Last week, I flew across Canada to visit my mom, who's been sick. I brought Emilia with me, because I figured - morbid creature that I am - that if anything happened to my...
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Once upon a time, before I had children, I expected that when I did have children, they would be smart children, and that they would excel in everything that they did, and that this...
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19
Jun
I can still remember, vividly, the day that my father taught me to ride a bicycle. We lived at the end of a quiet suburban street lined with cherry and dogwood trees, our house...
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16
Jun
Here’s the kind of conversation that my husband and daughter have, apparently, while I’m away:
Emilia: “Daddy, I thought of a good name.”
Kyle: “What’s that?”
Emilia: “Mrs Poopy McFucky Pants.”
There’s nothing like being away from home and getting a text from your spouse that says call me as soon as you can.
It’s about Emilia, he says when I call.
What about Emilia? I don’t know what the right words are to express, here, how shrill my voice was. ‘Shrill’ works decently well, I suppose. My voice was shrill.
She came home from school with a note. It said that she hit Madeleine, and that L and C were involved, and…
At which point I tuned out, a little, because I needed to take a moment to exhale. Everything’s okay, nothing happened to her, everything’s okay, she just hit another child. And then I had to take another moment, because wait, what? My child hit another child.
Oh god, is she a bully?
29
Apr
I would believe only in a God that knows how to dance.
- Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra
For filing under Things That You Probably Didn't Know And Didn't Think To Ask: all five year olds...
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21
Apr
Emilia likes to make cards. She has a basket filled with stickers and glue and ribbon and glitter and discarded Hallmark product and she draws upon the contents of that basket frequently to craft fancifully illustrated and elaborately decorated cartes de voeux for every occasion, including but not limited to birthdays, holidays, dinnertime, bedtime, breakfast and the weekend, and expressing sentiments ranging from thanks for the pancakes, congratulations on picking me up from school, condolences on having your Macbook scribbled upon with crayon, I’m sorry that I scribbled on your Macbook with crayon, I love you even though you got mad that I scribbled on your Macbook with crayon, to my favorite, ‘RJOV‘, which you might think is some obscure Latin acronym but actually means ‘I love you’ in the code of the five year old who lacks sufficient vowels in her alphabet sticker supply (‘the J looks like an L Mommy if you look at it backwards and also I didn’t have an E’. She didn’t say what the ‘R’ represents. I’m choosing to go with ROCKSTAR.)
We spent a lot of time, last week, talking about science. Which is maybe not what you would expect children to talk about during a week at Disney World, but there it is. Much of the initial discussion was provoked, of course, by Emilia’s very interesting hypothesis concerning the function and character of wishes in the Disney universe – a hypothesis that Tanner appreciated deeply, but that he felt raised further questions about wishes and about the nature of all things existing within that universe. Would all wishes come true at Disney World? A quick test – a declared wish to have ice cream for all meals – quickly confirmed that hypothesis false. And if that hypothesis was false, what did that mean for other Disney hypotheses?
8
Apr
‘Mommy, I have a hypothesis.’
Emilia is on a science kick right now. ‘What kind of hypothesis, sweetie?’
‘It’s about Disney World.’
‘Okay. Do you want to tell me what it is?’
‘My hypothesis is that Disney World is where dreams come true.’
‘That’s a very interesting hypothesis.’
‘I think it’s a true hypothesis because Tanner wished that we could go to Disney World together and have a family holiday there, and we’re going, and that was his wish.’
‘That is excellent science, sweetie.’
‘But we haven’t actually tested the hypothesis, Mommy, because we aren’t there yet.’ You will have to imagine her exasperated tone here. Clearly, I don’t understand science.