Wuss

There were Two Little Bears who lived in a Wood,
And one of them was Bad and the other was Good.
Good Bear learnt his Twice Times One -
But Bad Bear left all his buttons undone.

I think I've mentioned once or twice that parenting is one of those things that are not for the fainthearted.

I'm not really thinking of the physical sort of issues that greenlighting the Kid Project will raise, although between back pain, frequent urination, night sweats, and stretch marks the gross physical problems begin early and continue right through into childhood. This adorable baby toes you kissed in his cradle will stank right through the sneakers when he's eight. Just sayin'.

Disgorging dinner at midnight, frantic nosebleeds, random incontinence; puke, blood, and shit - as a parent you are and will be expected to deal with every loathsome aspect of our human frailty and do so with the sort of revoltingly cheerful perkiness that you thought was the province of Cherry Ames, the student nurse in the old hospital stories.

They lived in a Tree when the weather was hot,
And one of them was Good, and the other was Not.
Good Bear learnt his Twice Times Two -
But Bad Bear's thingummies were worn right through.

Then there's the time-management aspect of parenting.

Which is; you won't have any when the little eyes are open, from birth to about age fourteen...at which time you'll spend that time worrying about whether the little eyes are looking into a beer bong, or down the barrel of a gun, or at a naked fourteen-year-old promising to love her forever if she just lets him...

Let's not go there.

You will become a warm-blooded entertainment system and jungle gym. You will read a million stories, tickle a thousand tummies, run a hundred races. You will be soccer team, bridge partner, video-game target.

Plus there's the whole "get through the day" question. Sadly, the genetic programming of hairless monkeys does not include the instincts to tie shoes, comb hair, find classrooms, eat lunch, complete homework, pick up clothing, brush teeth, or invent bedtime stories. So you, the Potentially Responsible Party, need to be on hand to make sure that the progeny do not show up at the classroom door looking like a shoeless inbred from Hootin' Holler trailing a scrap of paper and a broken stick.

They lived in a Cave when the weather was cold,
And they Did, and they Didn't Do, what they were told.
Good Bear learnt his Twice Times Three -
But Bad Bear never had his hand-ker-chee.

And this never stops.

I think I've told you the story about asking my mother when she stopped worrying about me (and I was a difficult and fretful child, I should say; there was never an instance when I had the opportunity to do something that I didn't choose the most fraught, difficult, and fatheaded way to go about it and then insist, when advised that there WAS an easier, simpler, less chancy way to do whatever the thing was jam my fingers in my ears and chant "lalalalalala" as I went on my hardheaded and difficult way) and the look that I got in return which would have curdled fresh milk.

We never stop being parents. When our kids are adults we'll STILL be fretting about their choices, just unable to do more than suggest an alternative.

And what seems like the most unkind and unfair part of the transaction is that we don't get the guarantee of a Happy Ending.

They lived in the Wood with a Kind Old Aunt,
And one said "Yes'm," and the other said "Shan't!"
Good Bear learnt his Twice Times Four -
But Bad Bear's knicketies were terrible tore.

I have a friend; a truly brilliant, put-together woman, funny, inventive, just a great woman. She was cursed with a fairly worthless bag of stupid for a husband but put up with him for twenty years to raise two kids. And one of them, the older girl, is a shifty, treacherous grifter. Charming in her way, much like her father with the ability to deploy a certain amiability as long as it doesn't cost her any effort, but an untrustworthy slacker who lied and cheated her way to getting locked out of her own home.

I have another friend whose son has just stopped giving a shit about his schoolwork. He's a great kid; not dangerous, not angry, or mean, or rebellious, but he just stopped caring about his grades. She has been unable to convince him that in three years he's going to have to earn a living and that without a high school diploma that will be somewhere between difficult and nightmarish.

And then quite suddenly (just like Us)
One got Better and the other got Wuss.
Good Bear muddled his Twice Times Three -
But Bad Bear coughed in his hand-ker-chee!

I could go on and on...the ordinary tales of domestic woe that seem to visit every family in some way or another. When you think about it, it's rather amazing that any kid manages to get into young adulthood sane, unmaimed, and without an arrest record.

My littles are, thank Zoroaster, too small yet for me to have those sorts of worries.

And yet, there are always enough troubles in the world to spawn more.

In their cases, I look at them and try to peer down the road towards adolescence to divine who will have an easy puberty, who a hard one? Who will find themselves the narrow road through the mountains of teen age to the broad, sunlit uplands of a happy and prosperous adulthood, who the broad path down to the hell of trouble and pain?

If you'd asked me a year ago I'd have said the Girl was a likely candidate for the former and the Boy the latter.

Good Bear muddled his Twice Times Two -
But Bad Bear's thingummies looked like new.
Good Bear muddled his Twice Times One -
But Bad Bear never left his buttons undone.

Because Missy had the happy, sunny, open, loving sort of personality that lends itself to happiness. People loved her easily, were charmed by her instantly. The black keys of bossiness and touchiness were well hidden as she cheerfully played her preschool arpeggios.

The Boy, at seven, was already showing the kinds of things that made me such a heart-attack for my parents back in the day. Sulky, hard-headed, touchy, easily angered and disappointed, easily frustrated and discouraged. Those two touchstones of school failure; laziness and combativeness.

The negatives tended to outfight the positives for the Peep; his loving, clever, artistic, creative side would just get buried under the weight of the miserable little guy who seemed to lack the facility for happiness.

I dreaded his walking the same road I had, and, yet, seemed unable to do anything about that.But.

(And you knew there was a "but" coming, didn't you?)

Lately the little Bears have been trading places.

Take yesterday.

The Boy and I had a terrific day. We went all around Portland in the truck, spent time together looking through Pokemons and buying a new game at our favorite hobby store, agreed that the line at OMSI was, like, crazy long so went down to the Nickel Arcade and shot the hell out of some Terminators (where the Boy drove home the fact that twenty years of military service doesn't make you a better shot than ten months of playing first-person shooter games) and then stopped off at Burgerville for some fries.

Back home we ran down to his school and had a chilly kickabout under the covered training area where he showed me how to head the ball (grin...) and then out for coffee and cocoa and bowling(!) - the only blip; he didn't do well and was pretty sullen about it.

But then we went home for dinner, a movie, and then a couple of games, which he won with glee and good sportsmanship.

He was a great kid and a good companionWhilst we were about that, The Girl and her mom were having a truly difficult day. They went to our little North Portland consignment craft store, Scrap, where Missy was clingy and sulky, then home, to where she was whiny and cranky. She glumped, fussed, and whined through most of the day, only perking up in the evening to become more like her happy self.

She snarled and complained about being asked to pick up her toys and clothes. She was instantly sullen if she was denied a moment's attention from her mom. She was, more than she had ever been, much as she had been lately, something of a jagged little pill.

There may be a Moral, though some say not;
I think there's a moral, though I don't know what.
But if one gets better, as the other gets wuss,
These Two Little Bears are just like Us.

So I think I've come all this way just to settle upon another Hazard of Parenting they don't tell you about in "What To Expect When You're Expecting"; the uncertainty of it all.

Not only can they not promise you the happy ending, I'm starting to think there's no real way to figure out where the damn thing is, or how to get there, or to feel confident you'll know when you have arrived, or even whether you've already achieved it and are coasting into the winner's circle.

In short, we're back where we started; parenting is a contact sport, and anyone who tells you different is trying to sell you something.

For Christopher remembers up to Twice Times Ten ...
But I keep forgetting where I put my pen.*

*So I have had to write this one in pencil.

~ A.A. Milne

Oh, and the last picture? That's the church where Mojo and I were married ten years ago this October.

Full circle.

Or, let's hope, at least halfway.

Friday Jukebox: Tears

My bride told me this story.

She and The Girl were coming home from a simple errand; a shopping trip, a visit to the library, and she was playing this on the radio as the station wagon pulled to a stop at the curb outside the house.
She sat for a moment, watching the windshield wipers push the spitting rain, until she heard a to-a-parent-familiar sound and turned to see our little girl weeping.

Like any mother would do, she turned and unfastened the Girl's seatbelt and hauled her over the partition into her lap. She hugged the small, shaking body to her, and kissed the bowed head on the sleek, shining black hair, and asked Missy if she could tell her Mom what was wrong.

Mojo says that when she had swallowed down her sniffles the Girl said;

"This song makes me think of all the bad things I did and the times I wasn't nice, and the times you didn't like me. And that makes me feel sad."

So Mojo squeezed little Missy tight and promised her that part of being mommies and daughters was that you were always loved, no matter what sort of bad thing you had done.

Because, really...what else can you say?

And the two of then sat listening to the pattering of the rain until it was time to go into the house.

Light Sleeper

The rains have returned.

Not that that's surprising; December in Portland?

Rainy.

A typical December day begins with spitting rain and ends in showers while the temperature never rises above 47 and never falls below 44. The daylight hours pass in a glower of badly-lit drizzle as though you were living inside a poor-quality VHS tape of your life. We endure this part of the year without loving it, the price we pay for our lovely mild spring and summer days.

One unfortunate effect of the deterioration of my hip-joints has been that I usually need a painkiller to get to sleep. But the PKs have a nasty tendency to wake me up in the early hours of the morning; I'm not sure whether it's a side-effect of the drug or an effect of the drug wearing off and the pain returning.

Whatever the reason it's been consistent, so I've gotten used to getting up around 1:30 or 2 in the morning and spending a hour or so at the computer before trying to get back to sleep.

The world is a stark place when viewed through the pixels of the online news channels. My friend Lisa noted that in reality we live in a vastly safe world, and, when you think on that for a moment, we really do.

The great and terrible wars of the 20th Century have been spared us, our generation. The total number of combat deaths in all of my country's wars over the past decade come to less than the dead men piled up in 76 hours on the island of Betio in November, 1943.

Seventy-six hours!

We have been spared the terrible epidemics of history. The days of the fearsome marauders; the horse nomads, the migrating tribes, have been spared us. For most of us in the West we stand a better chance of being warmly housed, decently fed, and healthily raised than almost any other time and place in human history.

It must be human nature, then, to look around and ahead for things to fear when our here and today are so benign.

Just moments ago my little daughter shuffled out of the dark, rubbing her eyes and yawning. She, like me, is a light sleeper, and the light and sound of my wakefulness often brings her up out of whatever little-girl dreams are carrying her through the rainy night. She never really fully wakes but still feels compelled to go and see what I am doing.

So she totters down the hall, into the front room, and up to my chair and waits, wordlessly, for me to pick her up.

She's getting big, my little orphan child, with a density that betokens strong muscles and bones and which makes her difficult for me to lift. But that lifting is an important part of our night-wakings; I heft her to my shoulder and carry her back down the dark hallway with her smooth, soft, fine hair pressed to my neck. She cuddles in against me with a drowsy sigh, and then snuggles into her welter of soft blankets; thumb into mouth, tattered terrycloth blankie in fist, and in moments she's asleep again.

And as I'm walking back to this desk I realize that we don't need the big frights and the great terrors; every one of us has our own small worries to trouble us.

The flu germ, the inattentive driver, the lost job, the burning house...we all have so many places to be wounded. When we love we give those loves as hostages, knowing that life and Fate in their uncaring profligacy will spare us nothing, knowing that we are granted happiness and peace by the merest of random chances.

We can do all the Right Things; live carefully, love greatly, work fiercely and well, and in the end we may end up with a handful of dust and ashes.

And yet...

How can we not?

I will freely own that I have no great dreams of tomorrow. When I was young I dreamed of greatness; of my name being spoken with love, or dread, or admiration by people I had never met and never would. Of leaving monuments behind me; spires, thrones, and dominations, pyramids of skulls, works of great art and skill that would speak of me long after I was gone.

Now I hope only for small victories; a sound, useful life, a legacy of good work well done, and a part in the raising of a family of good men and women who grow to be themselves intelligent and honorable people. And every day well-lived becomes a victory over those small worries. Every evening that I can hug those small warm bodies to me becomes a triumph, and a challenge.

Because all those dangers and snares await me and mine with the next daybreak.

So I sit, and type, listening to the silent sounds of my bones as they ache and gripe at me, and look out the window at the predawn sky, seeking the faintest traces of the light of the coming day.

A crown and 205

Finally!

I've been stuck at about 206-207 pounds for a week now, and yesterday I got on the scale and I've broken that weight all the way down to 205. Yay!The only downside is I can't have a candy bar to celebrate.

By way of contrast, here's Missy's friend Barbie, who has never had a weight problem, the skinny bitch.Missy was taking pictures of her Barbies and managed to capture this image of the loneliness of beauty, a crown without a princess;I think the girl has a gift for this photography stuff, neh? So here's the little fairy princess her ownself complete with her own crown - certainly she understands the danger of beauty and the beauty of danger.That's it - just a little bragging and some Barbies. I warned you that this would be a daddy blog every now and then, didn't I?

Oh, and I wanted to post something about this whole "losing weight" thing and the one real oddity I've noticed. But that'll be for later.

Hey, hey, It's a Sunny Day

Last weekend we had a sunny Sunday

Sunny.

Do you understand what a wonderful thing that is?

We're deep in autumn here, and in the Northwest that means rain. And the winter is fast approaching and that means constant rain.

Tomorrow, for example, we're set to have a typical Northwest late autumn-early winter day; sunrise at 7:25, sunset at 5:30, overnight low, 42F, afternoon high, 46F.

It's a wonder that none of Lewis and Clark's GIs sucked the musket muzzle after 184 days of THAT shit. I've lived here twenty-one years and by February I'm twitchy and tend to make funny noises when I hear the gutters fill up. I can't imagine what it must have been like to experience our Black Months with no warning.

But it was sunny Sunday. Sunny, I say!The thing is, I've been working a LOT of long days; early mornings, late nights. This means that Mojo gets stuck with a lot of childcare. And as adorable as our little urchins are, they're also the sort of hard work that five and eight also are, and so when I can I like to try and give my bride some refit time. So Sunday I stuffed the kiddos into "Bob" the white Subaru and took them away.

We did All Things Kid; went to Chuck E. Cheese, went out for lunch at McDonalds

(or as our friend the Poet likes to call it, the Icky Clown House, which I consider pure genius and far above the sort of nickname that I recall from when my college chums and I thought we were being witty - "L'Arc dOr" and "Chez Ronald's" and that sort of thing)

and then off to our local hobby store to look over Pokemon cards. We ended up in the Hollywood district of Portland so the Young Padawan could go to his jujitsu class, and that left just Little Miss and I to pass a couple of hours together.And so we did.

We sauntered across the street to the Whole Foods market where the Girl found a teeny shopping cart Just Her Size and proceeded to have a wonderful time pushing it about.These "Whole Foods" places - you may well have them, I think they're a national chain - have all sorts of oddities and quarks. We dove deeply into the Asian aisle for some of what Missy calls "seaweed" - the dried nori she snacks on - and into the juice aisle for fresh apple cider. We came across a "nice lady" who gave us some delicious plum jam (from Hood River to the east up the Gorge) on a vanilla cookie, so of course we had to find some of that jam and those cookies.

Lamb, and some craft beer, and a couple of apples later we were heading out the door but stopped at the little tea kiosk (a coffee bar would be too...mainstream...for Whole Foods in Portland) for some savory oolong. Taking our paper cups we crossed back over the street and found a tiny parklet between the main road and Peep's gym to sit and enjoy the warm sun and sip our teas."This tea is spicy!" Missy reported. "I like it, but the tea at dim sum is better. Because it comes from China, like me."

So I had to tell her the story about her adoption, and how we met her. And she told me about how she knew Chinese words. And we looked up at the blue, blue sky through the saffron-yellow leaves above us. And talked about clouds, and dinosaurs, and why some birds are fat.And as I held her dear weight over my heart I felt the weight of the knowledge that this little girl was only mine for a moment.

And that our artless talk and random time together would slip away like the heat leaving the cup in my hand.

And I wanted to stop time, just stop it, and sit there forever in the slow autumn sunlight with my little girl on my lap, and hear her funny little voice, and stroke the anthracite sheen of her hair and just love her until the stars burnt to cinder and the world ended.And then we finished our tea, and I tossed her up on my shoulders, and she rode above my head all the way down to pick her brother up and go home.

Lost Daze

It was somewhere around this time in September four years ago that we were lost in Guangzhou in a muggy haze of exhaustion, confusion and grief.We had just lost the first little girl we had hoped to adopt. No, not lost. Abandoned.

Little Yun-yun had been afflicted with some sort of brain damage, and, already shell-shocked by the stillbirth of our daughter five years before we broke off the adoption rather than go forward into an uncertain future with a child whose ability to grow might have been unimpaired...or might just stop completely at five, or nine, or fourteen, to be with us as a toddler or an adolescent for the rest of our lives.So we were in pretty bad shape when the neatly dressed director of the Social Welfare Institute in Dongguan (东莞) showed up at our room at the White Swan Hotel with a tiny crewcut little girl in a white jersey and teeny plastic sandals.And that's how it went for the next week or so; she silent and distressed, we harassed and barely functional as we replayed all the miserable routines we had already gone through the first week of the journey with a different child.It is difficult now to look at the rude, chatty pixie who loves Beefaroni and "My Little Pony" and remember that silent misery.But she is still there, that sad little girl, locked four years in the past, and so are the we of then.We've come far since that day, though, Little Miss, you and I and your mother, and now I can't imagine being without you, or your artless chatter, or your wriggly back-scratching confidence. Or, as tonight, when you fuss and fret and cry yourself to sleep over a foolish lost trinket. In content and in contention you are ours and we are yours, now, until we go on before you to our long sleep.From a stony beginning we have begun to create a soil of love, and from there I hope you will grow straight and bloom brightly. For the road ahead is long and for all that there will be stony places again, and storms, and darkness I believe that we will have times to walk together in the light of love and the sun of happiness.Happy Family Day, daughter.

We love you very much, indeed.

Over the Hills and Far Away

I spent twelve hours or more working today and didn't really accomplish a damn thing.That's not a reflection on my work, but a facet of being dependent on others' work to make things happen. And in this case, the people whose work I was overseeing (although the term we like to use is "construction monitoring" rather than the more vulgar expression "dirt-nanny") had as bad a day as can be.

Things broke down, didn't work correctly, or weren't where they needed to be. I tried to be what help I could but...sometimes the damn thing just dies and there's nothing anyone can do about it.The one redeeming factor is that at least this is happening in the fascinating metamorphics of the Olympic Mountains. So at least I can sit around and examine the cool schistosity of the rocks related to the Crescent Formation......as I watch the rock anchor people perform lunatic aerial stunts on a four-foot wide rock ledge fifteen feet in the air.But.

The downside is that I missed my little girl's very first day of the rest of her school life.I'm sorry I wasn't there, Little Miss. And I loved your happy phone call tonight (thanks, my love, for encouraging her...) telling me about it. I'm glad you had a great day.

I imagine there are all sorts of things that people regret when they know they're dying. "I wish I'd been richer/smarter/kinder/happier..." "I wish I'd slept with her." "I wish I had been braver when I had the chance." "I wish I could have known what he wanted sooner." "I wish I'd done this (that, the other)."

But I'll bet no one ever thinks "I'm glad I was up in the Olympic Mountains looking at cool rocks on the very day my little girl went to school for the very first time."

Regrets. I've had a few.

Rude Awakening

I'm not sure if I've ever actually given you a full MTO&E of the personnel here at the Fire Direction Center, but one of the senior troops is Miss Lily, the little calico cat.She is a veteran of my first marriage, a rescue-cat from the animal shelter in Astoria, Oregon, where she nabbed my rain-slick sleeve one December day and has been with me ever since. Here's a tale of one of her adventures from some years ago. She is really a very personable cat.

She's also a very self-contained little soul, as with most cats; the only time she will admit to the weakness of need is in the night hours, when she likes to climb on sleeping people (me, typically, because, I think, I am bulkier than my bride and hence a better observation post). She then cuddles down on my chest and falls asleep, and since she's a tiny mite of a cat - less than 6 pounds - it's not really unpleasant. She never bites or claws if I move in my sleep, but she's very persistent, and will reclimb Mount Niitaka after I settle back down.

She is now very, very old in cat-years, probably more than sixteen depending on her age when I brought her home from Astoria. She sleeps most of the day, and she has stopped catching the small birds and mice that used to entertain her and annoy me. She has also become very thin, and her stomach is causing her trouble; she has difficulty keeping her meals down, and she is always ravenous. It doesn't help her that she shares her food bowl with Francesca Cypress Nittaneous III (a.k.a "Fat Nitty"), a feline stomach with legs, so she often has to bolt the vile canned concoction to prevent it disappearing inside the Nitteous One before she can get a taste of delicious by-products.

I am the only other troop in the entire unit who really likes her as something other than furniture. Mojo has little or no patience for either cat and will touch them only on sufferance, whilst the kids will alternately ignore or annoy her depending on their mood; Little Miss is slightly fearful only because Fat Nitty once ran her claws through the girl's blanket - just to get purchase rather than in fear or anger - and Missy has been wary of her ever since. I am the only human who will invite them onto my lap, or pet them for no other reason than tactile pleasure or simple companionship.Her one enduring fault is that by early morning - and I do mean early - her gyppy tummy is troubling her and she begins to caterwaul for her breakfast.

This morning she was doing her usual sand-dance over my prone body and singing her "Feed Me, Seymour" cat-song (which Mojo and I have learned to ignore until we're ready to get up) when she suddenly stopped.

Hunched over in the blanket-valley between us.

And shat the bed.

If you live with one of these little creatures you probably know that there is nothing more pungent than cat shit. Within seconds both humans AND the cat had lept from the bed. It fell to me to bundle up the beshat bedclothes and drag them downstairs to the washing machine; if left for even moments the penetrating pong of used catfood will permeate the very paint on the walls of a room. My bride - who if allowed will drowse into the early forenoon - mumped disconsolately into the kitchen, a surly dryad in an ultramarine Hello Kitty T-shirt, made a pot of coffee and then retired to an armchair in the front room looking like...a woman who had been awakened at 6:30 am by a cat fouling her bed.

Our daughter found the entire incident hilariously disgusting (or disgustingly hilarious) when she emerged a bit later. And the guilty party herself seemed more interested in her catfood than apologizing, although she spent a suspiciously long time cleaning herself up afterward before going back to sleep.

In most respects this would be just another tiny fragment of domestic excitement. The sheets are cleaned, the bed re-made, the cat asleep, the humans all gone about their business.

Except...our little cat has always been a very fastidious creature. This was VERY unlike her...and disturbing all the more for that. Like humans, animals entering the final stages of life tend to begin to deteriorate mentally as well as physically. I hope this was just a noxious accident, because if there are more to come it suggests that our small companion has begun the steeper slope of the descent we all eventually make towards the Big Sleep.And for all that she is nothing more than a rather smallish, aged calico cat her time on Earth is short enough as it is. I will miss her cat-look, the feeling of her gentle bones on my lap, and the shirr of her soft fur under my hands.

Princesses - They're Just Like Us!

They get up early to go to daycare, and when they put on their pink princess dress, they layer underneath it, because......"there's a hole down there and people can look in and see the puff-puff."

(apologies to the Salsa Family)

Princesses

This is Maxine.She is an Adventure Princess.

And when you're an Adventure Princess, you know your Fate: it's to Have Adventures;
This is Lucia.She is a Warrior Princess.

And when you're a Warrior Princess, your Destiny is already Written; you must Fight.With Adventure Princesses, if no one else.

Happy Fifth Birthday, Adventure Princess. I love you.

Despicable Me

There was once a time when the early morning hours were mine alone.

Mojo and the Peep are sleepers. They love their sleep, they crave it, they cherish it like a rare, delightful treasure, and whenever possible they indulge themselves by drowsing on into the late forenoon. And that was always fine with me.
I could get up early and make coffee, savor the rich scent and the dark, earthy taste in silence. I could read, or exercise, or go on-line. It was my private world before the rest of the family got out of bed.

But now I have another early riser; Little Miss is seldom asleep past six and often awake before five. She's never noisy or fretful. She comes stumping out, her little legs determined as her eyes are still full of sleep. She wants to be cuddled, and happily crawls up in my arms and curls onto my lap.So I feel like a real heel resenting the loss of my private mornings.

But I do; as sweet and quiet as she is, the girl won't be ignored or put by; any attempt to park her on the couch or in front of the television results in a monumental sulk, and this girl is an expert sulker; once you've hit the "sulk" button it's nearly impossible to reset - she will fuss and fume for a good hour or so.And even the semi-silence of her immediate snuggling is transient. Soon she is fully awake and wants to play, or use the computer. And I'm reminded of the old saying about playing catch with a dog; you will tire of it long before the dog does. So with Barbies or ponies or LEGOs. There are only so many scenarios the girl can invent, and we usually run through them all inside of five minutes or so. After that the only variable is how durable my patience is; the eventual consuption of it is never in doubt.
So I feel like even more of a lout; I love my little girl and all she wants to do is share my time. But I resent, somewhere ranging from mildly to bitterly, the loss; like a miserly old curmudgeon, I am ungracious about dividing the early hours of the day with this child who loves and depends on me. God, how despicable can I be?

I suspect that this says something truly unflattering about me, and in my better moments I try and staple a smiling face over my bad attitude. But then comes the thumping of the little feet down the morning hallway and my smile fades like the stars in the sunrise.

Rosebud...

I went to the Derby last weekend and brought home a purple shirt with the logo of Portland's Rose City Rollers junior team, the Rosebuds, on it.

Little Miss looooved her new "sleepy-shirt". "Purple is my MOST favorite color!" she proclaimed. I explained that the purple was the color of the Rosebuds uniforms, that the Rosebuds were these cool girls who skated on the flat track and did cool stuff."What's a rosebud?" asked little girl. I explained that rosebuds were little roses, baby roses, like the big flower only all curled up. "Are they pretty?" she asked. "Do they smell sweet?"

"As pretty and sweet as you, little one." I assured her, "You are my little Rosebud."

"I don't want to be pretty and sweet," stated the Girl, sitting up, "I want to skate the flat track and be called Kung Pow Chickie and knock all the other girls on their butt-butts!"


OK, I made up that last part.

What she did was just cuddle down against me and sigh.

And then ran off to climb the walls.Hmmm.

I think there she may just be a future Rosebud, at that...

To a Louse, after Three Weeks With No Relief in Sight

Wee obligate para’sitical beastie,
O, what a party’s on her heidie!
Thou’s gae’n about being nasty
Above her chin!
I’m nae laith to rin an' chase thee,
Wi' murdering Permetherin^TM.

I'm nae sorry man's dominion
Has broken Nature's social union,
Long syne thy hematophagic lugger.
Which sets me child tae scratchin’
At you, my oviparous bugger
Up there a hatchin’!

I doubt na, whyles, her blud may thieve;
What then? thou booger, thou maun live!
A drap or ickle o’ that serum
Is wha’ you’re suckin’;
I'll get a dose o’ interferon,
An' gie you a good...talkin’ to.

But Lousie, thou art such a pain,
And hard to pry from aft girlie's brain:
The best-laid schemes o' lice an' men
Gang aft agley,
At least thine will, if the louse-cream
Gives you your conge’!

Still thou are blest, compared wi' me!
All you do is breed and flee:
But och! A fortnight or mair
She's still beloused!
And wi’ no daycare for me child,
I’m stuck i’ the house!

(Apologies to Robert Burns, and a hat tip to Lisa, who inspired this work)

OhmiGod! The kids are climbing the walls!

These are from the preceding weekend. Little Miss wanted to show what she had learned:Yeah, that'll get you a full ride at Stanford, sweetie.

But it did inspire the Boy to show us what HE could do. So here they are, climbing the walls:Sadly, the Great Louse Invasion still goes on - Mojo is home today steeping the Girl's head in some awful prescription Pemetherin^TM goop that's supposed to kill the little bastards. However, we've already tried the over-the-counter insecticide shampoos, which I read are already full of Pemetherin and have, apparently, facilitated the breeding of a race of super-lice immune to the toxin. Great.

I welcome our new ectoparasitic masters.

Fit for a Princess

Well, half a mission accomplished.

I haven't laid hands on the Peep's LEGO yet, but the Little Miss has her pink "princess" bicycle safely laid away in the basement waiting for Santa to assemble it on Christmas Eve.

What is it that makes little girls crave pink, fluffy things? I swear we have raised the girl on climbing and running; she told me just today that if some scary monster tried to frighten her that she would "kick him in the goolies and then throw him in the garbage." Tomorrow I will have to post the pictures of her - literally - climbing the walls. She's a tough girl I have no fears of growing up to become some frilly helpless little thing being walked on by her inamorata.

But from whence, then, this delight in all things pink and princessy?

There are more things in this world, Walt Disney, than are dreamed of in your philosophy. But you wouldn't know it from my daughter.

Unsplit Ends

Took Little Miss out to dim sum this morning and then to her first real movie in a theatre.

Dim sum was good, as always; Wong's King doesn't disappoint.

But the pleasant surprise was that the movie didn't either.

I don't have much left in the way of expectations from the Disney factory. Outside of the Pixar shop, most of the horses trotted out of the Disney stable lately seem to have been the broken-down get of the old sire Walt. Given that the man has been dead for decades, it's not surprising that his progeny are starting to get more than a little, well, sickly looking. So I expected something that would be barely tolerable for a four-and-a-half-year-old.

I couldn't have been more wrong.

The story was nothing surprising - you can't exactly break the mold with fairy tales, right? And the "spunky princess" and the "rogue with a heart of gold" are chestnuts off many a tree other than the one in the Disney backlot.But the animation was lovely; bright and cheery in the Disney style but still rich with detail. The main characters, stock company troupers that they were, were rendered with loving care, well-written, and nicely voiced. The supporting "actors" stole the show (as they often do) in the form of the stalwart guard-horse and Rapunzel's little tough-guy chameleon pal.

Even the Bad Guy, who in this case was a Bad Gal, was rendered with care and attention; she was a villainess, yes, but one with flair and relish, a very diva of demonesses.So all together it made a really delightful hour-and-a-half for a dad and daughter to spend as part of a midday Saturday.

I think what made all the difference in "Tangled" was the sense I got of a genuine love of its creators for the two cartoon leads and the world they inhabited. I've sat through some of the worst of the Disney dreck - a father sacrifices for his progeny, sigh... - but much of the recent stuff the outfit produced since losing the Great Helmsman in the middle Sixties wasn't just bad, it was really soulless. By-the-numbers commercial crap with the heart of an adding machine and the soul of a cash register. The people making it hadn't just forgotten how to make a good movie; they'd forgotten how to make any sort of art at all.To make something of worth, you have to care. Your caring might come from love, or hate, revenge, anger, or desire. But if you don't care about your creation it will show, and it did.

The people who made Disney's latest picture may have had one eye on the bottom line; commercial art has to pay for itself, after all. But the other eye was on the characters they brought to life on the screen, and that eye was full of love.