Cerin Amroth

No doubt I’ve scraped myself on some occasion in the past while keeping Ella or Dominic (OK, probably Dominic) from dashing into an empty street or parking lot.  But yesterday I took it to the next level, both in terms of the danger averted and the injury sustained.

We were at Dutch Village in Holland, and Ella and her cousins and Suanna were riding on one of those twirl-the-swings-in-a-big-circle rides.  Dominic was hanging about the periphery and I was taking action shots of Ella squealing with delight as she whirled higher and higher.  There was just one strand of chain blocking the entryway to the area beneath the ride, but Dominic was respecting the barrier, and seemed content to just watch what was going on.

Then, all of a sudden, he wasn’t and he wasn’t.  Without warning he darted underneath the chain and toward the swings, which were spinning well above his head at that point, but still.  What should have been a straightforward lunge-and-crab was complicated by the chain, which I managed to snag as I vaulted over it, landing hard on my knee in the gravel and reaching out to snag the D-man’s ankle before he could make it too far.  The wound, while not serious, was gauze-worthy as opposed to bandaid-worthy.  Dominic, of course, found the whole thing quite hilarious.

In follow-up to Ella’s car conversation with Nate about Senator Obama, she and I had a conversation on the bed last night about it. She informed me that Barack Obama (she had a hard time saying his name) wants to be President in 3 days, but that another guy also wants to be President. This is where I expected her to mention John McCain. Instead, she said that George Bush doesn’t want to give up the Presidency, so Barack Obama is going to have to throw him in jail.

Perhaps considering a pardon will be among the things confronting new President Obama?

Barack Obama has been on Ella’s radar for a couple months now.  She’s peered over my shoulder as I watched video clips online and asked me who the guy was I was looking at.  She understands that he is somebody who wanted to be President, and she gets that the President is the person most in charge of our country.  The whole notion of “country” remains a bit slippery for her, but she’s had the general idea for a while.

Today for the first time she asked me who the President is right now, and I told her his name and she asked if I liked him and I answered honestly.  Then she asked (already knowing the answer — testing for consistency) who I wanted to be the next President, and I explained how there was going to be an election and how everyone in the country would get to help decide between Barack Obama or John McCain and that I was planning to vote for Barack Obama.

She said, as she so often does these days, “Why?”  And it’s a tough question to answer to a four-year old.  I definitely didn’t want to bring the whole “ill-advised military fiasco” angle into it.  So I explained that I thought the President should be somebody who cares about all the people in the whole country, and that our current President only seemed to care about people who were like him, and that I hoped that Barack Obama would care about everybody, even the ones who were different from him.  It was the best I could come up with on the spot.

“Does Barack Obama visit people in their houses?” she asked.   I said that yes, he did, but that there were so many people in the country that he could only visit a few.  “Will he visit our house?”  I said no, probably not, and that seemed to be a sticking point for her — I mean, how could he not visit us?  “He’s very very busy with his job and with trying to become President,” I said, but she didn’t quite buy it.  She’s been somewhat envious of all the yard signs that our neighbors have up front, and I told her that we could get a Barack Obama sign to put up in our yard too, and I suspect that in her mind if someone is kind enough to put your sign up in their yard then a personal visit is the very least you could do.

Later today she was hard at work at the table making drawings on roll-out paper with a sticky strip on the top.  Just now she came running up to me: “Daddy!  Daddy!  Come look quick!”  She led me to the kitchen, where she has stuck four of her drawings on the wall.  “Do you see?  Barack Obama came for a visit and he left these signs!”

Senator Obama, sorry to have missed you.  Feel free to swing by again — I daresay my daughter is expecting it.

The other day Dominic started saying “No.”  I didn’t count it as much of a milestone, since he had already been extremely well-versed at communicating the concept of “no” — the vocalization was just the icing on the cake, as it were.  (Side note: his favorite use of the word “no” is while putting his hand on things on or near my desk that he knows hes not allowed to touch.  For example, he’ll put his hand on the power cord of my laptop, look at me, and say “Noooooo.”  Then he’ll yank the cord.)

At any rate, I found myself wondering what sorts of thing Ella had been saying at this age, and as it happens, I have a rather precise record of just that information.  While her articulation wasn’t really there yet she was definitely putting words together.  And Dominic, at the same age, isn’t close to that.

Typical second-child behavior, I know.  But for all that, they don’t really seem all that different.  Dominic babbles like he’s talking constantly these days, and his babbles can be extremely expressive.  And his comprehension often surprises me — today he was holding his sandals by the front door, eager to get going, when I said “Sorry D — we have to change your diaper before we put your shoes on.”  At which point he dropped his shoes and made a beeline for the changing table, and afterward went right back to his shoes.  The main difference seems to be that Dominic just isn’t interested — he’s perfectly happy to communicate through babbling and through his facial expressions.  And hey, so far at least, they get the job done.

One of the perks of the new house is that we have space for bikes again — though with the laundry room fast filling with odds and ends, not near as much space as you’d think!  Today I took Ella to REI to look at bikes, and we ended up leaving with one for her — a reward for being such an incredibly good sport with the move and all the chaos surrounding it, which she most certainly has been.

Keep in mind, this is the girl who barely ever used the scooter she got when she was 2, and only occasionally used the tricycle she got when she was 3 — and even then, in only the most sultry of spurts.  I was expecting a slow warming to the notion of a bike with training wheels.  Instead, I found myself hustling behind a speed demon through the aisles of REI with Dominic on my shoulders, cautioning her to slow down for turns and avoid the other customers.  She loved it.

Gender neutral colors appear to be foreign to the kiddie-bike world, but given the pink vs. red-or-blue choices, she went with a pink bike, more I suspect because it felt more comfortable than anything to do with the color.  (Me: “It’s pink, Ella.  Do you like that about it?”  Ella: “I like it anyway, Dad …”)  I also gave her free reign on her choice of helmet color and she went for the one with flames on the side colored blood red, kryptonite green, and eldritch-sunrise yellow.  (”I like green!”)

Later that afternoon we took the bike to the flat area by the school playground so she could get some more practice.  The main problem she had was a tendency to reflexively pedal backwards and stop herself even when she wanted to go forward, and after a few stops and starts she stood there clenching her fists at her sides yelling “Daddy!  I!  Am!  So!  Frustrated!”  And then — a big first — she stopped and took a long, deep breath to calm herself without me even having to tell her to do it.  Admittedly, it did little to allay the frustration, but after a few more minutes she was getting the hang of it.

And of course, there was a scary moment, as she was pedaling down the sidewalk away from the playground and I was relatively far from her, keeping an eye on Dominic, who was flirting with precipices up at the top of the kiddie slide.  The sidewalk Ella was on sloped downward, and she must have started rolling without pedaling.  I heard her panicked voice — “DAD!” — and saw her rolling toward the parking lot, too taken aback to remember how to brake.

I can’t say for sure that I teleported across some of the space between me and her, but if I did it was one of those super powers that only comes when you’re not thinking about it and that you really wish you could harness for everyday uses.  I got to her just as the bike was nosing into the parking lot.  (Only parked cars anywhere around, fortunately.)  She was a little bit freaked out, though not as much as I expected her to be.  “Ella,” I said, “How do you make the bike stop?”  She was still on it and she demonstrated.  And then I saw the look on her face as she realized “Doh!  That’s what I should have done!”  Then we talked about a bit more about how important practice is because then you remember how to do things even when you’re scared, and for once I could see that she was getting it, really getting it, and not just nodding politely along.

The challenge going forward, at least when it’s just me and the kids, is how to give Ella free reign on the bike and still keep Dominic entertained.  I actually left my bike in the bike room at the old, old apartment in Arlington — we had nowhere to put it in the last apartment — and I’m hoping beyond hope that it’s still there because it had a bike seat attached to it that would be perfect for Big D.  If it’s gone, though, a new bike for me is not in the near future, what with our healthy moving-in debt to IKEA and Lowes.  We’ll figure it out.

Dominic is trying real hard to say words these days.  “Na!” for “snack” comes through quite clearly, as does “mil!” for “milk.”  Also, you know that scene from Ice Age where the sabretooth plays peekaboo with the human baby?  Ella likes to play that with Dominic:  (snarly voice) “Where’s the baaaby?” (pause) “THERE he is!”  Dominic loves that game, and pushes his vocal chords to the limit to say both parts.  So it comes out, roughly “We da beee?” and “Der eee ehh!”

Ella, meanwhile is working on theology:

“Daddy, is God near and far away?”

“Um, yes . . .”

“And is God far far away?”

“Yes.”

“And far far far away?”

“Yes.”

“And is God far far far far away?”

“Yep.”

(incredulously) “Is God even in a different country?”

They two of them just had a grand time in South Carolina, though not, admittedly, a grand a time as their parents.  Pictures will come one of these days — we’re still unpacking.

We’re in the “too much is happening to sit down and write about it” phase right now.  New house, separate bedrooms for the kids, boxes everywhere.

Ella is handling the move extremely well.  She spent a good bit of the afternoon playing in the front yard while the movers took stuff in, kicking the soccer ball, pushing around on her scooter, and periodically shouting commands to them:  “That bookshelf goes in Dominic’s room!”  “Don’t put that in the kitchen while Mr. David is painting!”

Later on we were reading a book on her bed in her new room in preparation for a nap that never ended up happening.  “Isn’t it exciting to have this new room?” I exclaimed, expecting her to respond with the perky enthusiasm she has shown toward the whole move so far.  But instead she thought for a moment, and then shook her head tentatively, all the while watching me for my response.  “Sometimes it takes a little while to get used to new places and things,” I said.  She nodded vigorously.  “Maybe it will take me some time to get used to it … just like Dominic!”

Dominic was an apt object lesson in this case because his response to the move so far has been considerably rockier.  Our first phase of box-packing a few weeks ago didn’t phase him much, but as we started upending everything to pack it away more recently he has definitely become anxious.  Of course he can’t vocalize his specific concerns, but if you had to try to deduce them based on his actions, he is very worried that, in the process of moving all this stuff around to wherever the hell it is going, he, because he is small, will accidentally get left behind or stuffed in a box or otherwise overlooked and will never see us ever again.  He has been putting the “cling” in “clingy,” and Suanna is catching the brunt of it.  Some of the time it’s just that, what with all that’s going on, we let too long go for him without milk or a snack.  But other times he just wants to hold on tight to someone to keep the world from spinning.  Tonight I rocked him on my shoulder before bed he clung as tightly as if we were standing on a windy cliff, even after he was asleep.  Finally, after a long time, his body relaxed and I was able to settle him into his crib.

New digs means new places to put the kids’ stuff.  Should the tricycle go in the front or the back?  We’re in the middle of a row of six townhouses so the decision carries some permanence.  Should the toys go in the bedrooms, which are upstairs, or in the basement, where the TV and computer desk are?  There’s a story about Calvin College, possibly true, that they didn’t put the walkways across the Commons right away, but waited to see where natural paths were made in the grass by the routes students chose to take going place to place, and then they put the pavement there.  I plan to follow a similar plan with toy placement: they’ll all start up in the kids’ rooms, and after a period of observation as to how often they are brought downstairs, and how far, final toy placement decisions can be made.

Tomorrow: the sacred pilgrimage to IKEA, no doubt the first of several.  My enthusiasm for the trip will be directly proportional to the number of hours Dominic stays asleep in his crib tonight.

Check out this picture.

Can you tell whether that’s Ella or Dominic? What’s your guess?

UPDATE: The answer is in the comments now.

Today, given the choice of what to watch on TV while we were working on supper, Ella chose . . .

. . . not The Incredibles, but the “Making Of” documentary in the bonus material on the Incredibles DVD. I think we must have watched part of it at some point in the past, though I don’t recall when. This time she watched the whole thing attentively, pausing the DVD in order to examine the action figures on the shelf behind John Lasseter when he was being interviewed.

I’m sure plenty of people would find her choice bizarre, and only a tiny number of people would find it a reason to be particularly proud or her. I belong to the latter group.

I have added new photos to the site. They include pictures from the spring fair at Ella’s preschool this past Saturday.