komplexify!

Dear Ladybug,

This week you turned forty-seven months old.  While you’re still a month away from becoming the Big Four, that doesn’t much seem to matter anymore, as this month you became a Big Sister, which to you is infinitely better.

You’ve been excited about being a big sister for some time now, which has been a little stressful at times since your mom and I were trying to keep the adoption relatively quiet.  You are terribly excited about being able to hold her close to you.  You can’t wait to hug her and kiss her.  You are brimming with excitement about feeding her milk from a bottle.  You are, however, entirely uninterested in changing her diapers, my claims to its importance notwithstanding.

As a result, you were positively thrilled when the first packet of information about your baby sister arrived in late January.  You brushed past the pages of medical forms (pausing only to note that some of them were in Chinese, which you found oddly surprising) to see the three pictures of the Butterfly.  “Oh!,” you squealed, “She’s cute!”  Moments later you disappeared in your room, emerging seconds later with ladybug backpack crammed with shirts, socks, and snacks and announcing you were ready to go get her.

It’s going to be a loooooonnnnnnnng four-to-eight months.

Eventually we convinced you that (a) we wouldn’t need to pack for China for several months and (b) when we eventually did, you would be better served by packing pants and underwear rather than trail mix and craisins.   Nevertheless, you remain excited about the prospect of finally, officially becoming a big sister.

It’s already become the new chronological benchmark for you, replacing your previous measure via units of annual age.  To wit, nowadays you preface statements such as “When I am a big sister, then I can sit in the front seat,” or “When I am a big sister, I can chew gum,” or “When I am a big sister, I will rule the world with my minion, muwah ha ha haaa!”  I may be exaggerating a little bit.

Of course, I’ve also been trying to explain the logical consequences of the  “When I am a big sister” antecedent to you, namely, When you are a big sister, you will not longer be the only child in the family.”  The concept of no longer being the daughter, as opposed to being a daughter, has troubled you of late.  I suppose this is true of all first siblings, but I’ve been particularly impressed by the way you’re handling it: not with quiet grace and acceptance, but neither with tantrums and tears.  Instead, as is often your way, you’ve approached this not as a problem, but as the starting point for negotiations:

You: So Dad, how about this?

Me: I’m listening.

You: How about I be your daughter, and the Butterfly by my little sister?

Me: Well, that is how it’s going to work.  But the Butterfly will also be my daughter, too.

You: No, no, that’s not what I mean.  I mean how about I be your daughter, and the Butterfly by my little sister, and that’s all.

Me: Well, if the Butterfly is your sister, then she has to be someone’s daughter, right.

You: Okay, okay.  How ’bout I be your daughter, and the Butterfly be mommy’s daughter, and she be my little sister.

Me: But then you wouldn’t be mommy’s daughter anymore, right?

You: Oh, yeah…  Maybe we could take turns.

Me: Sometimes your my daughter, and sometimes your mommy’s daughter?

You: Yes.  I think that would work.

Me: But that means sometimes you won’t be my daughter, but the Butterfly will instead.

You: Oh, yeah… Okay, okay, here’s my final offer: I be your daughter and mommy’s daughter, and the Butterfly be’s my daughter.

Me: The Butterfly will be your daughter and your sister?

You: Yes.  How about that?

Me: I think that’s illegal outside of Arkansas.

You: What?

Me: I’ll explain it to you later.

You: How about when I’m 6?*

Me: How about when you’re 16?  In any case, the answer is still “No.”

You: You drive a hard bargain.

…And then you’ll go off to your room and furiously begin scribbling out master plans and complicated calculations in the attempt to find that perfect combination of attributes that will allow you be the an only child and, simultaneously, and older sister.  I’m not exactly sure what progress you’ve made, since most of your calculations take the following  form:

However, if volume of calculations is any indication of progress, I expect you’ll have a publishable result any day now.

* Unrelated to issues of the Butterfly, you’ve taken to asking questions that require explanations of increasing complexity or maturity to understand.  When such questions arose, I would usually preface my response with “Well, that’s a little difficult to explain,” before launching into a (usually incomprehensible to you) answer.  However, lately when I make such a proclamation, you’ve been responding with “Why don’t you tell me when I’m older,” and then specifying a particular age at which you’d like to be informed.  For example, as noted above, you’ve requested to be informed of the inbreeding stereotypes of the Deep South when you’re six.

As a second example, the other night we were watching the kid-friendly time-traveling movie Meet the Robinsons.  Near the end of the movie, the protagonist Lewis and the antagonist Goob fly through a disruption in the film’s time-line, and watch the effects of one potential future (a grim industrial one) change into another potential future (a retro-utopian one) through a cascade of bubbles.  “Dad,” you asked, “what’s happening to the city?”  “That’s a little hard to explain,” I replied, and mentally began the process of distilling the A- and B-theories of time at a level appropriate to a 3-year-old pretend princess. “Why don’t you tell me when I’m older.  When I’m 5, I think.”

So there you go: my current docket for back-logged explanations

• Temporal causality and paradox — age 5
• Southern stereotypes — age 6

So, yes, you’re full of love this month.  I guess that’s particularly timely, what with this month also including Valentine’s Day, which you celebrated by passing out (and thereby collecting) cards and candies at preschool.  This year you opted to give out Phineas and Ferb valentine cards and heart-shaped lollipops, which was fine.  You also wanted to give each valentine your own personal touch, which meant signing your name by yourself and affixing heart-shaped stickers on each card of various sizes indicating the relative degree to which you liked the person to whom the card would be given.  The upshot of this is that it took me about ten seconds to properly label attach a lollipop to each of the 24 valentines we needed to make; it took you the better part of a hour to sign your name and stickerly bedazzle each one afterward.

I should have paid particular attention to the size of the heart you stuck on “Alex”’s card, because the day after Valentine’s Day you announced that Alex was your new boyfriend, and that you loved him.   When I asked why Alex was your boyfriend, you replied “Because he said he loves me.”  Then you danced up into the clouds on a sea of hearts and rainbows that unexpectedly burst forth from your head.

On the one hand, I was relieved to hear that bad-boy Jevon was out of the picture (literally, apparently — he was bad enough to be removed from daycare); on the other hand, I’m still not ready to deal with this particular brand of drama.  As a result, I laid down the following edict:

Me: You’re not allowed to love any boys.

You: But Dad, I love you, and you’re a boy.

Me: Good point.  Okay, you’re only allowed to love one boy.

You: Oh daddy, sometimes one boy is not enough.  Sometimes you just have to love two boys.

Me: And why is that?

You: Oh, it’s a little hard to explain.

Okay, kiddo.  Why don’t you explain it to me when I’m older, like when I’m 40.

In the mean time, I love you!

–Ba ba

PS. NO BOYFRIENDS!

Dear Ladybug,

Last week you turned forty-six months old, just two months shy of becoming a four-year-old.

Once upon a time you were busily counting down the hours until you turned four, largely because your mother promised you that you could start chewing gum at that magic age.  However, nowadays you would probably hardly notice, as you spend every waking moment playing Super Mario Kart.  We got one of those Wii systems for Christmas (thanks, Nana and Papa Shoo!), and given its simple play mechanic, viz. steer the steering wheel, it’s one of the few games you understand well enough to play.

This isn’t to say you play it well, however.  In fact, you like to race on specific courses to purposefully drive silly.  One of your favorite courses is something called Shy Guy Beach, not because you find the sandy racetrack particularly engaging, but rather because you can drive (and subsequently sink) your car into the drink over and over and over again, each time to have your onscreen avatar fetched from Davy Jone’s locker by a floating turtle with a fishing rod.  Another course favorite is Delfino Beach, which features a sort of European-themed neighborhood through which you like to drive at a meandering pace, repeatedly bumping into the doorways and shouting at the screen “Nana… are you in there?”

We also have a Toy Story game that features a lot of carnival-themed mini-games, several of which are shooters.  You’ve become adept at removing the game remote from its plastic sleeve and sliding it into the pistol attachment, and have turned into something of a crack shot.  Part of me is concerned about your growing fascination with video games, partly because I’d rather you not get addicted to them so young (or indeed, at all), but mostly because your two video-game fascinations — shooting guns and manic racing — suggest a burgeoning interest on your part in organized crime.

On a tangentially related note, I’ve been dreading writing this particular newsletter, not because of any particular unpleasantness I need to report with regards to your growth, but rather because you’ve so much growing in the past two months… and I never got around to writing your month 45 letter.  I fear now that when you eventually grow up to be some maladjusted emo teen* destined for a life of crime, it will all be traced back to when you were a toddler and I forgot to write you a digital letter about the time you got that rash.

* Right now, however, you’re developing not into a emo kid, but a valley girl.  In addition to a wide array of scoffing noises and eye rolls, you’ve become addicted to the word “so,” as in “I am so going to see Princess and the Frog” or “I’m am so not interested in eating that.”  Couple that with your similar affection for the phrase “Oh.  My.  Gosh.” and talking to you is like having a Turing Test with a sentient copy of Desperately Seeking Susan.**

** Thankfully, you haven’t yet discovered the audio-filler of “like” (as in, “I’m like going to like go to the like mall, okay?”), although you have coined a variation of it: or like that.  You often tack in on to the end of requests so as to soften its blow, as in “Maybe we can go see a movie, or like that?” or “Can I wear my sparkly shoes, or like that?”  Your lexicography never fails to amuse me.

In point of fact I did not forget about to write your newsletter.  Rather, it coincided with finals week, and by the time I was done grading those it was suddenly Christmas and then it was 2010 and then… well, you get the picture.  Nevertheless, Month 45 does merit some mention as the month of The Rash.

It started at the the day before Thanksgiving, with a couple of raised bumps of reddish skin on your back.  We put a little lotion on them on the assumption of irritated dry skin, but within an hour they spread all over your back, then to your neck and back of your ears, and then down your arms and legs.  It took another hour after that to get you into an emergency visit to urgent care, at which point you’d swelled up like Miss Stay-Puft.  The doctor there looked you over for all of thirty seconds before rendering his differential diagnosis: “She’s got hives.  Here’s a prescription for some antihistamines.”  Noting that I was significantly unmoved by his lightning fast MD reflexes, he added “She looks a lot worse that she feels,” which struck me as a odd attempt to comfort — it was obvious you felt better than you looked, since I think it was physically impossible for you to look worse: by the evening your entire body was covered with swollen red and purple blemishes, giving you the impression of someone who had, say, lost a fight with a belt sander whilst in a burning house.  However, to the doctor’s credit, though it itched a little, you hardly seemed to notice, and after a solid dose of medicine, your rash disappeared completely within another day.

And so it was through the first week of December, when one evening I noticed a little splotch on the back of your arm.  Within a hour you’d swollen up like a fuchsia Hulk again.  This time, however, the swelling went to your ears and eyelids too, which made you look like you’d survived eight rounds with Evander Holyfield… but just barely.  Once again we went back to the doctor, who looked you over for all of fifteen seconds before declaring “Hives.”  She then looked at your chart and added, not particularly helpfully, “It looks like she might be allergic to the medicine we gave her last time for the hives.  Huh.”  She then prescribed a different antihistamine and suggested an “oatmeal bath” to help with the itching.  You found this latter concept particularly amusing for two reasons.  First, you associate oatmeal with breakfast foods, so in effect, the doctor was ordering you to get into a ginormous bowl of warm cereal; that is, you were given a doctor’s note specifically authorizing you to play with your food.  Second, when you finally extricated yourself from the oatmeal, you were covered with the slimy remnants of the oatmeal power that had congealed on you, so that in effect you emerged from the bath dirtier than when you went in.  “That’s silly,” was your assessment, and I agree wholeheartedly.

Fortunately for all concerned, the antihistamines beat the rash away in a day without any adverse effects, so by the end of Month 35 the only thing you were worrying about was Christmas.

You made out pretty good this year.  Including the aforementioned Wii, you got a heap of princess gowns (including a Dorothy Gale costume, who while not a princess exactly, is at least lousy with rubies).  Among them was a Snow White gown, whose existence as a Christmas present was more or less a given, as you had requested it as a gift from me, your mother, your grandmothers, your aunt, your cousin, and, of course, Santa Claus.  On no less than 3 occasions, too.  Consequently, in the weeks immediately following Christmas through the New Year you spent in a constant state of fashion flux, changing from one gown to another to another over the course several minutes, as if you were less a flesh-and-blood child than a quantum superposition of princesses.

Of course, even you can get a little tired of pretending to be 2D royalty, and in Month 46 you’ve decided to try your hand again at several activities I thought you’d given up on.  For example, you’ve taken it upon yourself to help me shovel snow, and to assist you got your very own red snow shovel.  You understand the basic premise — namely, to move snow out of the way to form a walking path — but have yet to connect this concept with the existence of sidewalks and driveways under the snow, so if left to your own devises you end up scooping an exotic Brownian motion across my yard.

You’ve also decided to give sledding another try.  I’d pretty much broken you of the habit when you just turned two, when we went out for our first sledding expedition, wherein you sat in your blue and I pulled you around the park on the snow.  That was all fun and games until I took a turn too quickly and flung you out of the sled, although on a positive note you learn (quite unexpectedly) how to make a snow angle at velocity.  This time out, however, we started by sledding down some gentle slopes together, and you quickly discovered the twin joys of thrilling speed of zipping down the hill, and not having to pull the sled yourself on the trudge back up it.  By the second day you were sledding by yourself; by Day 3 we’d built a small snow ramp so you could get some air; and by Day 4 I made you pull the damn sled yourself.  Perhaps not coindentially, there was no Day 5.

Speaking of sports, bowling is also experiencing a resurrection.  The last time you bowled was also the last time you sledded, and back then your teeny tiny muscles imparted so little force to the ball that the only reason it moved at all was plate tectonics.  This time, however, you had both moxie and machinery on your side: not only did the bowling alley have lane “bumpers” to keep the ball from falling in the gutter, but they also had “bowling ramps,” a little metal stand that resembled the first drop of a roller-coaster in miniature.  When your turn to bowl came up, you would carefully slide the ramp to the end of the lane, squat, and through one squinting eye gently aim the ramp at the center pin in a comically intense display of meticulous precision.  Then you’d fetch your ball and, in the process of trying to lift it up to the ramp, would knock it all akimbo, so that when you finally pushed the ball down to play, it was rarely aimed at the correct pin or, in some cases, even the correct lane.  Nevertheless, you had a blast, shouting Adios! to the pins every time you’d send the ball on its way to mete out their destruction, and inventing elaborate celebratory dances whenever any of them fell.

And while it’s not nearly as ESPN-worthy of the previous two items of discussion, you’ve also decided to work on improving your pronunciation skills in general, and on the phoneme [L] in particular.  Your whole life you’ve pronounced it as a [W], which given your name can be a source of endless irritation to you.  You’ve learned that the sound requires your tongue to be against the uppoer part of your mouth, but as yet haven’t quite figured out that pheonetic sweet spot’s location, and so your tongue wanders around the front top teeth in what resembles a slow-motion replay of a failed attempt to blow a raspberry.

You’ve also taken to some new activities.  One of your current favorites is the writing of stories and letters to people you know.  You grab a sheet of paper and a convenient pen, and begin recording your elaborate plot-lines and character development or thorough retelling of personal anecdotes in a frantic cursive script.  Well, not English cursive, mind you, nor any other human cursive with which I am familiar, but cursive nonetheless:

Of course, the fact that the characters don’t mean anything — or your inability to read them even if they did — does not deter you from writing them endlessly; moreover, your amazing memory allows you to recall what you’ve written for days after the fact.  In fact, your mom and I are so enamored with this burst of literary creativity (given your flair for story-telling, you mom thinks you have a career ahead of you in literature; given your mastery of arcane and indecipherable symbols, I think you’ve got a future in mathematics) that we’ve bought you a spiral binder to jot your thoughts in — which you promptly filled up within days.

You are amazing, little girl.  I’d give you a big hug and kiss to show you, except that you’re too busy holding up a store on Mario Kart to notice.  Love ya, kid.

–Ba ba

Dear Ladybug,

On Thursday you turned technically only forty-four months old, but for all intents and purposes, you became a teenager.

For example, you’ve started collecting boyfriends.  I already mentioned Matthew, the boy from New Jersey you met in Hill City and spent an entire weekend staring at through heart-shaped eyes and kissy lips.  You still talk about Matthew at least once a week, mentioning how you want to go and visit him, or invite him to your birthday, or sail away to Greece to get married. Of course, it’s a challenge to maintain a long-distance love affair, so in your spare time you’ve decide to infatuate yourself with a boy called “Jevon” at your preschool.  I know that you’re infatuated with him based on two main reasons.  First, every sentence you utter has to do with him, as in

• “You know what Jevon did at school today?” or
• “Guess what Jevon was wearing today?” or
• “Want to know what Jevon said today?” or, in some cases,
• “Jevon Jevon Jevon Jevon….”

Second, and most importantly, whenever I mention “I think you love Jevon,” you turn bright red, stamp your feet, and demand “NO! I. DO. NOT. LOVE. JEVON!,” typically followed by “I don’t even like Jevon, and I don’t care what Jevon did and I don’t even remember what Jevon said or anyway Jevon Jevon Jevon Jevon…”

Your mother and I might have found this cute if it wasn’t for the fact that this Jevon is actually a pretty rotten kid, as the stories that follow these questions invariably involve Jevon getting in trouble with his teachers for disobeying or back-talking or boosting cars or whatnot.  Your second crush, and he’s the class bad boy.  I’m terrified of what my life will be when your age reaches double digits.

You’ve also decided to infuse “drama” into your day-to-day life, so that a typical recounting of the events of your day reads like a episode summary of pre-pubescent 90210 episode:  “Today Aaron was my friend*, but not Diane.  She decided to Wica’s friend today, but Wica is not my friend since he was mean to me yesterday**.  And Brian said he would let me play trains with him today, but when he thought I wasn’t looking, I saw him sharing a caboose with Jaylyn.  JAYLYN! That two-year-old hussy!”  Your preschool has more cliques and castes than British India.

* You’ve adopted a strange definition of the term friend, which you take to mean “whoever I played with most recently.”  Your mother and I initially tried to give you a more holistic definition of the term, one that captured the longevity of the term.  We explained that just because someone decides not to play with you on a certain day doesn’t mean that said individual does not like you, and that friendship transcends those kinds of day-to-day arguments and disagreements and so forth.  Then we realized we’d suddenly turned into an after-school special, whereupon we shut the hell up.

** You’re still confused about the term yesterday, which you still take to mean “sometime in the recent past.”  However, I should point out that while your temporal vocabulary remains pretty limited, your temporal understanding is improving.  For example, you’ve taken to using days of the week as modifiers for “yesterday” as in “Yesterday Monday I did X” or “Yesterday Wednesday I went to Y.”  I am always impressed by the cleverness of your solutions to linguistic problems.

You’ve also taken to much more “grown-up” activities.  You’re less and less interested in, say, cuddling up to watch a Wiggles movie with some popcorn.  Instead, this month, you’ve opted for a weekend miniature golf excursion, a two-mile bike ride, an ice-skating/gymnastics show, an after-school volleyball game, and (of course) several trips to the toy store to scout out the latest in (realllllllly) compact cars. You’ve also become addicted to your MP3 player/phone, and spend considerable time laying on the couch with your head flopping of the cushions and your feet flung over the back, holding one-sided conversations with imaginary copies of your nanas, Matthew, or Jevon and rocking out to ABBA or PFT.

Fortunately, you’ve also taken a big interest in science, owing largely to repeated listens to Here Comes Science by They Might be Giants.  One particular conversation is still pretty fresh in my memory, and exemplifies your wonder with it.

You: Dad?  What is blood for?

Me: Think about the Blood Mobile song.  You blood has lots of jobs.  First it carries oxygen you breath in to your cells so they can breathe.

You: Oxygen is an element.

Me: Yep. Second, it carries nutrients from the food your tissues.

You: Tissues.  That’s funny.

Me: Third, it does the trash collection in your body.

You: Wait, what?  There’s trash in my blood?

Me: Well, yeah.  When you breath, your body gets rid of something called carbon dioxide, which is like trash.  Also, when you eat and drink, your body makes waste that it needs to get rid of.  Your blood helps move that trash to your lungs and your liver and your kidney, where you can breathe it out or tinkle it out or whatever.

You: My blood does that?  It has a bunch of trash in it?

Me: Yes.

You: Oh. My. God.  My blood is disgusting.

Me: No, no, no.  It’s not.

You: It’s full of trash.

Me: Hmmm.  Okay… is our house disgusting?

You: No.

Me: But our house has trash in it, doesn’t it?

You: Yes.  In the kitchen and the bathroom.

Me: Right.  Our house has trash in it, just like your blood.  But why isn’t the house disgusting?

You: Because you take the trash out.

Me: Right.  It’s one of my chores.  Every Thursday nightI take the trash out to the corner and it gets taken away.  That’s juts like your blood — one of it’s chores is to carry your body’s trash out to have it taken away too.

You: Oh.

[ A few minutes pass in silence. ]

You: Dad?

Me: What?

You: Blood is cool.

It is so hard for me to believe that it’s only been three years since you first came into our lives.  We celebrated this on November 13, our “Forever Family Day.”  As I’ve noted before, this day also coincides with your mother’s birthday.  It marks the day when in a humid little hotel room several stories above downtown Guiyang, we all came together as a family for the very first time.  I never in my wildest dreams could have thought that the little, scared, wild-haired babe  would grow into the charming, happy, intelligent, young little lady you are today, just thirty-six months later.  You are amazing, little ladybug!

Maybe the best way  to end this newsletter is with a conversation we had in the car just the other day.

Me: Thanks for going shopping with me Ladybug.  I love you.

You: I love you.

Me: No, I love you.

You: No, I love you.

Me: No, I love you.

You: No! I love you.

Me: NO I LOVE YOU!

You: NO I LOVE YOU!

Me: No, NO, NO!  I LOVE YOU!

You: No no no, wait, Dad.  We both LOVE each other!

Me: Yeah, that sounds good.

You: Yes.

You: … but I love you more!

You sneaky little monkey!

And guess what?  I love you most!  (Ha! I’ve a blog, and therefore, the last word! Ha!)

– Ba ba

Photo album

You can see more pictures from your forty-third month over at Flickr.

Dear Ladybug,

On Monday you turned forty-three months old, and as months go, it’s been pretty busy.  For example, this month your mom completed here three week run of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.  We saw it three times, and I must admit you did much better than when we saw mommy in the production Cinderella last year, during which you cried in abject rejection every time your mommy didn’t wave at you in the audience.  This year you not only came to terms with that lamentable fact of theater life, but you were actually quite involved with the story itself, which you manifested by (a) laughing loudly at all the funny bits, (b) singing loudly along with all the songs you knew, and (c) shouting questions to the actors on stage during quieter moment’s, such as “Be careful on stairs, lady!” or “Why are you in jail, Joseph?” or “What is Joseph doing behind that sheet with the Queen?”

Because of your stellar behavior at Joseph, your mommy decided to surprise with with tickets to see a production of Momma Mia! at the Civic Center theater, which you alternatively found

• thrilling, when you learned that you were going to see Sophie and Donna and Sam Carmichael in person.
• disappointed, when you discovered they were not being played by Amanda Seyfried, Meryl Streep, and Pierce Brosnan,
• and thrilling again, when you learned there were more songs in the play that in the movie, including a whole dream sequence!

Of course, for the theatergoers in your immediate vicinity, the real star of the show was you, as those folks had never been treated to the sight of a three-year-old dancing and singing on her chair to ABBA songs at the top of her lungs.  (I didn’t have the heart to inform such people that the novelty of it wears off after the first year or so.)

Midway through the month, near the beginning of October, your Nana and Papa Shoo dropped by for a five-day weekend to visit you.  You, of course, we delighted by their visit, not only because you love your grandparents, but also because they are convinced of their right to spoil you, and you are only too happy to oblige.  For example, one day you had Nana take you to Chuck E. Cheese, where you demonstrated to her both your indefatigability and your grasp of capitalism by unceasingly collecting tickets to trade for Tootsie Pops for three and a half hours.  Another day you decided to have Papa take you to Cabela’s, who, being an avid hunter and fly-fisher, happily obliged.  (Indeed, Papa Shoo is so much an outdoorsman that he actually thinks that the Rapid City Cabela’s is the jewel of the Black Hills; those presidential faces on the mountain… eh, not so much.)  The end result of the trip is that you returned home with two high-end snow suits, a Barbie fishing pole, and an insatiable desire to go out to the back yard to bludgeon a rabbit and eat it.  Raw.

A few days after your grandparents left and your blood lust subsided, you and mommy and I spent a three day weekend down in Hill City at a cozy bed and breakfast, ostensibly to celebrate our seventh wedding anniversary, but mostly to simply relax after what had been an ungodly busy month (your mom with her classes and the play; me with my classes and the completion of my ginormous tenure application).  The B&B is a cozy little place run pair a wonderfully friendly couple called Sam and Linda, and it turned out that a second family was staying the weekend there as well with their seven-year-old son Matthew, with whom you fell immediately and deeply in love.  Seriously.  You spend each morning at the breakfast table with your head in your hands gazing across the room at him, a big goofy grin spread wide across your face; each afternoon following him around like a lapdog or, more appropriately given your tendency to clamp onto him with giant hugs, a leach; each evening telling your mom and I about what you did with Matthew that day, what stories Matthew told you, what jokes Matthew said, when and where you planned on marrying Matthew, what you’d name your kids and your pets, and so forth.

So… Month 43 is when you found your first love.  Of course, after three days it was time for everyone to go home, and I haven’t yet had the heart to explain to you that Matthew is not waiting patiently back in Hill City for you to return so you can practice your wedding vows.  You’re going to figure this out soon enough, whence I suspect Month 44 will be when you experience your first break-up and the subsequent first time locking yourself into your room listening to Cure albums and promising to never love again.  I think I’m gonna let mom handle that one.

Then again, maybe you’ll display your characteristic maturity and chalk it up to “’tis better to have love and lost…”  You continue to amaze me with your wit and wisdom.  You find patterns and connections in everything.  For example, I remember having the following conversation with you:

You: Is it Tuesday yet?

Me: No.  Today is Sunday.

You: When will it be Tuesday?

Me: In two days.

You: That’s funny!  Tuesday is in two days!  That makes sense.   When is Monday?

Me: Tomorrow.  That’s one day away.

You: Monday is one day and Tuesday is two days.  That’s funny.

Me: I’ve never thought about that, but you’re right.  It does make sense.  And you know what?  Friday’s in five days!

You: That’s funny too!  When is Wednesday?

Me: Wednesday’s in three days.

You: Huh.  Well that doesn’t make any sense at all.  Let’s not talk about this anymore.

Your wisdom often demonstrates itself in ever the search for ever greater efficiencies, such as (as yet unsuccessful) attempts to change the status quo, such as advocating for dessert with dinner, on the grounds that (a) you might get too full to eat or enjoy dessert if you have to wait for it and (b) you’re guaranteed to eat the dessert bit which, if considered as part of dinner, therefore means a guaranteed percentage increase in daily amount of dinner consumed, making it a win-win situation.

Other times your discovered improvements are less ego-centric, such as the following gem you shared with your mother when the two of you took a shower together one evening: “When I’m in the shower and I have to go to the bathroom, I can actually go to the bathroom in the shower!”  On a not unrelated note, that was actually the last shower you’ve every taken with your mom.

As another example, in the apparent strive to make more efficient use of your energy, you have decided to simply cease all activity whenever I announce that it is bedtime, going into a form of self-induced torpor.   Hence, instead of expending your valuable energy on such tasks as, say, walking to your room and climbing in your bed, you now simply collapse into a boneless pool of arms and limbs and wait to have me fling you over my should and literally pour you into your bed.  At least, I’m chalking this up to a quest for improved biochemical efficiency rather than an appalling display of lethargy; then again, you do refer to such a state as being a lazy lump, so perhaps I’m being played.

You’ve also developed something of an interest in the TV show Eureka, which we either watch together on Friday nights when it’s on Syfy (or whatever the hell the SciFi channel is calling itself nowadays), or downstairs on DVD with popcorn and Junior Mints.  While I love the company, let me be brutally honest with you:

• You’re Asian.
• Your dad is a mathematician.
• Your mom is a math teacher.
• You’re not even 4, and you can work a computer, cell phone, MP3 player, digital camera…
• You’re into geek stuff (Eureka, Avatar, Here Comes Science, etc.)

You are freakin’ doomed for life to be such a nerd.*

* Well, this and your apparent fascination with the Daily Show and President Obama, you have all the makings of an intellectual liberal elitist.  Which means I need to get you a hunting permit and have you bag yourself a buck before your Papa Shoo disowns you entirely.

Perhaps it is a side-effect of this maturity, but I find you’ve grown more and more nostalgic, regaling me daily with anecdotes from your past. Over the course of the month, however, I’ve discovered that while your cognitive understanding of past is detailed and multi-layered, your vocabulary for it is somewhat more limited, consisting of exactly two* phrases, namely:

• When I was a baby, which refers to those things that happened to you between your birth and, say, the time you started getting teeth, and
• Yesterday, which pretty much means everything else.

That latter term can be a bit confusing, especially when applied to sentences such as “Yesterday when we went to Mount Rushmore I had a hot dog, and then yesterday at school I also had a hot dog, just like I did yesterday,” in which the first yesterday might more accurately mean last month; the second yesterday might literally be yesterday, and the third yesterday might, in fact, refer to ten minutes ago.  I’ve occasionally tried to broaden your temporal lexicon from time to time, though each attempt usually ends in the same failure.  A typical exchange might be:

You: Hey! Dad!  Remember yesterday when I got my floss from the dentist?

Me: I do remember when you got you floss, but actually, yesterday you went to school with your friends.  You went to the dentist last week.

You: I didn’t go to the dentist yesterday?

Me: No.  Yesterday was just one day ago.  You went to the dentist… nine days ago now.

You: Oh…

You: …

You: Hey! Dad! Remember when I was a baby and I got my floss from the dentist?

Chronological conversations with you might be accurately described as “acutely dependent on context and shared memory,’ although “confusing as hell” is equally correct.

* Although occasionally you sneak in a new one.  For example, a couple of weeks ago we were sorting your shirts, and you found a purple tee that, being at the bottom of the drawer, you hadn’t worn in a while.  Excited, you yanked the shirt out, hugged it, and declared “Oh, my shirt!  I haven’t worn this in years and years!”

“You haven’t even been alive for years and years,” I commented.  “Years and years would suggest that you’re at least four, but you’re only three.”

“Oh,” you replied.  “Well then, I haven’t worn this shirt in year and year!”

You’ve also become increasingly interested in the concept of days, or at least their order and properties, as each school day has acquired interesting attributes as a result of school; for example, Wednesday is Show-and-Tell Day, Thursday is Movie Day, and Friday is Treasure-Box Day.   Not coincidentally, you’ve also come to realize that Saturday and Sunday have the enviable of property of weekenditude, or as you describe it whenever you find out it’s one of those two days, “I don’t gave to go to school…. YAY!”  Loverboy was right: everybody is working for the weekend.

Given all this cerebral activity on your end, it is therefore somewhat comforting to be reminded from time to time that you are still a three-year-old, and at no time is this more apparent than with you current fad activity, which is to aim your butt at people.  I’m not quite sure where you picked this up (I’d blame MTV except that we don’t watch it), but occasionally you’ll stop whatever you’re doing, walk over to me or mommy and grad our attention, and then turn around and stick your bottom in our general direction amid a flurry of uncontrollable giggling for a few moments, and then return to your previous activity.  It’s goofy, slightly embarrassing, and entirely inappropriate.

So maybe you’re a well-balanced three-year-old after all. I love you, butt head.

– Ba ba

Photo album

You can see more pictures from your forty-third month over at Flickr.

Dear Ladybug,

On Saturday you turned forty-two months old, which is a grand, ultimate age to be.  We decided to celebrate this infinitely improbable event with SCIENCE!, and spent Sunday afternoon launching foam rocket ships powered by Mentos and Diet Coke.  You received a Mentos rocket set as a stocking stuffer last Christmas, and we borrowed the top of our bird bath to use as a launch pad.  Your job was to load the candies and pull the fuse to initiate SCIENCE!; my job was  make sure that the Coke bottle stayed upright long enough to ensure that SCIENCE! sprayed away from us; and Mommy was recruited to film the event, although she was rather less excited about all that SCIENCE! coating our backyard with a layer of sugar water.

One the one hand, you were thrilled and delighted by the spurting cascade of carbonated cola; on the other, you were disappointed that it didn’t last very long and that I was unwilling to fork over another twenty dollars on candy and pop so that you could play Mission Control Commander for another five minutes or so.

We’ve actually been doing lots of little activities this month, probably because August marked the end of summer for your mommy and I, and we wanted to get a little more vacation in there.  For example, we made a spur of the moment family trip to visit Mount Rushmore again this month, a trip you always seem to enjoy if for no better reason than to eat a big hot dog and an ice cream cone in the shadow of four big faces on a mountain.  This time, however, there were a number of park rangers handing out activity guides for children, with those kids who bothered completing the form earning “Junior Ranger” badges.

At first you were terribly excited about becoming a park ranger, and we you diligently answered questions about the kinds of colors you saw on the monument and in the forest (white, brown, green), about what foods were and were not appropriate to feed the local wildlife (nuts and seed: okay; hamburgers and fries: not so much), about how many needles formed each clump on a the local conifer trees (2), and a picture of a mountain lion that inexplicably ended up looking a lot more like Wilt from Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends.

Eventually you turned in your activity sheet to the lady in the guest center, who found it to be sufficient for meritorious conduct, and bestowed upon you the title of Junior Park Ranger and handed you a plastic badge embossed with the image of Rushmore signifying such.  Oddly enough, you wouldn’t wear the badge, and instead preferred to hold onto it the rest of day, occasionally flashing it at people like an FBI agent at a raid.  Apparently you were aghast at the fact that pinning a badge on you meant sticking a needle through the fabric of your Disney Princess dress, and it is clear that being a facsimile Disney royal ranks significantly higher than a facsimile public servant.  (To be fair, however, I can find no compelling argument against that worldview.)

You and I have also had a lot of daddy-daughter time this month, owing to the fact that your mother has a role in a production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat that just started its public run, so she’s spent most every evening this month at rehearsal.  Most school nights this has meant watching movies curled up on the couch, although early on you requested to watch the first Avatar: The Last Airbender episode, which has resulted in us working our way through my Avatar DVD collection.  (We’re currently at The Crossroads of Destiny near the end of Book 2.)  The end result has been that you’ve been diligently practicing to become a waterbender, and during most episodes you’ll spend some time watching and mimicking Katara’s moves.  I have happily let you practice away, on the grounds that (a) I don’t have the heart to tell you that waterbending isn’t real and (b) if it actually is real, I’d rather not piss off a little waterbending master in the making.

We also spend a lot of time watching Phineas and Ferb, probably because it’s on twenty-four hours a day.  Most episodes typically include a catchy song or too, and so when you’re not practicing  your waterbending forms, you’re dancing around the house singing “Gitchie-gitchie-goo means that I love you!” or “Busted” or “We’re Watching and Waiting.”

Other evenings we get in my car and decide to drive to some place that you’d like to go, and among this month’s selections you’ve opted to

• Go to Storybook Island, where you play on the slides and swings and monkey-bars and train long enough to convince me to by you a lollipop from the Snack Shop
• Go to Time Out,* the arcade in the mall, at which you spend the change you’ve collected over a week on several games of Skee-Ball, whereupon you cash in your tickets for a lollipop.
• Go to Chuck E. Cheese, where you spend any leftover change you still might have on more Skee-ball and Water Pistols, whereupon you cash in your tickets for a lollipop.

You might notice that there is a common theme to the activities you request.  Moreover, this common theme and the fact that I’m no longer accepting your suggestions for evening activities are not entirely unrelated.

* We also use the term Time out to mean a particular form of punishment after you misbehave, which means that you are very, very specific when it comes to going to the arcade.  A typical request might be along the line of “Daddy, can I go to Time Out?…  I mean the Time Out at the mall, not the Time Out when I’m in trouble.  I’m not  in trouble, okay?  I’m being good right now, see?  Really good.  I don’t need to be in time out in trouble, but Time Out in the mall. Because I’m being good.  Right?”

It’s probably a function of your mommy practicing for her play, but you’ve been particularly theatric this month, as evidenced by the aforementioned practicing of animated martial arts and kid pop tunes.  You’ve also been singing songs from the Joseph play itself, although owing to a mispronunciation on your part it took me a while to decode that.  I was seriously confused with lyrics like “Go go go Joe fish, you know what they say” and “Poor poor Joe fish, whatcha gonna do?” although I do think a version of the biblical Joseph involving seafood might yet have some potential.

You’ve also been particular fond of the gospel song Down by the Riverside, which you have on one of your sing-along DVDs.*  In fact, one Saturday this month, after spending a Sunday at Storybook Island (so that mommy could have the house to practice for the play) we strolled behind the park to a point where Rapid Creek lazy slithered by through the trees.  Being rather toasty out, we yanked off our shoes and rolled up our pants and strolled along in the creek bed, where after a half hour or so it suddenly dawned on you that we were quite literally “down by the riverside,” at which point you burst into song and dance.

Of course, what with your balance being what it is (you are a klutz) and the current whizzing along, the chorus was cut a bit short:

* Curiously enough, though you are quite fond of the song, you never can get the chorus quite right.  The song goes “I ain’t gonna study war no more, / I ain’t gonna study war no more, / Ain’t gonna study war no more, no more!” but you always seem to omit the word war, which has the amusing effect of changing the song from a rousing declaration of peace to the ranting mind-set a typical college student.

You’re still big on the word “actually,” and there’s nary a sentence that goes by from which it is absent.  Whereas last month you were more or less using it in its proper context, this month the word has apparently been promoted to the new “um” — it is the word you say when you can’t think of anything else to say.  As a result, most sentences out of your mouth take the form “Actually I think that actually I would actually like to actually go to the store actually and actually buy some gum actually, do you actually think we can actually do that actually?”  In fact, you like that word so much that some times you simply say it and nothing else, which was a little disconcerting at first:

You: Actually….

You: …

You: …

Me: … actually what?

You: Nothing.

You: …

You: Actually…

You: …

You: …

Me: “Actually” WHAT?

You: Nothing!

You: …

You: But actually…

Me: AAHHH!

You may drive me crazy, little girl, but I love so much all the same.

Actually.

– Ba ba

Photo album

See more photos of your forty-second month over at Flickr: