Skipper scootches, Dutch sulks.

I'm so sorry - I should have made it clear that I was just back from a wonderful, yummy, cozy family Thanksgiving. No, really! It was lovely. I was super-lazy and let my wonderful family members feed me and clean up after me and play with my kids. Dutch loved every second of it, and scored a much-beloved Barbie coloring book out of the event. Skipper loved flirting with everyone in sight.

Today we realized something important about Dutch. She's been pretty awful for the last month or so, which we've been blaming on all sorts of things- Skipper's birth, our move, bad weather, our stress levels, etc. Today we kind of put it all together, FINALLY, and realized that what's happening here is more than that - it's a major shift in Dutch's life. She has officially left behind her status as Little and Cute. This has been accelerated by her hugeosity and her new glasses, which make her look older than she is, but she was getting there anyway. She's entered a sort of a preview of adolescence, a transition from small-childhood to grade-school-childhood.

This transition is made more difficult by the fact that Skipper has just arrived in small-childhood and the privileges thereof. Skipper is overwhelmingly Little and Cute right now, and she gets all sorts of positive attention from strangers, as well as from Cook and me. She has also just begun commando-crawling, and is starting to get into Dutch's Stuff. None of the annoying things she does are her fault, and everybody forgives her every transgression. This looks wildly unfair to Dutch, and it doesn't help to point out to her that she got all the same privileges when she was Little and Cute. It also doesn't help that her new maturity and responsibility come with new privileges, because they don't look to her like adequate compensation. I'm not sure they really ARE adequate compensation, honestly.

Cook and I are now trying to redirect our energy* toward coming up with ways to make child-middle-age look better to Dutch - some way to recognize and honor her status as a Big Kid in a way that makes sense to all of us. Ideas would be very welcome.


*from activities such as checking how much it would cost to mail a 50-pound package containing a live animal to Ecuador. Or looking into the minimum age limit for boarding schools. That sort of thing.

Thanks

We're back from Thanksgiving! Now Cook and I have to figure out how to get a big consulting project done (Cook) while also finishing a paper (me), drafting a final project (me), writing a term paper (me), and writing up a research assignment (me). Also, going to Gresham to work (me). Should be no problem, right? So I'm going to stop spending time blogging.

Bribe me.

An incentive chart is a poster on which Dutch gets to put a sticker at the end of each day that she keeps her glasses on all day, working toward prizes. If she earns a sticker each of the next four days, for example, she gets to have breakfast with me on Sunday, JUST THE TWO OF US,* at our awesome local cafe, where Dutch will eat bacon, jam, ketchup,** bread, and freshly-squeezed orange juice.

I wish I had an incentive chart. Adulthood is kind of shitty that way. My rewards are erratic, usually unearned, and often entwined with something less lovely, but they are lovely. The sight of Dutch's small, defiant face turned up to me today as we discussed her incentives, with her jutting chin, tangled hair, and lopsidedly magnified right eye peering through those despised glasses, was a reward. When she said that thinking about the bacon "makes my mouth water!" and then said thoughtfully "... I don't actually know what that means," that was a reward, too.

But I'd still like some stickers. And a prize.


*This is a very powerful incentive, because she's so sick of that damn interloping baby.
** That is a very specific list - the ketchup and jam are made in-house, and are delicious, so they have become a central part of the meal, rather than peripheral.

So...tired...

Skipper has gotten over several nights of wakeful playfulness from 11 PM to 1 AM. Now she's back to just waking up at 5 AM. Meanwhile, I am most productive with my schoolwork from 9 PM (when kids are asleep, dishes washed, random stuff tidied up, etc) to 11 PM (when my last few brain cells give up and go to bed). I am lucky to get six hours of sleep a night these days, and it's broken up with breastfeedings and comforting-back-to-sleeps. I can't remember what it's like to have a fully-functioning brain.

In the good news, Dutch has been eerily nice for the last 24 hours, as if the glasses that make her look 2 years older also have somehow matured her emotionally. She still dislikes the glasses, but her re-entry into daycare as a glasses-wearer was much less traumatic than she feared (several kids even said they LIKED her glasses, much to my relief), and I think we're on track (with the help of an incentive chart) to regular wearing.

Dutch has hidden her glasses several times. She takes them off at every opportunity. When her friends came over for her birthday party today, one of them said "You look weird with glasses on. You look like a doctor." and of course Dutch immediately took her glasses off.

The problem is that she can see beautifully with ONE eye, which has basically taken over all the vision responsibilities, so the glasses don't functionally improve her vision - they kind of boggle her poor little brain, which was happily chugging along with input from one eye. Thus she has no reason to wear the glasses; not only do they not make it easier for her to see, they actually make it harder for her to see during this transition period.

So - we have to come up with other incentives. Any ideas?

Four eyes

Here is Dutch wrangling one of her TWO new pairs of glasses. She's not very happy about the glasses thing at all...



This video, while boring, is notable because a) hey, check out Dutch in glasses! and b) hey, check out those sibling dynamics!

Girls Who Wear Glasses

I have a five-year-old. I have an amblyopic five-year-old. I have an amblyopic five-year-old princess who LOVED her birthday presents (thank you, all of you!) and is wildly excited to play her new games, read her new books, wear her new clothes, and dress up her new Shirley Temple paper dolls (courtesy of our housemates, who have had to watch all that tap-dancing). The kid loves Shirley Temple.* The kid does NOT love the prospect of getting glasses.** I cannot find any evidence that Shirley Temple wore glasses, but I'm looking for evidence to prove that people CAN be fancy and wear glasses at the same time. I welcome any suggestions for getting over this hurdle.

* The irrepressibly jaunty little-girl Shirley Temple, not the scary Republican old lady Shirley Temple
**Because she actually only needs a corrective lens on one eye, Cook thinks we should get her a monocle.

Movies

This is Skipper in the morning, again. I was trying to capture her sitting up, but she fell over.


And this is Dutch's new bike. It's huge. Dutch loves it (it's pink and superfancy!) but hasn't quite yet got the hang of it. And we haven't got training wheels. So Cook has been doing a lot of running around holding on to the back. In this scene, however, he's changing the gears. Really.


This is Skipper asleep on our bed, dreaming about breasts. Everything is yellow.


This is Dutch and Skipper this morning (we got the package, Mom!). Dutch is dressed for her first ever soccer class at the community center. She participated enthusiastically for about 20 minutes, and then said she didn't want to play anymore because she's not good at it. Alas. But I made her stay and watch the other kids for the remaining 25 minutes, and she's going to try again next week. My kid with the perfection complex...

Horrible/Adorable

Cars suck. They really do. They take up so much space and time and energy and they KILL PEOPLE. I'm sick of feeling defensive about being car-free. Not having a car (on purpose, I mean, not because you just lost your license or can't afford* a car) isn't a personal virtue. It's a way of living that is good for everybody. It's good for me. I walk two miles a day as a minimum (and boy howdy do I need to burn those calories). I chat with my family members as I walk and on the bus, without having to concentrate on driving. It's good for you. I'm not polluting. It's good for Portland. For every $1 I don't spend on gas/insurance/etc., about $.70 goes into the local economy.** And don't forget the fact that I'm gentle on the infrastructure, saving the taxpayers' maintenance money.

Portland is a weird place. Being here, and in an urban planning degree program, I find that I'm defensive about my transportation in a totally new way. In Portland, the people with whom I spend my days generally think car-free-ness is admirable. But I have to be defensive about the fact that I don't bike.In Portland, people who don't bike are losers.*** A helmet and battered bike bag are status symbols in Portland. A bus pass, not so much.

That's about all I have to say about that. In other news, Skipper is so adorable that it kind of hurts my teeth. Dutch is possibly possessed by demons, and has been behaving like that kid you sometimes see in public who is so horribly awful that you shake your head in horror and feel a pang of pity and contempt for that horrible child's parents, who are obviously incompetent or neglectful, and are definitely horrible. Dutch obviously sees that Skipper is adorable, and I expect that's one of her demons. Also, she wants us to buy a car.


* Okay, I can't afford a car. But it's also by choice!
** According to Joe Cortwright. I don't know enough about economics to even begin to assess that claim.
*** Utilitarian biking, that is. People who bike for recreation are also losers.

Err-Lie in the Morning...

Here are two new videos, taken this morning at 6 AM as Skipper and I prepared for the day. (Skipper, like Arizona, does not believe in time changes.)


You have questions?

Yes, she is kitted out entirely in Swedish-ish things, including the highchair. So? She's one-quarter Swedish! It's legitimate.

Yes, she's wearing a hat inside. It was cold, and that was the only warm-ing-up-type thing I could find in the dark without waking the rest of the family.


No, these videos are not very interesting, and yes, they're practically identical. I'm serving up two because I assume that you can't get enough of watching my daughter bang things on other things. I think she's completely adorable* right now,** and I expect you to feel the same, or at least not tell me otherwise.



*in spite of the 5:30 wake-up calls...

** A friend of mine opines that babies reach their Maximum Babyness at age 7 months, and I think he's right. Skipper squawks and whacks things and smiles and says "blah blah blah blah!" and it's all just overwhelmingly adorable. She's so enthusiastic!