Blowing & Drifting

There are more gaps in my pop-culture awareness than there are holes in a Sarah Palin policy speech, but thanks to the internet I can address one of those holes by watching the videos for all six of Lady Gaga’s number-one songs. Which I will now do, with the grounding assumption that I have never [...]

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Julia improved on my shot of the girls at the downtown coffeeshop on one of our Saturday-morning bagel outings with this excellent rendering. The lights are realistic, if somewhat (say, 1000%) oversized in relation to the three of us at our table. Vivi was wearing heart-kneed pants; I was not holding my coffee mug over my [...]

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Julia is semi-obsessed with the cafeteria at her elementary school. More than once in the past week, we’ve had to look up the menu on the school website and talk about all the options. And since Julia is Julia, this has led to art: a drawing of kids getting their food. It’s pretty accurate. You [...]

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Genevieve drew this portrait of me last Sunday. The text reads as follows:
To Dad
By Genna
Love Vivi
This is you!
And this is me
She didn’t draw herself into the picture, though. She also said that I’m wearing a brown dress, not pants and a shirt, and then laughed at how crazy that idea was.

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Overheard, 6:15 p.m.
Vivi, pointing at the easel. “Julia, what you tryin’ to show me over dere?”
Julia: “I was just showing you the word ‘vowel,’ and that it starts with the letter ‘v’.”
Vivi: “Oh. I a growd-up, so I don’t hear you good. My ears don’t work.”
Me: “Genevieve, most grown-ups’ ears work fine. It’s just me [...]

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In five (or six) units…
1. Articles I Read:
A. Popular
“God Said Multiply, and Did She Ever” (Joseph Berger, New York Times, February 18, 2010)
When Yitta Schwartz died last month at 93, she left behind 15 children, more than 200 grandchildren and so many great- and great-great-grandchildren that, by her family’s count, she could claim perhaps 2,000 [...]

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The nordic events at the Vancouver Winter Olympic Games were colossally exciting to watch. The best single moment for me was Billy Demong’s gold-winning attack in the last nordic combined race, last Thursday. Demong’s medal – part of huge American haul in nordic combined which also included two silvers from Johnny Spillane and a silver [...]

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In today’s nordic combined event at the Olympics, Americans Bill Demong and Johnny Spillane raced extremely well, working together to take over the race and then, with just one Austrian skier in tow, to launch a vicious attack that brought them to the finish line for a gold and silver. A GOLD AND A SILVER! [...]

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As any book on raising kids will tell you, all kids have imaginary friends. Julia invented a few, or invested actual stuffed animals with fully fleshed-out personalities and histories, though she’s always preferred setting up complicated scenarios based on a book, a story, a TV show, or whatever. (See “Nativity Scenes, the Neverending Power of…,” [...]

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The other day, Laura Valaas, an e-friend who happens to be one of the best cross-country skiers in North America, emailed me to ask if I would be willing to try out a new product she’d developed: the “BootBuddy,” a little plastic doodad that snaps into the front of your ski boot to protect the [...]

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Julia’s facility with words has always been strong; she was talking as well at two or three as many five-year-olds (including some of her current classmates). Since starting kindergarten, she has, as we expected, rapidly acquired and improved her writing and reading skills. She’s always loved to draw pictures, so being able to label some [...]

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The four girls who wait for the bus each morning – my kindergartner, two neighbors who are in first grade, and the preschooler hanger-on – have discovered that the big old snowbank at the stop makes an excellent slide, and that sliding makes the long, cold wait for Bus #14 less cold and long.

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Perhaps because of the nationalism on display at the Olympics, Genevieve’s preschool class made flags today. I rather like her flag, and her flagwaving technique.

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Based on my careful viewing of the events raced on snow at the Olympics so far, I propose the following index of the various athletes:
-1 beers: ski jumpers, because they can’t afford the calories
0 beers: ski jump champions, because now they can celebrate
1 beer: biathletes, because they have to rehydrate, but not so much that [...]

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The Saturday morning daddy-daughter breakfasts at the downtown coffeeshop incline Julia toward thinking about crucial issues in her life, such as whether cream cheese is better than peanut butter (it isn’t), when she can have coffee (when she’s older), and why we can’t go out for breakfast on both Saturday and Sunday. So far, she’s [...]

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