold momma and daddy’s hands for so long while the ggparents looked on. For her the peripherals are central to the experience. And because of her, we all had a great time, mostly sitting on benches or bus-seats far from any animals, still enjoying the afternoon.

The other thing that helped me have a good time this weekend was some advice I got from another mom on the playground. I had been asking many friends for help with the great-grand-parents’s visit, because I knew what would happen:  the ggps would be excessively polite, repeating at least thirty times, “We don’t want to be any trouble,” until it would start to feel like trouble to keep assuring them that they’re not much trouble. I would begin to get irritated at them, then hate myself for feeling impatient with these incredibly sweet old people, and — because I would be mad at myself — I’d be even more snappish at them. It’s a terrible cycle, and it was predictable.

Thank goodness for SoCal playgrounds. Here’s what C’s mom told me: It’s okay to feel irritated at houseguests. Houseguests are hard, especially with young kids. Go ahead and feel irritated, and don’t beat up on yourself for that feeling — just don’t act on that feeling, too much.

It sounds so obvious when I type it out here. But it was liberating for me to hear, there on the playground. I got through the weekend cheerfully, despite having the same conversation every morning:

- What would you like for breakfast?

- Oh, anything, whatever you want to feed us.

- We could have cereal or pancakes or eggs. What would you like?

- Oh, anything, whatever you want to feed us.

- Really, I’d like to feed you whatever you’d like to eat. What would you like to eat for breakfast?

- Oh, anything.

At this point, Sophie is usually busy doing something more interesting, so I can pull away and go take care of her, and hope that hunger will eventually drive the ggparents to declare a breakfast preference.

When we finally settle on a breakfast menu, then there is the negotiation of breakfast time (GGMa takes two hours to do her hair in the morning, sweet woman, and wants to know whether to do it before or after breakfast), then negotiating who sets the table (I have, at least, managed to insist on cooking in my own kitchen), and negotiating who does the dishes, and by then it’s almost time for Sophie’s noon nap.

Polite people are a whole lot of trouble.

In addition to reminding myself that it’s okay to feel irritated, I also hit on a new trick: whenever I felt especially annoyed at repeating the same thing more than three times, I chose to simply behave as if the ggparents must be hard of hearing. So I shouted my answer the fourth time. Not an angry shout, just a clear, calm, projecting-across-the-yard voice, under the guise of helping out the hard-of-hearing. Very satisfying.

It was a surprisingly good weekend.

And we got annual zoo-passes, so Sophie and I will go back sometime soon and walk around as much as we want.

This post probably sounds too churlish. Really, the ggparents are incredibly sweet people. I had a great time playing boggle with them, and getting to feed them the first tofu they’d ever eaten. I even had a great time sitting on zoo benches with them — but without Sophie’s example of delighting in the moments, I might not have had as great a time.

Purple shoes

Wednesdays I work late. Sophie is usually in bed by the time I get home. But last night, when I walked in the door, she ran and burbled and leapt into my arms.

Ben had bathed her, put on her favorite purple-footed-pajamas (what she calls “purple shoes”), and then failed to convince her to go to bed. Instead of battling with a crying child, he wisely decided that they would just hang out calmly in the living room, watching “40-year-old virgin.” That’s not quite my choice of a calm movie for a 21-month-old, but I wasn’t there, they were happy, and Ben is amused by the idea that she might start quoting from it soon.

It was such an amazing way to come home. I got to hug Sophie, whom I usually don’t get to see on Wednesday evenings. And she looked so darn adorable in her purple-shoed pyjamas.

Then I felt like a competent mom, for a change: needed but not overwhelmed. Sophie was overflowing with energy, so I carried her around the house to turn off the lights, one by one, until the house was dark. Then we went to her room and said nighty-night to all her toys, especially the quilts that I made before she was born, quilts that are now decorating her walls. She likes to touch each of the different types of fabric in these quilts, bidding it nighty-night and bye-bye. We have got this routine down. Then we sat in the rocking chair and she went to sleep. Aaahhh.

These are the moments I want to remember: Sophie running to me, jumping with joy in her purple-shoed pyjamas, and then permitting me to guide her to the sleep she needs.