Blowing & Drifting

Thanks to an jesting link from a Facebook friend, my girls heard Malvina Reynolds’ “Little Boxes” the other day, via a YouTube clip of the opening to the TV show Weeds. Unbelievably, they love the song – Reynolds’ unique voice and delivery, the funny lyrics, even the message. We listened to it about ten times [...]

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I’ve been a parent for almost eight years now, but tonight was the first time I’ve ever carried a sleeping kid in from the car. Genevieve fell asleep on a five-minute drive home from a friend’s house, and stayed asleep through the closing of the garage door, through the unbuckling of the safety-seat straps, through [...]

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Some five year olds are composing operas or dribbling basketballs ambidextrously or mastering a third language or playing Django Reinhardt on the guitar. My five year old, on the other hand, is playing with authorial convention and narrative structure (and giving the old heave ho to the bourgeois constraints of punctuation).

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Vivi bounced out of bed this morning (6:01!) and recounted this dream: I saw two little girls carve a circle in the snow. Then the circle howled like a whale and said, “Errrrrrrrrica!” Then a little thing popped out from behind a snowbank and yelled, “Now the monuments!” She added, “I have no idea what [...]

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I am ridiculously lucky to be able to take a lot of time off this holiday season, including all of the week between Christmas and New Year’s. Before Christmas, Shannon and I decided to make the most of this time by doing fun stuff with the girls each day. Early this afternoon, we headed over [...]

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True to tradition, Julia is making Christmas presents for the rest of us. She started making me a book – How to Be a Good Daddy! – but then abandoned it. This is a shame, given that the first page is GENIUS and because I would love to read the other chapters, especially number 6, [...]

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As the girls get bigger, sledding becomes easier and more fun. Already this winter, we’ve twice made the short drive to a relatively big and steep hill near Julia’s school – a hill they found too scary even last winter. They’ve loved it both times this winter, which I find exciting. And I’ve also been [...]

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Here is a partial list of make-believe “games” that my daughters play, and what explanation of each that I can offer: Kitchen (cooking and serving food in the play kitchen) House (being a family) Old Fashioned (being the Ingalls family, or another pioneer family) Rich (being a rich family) Poor (being a poor family) Mrs. [...]

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Tonight the girls entertained themselves while I cleaned up the kitchen with the “Naughty or Nice” game at santaclaus.net. They laughed for literally a half hour straight, putting everyone they could think of into the game: themselves, their friends, classmates, fictional characters. And on and on. Santa’s a pretty soft touch; he hardly ever gives anyone [...]

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Friday afternoon, as we headed downtown to do some window shopping, we admired the beautifully-decorated evergreen outside our neighbor Mary’s place. We mused about how it would be nice to have a nicely decorated tree outside our house too. Before I could even get to thinking much about how to make that happen, we’d run [...]

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The girls were outside this morning by 7:30, having a blast sledding in the half-inch of snow.

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Vivi woves lerdplay. She and I are the only people in the house who don’t think toying with words is pun-ishment. Her specialty, though, is coining and using nonsense words, the latest and perhaps greatest of which is “baba,” as in Baba? Beebee baba. This muffin is so baba! Daddy! I’m baba to see you! [...]

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Genevieve: “Know what my favorite population is?” Me: “Population? Uh, no.” G: “Seventeen thousand.” Julia: “Daddy, did you know that if you’re a human, you have thousands of ancestors who were cavemen?” Me: “Sure. You do, too.” J: “What? That’s crazy! I wonder if they looked like me…”

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The girls were VERY EXCITED about Halloween – Vivi way more than Julia, but still. They had a blast on Friday at the Halloween parties at school, and we had fun on Saturday carving pumpkins fun on Sunday at Carleton’s big Halloween carnival (despite this “I won’t smile for you” portrait) and fun today trick-or-treating – [...]

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I’m not much into the girls’ milestones. I mean, I pay attention to them and mark them as significant, but I don’t get choked up about first steps, going to kindergarten, or whatever. I figure that they’re growing up whether I like it or not, and that it’s not worth getting too sentimental about that [...]

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