Dadblog

Dora goes rogue

Elizabeth has a friend in her kindergarten class whom I'll call Lola. Lola has two significant qualities. The first is that she loves Elizabeth, and the second is that she does not appear to have any inhibitions. Rachel acknowledges that Lola is a tricky friend to have, likely to lead her companions to places they might not otherwise go, but says (I'm paraphrasing) that every girl should have an ass-kicking, take-no-prisoners friend.

Yesterday Lola was over for an after-school playdate. The girls were in the basement, quiet, and Rachel was taking advantage of the time to get some quotidian chores done. It's difficult to vacuum a home with kids. Either they're running around everywhere, demanding your attention, or it's 9:30 pm and you're too damn tired to get started.

When Lola had to go home, the price of that quiet was discovered. Come with me now on a photographic safari of my basement. I had to help clean it up last night after dinner.

First, we head down the stairs.

This is an unholy marriage of baby toys, dress-up clothes, and Dora The Explorer toys,  presided over by  Thomas the Tank Engine.

The trail continues into the bathroom...

Okay, now Andrew's forgotten and discarded Rescue Heroes are joining the orgy.

 
On the bathroom floor, we are joined by stuffed animals. I'm noticing puddles closer to the toilet.

The sink is full of water, with all of Dora The Explorer's worldly goods packed on top. The paper towel roll is wet.

We asked Elizabeth if she knew that a line of civility was crossed, and she protested that she told Lola "No", but Lola didn't listen. So we should blame Lola, not her.

We wondered aloud if Lola even has a superego, and Elizabeth told us that Lola knew full well the scope of her destruction. "She said, wow, your mom's going to be mad!"

Next time Lola comes to visit - five minutes of quiet will trigger an alarm.

 

Now I know what happens

Last night as dinner was winding down, Elizabeth let out an extra-loud belch. She is the burpiest kid I have ever met. And she takes great delight in each one.

I asked if this happens at school too, or just at home. Rachel looked skyward and nodded. Elizabeth beamed.

Then she said, "today at school, Fiona's mom bwought in cupcakes for snack. And Aiden took his cupcake whapper and stuck it in his mout like dis, and then he went, 'BUUUUUUUURRRRRRRPPPP!!!' and put it on his pwate. It was sooooo hiwarious!! The whole class was waffing!"

It brought a tear to my eye. Alex and Andrew have NEVER told me so much detail about what happens in school as Elizabeth does.

Who believes in Santa?

Andrew says his pal Raza told him that Santa must be a fraud because Raza's mom was seen putting out presents that were supposed to be from the guy in the red suit. Andrew told this to Rachel as a way of getting used to the unsettling idea that Raza might be right. 

Alex knows the score, but then Alex spent almost two years of her life obsessed with ancient Egyptian culture, which is a great way to introduce kids to the idea that sometimes people believe in things that aren't real. Elizabeth probably believes in Santa, but only because it's so convenient. She would rather not believe in Dr. Blum, the dentist. 

Rachel told me last night that some friends in the neighborhood pay $60 a year to have Santa telephone their house on Christmas Eve and talk to their kids. Santa knows the names of thier friends, pets and teachers, and creepily, what the kids might need to improve about their own behavior. The call leaves the children with a mix of wonder and shame, but very compliant with Santa's instructions to go straight to bed that night after church. 

nighttime drama

Andrew and Elizabeth have a sleepover just about every night, which means Elizabeth ends up in Andrew's bed. She doesn't mind the wall-side, which he hates. Even on nights when she's fallen asleep in her bed before the official lights-out for Andrew, we still find her across the room the next morning.

Andrew has come to depend on his sister for security. It's normal to be scared at night. Both Rachel and I used to climb in bed with a brother when we were kids. But sometimes Elizabeth, who was going to go over anyway, says she doesn't want to sleep in Andrew's bed. This makes him frantic, which is why I think she does it. I've seen the look on his face when Elizabeth declines Andrew's invitation, and it looks like a smoker who desperately needs nicotine. The last time it happened, he jumped up and got a lovey from his drawer and pressed it to his nose. He'd been off loveys for weeks before that incident.

When Elizabeth says no, Andrew keeps begging and insisting. I have told him that "no means no" and you can't keep pressuring a girl to get in your bed if she's declined. "I know, but it's hard, I get scared," he says.

Here's the kicker - when Elizabeth is in there, as she is most nights, she just wants to run her fingers through Andrew's curls as she falls asleep. And he hates this. It leads to nightly screaming matches. "Don't! Touch! My! Hair!" he bellows, loud enough for his parents to hear in the back room downstairs.

"Dude," we say. "you have a choice here. Let her touch your hair, or don't invite her in." So simple, and yet we can't quite find the solution.

superpower

A few years ago, I used to wonder all the time about how Elizabeth's brain was going to work. Is the left side functional, or degraded? Will the functions that are normally left-sided in you and me migrate to the right hemisphere?

Now that Elizabeth is so plainly capable of everything, I don't dwell on the subject as much. I must note though that she is profoundly right-brained. By this I mean not only is she left-hand dominant, but she observes visual changes better than anyone else in the house. According to my mother, when she learned how to draw she had to stop processing images with her left brain (that's a tree trunk) and instead examine them with her right brain (that's brown and cylindrical)*. 

When I get my hair cut, Elizabeth calls me on it as soon as I walk in the door. If I didn't make a practice of stopping by the bakery every time I visited the barber, nobody else in my family would every realize my hair was shorter.

* There are two jokes for my brother here.

carry that weight/she's so heavy

None of my children ever liked to walk when they were four years old. Andrew used to need a stroller ride up and down the hill to the elementary school, as tying a rope to his belt and dragging him up the hill would have been too slow, and trying to convince him to walk would have been even slower. Alex used to complain that her legs were tired walking from the car to the house.

Fortunately, both the older kids have improved tremendously with age. While I wouldn't call them hikers, they can at least marshall the necessary resources to walk with us wherever we need to go.

Elizabeth hates walking anywhere. She rides in the grocery store shopping cart, she DEMANDS to be carried any time we walk anywhere, and is quick to complain that her legs or feet are hurting. What makes her different in this regard is she may have some physical merit to her complaints. There are some veins popping out the back of her right leg (not the big one) and while we no longer think she has classic Klippel-Trenaunay Syndrome, there is definitely something about her circulatory system that makes her different.

Of course, with the right kids, in the right situation, she can run on the playground all afternoon. We know the equipment can work correctly. I am not sure if forcing her to exercise her legs will improve her condition or exacerbate it. Mostly I am just hoping that whatever transformed Alex and Andrew will happen to her too when she turns five or six.

another difference

Elizabeth received some new jeans and a package of very stylish socks in assorted colors. She was incredibly happy about this and eager to try them on. It takes a while to try on six pairs of socks when you still need your parent's assistance to fit them on your feet.

I am pretty sure that when I was Elizabeth's age, I would have been offended if someone had given me new clothes and tried to pass it off as a gift.

Here she is wearing the new jeans, making time with a boy half her age.

condensed milk of human kindness

Alex is spending the week with my parents in Connecticut. So far, they've taken her fishing at the state park in Redding, to a VIP tour of the Bronx Zoo, to a Beatles reenactment concert in Bridgeport, and today they are going to the Seaport in Mystic. At night they do puzzles, build crafts (yesterday: rain stick out of cardboard tubes, nails and beans), and watch baseball and the Olympics on TV. Then she gets to read late into the night. We get her home this Sunday.

She calls home every night around 8:45. At first she sounded faint and wistful, but now she's got her high spirits back. I rheard her tell a friend that the first two nights are the hardest - the seeing parents drive away part especially - but then you adapt. She's a wise girl for her age. I knew some college freshmen who had a much harder time with separation than she does.

As part of a general makeup to Andrew, Rachel and I are taking him to a Phillies game tonight. As long as we bring home some cotton candy for Elizabeth, she is fine not going. Last night she told me that she likes when the Phillies win, but she doesn't care when they lose. We hired her favorite babysitter - the one who likes to host tea parties with stuffed animals - to keep her company while we're out of the house. Typically, Andrew is now concerned that he might be missing out.

Yesterday, Rachel took Elizabeth to the eye doctor for her annual checkup. She is at risk for glaucoma, so she gets her pressure checked every year. It's never easy to convince Elizabeth to submit to even noninvasive procedures, so getting her to allow the big nosed medical student to stick his pin in her eye was a very difficult sell. Rachel said "we could hold her down, but that would shoot her pressure way up." I got a call on my cell to try and deliver a remote pep talk, but poor Liz was still sad. She proclaimed it unfair. "How come I have to get my eyes checked and Andrew doesn't? I wish ANDREW was here!!"

Later, Andrew saw the conciliatory chocolate wrappers in the back seat and yelled "HEY!!!" Poor kid, he's always getting screwed out of something.

Next year, Andrew will be old enough for Camp Grandma.

dynamic cling

During one of our daily phone calls when she was in Chicago with the kids, Rachel told me that we need to think about getting a dog.

"Oh yeah," I asked?

"Alex has Special Bunny," Rachel explained, "Andrew's got his lovey, and Elizabeth really needs a transitional object other than myself."

It is true that Elizabeth is a very huggy kid. There is no place she would rather be than cuddled up against a loving grownup, with her left thumb in her mouth and her right hand stroking or clenching long hair or a shirt. This makes her very popular with grandparents and the odd kid-friendly houseguest. I enjoy it too, when I am sitting down and pretending she is a large cat. There are times, though, when having an attached preschooler is inconvenient. These include:

• an ambient temperature over 80°F
• any activity requiring both hands
• walking more than a short distance

Rachel told me that when she took Elizabeth shopping yesterday, she had to push the shopping cart with locked elbows to avoid coming within groping distance.

philosophy problem

Elizabeth hates any discussion of events that took place before she was born. "Where was me!??" she asks, and none of us can tell her. This leads to screams. "I HATE talking about before I was born. It's NOT FAIR!!! Talk about before ANDREW was born!" This makes her siblings cackle with glee.

In addition to not wanting to hear about events before she existed, Elizabeth hates being laughed at. These conversations quickly devolve to sheer rage, often before we are even 100 feet from our house.