moominmolly | Entries tagged with n

Natalie's always been a shockingly physical kid. As a baby, she wanted to be swaddled to sleep much longer than the other kids. She loves snuggles, and still would sleep on top of me like a mattress if I let her. She points and gestures, and tells stories with her body in a way I don't often see. She loves running and climbing and biking and swimming and picking up heavy things. She loves hitting the punching bag and jumping on the trampoline and being hugged so hard it hurts.

A few years ago-probably embarrassing early- I bought her some fraction blocks. You know, the kind with one block that says "1", one in two halves that says "1/2", and so on. I showed them to her, but it never took. In fact, I thought she didn't know where the blocks were anymore. But tonight, at dinner, but she wanted to make a point about math, she ran to the sewing closet, got out the fraction blocks, came back to the table, and made her point. With objects.

(I didn't know they were still in the house. She knew right where they were.)

She loves to diagram things. She loves to make mockups. She loves to build crazy shit out of the recycling.

I don't have a grand point here. I'm sure that I don't quite know how to engage with this style of learning in a perfect way, but it's pretty fun to try sometimes. Also frustrating sometimes, too- like when I want to scream AAAAGH PLEASE JUST USE SOME WORDS FOR PETE'S SAKE. But I am curious: was this you? Is it your kids? It wasn't me. I'm all words and numbers, and grew up a brain in a jar.

[edited to add: out of curiosity, I lay face down next to her at bedtime tonight, very still, and she half crawled on top of me, used my head as a pillow, and almost instantly started snoring.]

Natalie is in our bed, asleep. I just crawled in and she said, "Mom?... Mom? This is a cheese over banana... Zzzsnrrrksnumb *SNORE*"

A literal snore, right at the end of her sentence.

Today she and Sylvana built a time machine out of the recycling. It runs on tokens, which they also made. Except, as she explained to me, normal time machines don't work so this is an AGE machine. It changes your age, but only for an hour. It was easier to build. Alas, only kids fit inside, so it doesn't change your outside body. Just your inside one. For an hour.

Things she loves: manga, biking, going across the street to run errands at Rite-Aid, her new pierced ears, jokes about butts, snuggles, and inventing. Her comic timing is flawless. It's a problem. Today, apparently she and dilletante spent a while discussing twins, triplets, clones, and the nature of identity. She always asks the good questions.

Seven years old: I'm a big fan, I think. Best yet.

Before their "official" start at the school on October 1st, the Not Just Lego club will be offering a 3-week "parkour and street art" afterschool program. And I quote:

"Explore the urban environment with kid-friendly Parkour instructor Blake Evitt and leave behind non-invasive art with Kelle Shugrue"

...and yet again I'm left wondering, "can I join this club?"

Yesterday, I:

Had a hot breakfast-in-bed made by two small girls without adult supervision
Ate brunch at 3 Little Figs
Put in some sweet LED lightbulbs, restored the hidden reading nook to its former glory, and sorted the mail
Snuggled my kid while watching dorky TV
Discovered a magically squeaky clean kitchen had replaced the previous one while I was lounging
Took the aforementioned girls out to Roller World for some skating, and got a lot of time skating solo
Practiced skating backwards, a skill I never picked up
Walked in the Fells with the girls and dilletante and jojotbird
Explored PANTHER CAVE (which was epic)
Went out for bedtime drinks with redheadedmuse
Came home and enjoyed my marital privileges

...yeah, that's basically the best mother's day I've had in more than a decade. I'm a lucky lady.

If ever I had any doubt about whether switching schools this year was the right move for my kid, I no longer do.

Last night, at bedtime, she whispered to me about a plan she had. This happens a lot. But last night's plan was a SECRET FRENCH PROJECT! Here's what she reported:

"I want to write a letter to my teacher last year - in French - and say that I am going to New York this weekend on a trip and I hope she's happy. And I would like to put another smaller envelope in that envelope for her class, for all the students in her class, and it will be filled with pieces of paper that say in ENGLISH: 'I love you, and you are great in school.' Or maybe just 'XOXOXO You're great.' Then I want to sneak into the school and leave it in front of her door and sneak away."

This breaks my heart, basically. She continues to work through her difficult experience last year with bursts of insight and grace -- this step is clearly her trying to think about what would have made life better for her, and trying to fix the problem for other people.

That kid. I hope she changes the whole world.

SCENE: Two five-year-old girls are walking barefoot and hand-in-hand down a forest path. Natalie is holding a big foam sword in her other hand. I am walking by and eavesdropping from another path.

N: You don't need to be scared! I have THIS! *brandishes sword mightily*
S: ...Is that sword made of plastic?

I love this combination of adventure and skepticism. Neither seemed fazed; it's not like the fact that the sword was a toy stopped it from being their weapon against, you know, whatever they might find.

Later, S (who is not the usual five-year-old S, but rather

concrete and

entrope's little one) was locked in EPIC MUD BATTLE with N. They were in bathing suits and underwear and covered in splotches of mud and smiling almost-unbearably-huge smiles. It is a tragedy that my camera is still not working, because this might have been the most wonderful thing I've seen in months.

They're all growing up. It's wonderful and difficult and strange; five years ago, I was nursing a baby. Five years from now, she probably won't clamor to sleep in bed with me all night. Right now, I think that she loves nothing so much as independence and adventure, as long as she can still give her mom and dad big muddy hugs while she's doing it.

Do you ever have intense pangs of nostalgia for things that are happening RIGHT NOW? I just look at my kid -- trying out rollerblades, climbing the walls, growing out her bangs, asking complicated questions about human relationships, reading the world -- and sometimes I feel this overwhelming wistfulness that I don't quite understand and am not going to argue with.

Dear future-me: 5 was a pretty damn good age.

Where should I go around here to get kids' rollerskates on a whim, this afternoon?

So, the girls recently found my stack of Scott Pilgrim books and were QUITE ENTHUSIASTIC about a grownup reading picture books to herself. Naturally, they wanted in. I read my rapt audience several pages before realizing ... yeah, this is basically about sex and fighting.

My question to you, Internet: what is the most awesome (mostly fun) graphic novel that's okay for kids? Many of my favorites are right out (Preacher, etc), but surely there must be some! I think Bone could be good. What else?

In a messy house, it is VERY EASY to hide presents in small semi-institutionalized bits of clutter. Which is good, because the girls have sleuthed out all the normal-hidey hiding places.

Posted via LiveJournal app for iPhone.

I played "3 Feet High and Rising" for Natalie, and she liked it well enough. I didn't get around to playing the other recommendations you guys gave me (thanks!), because last night all she wanted to hear was yodeling. We played "The Lonely Goatherd" three times, and she also quite liked this video of a girl who taught herself to yodel because she was bored.

Just keeping y'all up to date.

Songs Natalie has made me turn off, recently: "Dream Lover" by White Flight
Songs Natalie has made me play on multiple repeat recently: "Mission" by Le Peuple de L'Herbe; "Plastic Jungle" by Miike Snow (I had to play this one three times).

She also would like to listen to more hip-hop please. So, if anyone has any not-kid-unfriendly hip-hop that they could share with me, I'd like it. She likes relatively clear vocals, Blackalicious, Jurassic 5, and Daft Punk. She asked if

fennel could give us some, but I figure I should go ahead and ask everyone.

--

Last night in the car:

"Pigs breathe hay. They breathe it through their mouths and noses."
"....Really?"
"Yes, Sarah told me. They don't know how to eat hay so I think they breathe it."
"OH! 'Pigs don't eat it 'cause they don't know how'?"
"Yes! It's a funny joke Sarah told me. Pi-- um -- horses and cows eat hay but pigs don't know how to eat it so they don't!"

*we both laugh*

--

Apparently she told

dancingwolfgrrl this, also out of the blue:

"If you had a boat, and it had three buttons on it, and they were magic, probably one of the buttons would, um, make the boat fly, um. like an airplane. And one of the buttons would turn you into a princess, like I am. And one of them would, um, probably make the boat zoom fast like a car."

Probably! It probably would.

--

Also in the car:

"I was playing with my sister Sylvana the other day and -- I would like for Sylvana to be my sister now, okay?"
"...okay! If you would like to talk about her that way that's okay, I think, since you live like sisters even though you have different parents."
"OK. Sylvana is my sister."
"OK."
"I was playing with my sister Sylvana the other day...."

I get the strong sense that this was motivated by a desire to simplify storytelling when she's at school. Complicated. She had recently leaned toward "sisterfriend", which is more descriptive but also not immediately legible to strangers.

Me: *only half-listening to a story about school*
N: ....but maybe I imagined that.
Me: Oh yeah?
N: Hey! Actually, maybe I'm imagining this!
Me: This right now?
N: Yeah! Maybe I'm in bed asleep, imagining me here! Maybe I'm ...a different me, thinking!
Me: ..............maybe! I don't know!
N: Why not? Am I a different me?
Me: Probably not! But maybe!
N: Why?
Me: Um. Because uh... reality is subjective. All we really know is the stuff we see and think about, but we also see and think about dreams, so it can be hard to tell. It's an interesting question.
N: What's reality?

I HAVE NO IDEA ANYMORE.

[In the middle of a conversation about how much she wants to buy Dora-branded Fruit Snacks, which is itself an interlude in the middle of a bigger conversation about her suddenly having trouble in school in the afternoons, about which she said "I can't behave because I don't want to be in school anymore so it's hard to listen"]:

I want them because SOMETIMES I JUST WANT TO BE LIKE ALL MY FRIENDS.

Emphasis hers, not mine.

I won't go on. But ( here are a few playground photos from yesterday )

N's preschool is doing school photos. WHAT DO I DO?

They don't make you prepay or choose a package until you see the photo, so I think what we'll do is let her get her picture taken along with everyone else and then just quietly let it drop, but still. This is a thing that is going to happen forever and every year it's going to make me feel a little bit weird.

(1) This has been going on for years, but I've never really posted about it. So, ok, I have this arty photo journal at

snap_pop, but I also have had a phone camera lj at

molblog for over 3 years. I started using it after D went back to work post-paternity-leave so he could see what we were up to during the day, and for a long time I didn't tell anyone about it unless I took their photo and put it in the journal. Quality is not guaranteed; more often than not, it's just charmingly motion-blurred photos of Natalie on a swing, or whatever. But it's a thing I do, and it turns out that it's actually extremely important to me. Last week, I went to get dinner with

fennel and my phone was not working, and of COURSE that's when I saw the soggy open paperback at the base of a fenced-in sidewalk tree in the rain. Anyway, a few different people recently have said, hey, how did I never know about this?, so I figure it's time to post about it. Quality not guaranteed, lots of photos, read at your own risk, etc etc etc. It's just a slice of life.

(2) and it's the reason I don't do twitter. For me, it fills the same role -- taking bits out of my daily life just as they are and posting them on the move, as I go. But I really prefer having it be images. I flirted a tiny bit with twitpic.com, but it's just not the same. A little while back, though,

redheadedmuse said, "I wish you would fall in love with twitter so I could read the silly things that Natalie says every day." And I thought: why not? So I'm experimenting with twitter now, under the name "nafco_says", where I'm just posting things she says to me with no more than 140 characters of context. It's not perfect yet, but neither am I, so there you go.

Watermelon and beer in dappled shade: a girl in her bathing suit outside, at long last, with a wet sandy butt: love that keeps me up at night: barefoot small girls holding hands: all the windows rolled down: the honey smell of dandelions: our glorious backyard: a love ballad about missing daddy when he's gone: hot sun and a cool basement: kitties on loan: giggles all around.

Good weekend.

The beginning of street-sweeping season
Spontaneous day trips to New York to see the_xtina and rosefox
9 hours in a car chatting and singing with fennel
Plans to go BACK to New York in a week!
Morning weightlifting
Raw milk in coffee
A sleepy happy little girl with a wild tangle of hair who can't quite wake up but can still be sly
Early bedtimes, early mornings, even if I can't quite wake up either

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Entries tagged with n

Physicalkid

Tiny updates on a big kid

(no subject)

best mother's day ever.

Yet another N story about school

(no subject)

(no subject)

ask dr LJ!

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Sweet sweet side effects

she may be short, but she is enthusiastic

(no subject)

the natalie update

life with tiny infuriating socrates, cont

things it can break your heart to hear

sunny day, sweepin the clouds away --

how ridiculous a thing to stop me in my tracks

Two non-updatey updates

(no subject)

things it would be difficult for me to be any happier about

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