Christmas 2013 Recap

Earlier, I recapped of the set-up for Christmas day and told about the start of the day. Here, we pick up the story from when the girls started opening their presents.

Our youngest doesn't quite know what to do with the Jumpolene. Or the beanbag chair, apparently. She did figure out the former before the day was done.

Our oldest knew exactly what the new purse is for.

My wife didn't want me in this picture, but I inserted myself. And my coffee mug inserted itself, too.

See? She's just stinkin' cute!

And she's already to start conducting the family Christmas carol sing...

Here, she gets her first good look at her new cousin. How will she react?

About like this, apparently.

I just liked the way this picture got both of our girls and (a glimpse of) their cousin.  And the Aunt Emmy they all share.

Lauren wasn't going to be denied her time with the wee babe, and our older girl gets to know her a bit better too.

After 11 straight hours of Christmas, at 5:45, our younger appeared to give up the ghost. Sadly, she got her second wind a couple hours later and is still going strong as I type.

Her sister, on the other hand, lost the battle with sleep right in the middle of a delicious, delicious brownie. Sweet dreams, sweetpea!

Darker Kiddie Lit

Before Christmas, as we let our 2-year-old watch various holiday specials, we noticed something. She is a big fan of Mickey Mouse, by way of The Mickey Mouse Clubhouse. Naturally, then, we TiVoed the Disney special, which was a bunch of the old shorts (which we both remembered at least vaguely from our own childhoods. In one, Pluto chases around Chip and Dale, who have entered Mickey's house; Pluto's feelings toward the chipmunks are, well, about what you should expect from a dog toward rodents. In another, Donald Duck--in his usual cranky form--wages a fierce snow war on his nephews. What stands out for us is how, well, nice all the characters basically are to each other on The Mickey Mouse Clubhouse. The main characters are always friends to each other; Pete sometimes acts as the "villain" of the show, but he's always brought around by the end, and everyone is always nice to him no matter what he does to them. The older shows have a much wider range of feelings and behaviors, particularly with regard to more negative emotions.

And then there's the Charlie Brown Christmas special. You know, one of the most-beloved animated holiday specials of all time. But wow. I'd forgotten just how mean the kids basically are to each other. Lucy bullies everyone around, characters call each other "dumb" or "stupid." At times, they're just plain mean to each other. Yet, it has endured--will any of the nicer, gentler animated features that are being produced today?

The thing is, much as we would like to think that it's otherwise, kids really are mean to each other (sometimes). They really do call each other names, even from a young age. It was the same when I was a kid in the '80s, judging by Charlie Brown, it was true of kids in the '60s, and I have no doubt that it's true today. It would be a better world if it weren't so, but it is, and perhaps that fact speaks to the special's staying power (and that of the Disney special I referenced earlier). Some people are jerks, sometimes even good people get frustrated and upset, and sometimes imperfect people see the error of their ways and sometimes they don't. File it under "art imitates reality." We can and should discourage our kids from treating each other so poorly, but that's not the same as insulating them from its fact.

Related to this, we recently heard little more than the fact of Peggy Orenstein (author of Cinderella Ate My Daughter) on The Diane Rehm Show. I heard perhaps 2 minutes of the broadcast and Lauren heard a blurb for it, but I mentioned it to her again later and she saw and picked up the book at our local library because it spoke to concerns she herself has had. Lauren read to me portions of one of the chapters, comparing the sanitized versions of various fairy tales to their original versions. She read a few, and she also pointed me to this passage from Orenstein's book:

if you believe the psychologist Bruno Bettelheim, we avoid the Grimms' grimness at our peril. His classic book The Uses of Enchantment argues that the brothers' gore is not only central to the tales' appeal, it's crucial to kids' emotional development. [...] According to Bettelheim, fairy tales and only fairy tales--as opposed to myths or legends--tap into children's unconscious preoccupations with such knotty issues as sibling rivalry or the fear of an omnivorous mother. In their tiny minds, the fearsome giant may be transformed into the school bully, a menacing wolf into a neighbor's put bull. Fairy tales demonstrate that hardship may be inevitable, but those who stand fast emerge victorious. What's more, he wrote, the solutions to life's struggles that fairy tales suggest are subtle, impressionistic, and therefore more useful than either the spoon-fed pap that passes for kiddie "literature" these days or the overly concrete images of television (and now the Internet). He goes so far as to say that without exposure to fairy tales a child will be emotionally stunted, unable to create a meaningful life. 

This speaks to me of the same issues I looked at above. Children may not be able to work through or understand all the nuance of the darker stories, but perhaps in the end that will be part of their appeal, part of what keeps drawing one back to them. What we acquire without effort is often not valued highly or really internalized.

There's surely something to be said for "age appropriate" material, but being sensitive to that probably shouldn't mean avoiding darker, more difficult material that is more challenging for children and adults as well. In the end, our job as parents is to prepare our children for life, and "Therefore, since the world has still / Much good, but much less good than ill," part of our job is to prepare our children for the difficult realities, and we can't do that without some exposure to the darker side of life, and stories allow them--and us--to do that in a safe(r) manner.

Your thoughts?

State of the Baby

So. Here's where our daughter is at 14 1/2 months old.

Our efforts at sign language were limited, and thus her signing vocabulary is similarly limited: "please" and "all done" are the bread and butter of her self-expression. Verbally, she can say "mama" and "dada" (thought that sometimes also means "diaper") and "ra-ra," her nanny Rhonda. "Nah-nah" means she wants to nurse, though I think she also uses it to mean that she's distressed and wants comfort, because she doesn't always take what she was apparently asking for.

Her favorite toys are mommy's or daddy's iPod, followed by mommy's phone and daddy's phone, followed by Beaker's food and water. We put our phones in Airplane mode to minimize the damage, but the corollary to that is that we miss calls because our phones are essentially off-line. She loves to dump Beaker's food all over the floor, she loves to food Beaker one piece of food at a time, she loves helping to fill Beaker's food dish, and she especially loves slapping her hand down in Beaker's water dish. The corollary to this is that Beaker's food and water dishes spend a lot of time up on the table, which translates to a thirsty pup sometimes. She's getting better at asking for her water, though, or I'm getting better at interpreting.

Of her actual toys, she loves books--and recognizes many of them by name--and she loves her plastic tea set. There's something delightfully archaic about the whole idea of a tea set, as though we need to train our daughter for the proper etiquette of a tea party with persons of quality and need to get an early start. But she does love the different pieces. She likes stirring her cups and bowls with the spoons, and she even pretends to drink. "Cheers" is still more than a little dicey. At other times, though, she just loves the tea set as something that makes noise and can be dumped out of--and put back into--its container. Just as she can happily stir her imaginary tea or soup, she can also ignore the function and appreciate it as objects to be manipulated: out of the box, in the box, out, in (mostly out, though, to judge by our living room at any given moment).

She's walking around like a champ. She still falls over sometimes, but she does pretty darned well. With the nicer weather we had last week, she's gotten outside a lot more. She loves going out, and there's another word she knows: out. If I ask Beaker if she needs to potty outside, our two-legged daughter will be making a bee-line for the door, before the dog has even answered the question. If anyone's going out, she wants to go with them. She knows what "shoes" and "socks" are when we tell her she needs them to go outside. She loves walking around outside, but she's a little yucked out by the ground. It's just so... dirty. If she falls down, she has no desire to put her hands down to push herself up. It's like she's looking for somewhere clean to put her hands, can't find it, so her hands just sort of hover there and she fails to get back up. She also likes holding Beaker's leash, although she only seems to make that demand of mommy.


She loves to tease Beaker. She'll take Beaker's ball and then run away, to hide behind the recliner or on the other side of a parent. She'll hold the ball out and then pull it back when Beaker goes for it. Like I said, a tease. Much of the time, she's a happy, smiley baby. No one, and I mean no one, can get her laughing quite like mommy can. Even--at least sometimes--when she's crying.

She's not the easiest when it comes time to go to bed. She pretty much needs mommy in order to fall asleep, which can be awfully difficult for mommy, both because she tends to have more "take home" work than I do and because she tends to fall asleep with her in the process and re-rise only with difficulty. Part of the problem is that it can take an hour or more to get her to sleep, which not only a big chunk of the evening by itself but also raises the likelihood of falling asleep together.

All in all, we're happy happy parents of a happy baby. We all have our ups and downs, but life is good.

This Changes Everything

Our daughter took her first real steps yesterday. I've been told that we'll look back on this as when everything changed.

Thea apparently already realizes this. She spent half the night crying inconsolably--I presume it was for her lost innocence.

It may, however, have been for her first french fries, which I suppose is a whole different loss of innocence. Her little digestive tract will never be the same.