April 30th, 2003

I’m outside in my backyard, which is really quite lovely. It’s pleasant out here and I’m about to begin working on Cualcotel. Tonight’s mission is a scene listing and some progress towards names, as all my characters save one are unnamed. I’m terrible at names, so I expect there’ll be much wailing and gnashing of teeth. I can hear Sophia crying, presumably because she wants to come outside too, but I have to be alone and undisturbed in order to get my writing done so I imagine Kurt is telling her she’s going to have to stay inside. I have some things to relate concerning Sophia and the past couple of weeks, including accounts of Easter and the Grandparent’s visit but I think I’ll save those for later. Right now I just want to tell you about two quick things my daughter said.

She has these bears, you see, beanie baby bears and she loves them a lot. She likes to set them all out and make them listen to her stories, put them down for naps and so forth. She even yells at them and forces them to go to time out from time to time. The constantly present bears were the first recipients of her hugs and kisses. She wipes their noses and faces. Occasionally she makes them do the gestures that go with Humpty Dumpty. She lies them on the floor and puts little blankets on them and tells them to shush. Often I can see new phrases and new emotional tonalities emerging in her transactions with the faithful bears. Yesterday, I observed that she was telling the bears that things were not theirs.

“Not yours, bear!” she’d growl angrily, and fling the bear away from her. I’m not sure what it was that was not theirs, but she was serious about it. This is interesting to me for several reasons. First, it shows the beginnings of a grasp of pronouns. Up until now she has been using nouns in all sentences. Secondly, it shows the first expressions of her growing sense of possession and possessiveness. I don’t know how long she’s been percolating on this concept, but I suspect that with her playmate Matthew’s weekly visits of the last two weeks and the constant struggle for items at daycare that we’ve arrived at the “mine” stage.

The second thing was even more astonishing in a way, and brings home to me yet again how much information kids are absorbing all the time and how little control over what pieces will be digested and retained and which pieces will be filtered and forgotten we actually have. She several times told one of her bears to “Quit yer yapping!” I was a little taken aback by this, and I wondered where she could have heard something like that. She was saying it so vehemently, and I was fervently hoping they weren’t telling the kids to be quiet in that tone and with those words at daycare. Well, they may or may not be, I’m not sure, but I am pretty sure where she got that phrase from, as it was in the book I’ve been reading to her every night for over a week. I just didn’t put two and two together until I heard her saying it and then later that night saw the phrase in the book, moments before I uttered it in the nasty tone she’d used with the bears. That’ll teach me to do the sour kangaroo’s voice in Horton Hears a Who with so much venom. I didn’t think she was paying that much attention, to be honest.

And before I get completely off the subject of Sophia, I could use more variety in our night time reading. She’s decided that Good Night Moon and Guess How Much I Love You, previous favorites, are too short and only Dr. Suess’ Sleep Book or Horton Hears a Who will do (she calls the latter “Hort-Who-Elephant”). What I’m looking for is a 20-35 page illustrated kid’s book with no more than 4 or 5 lines per page preferrably on the topic of bedtime and going to sleep. Suggestions are welcome.

And now, to face Cualcotel

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There was a spider in the bathtub this morning, and Kurt had already gone to work. I spoke loudly and bravely, “Ok, live and let live, live and let live, you just stay in there, I’ll just stay out here.” I was pretty proud of myself for not shrieking, falling to pieces, calling Kurt at work to come home and rescue me or trying to kill it. I had to keep checking to make sure it was keeping its end of the bargain, though. So I’d peer over the edge of the bathtub with the toothbrush in my mouth and squeak when I laid eyes on the thing. Ack! Still there. No wait, that’s good, still there is where I want it. That was alright at the time because I was fixing to leave for work anyways. But now, when I get home, if the spider is not in the bathtub I will have to worry about where it went and whether it will try to eat me while I’m sleeping.

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I just remembered the dream I had last night.

Topics: Shasradio, music tastes, and Lewis makes his first appearance in my dreamworld.

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Sophia’s review of the new Tangential Cold piece Star Schema was : “mam! so coool!”. That pretty much sums it up for me as well. It’s been too long since the last piece, but this is quite a reward for the wait.

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