Our Robot Overlords, Part Two

Several days in the planning stages, using a collection of recycled materials, behold the sculpture robot put together by The Littlest Critic and your humble blogger.





It's WALL-E, clearly.






Not that you need this additional graphic for comparison. Just putting this up in case any of the fine folks at Pixar stumble across my blog and, bedazzled by my artistic vision, seek to hire me. (I'm especially proud of the hands.)

Art

Yes, yes, parents tend to gush about their children's talents (real and imagined), but I'd like to show you why The Littlest Critic gets the highest rating in her kindergarten art class. They usually only have two stars as the highest, but her teacher created a special three-star designation just for TLC. Which, of course, thrills us to pieces.

Thus, behold below, the latest production, front and back. The front is the art, the back is the title, wisely written in crayon so as to not bleed through and ruin the composition. This piece, in case you're not able to read the ranging handwriting below, is titled "The Red Balloons Fly Over the Cat."

Awesome.

Storytelling, or Who's Telling this Tale?

For the last month or so, The Littlest Critic has been enthralled by the stories I've been telling at bath time.

Over the months shortly after the birth of our daughter, The Wife and I were gifted three purple hippos with yellow inner tubes for the bath. With temperature sensitive letters spelling out "HOT" on their bottoms, these toys informed new parents, idiots that we are, when we ran too hot a bath for our newborns.

The stories featuring these hippos are alternately about three hippo sisters, Cloris, Delores, and Doris or three hippo brothers Boris, Morris, and Norris. The sisters had real, classically constructed stories with an introduction, rising action, climax, falling action, resolution. The brothers stories were just madcap nonsense about getting cookies off high shelves or playing catch.

In the beginning, there were only the three sisters and their friend, The Green Bear, a bath toy we found last summer trapped in the filter of the public pool that we could not (COULD NOT) leave behind. Other bath toys, such as the Jewel Duck, the Corn Duck, or The Boy and The Girl, could join in the adventures, but it was pretty much a hippo and bear only show.

After a while, I got a little case of writer's block (although what we'd call it in this instance, I don't know) and I began toying with the notion of using classical sources from antiquity when I was trapped. At first, it was hard digging through source material to find the right Greek myths that I could pilfer (like Shakespeare, he said, preeningly), then I stumbled upon the Thousand and One Nights scenario.

This has worked like gangbusters. The three hippo sisters don't want to go to bed. Their daddy, The Green Bear, makes them go through all the required cleaning rituals, then tucks them into bed. The wily sisters, wanting to stay awake, offer to tell their father stories. He, being a bear who enjoys a tale more than most, always acquiesces and lets the three sisters tell one story each.

The first sister usually tells a Three Hippo Brothers story that is some kind of nonsense (though I've lately slipped in some small math problems for the hippos to solve in order to get the cookies or the candy they want). The second sister tells a classic tale. (The night I told a variation on Pygmalion where a lonely hippo makes a statue of a duck to be a friend, a statue that comes to life, the story proved such a hit that I was required to tell it three times in various ways.) The third sister usually tells a very repetitive story about a bee that visits a playground and everything he flies over and around. This last story typically puts The Green Bear Daddy to sleep and the Three Hippo Sisters celebrate their victory by staying up and playing all night.

Ahem. That, my friends, has been the routine for a while now.

Until. Until TLC decided she wanted to take over the storytelling duties. Stepping back from this, having had time to mull it over, I am usually quite pleased that she's shown such an interest in being a storyteller like me.

But, but, but, at the time she does it, I'm really and actually pretty frustrated. Hey! I think, I'm the one telling the story here. I've actually taken time out to make a good parallel, hippo-centric version of the Judgment of Paris. This is real work that I'm putting into these bath time adventures. Now she's going to sidetrack the whole business for her nonsense?

I always let her tell her stories though. They're usually pretty funny. High on nonsense, goofy as all get out, they're like some dadaist prank of a children's book or a trip through the mind of a five year old Dali (incidentally, the last time we visited the Cleveland Museum of Art, this was TLC's favorite picture; while it's not particularly amusing, she thought it a stitch).

All of this, mind you, is just one big preface so I can present to you, unedited, as transcribed by me seconds after its completion, one of the bath time stories, as told by The Littlest Critic. Enjoy.

They all played in the park and they played ping poe pong pango peego. And they hit the baseball right into their mouths, and it was ice cream. It was an ice cream baseball.

And they hit it with a bat! Another one! Another one! Another one! Another ice cream baseball.

And it landed right in the mouth of a lion! And the people saw the teeter totter would be a good way to shoot him up to the sky. And the lion ROARED and he jumped.

The End.

Sophocles better watch out. There's some pretty stiff competition on the way. Oh yeah.

Who?

"It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer. Charlotte was both."

The Wife has been reading non-picture books to The Littlest Critic for about a month now. About a year ago, I discovered she'd sit still for a chapter of Winnie-the Pooh and on some days for two, but I never tried a sustained narrative. Generally speaking, TLC's preference is for brightly colored pages of wacky adventures like Scaredy Squirrel or Pinkalicious, but she is getting bigger and she is listening very well.

At any rate, last night was the closing chapter of Charlotte's Web. The Wife finished the book, reading slowly and surely the last two sentences. She shut the book, turned to TLC and said, "You know who is a true friend and a good writer?"

TLC asked, "Who?"

The Wife: Daddy.
TLC: Who?
The Wife: Daddy.
TLC: Who?
The Wife: Daddy.
TLC: Who?

Note: this was not done as some kind of game or bit of silliness. The Wife is a teacher. That is something easy to get your head around when you're a kid, especially if you go to school. But a writer? How do you explain that in a way that makes any sense to a five year old and have them truly understand it?

Ah well. When I was her age, I wanted to be a fire fighter.

Partisans

First, let us begin with this video of The Littlest Critic, unprompted, in action almost four years ago. I think you'll gather the scene and situation on the television rather easily. A hint: New York City, 2004.



Flash forward four years later, The Wife, on a whim (actually, she learned about it at the last minute and decided to go, taking TLC) attends a Hillary Clinton rally at nearby Brush High School. Here's how she described TLC's reaction:

she waited outside in the cold after a ten minute walk and then sat quietly in an auditorium (the overflow room) for four hours for a ten minute glance at Hillary Clinton ... she was appropriately excited when Hillary walked into the room, her eyes going wide, her jaw dropping, her face lit up like she just saw a Christmas present, and her hands appropriately clapping and ... she said "I thought she was beautiful" about Hillary Clinton.

Tonight, when I got home, this is what, again, unprompted, my four-going-on-five year old daughter decided to make.


I think it safe to say that we are very proud parents of a member of the next generation of feminism.

It's a Beautiful Day!

For the last two weeks, The Littlest Critic has been bereft of her stuffed giraffe, Dedan. A gift from Grandma, this toy accompanied the book Dedan Saves the Day. She took it to school to have at naptime and we put it neatly into her cubby.

Then someone stole it or did something else nefarious to it, and this little brute did it before naptime, so TLC was without Dedan for naptime. Needless to say, she did not nap. That night, she told me there was another little boy there who had a giraffe similar to Dedan and the last time she'd taken hers to school, he had thought hers was his. Not unlike the plot of the recent, excellent sequel Knuffle Bunny Too: A Case of Mistaken Identity. (If you're unfamiliar with Mo Willems, stop being a chump and check him out!)

Try as I might, I couldn't get TLC to cough up a name of the little boy, then she later began denying the story and muddying the waters with conflicting accounts. This, this is why children are so rarely called to the witness stand.

We searched high and low, myself, The Wife, the teachers, the teachers' aides. Everyone. We looked in the stack of cots, we triple checked her cubby, we rooted through the tubs of blankets & pillows, we checked shelves. Everywhere.

Nada. Dead end. A notice was placed on the dry erase board: "Missing: One giraffe." And we waited. And waited.

Meanwhile, over the past two months, TLC has been trying desperately to learn how to snap her fingers. She's rubbed her finger on her thumb over and over. She's wept bitter tears at her failure. She's made me snap my fingers over and over to watch how it's done and we've done that until she's just been mad at me for being able to snap my fingers.

Yesterday, The Wife went to pick up TLC at school, and my daughter ran to her and said, "It's a beautiful day! I got Dedan back and look!" Whereupon she awesomely snapped her fingers again and again. "I can snap!"

And she snapped all day and she snapped all night. And when it was bedtime, she lay in bed, holding Dedan clutched under one arm, snapping her fingers in the dark.

It really was a beautiful day.