The Extroverted Kid

Every time I think Child Harbat might be not quite as extroverted as I observe, she does something that reinforces my beliefs.  I’m used to being forced to be an audience member for tricks in the pool, shows in the living room, shows in the hallway, dance routines, puppet shows, the list is as manifold as layers in an onion.  She will creep out of bed at night to come in the living room because she has to “tell me something” and gets furious if she is interrupted during one of her long rambling stories.  This kid loves to talk and be around people.  But she gets tired and cranky through overstimulation and I can tell when she needs a little break.  Her quiet time doesn’t include naps any more, as much as she needs them, but she’ll instead fall asleep in the car in a matter of minutes, sometimes in the middle of a sentence.  What happens during quiet time at home?  Usually it involves some kind of project.  And in case you had any doubt about who wants to be at the center of the social wheel, see the exhibit below.  Who is in the center, the gravity well of all planetary bodies, the origin point, the aleph, the source?  You guessed it.

Bedtime Stories My Daughter Hates, Contd.

Child Harbat:  “Babbo, I want you to tell me a story tonight but not like you usually tell it.”

Me [acting innocent]:  “Oh, like how?”

CH:  “Okay, I’m going to tell you but this ISN’T the story for tonight.  Okay?”

Me:  “Proceed.”

CH:  “Once upon a time there was a banana.  And its name was tomato.  THE END!”

Me:  “I liked that story!  But okay, here’s a real story.  Once upon a time, three animals decided to open a pet shop.  There was a giraffe, who was good at getting things off the top shelf, a rat, who was good at burrowing through the garbage, and a polar bear, who was white and made things cold.  But none of them had any business management or accounting skills and the shop shut down within a month.  The end.

CH [scowling]:  “Babbo, that was a banana story!”

Me:  “Night night!”

The Happy Children

The end of the day is tough for everyone.  Child Harbat is usually over-stimulated and tired, Number Two has had a full day of preschool and has no idea how to read his body’s own cues that he is accelerating toward the bedtime wall at dangerous speed.  Now that it’s light out so late we are enjoying taking an afternoon stroll when we get home from work/school.  Number Two will walk to the porch, wrestle down his stroller, climb into the seat, and look up with the exact same look that dogs give when they are holding their leash at the front door:  “Could I be any more clear about this?”  So we push Number Two in the stroller and he watches the world roll by, a pretty nice way to ease into the evening.  CH will hop on her scooter and zoom around the neighborhood, then we all crash into the kitchen for dinner and everyone is:  A)hot, B)tired, C)grumpy.  Why grumpy?  It has something to do with cleaning the kitchen, making a new meal, and providing relief for screaming and whining children who have transformed into cloven-footed horned demons who DEMAND FLESH NOW!  How do they respond when given food?

You know, this picture is familiar.  Let’s jump in the time warp blog-o-rewinder and see how Baby Harbat reacted when I tried to take away a piece of bread.  See the same misery, the food ready to fall from the mouth during protest about not having enough food?  Do we all see the irony here?  What?  WHAT?  I can’t hear you over the crying.

 

Mr. Noisy

Number Two child is working on his speaking skills.  This involves yelling EVERYTHING AT MAXIMUM VOLUME.  Requests for food are similar to that of a bull elephant trumpeting an immediate charge.  Denials of questions about wanting more water/food/face-wiping are met with a drawn out “Nooooooooo” that leaves you with no questions and little functioning apparatus in your inner ear.  All hopes my wife and I had for a quiet introverted second child are being trampled.  But it still may come to pass.  Now the important question that has been hovering on the lips of all you readers:  what is it like to take Mr. Noisy to a smorgasbord at IKEA?  Let’s start from the ground and work up.

Even though it looks like most of his food is on the floor I can assure you five times as much made it into his stomach, sometimes detouring across his face and through his hair.  It was really a horrifying amount of food he consumed.  Mr. Noisy yelled, smacked his hands on the table, rocked his high chair back and forth to the point of severe consternation of reasonable adults.  MORE MORE MORE!  We gave him smoked salmon, toast points, grapes, potatoes, meatballs, broiled salmon, blueberries, watermelon, pickled beets, lingonberry sauce, deviled eggs, and still he ate.  My God, the consumption was something to behold.  Did he enjoy his meal?  The Social Smile says…yes!

Wait, I’ve seen that face somewhere before.  I think he’s picking it up from his big sister.  Now it all makes sense:  the noise, the thousand-megawatt smile, it’s all trickling down in the household.  Where is an introvert to hide?  My wife has recently been buying grownup drink-making supplies, from rum to muddlers, mixers to jiggers.  At first I made fun but now I see how a few hours with the mini-human noise machines will send even the calmest soul reaching for the bottle.  YAAAAAAAAAAAAYYYYYYYYY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Sometimes They Surprise You

The weekend was a tiring march from one required task to the next:  dishes, laundry, clean house for party to which I’m not invited and must hide with the children in the kitchen and bedrooms, smear food off the floor with teary futility, and trim back dead clumps of lavender that was flowering just three months ago.

Okay, it wasn’t all misery but it felt like all chores and no relaxation time, possibly exacerbated by Number Two’s cold/general unhappiness.  I should say my 18-month old son is mostly happy and patient so after getting some required vaccinations last week we were sorry to see he’d caught a cold and was grumpy and tired.  For several days he took two two-hour naps then went to bed early after being miserable and tired all afternoon.  This weekend I chased him around trying to wipe his nose, at one point resorting to a leaf torn from a tree to try and stem the tide of goop coming from the front of his face.  Gah.  And because he’s a boy and a toddler he gets into everything.  Not content with emptying the lower cabinets and pantry of all the contents, he now picks up objects and delivers them to unpredictable places.  I found a dirty diaper in the shower, yogurt cups from the recycling bin scattered across the couch, and my dental floss is nowhere to be found.  I’m thinking someone will discover it in thirty years when they switch on the bathroom shin-heater and a billow of trickle of toxic smoke snakes out the vent.  “Now who would put floss in a heater?”

I spend most of my time chasing the Boy around saying whiny and hopeless things like, “Please don’t pull that lamp down…leave the mop alone…get out of the trash…watch your head on the—[THUNK]”  All small slights, disturbances, or stumbles were amplified by his mystery illness, meaning we got to the Everything Tears ™ checkmate earlier and earlier in the day until breakfast was an explosion of hurled yogurt, rejected toast, and snotty tears.  Poor kid.  I mean me.

So it was with great satisfaction that Child Harbat decided to read a book to her younger brother, unbidden, and both sat calmly while I tried to scrape ossified banana mush out of the carpet with my fingernails.  Sometimes it’s what’s out of frame in the picture that tells the real story.

Nightmares and a Scary Bunny

If you have kids you have to resign yourself to interrupted sleep.  Last night, The Boy was teething and had thrown up earlier in the evening and was in a grumpy mood.  Child Harbat was in a very good mood having stayed up late to start reading The Hobbit.  By 11 The Boy had already woken up twice because he has the ears of an owl and the sensitivity of a seismograph.  If you drop a tissue on the far side of the house you can count to three and hear screeching from his room.  By midnight I thought all was well and could have a continuous stretch of deep restful sleep and didn’t just tumble about in mild delirium.  NOPE! Child Harbat had a nightmare, a near-nightly occurrence these days.  I am not discounting the nightmares, just her need to come climb in bed with us and squirm like she has St. Vitus’ Dance.  This was at one AM.  Then The Boy woke up at two and was coughing like a career smoker so I stumbled to his room and comforted him until he screamed louder, at which point my wife came and got him.

Sometimes our room at night is not a moonlit elfin glade but a bus station lobby.  People are hurrying here and there, there is a persistent odor of urine, and someone is trying to sleep in a corner with a newspaper draped over their shoulders.  How does my mood progress throughout the evening as I am not getting sleep?  Please refer to this handy chart:

11pm     I will comfort my children and guide them to slumberland

12 am    Someone is crying so I will do what I can

1 am      There is noise—I will something

2am       Oh, COME ON!

3am       KillBot 6000 has been activated—identify and eliminate noise disturbance

This is all a great shame because it should have been an ethereal blissful respite.  The windows were cast open, letting in caresses of cool flower-scented evening air accompanied by the hush of wind in the leaves.  By the fourth time I got up there was some critter crunching around in the leaves outside and a smell like pre-digested pina colada was seeping in the window.  Then the alarm went off and all was lost.

But in the blog title I promised a scary bunny and you shan’t be disappointed.  Before you pass judgment on this monstrosity please note that the face paint scheme is all per Child Harbat’s specifications.  But learn from my mistakes:  sometimes you need to interpret your child’s wishes so they look like a cute Easter Bunny and not a Dia de los Muertos celebrant or a Haitian witch doctor.  So…maybe I should hold off on my cosmetology school application.

Spring!

Holy Jeezum Crow and a whole bunch of other sanitized versions of non-curse sayings!  It’s the first day of Spring!  This means today is cool and overcast because San Diego just likes to be different.  Not Portland or Austin different, with skintight jeans and sexy tattoos…on men.  Speaking of dreary hipster types, I visited a great bar in San Diego that was made up to be a late 19^th century drinkery, with heavy emphasis on cast iron scrollwork, formal signage on plaques (Sir, Please Remove Your Hat Before Approaching the Bar), and bartenders, err sorry, Mixologists, who wore vests, rolled-up shirtsleeves, and paperboy caps.  I really expected to see a velocipede-only drive-thru built on the side, and a moustache wax dispenser in the men’s room.  Listen, it’s only fun to make fun of hipsters when they take themselves so seriously.  How many guys toting portable typewriters to the local coffee shop to bang out a manifesto on The Tragic Decline of the Steam Locomotive do you see who look really happy, a huge grin hidden under their Pro-Level beard because life is just grand?  No, hipsterdom falls right on the unhappiness continuum between retired grump and emo depressive.

Ahh yes, we were talking about Spring.  Rather, I was talking about Spring and you were wondering how you’ve gotten an entire paragraph into a blog post about something other than Spring.  Our garden is really taking shape this year, mostly through my wife’s careful planning and purchasing and my willingness just to plant something somewhere before time runs out and we have a bunch of dead scorched plants hanging limp out of their pots in mid-August.  Maybe it’s because Child Harbat can play in the front yard and Number Two can do feats of strength pushing the wagon around the yard, but we are able to spend a lot of time outside this Spring and the garden really looks good.  Let’s just see what the local cats, skunks, mocking birds, slugs, snails, grasshoppers, and aphids can do to it before harvest time.

And because I’m a horribly lazy blogger and didn’t think to get a picture of the aforementioned beautiful garden progress, please enjoy this complimentary picture of Number Two about to be eaten by a ravenous wild lamb.

Earliest Memories

What can you dredge up through the neural soup of your mind and qualify as your earliest memory?  Mine comes from a time when I was three or four, and it’s of our housekeeper extinguishing a lit match in her mouth to amaze my brother and me.  This memory has been so shellacked and recreated over the years that I think only the very core of it is real now, a tiny blip of retrievable data.  From the ages of three to six I can only come up with about four or five memories at will.  Once, about fifteen years ago I was camping and woke from a brief nap with a sudden and intense memory flashback which may have been my earliest.  My mind had recreated a portion of an entry hall in a house I’d lived in when I was no more than three.  The striking thing about this dream was the completeness—the dim yellow light coming through shaded windows, the height of furniture to someone only three feet tall, the feel of the flooring, the smell of paint and wood.  I woke from the dream with a cry in my throat for having been transported so wholly back to a place I knew was real, a place I’d not been able to visit for twenty years, a place I’ve never been able to visit in my mind since.  I marvel at the high fidelity of that dream and despair at the impossibility of accessing it, or any of the other millions of memories buried deep in the electronic impulses in my brain.

I think about this when playing with my kids.  We tend to think of life signposted by grand events yet really the movement of our lives is described in small eddies and ripples.  I know memory doesn’t place greater value on momentous occasions, or those things we want to remember.  Perhaps my parents would want me to remember the extraordinary things we did, camping out on the African plain and seeing giraffes lope by.  But no, I remember an extinguished match.  So each time I see Child Harbat and Number Two caught up in some seemingly innocuous play, I ask myself, “Is this the moment they’ll remember the rest of their lives?”

Going to Another World

San Diego is truly a place on the border and not just because of Mexico.  Go out into the ocean a few miles and you can drop into deep trenches that bring cold water, whales, and deep sea creatures.  This completely different world is geographically close but wholly alien.  In the same way, a trip up into the mountains in winter is a journey into another climate zone, another season.  On Sunday I took Child Harbat and her friend up to see the snow.  The girls were bubbly with excitement, ready to make snowmen and snow angels and snow ponies and snow babies and OHMYGOD THERE’S SOME SNOW!  This was shrieked at the first clump of dirty snow we passed after driving about thirty minutes.  We climbed and the temperature dropped to freezing, the misty rain turned to heavy snowflakes, and we transitioned to a world of wintertime.

I’ve grown up where snow is a yearly occurrence, despite what idiotic drivers seemed to realize.  Snow fell from the sky in winter and the landscape you were used to got a nice white coating.  Pretty and different but not amazing.  It’s completely different to drive from the warmth of San Diego up the highway and arrive, under an hour, into another world.  The girls were about to bust right through the roof of the car like pneumatic hammers so I pulled over at the first snowy field we could find and let them loose.  There was squealing, oh lawdy the squealing.  There were attempts at snow angels, snowballs, and snow forts, and at one point the girls were on all fours, grazing through fresh snow to lick it up and experience the joy of eating cold snow.  Also the word “snow” was said a few thousand times.

Eventually they were corralled into the car, wet mittens and hats dumped in a messy pile along with muddy boots, and we drove higher into the mountains for Julian, a small town that gets absolutely packed with tourists during the fall and winter.  We found a place to eat, hot chocolate was chugged, and extremities thawed out.  The sky was the color of dirty aluminum, the signs shimmied in a strong icy wind, and the trees were bent over with a frosting of wind-spat ice.  There was even a pony pulling a tiny sleigh with tourists wrapped thick with scarves and coats.  It was the most Christmasy I’ve felt all year.

On the ride back I got to experience the inanity of little girl conversation.  Some comments were surprisingly lucid:  “Snow is just ice!”, others were incomprehensible: “I’m a mee baby and you can nurse smoothies from my hand!”.  At one apex of apple pie-fuelled spazzing, the girls started a most-annoying-sound contest.  I won by screeching like a Siamang gibbon in a territorial dispute, then immediately lost the title to a pair of yowling “Mee Kitties” that desperately needed spaying.

The whole time I could sense how this was imprinting on Child Harbat, the feel of icy toes, the smell of fresh snow and wet pavement, the taste of hot chocolate when your nose is still numb from cold, and the joy of experiencing this with your best friend.  Though I’ve grown up with snow in all forms, this outing to the snowy mountains was for the girls as foreign as a trip to the deep ocean would be for me.  Writing this today in a warm sunny office it’s still hard to believe how close these other worlds lay, how fragile my perceived stability.  There’s nothing better to remind you of who you are and what’s important than to get out of your comfortable world and go exploring.

Setting Priorities

Here’s a bombshell:  playing princess Yahtzee is more important than spending extra time at work.  See Child Harbat below, with the game pieces ready.

Why is this more important than work?  Or more importantly, why is this more important to me than work?  Let’s pull back and look at the bigger picture.  Not the weekly or even monthly but the ten-year.  Say I’ve put in extra time at work.  Ten extra hours a week, forty a month, four hundred and forty per year minus holidays, forty-four hundred over a ten year span.  If you’re an economist (micro or macro, take your pick), you’ll understand opportunity cost.  While products may have market costs, actions can have opportunity costs.  By doing activity A, you are using up time that could be spent on activity B.  What do I get for those extra hours at work?  The possibility of a raise?  Maybe that money could be spent on childcare so someone else can watch my children grow up while I’m at work.  What am I giving up?  The chance for my children to know me as more than a Monday-Friday blur out the door, the chance to hear about their day, their thoughts and fears, their hopes.

Setting priorities in your life involves more than cold arithmetic, it involves thoughtfulness, introspection, and the long gaze.  When you’re on your death bed, will you clutch the hands of your loved ones and whisper that you wish you’d put in more time at work?  Or will you weep with regret that you didn’t spend more time with family?  Think carefully because what seems like a temporary pattern now may turn into habit, then routine, then fact.

Let’s get back to princess Yahtzee.  Does it matter that Child Harbat tried to cheat at the end, attempting to take extra turns and flip over the dice when I wasn’t looking?  Does it matter that I won handily, matching up more Tiana and Ariel tokens than she?  Does it matter that CH spent hours in anticipation of spending time with me and carefully laid out the game so it would be ready the moment I got home?  What would be the opportunity cost of dismissing that?

Working parents have to wrestle with this question constantly, and it’s a question with no objective answer.  The trick is to find what matters most to you.  Economics and emotion are bitter enemies and you’ll be yanked between the two as you struggle to find a solution.  I prefer to play princess Yahtzee.  Next game I’ll let her win.