Been a While Since I Wrote

But the end of the school year is always a frought time, even if you're not a teacher.

But I promise some summer hijinx will be posted shortly, no doubt.

We'll Hear a Play

At bath time lately, for reasons I do not know, The Littlest Critic has taken to asking for "a play."

This means telling some outlandish story as I sit on the toilet (not using it, don't be ridiculous; I mean on the lid). The stars of these particular theatricals are her stuffed animals and all rules are off. Elephants are married to bunnies and have puppies as children. Whatever. I used to do something similar with three hippo toys she had for the tub (Cloris, Doris, and Delores), but that eventually grew old.

At any rate, Monday night after dinner, The Wife and I were watching the Mel Gibson Hamlet, which is awesome, haters, completely awesome. TLC was about in the room, not really paying attention. She played some piano, she read from one of her books, put together some of her word magnets on a little plastic-coated metallic book, and she got off the couch and on the couch and off the couch and on the couch, etc. I tried pointing out parts of the story to her, but she didn't seem all that interested.

A few parts she did find interesting, but at one point she turned to The Wife and said, "Mama, I can't understand what they're saying." The Wife explained old forms of language. Fine.

The not so melancholy Dane.

Bath time comes later that night. In a fit of inspiration (or in a lack), I decided I would tell her the story of Hamlet completely. And so, with a huge cast of stuffed animals, I told the story from beginning to end, though I started with the poisoning of The King in a sort of prologue. I did the spurning and death of Ophelia, the stabbing of Polonius, the poisoning plot at the end, and I killed off all her animals save for a black cat, Horatio.

"Is that the whole story?" she asked me.

"Yes it is," I answered.

"The real whole story?" she asked again. I thought maybe she figured I was making it up.

(Sometimes when I'm reading to her at night and I think she's not paying attention, I add insane details to the story like "and then Peter Rabbit heard a rustling in the bushes. Out came an alligator who promptly gobbled up the little rabbit and Peter was never heard of again. The end." Some books have such ludicrous plot developments though that even when I'm reading 'em straight, she asks me if what I've just read is real.)

"Yes," I repeated, "that's the whole real story."

"You forgot something," she admonished with a smile.

"Yeah? What's that?"

"The play."

"The play? I just did the whole play."

"No, the play they watch on the stage. The one with the poison in the ear."

Caught. I had left out the play-within-a-play. She totally busted me like some kind of pint-sized theater critic chastising me for leaving out her favorite scene. Edit a text at your peril.

This kid just makes me love her more and more every day.

Of course, I left out Rosencrantz and Guildenstern too, but luckily she let that part slide.

The Littlest Critic FTW!

Lovin It!

On our way to school this morning. The Littlest Critic was bookin it, man!

Six Years Ago

I was awake at 3am, more alive than I've ever been in my life. Six years ago today I fell completely and totally in love with the funniest kid in the whole wide world.

Child development specialists explain that babies coo at around four weeks and laugh anywhere between two and six months of age.

That morning, fresh from her mom, after being scrubbed clean and put under a heat lamp, The Littlest Critic not only cooed, but she laughed. I didn't mishear her because The Wife heard it too and she did it more than once. Even a nurse commented. She entered the world with this crazy afro of bright coppery red curls to the astonishment of her two brunette parents and she must have thought it was hilarious to see our astonished faces.

There are some kids that aren't funny, but luckily I didn't get one of those. My life has been so amazing ever since I met this kid. Day for day she has given me more smiles and more laughs than anyone in the history of ever.

She has always been my happy baby, ever since that day. Six years already. Six years of making me laugh, of being attacked by the tickle monster in a game we call Tickle Tack, six years of running and jumping and growing, six years of reading stories (Moby Dick when she wasn't even a year old!), six years of playgrounds and zoos and vacations and wading pools and haircuts and just everything you can pack into life.

Six years old and she's losing her baby teeth and becoming a big girl now.

And she doesn't know it yet, but today she's getting her big girl bicycle. And I think she's going to laugh and love it.


I love you, little monkey of mine. Happy Birthday!

Finally. Sure, It's Second Billing, But...

...I'll take it.

Lament of the Daddy

I don't want a ticker parade, honest.

I don't want people throwing compliments my way and talking up what a great and brave decision I made choosing to stay home with my daughter when she was a baby. Women choose or are stuck staying home with babies every single day of the year and no one is praising them to the sky for their sacrifices or their sensitivity or any of that. In fact, if you're a guy, change a diaper some time. Not only will you get a taste of how the other half lives far more of their lives than you do, but every woman in a ten mile radius will declaim over what a great guy you are.

Yes, I chose to stay home with my daughter and it was the best four years of my life. The soulless, mindlessness of my evening job? I did that with one half of me brain tied behind my back, and it was all gravy. Because I got to stay home during the day and play and sing songs and have fun and go to the zoo and the museum and eat ice cream and set up the kiddie pool and go for long stomping walks in the rain and snuggle in a chair to read stories. I got to spend about six to eight uninterruped hours every day with my favorite person in the whole wide world and we could do whatever we wanted for as long as we wanted.

Until nap time, of course.

It's not bravery if you're having a blast, loving every minute of it, wishing it would never stop.

But still.

Yes, The Littlest Critic is a Daddy's Girl a lot of the time. I mean a lot. She got into trouble once at the grocery store, not more than a month ago, because she ran away from her mother so she could go with me when I went to look at wine. And when it's time to brush her hair for a fancy event or gymnastics class, it's always me she wants to do it. And if she had to pick one of us to play with, nine times out of ten, it's me.

But still.

But still and still and still.

I want one person to recognize what I did. The fun we had. Just one. Only one.

The other morning, as we all awoke one fine Sunday morning, TLC leaned over and she patted her mother on the arm and what did my daughter say to her? "Mama, guess what? I love you."

How adorable. It made my heart want to just burst into rainbow colored puppies with sprinkles on top.

Five minutes later, an identical pat on my arm. I turned to my daughter with expectation in my heart.

"Yes?" I asked my beloved daughter.

"Daddy," she said, "did I get a new toy?"

Just one incident you say? But it's not. I overhear them all the time, sitting on the couch. Out of nowhere, TLC comments, "I love you, mama."

Or we'll be in the bathroom, I'm giving her a bath, sitting next to the tub while TLC tells a little story with her ducks and her hippos. Apropos of nothing, she'll say, "I miss mommy. I love mama."

Or The Wife will go out with her friends some weekend night, and when it's bedtime and we're reading stories, TLC will make me stop and I'll have to get my cellphone so we can call her mother to tell her she misses her and wants her to come home.

And, yes, I'm certain my daughter loves me. I have no doubt of this in the world.

One time when we were racing along the street holding hands, she looked up at me with this look on her face, this look that just blazed with love and fun and happiness and it was because she was with me. and I thought I could die right then and it would be the apex of my life. Then we had to break eye contact to see where we were running, but I glanced back at The Wife to see if she had seen it too and she had and we were all just one big happy loving family.

But she doesn't say it.

I say it to her every day when I drop her off at school. I say it to her every night when it's time for lights out. I say it to her every chance I get and every time I remember out of the blue.

But not TLC.

So, Tuesday night, I come home from work. And there's this:



Come home Thursday night, there's this:


And on and on and on.

In all my life, almost six years old now, TLC has one single time made me an unprompted "I love you" message on paper. She wrote "I love J" in pen on a blank piece of paper, then a couple minutes later she took it back from me and wrote "and Sparrow" (her cat) at the bottom.

What's up with that?

Moms. You know what, moms? You guys piss me off. Even when you've got it easy, it's all about you. Grrrr.

Bill Cosby knows what I'm talking about (never mind the second part of the video where "Carlos Mencia" totally rips off this material like the punk ass joke thief that he is). You know it, Bill, you preach it, brother.

Whaaaat?

My other content done got hijacked. I'm writing this because there doesn't appear to be any posts when I look at this page.

Recent Fears and More

The Littlest Critic has for a while been obsessively worrying about fire. She requests that I go around the house unplugging things at bedtime to ensure that they won't start a fire. Needless to say, I embellish exactly what I'm going to unplug at night, because I'm just not going to do that to te refrigerator. 

In-depth and frequent explanations as to why there is a very low statistical probability of our house catching on fire haven't actually been of much use (and for some bizarre reason made her then start worrying that burglars and robbers were going to break in and steal her stuffed animals). Nor has going around the house demonstrating all the things we have in case of a fire, such as smoke detectors, fire extinguishers, and even a safety ladder under the bed for quick escapes out the window, been of much use.

Now, for the last year or so, we've been reading chapter books and by that I don't mean short little kiddie books broken up into ten page chapters. I mean the Winnie the Pooh series, Charlotte's Web, Coraline, the Junie B. Jones books, and more. At a recent Scholastic Book Fair at TLC's kindergarten, able to pick her own books, she chose something entitled The White Giraffe. (They were all out, much to her dismay and we got a copy for her for Christmas, but I digress.) I picked it up the other night to read to her, after her second run through Coraline to ready The Wife for the film, and read the back.

The night Martine Allen turns eleven years old is the night her life changes completely. Martine’s parents are killed in a fire, so she must leave her home to live on an African wildlife reserve with a grandmother she never even knew she had...

.

Well, reading that kind of thing, I decided that we would skip this story for a bit. Not that we'd never read it, but probably during her big obsessive fear phase, maybe not the best bedtime story.

But, I asked TLC while she was in the bath if she wanted to know why we were going to skip the story even though she's been requesting it. This is what followed:

TLC: Okay. Why?

Me: Well, something bad happens in the book and I thought it might scare you right now.

TLC: What? What happens?

Me: So, the little girl the book is all about? Her parents die.

TLC: How.

Me: Well, they die in a fire. [I then read her the above back jacket copy.]

TLC: What??? That's horrible. On her birthday? That's awful. That' would completely ruin her birthday party.

Me: (Trying not to laugh) Well, yes. That would ruin her birthday party. Among other things.

TLC: I can't believe someone's birthday could get ruined like that.

Me: Me either.

So, of course, perspective is obviously everything. Imagine what she'd have thought if this character's inconsiderate parents had been burned on Christmas Eve. She might not even have gotten her stocking!

Milestone

Tonight, The Littlest Critic completely and totally wowed her parents by reading the entirety of Green Eggs and Ham. She's a month away from turning six, and she's just blowing our minds totally.

If you don't have kids, maybe you can't quite get your mind around why we're just so jumping with joy here in the Critical House, but – seriously – we're losing our MINDS.

Yay for The Littlest Critic! She gets all her Valentine's Day treats tomorrow!

Yay!

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.)

Our Robot Overlords

The Littlest Critic: Eve for President.
Me: Robots can't be president.
TLC: (Pause.) President of Outer Space.

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.

Deep Thought

Sometimes, when I'm folding laundry, the only way I can tell the difference between my 30-something Wife's clothes and my 5-year-old daughter's is to look at the sleeves. If the arms are way too long to be The Littlest Critic's, it goes into The Wife's pile.

Socks are actually harder.

Yes We Can

Politics Through the Eyes of a Five Year Old

Four years ago, while watching the GOP convention in New York City, The Littlest Critic had this unprompted response:




Four years later, during the Democratic Primary, when we were a Hillary household, all of us rooting for the first girl president, TLC rendered this campaign poster:



And tonight, while watching the half hour Barack Obama campaign commercial (well done by the way; very slick production values, excellent cinematography and editing; successful use of surrogates and real-life stories; I was pleasantly surprised as I have memories of Ross Perot and his graphs and such from way back when), TLC rendered this portrait (among several others) demonstrating which candidate currently has her support:






I love the jacket, shirt, and tie action going on here.

Yes, TLC was a huge, I mean HUGE, Hillary fan. When The Critical Wife took her to a rally in Lyndhurst, TLC beamed, "She's beautiful!" upon catching sight of the former First Lady. She made her own campaign sign, which we displayed in our front window, and she regularly chanted, "Hill-a-ry! Hill-a-ry! Hill-a-ry!"

Suffice to say, there were quite a few tears shed when it became obvious that Ms. Clinton wouldn't again be occupying the White House. I left the breaking of the bad news to my wife.

As consolation, we regularly read (and still do) Grace for President. Buy it for the girls in your life. And for lighter fare, Duck for President.

(Now, I'll admit right here that when I hear Obama speak, I'm giddy and swayed by his soaring poetic abilities, but I can't help still crying a little inside when he talks about "affordable healthcare" instead of going the full progressive route and promising universal healthcare instead. That still remains one of my political Holy Grails.)

Anyway, going for walks in our neighborhood is fun stuff, as we Obama supporters outnumber the McCain supporters, as measured by sign displays, somewhere on the area of about eight to one. The two houses right across the street from our polling location both have Obama signs in their front yard.

We're gonna win this one, folks. All the haters, all the crap out there. We're gonna rise above all that and we just might see real change.

We have hope here. The hope of a little girl with her crayons.

Vocab Lately

The other day, while The Littlest Critic, The Critical Wife, and I were going some place in the car, I was gently teasing TLC, as is my wont. Finally, after having heard enough of it, she said to me, "Stop taunting me."

She's five.

Later that same day, The Wife and I in the middle of a conversation, were interrupted by TLC pointing out that "that's descending," referring to something in our conversation that was, in fact, going down in a metaphoric sense.

For the record, again, she is five.

Although to be fair, she's closer now to six than five.

We have always tried to model conversation for her, using occasional big words when talking about things with her instead of going for babyish alternatives.

But every so often she throws out something like "taunting," and I'm just blown away.

Zoo Day

The Littlest Critic and I spent Sunday at the zoo and it was the perfect day.

If you really want to see the animals to their best advantage, what you want is to go to the zoo when it's overcast and a little breezy. The animals tend to be more active then – and were they ever on Sunday. The polar bear was diving and splashing repeatedly in the water, the tigers were pacing instead of sleeping as were the lions, the gorilla jumped around a lot and threw one of his toy barrels, the snow leopard looked at us with an open mouth then put her giant paws up on a tree trunk and scratched just like a big ol kitty-cat.

The cheetahs were pacing and I kept trying to get good pictures with my camera phone, but it's a bit hard as camera phones totally suck at photos.

But once, when the cheetah was nearing the fence down from us, I ran right over to the fence where it came to and snapped the picture below. The cheetah was a bit startled at my approach and hissed and growled at me, a deep throaty growl like thunder in her throat. It was awesome in that back of your neck hair standing on end way. And I was crouching only about eighteen inches away.

I fiddled with some of this, demonstrating my poor photoshopping skilz.

Meanwhile, TLC was much more interested in putting her Zoo Key into all the machines that would tell you interesting facts about the animals. She's almost always more interested in other things than the animals, like the press screen where you put your hand on a chimpanzee's handprint and it lights up a picture of a chimp. Or the playground near the Primate House. Or acorns. I had to insist that she could only take one crabapple from the tree near the parking lot. Insist, and insist, and insist once again.

You can show her enormous tigers on the prowl and she'll glance at them with minor interest – but then a squirrel crosses our path and she's all enthusiasm. It's kind of funny, and just a little irritating at times.

If You Don't Know What This Is

You're not alone.

Apparently, it is a bird known as a Chukar (Alectoris chuka), a game bird native to Europe and Asia, introduced many and many a year ago in the western United States and southwestern Canada.


What exactly one was doing in our backyard in Ohio, we may never know, but when The Wife and The Littlest Critic were out in the backyard, this little bugger was hopping around our woodpile. They thought it was hurt as it didn't fly, which apparently isn't really the Chukar's strong suit, and instead the little thing (about duck size) hopped right down the driveway and out of our yard.

As you may imagine, this has caused quite a stir in the Critical household, and now we are naming things Chukar, we are talking about plans to catch the Chukar should it return, and we are learning more and more about the Chukar.

Fiction, Monotony, Chrysalis

I'm not sure what it is exactly, but when I was a stay-at-home dad, our days were always different, but The Littlest Critic and I still had a routine. We were on the clock. We woke around eightish, had breakfast and some cartoons, then got dressed, brushed our teeth, and went out to play somewhere. This could be the zoo, the world's biggest playground, the library if it was rainy out, the mall or Target or some shopping venture if we needed stuff, or it could have just been errands.

But, we'd be home around 1ish for lunch, stories, and then nap. After she was asleep, I'd make dinner for The Wife, who'd get home around 3-3:30, we'd eat, then I'd go off to my night job.

That was four days a week. One weekday I had off, and everything was the same except that I'd not leave for work.

And I finished writing not one bit of fiction the whole time and could barely focus on anything narrative based at all. I couldn't write very much in the parental vein of "the life of a stay-at-home dad with kid" stuff nor could I make up completely fictional stories. Something about the predictability of our routine sort of stifled me in that direction.

I tried. Boy, did I try. I probably started thirty stories or so that went about four pages and then nothing. I wrote a few well-received emails detailing the lives of TLC and I as we struggled with fish-death and things like that.

But overall, kaput. So I took up writing book reviews as a way of keeping something simmering on the writing desk. I worked at honing sentences and didn't look too far past 2,000 words at the longest.

Almost a year has passed since that life ended and my new "Take the Morning Train" life began with TLC in school and so on and in that time, I've written (and completed) four stories that I'm really proud of – one of them around 25 pages long. Story ideas are coming at me left and right. I have dreams that are almost fully fledged narratives again that I can fiddle with on the page.

Something happened when I started spending more time by myself, when I started walking a slightly different path to the office from the train each morning. Something changed, but I can't put my finger on it exactly, but the change was somewhere inside. Maybe it was all the energy I spent on telling TLC stories throughout the day. Where did this funny shaped pine cone come from? Why do birds do that? Do you know what that squirrel is going to do when it gets home tonight? Maybe that soaked up all my direction for narrative. Maybe. But on the walk in this morning, I wondered about the new narrative turn my life has taken.

It's hard to tell yourself your own independent story when you're in the middle of reading one at that very second. Maybe that's it. I'm not sure.

All I know is that I'm writing again. I'm writing again and it feels fantastic. It feels better than it ever did before.