It’s a Beautiful Day

The day after Christmas, we went to my mother’s house.  Amazingly, my non-Christmas clebrating, Jehovah’s Witness grandmother had come to visit bringing a slew of that side of the clan to visit. I couldn’t miss that.

Marcel and, for her first time ever, Tristan got to hang out with many of their paternal cousins.  Tristan tended toward the older relatives who coddled and cuddled her constantly.  Marcel, meanwhile, ran wild with the younger cousins.  This was from the moment we got there and until our last day.

There was some time when we were away from the ruckus, though.  Bedtime.  (We slept at my mother’s house while most of the activity was at my youngest brother’s home.)  But, even then, the fun wasn’t far from mind.

In fact, our first morning began away from the action at my mother’s house with Marcel yelling for me.  She had awoke in a relatively strange bed and wasn’t sure were to go,  so she called for me to come get and guide her.  I walked into her bedroom and told her that she could get out bed and join the rest of us.

You’d think her mood would be frightened or, at least, angry, but it wasn’t.  Instead, she eagerly climbed out of bed and, as she walked to exit the room, kindly informed of what was to come.

“It’s a beautiful day, daddy.”

 

Vacation Edition

I’m writing this blog to catalogue the history of my life in my daughters’ world so I don’t lose and forget any of our wonderful memories. During vacations, however, we’re working too hard developing memories to find time to get to a computer and write them down. In those instances, I’ll fill one post with multiple entries. This is one of those instances.

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8/16/2008:

So maybe I was a little premature in announcing a change in Tristan’s sleep patterns. She woke up several times a night, in the middle of the night, every night, last week. Worse, my wife continues her practice of always waking me up along with her and Tristan.

Specifically, she asks me to change Tristan’s diaper while she runs off for a little potty time herself, even if all Tristan wants to do is to nurse. I mean, if diaper changing won’t stop the crying, why do I have to be miserable along with everyone, too? One night, however, Tristan didn’t want to feed. She really just needed a diaper change.

Or maybe something else was happening.

Tristan’s crying didn’t abate when I removed the dirty diaper, as it usually does when she’s only complaining about a dirty diaper. And, as I pulled out the cold wipe, I fully expected her crying to intensify when I slathered it across her bottom. Instead, she quieted precipitously.

By this point, she had turned to look at the lamp, which bathed her face in a warm glow. And as I finished the job and taped the fasteners, her eyes closed, her hand, previously raised in a clinched fist, slowly fell and a smile–a BIG smile–spread across her face.

And a little misery was a small price to pay to see that.

8/23/2008:

When I was growing up, my Dad was very much involved in my life.  He read me the Bible through Exodus and taught me Amazing Grace.  He also taught me Chess, Checkers, Backgammon and Monopoly. And when it came to football, baseball, basketball and, even, soccer, he never missed a home game.

He’s a grandparent (“GP”) now, though, and he expects to only have the easy parts.  So he was taken aback when Marcel ordered him to get in line.  Even though I was feeding Tristan a bottle, I tried to save him, and jumped in line behind Marcel but she insisted that all of us–my Mom, my wife and GP–get in line behind her, too.  Defeated, my Dad complied.

We marched out of the den, through the library, the dining room, the kitchen and then all of the way to nursery.  In the nursery, there’s an oval area rug where she sat down, Native American-style, and ordered us to do the same, taken my Dad by surprise, again.  Again, nursing Tristan and all, I tried to take the weight and sit down for the group but, again, Marcel insisted.  Defeated, my Dad compromised and sat on her bed.

As soon as everyone was seated, Marcel started in with the songs.  We sang several rounds of an incomplete “A, B, Cs”. Then we played instruments. Tristan and I had a pillow masquerading as a basketball which Marcel informed the group was a guitar.  My wife, Grandma and GP had “instruments”, as well.  When we were done, Marcel instructed us to put the instruments behind us (surely so we wouldn’t be distracted during the next activity), then we sang new songs.

It became clear to us that Marcel was mimicking her daily experience at fancy daycare.  This revelation filled me with comfort and gratitude that my daughter was being so well nurtured and inspired by the people to whom I entrust her.  This revelation filled my father with something else, altogether: It filled him with a question.

“When do we take a nap?”

 

Home v.2

As the legend goes, at 3 and 4, respectively, my younger brother and I walked the entire 3 mile length of the boardwalk to earn softserve ice cream cones promised by my dad. At barely 2 years old, Marcel isn’t ready for that. I had hoped, however, that she’d at least enjoy a walk through the fancy new mall on the boardwalk, whose length is much shorter than 3 miles and which would allow us to avoid the rain that had fallen all week and threatened us again, that morning.

When we got there, though, the mall hadn’t yet opened for the day, so we ended up on the boardwalk, anyway. Still leary of the walk, I tried to keep Marcel in the stroller. Of course, she immediately begged to get out and, when released, raced away.

Unfortunately, we found few of the hallmarks of my childhood. The video game arcades had long surrendered their fight to the rivals in our homes: Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft. The roasted peanut shop no longer roasted peanuts. And a group of men were feeding, amazingly, a giant pride of alley cats instead of competing flocks of pigeons and seagulls.

Alley cats.

A pride.

After sitting a bit with the cats, we continued down the boardwalk. We walked past the last of the hotels. Past the cacophony of strollers, hawkers and new construction. Past the point where new boards had been installed and only the old boards that I’d grown up with–deteriorating and creaking–remained. We walked to the point where the only sounds were the cackling of gulls and the crashing of surf.

Marcel may have always noticed and understood the world around her, but only now is she able to communicate that with me. I was hopeful that our improved communication would allow me to introduce my child to my childhood. And, at the beginning of our trip to my hometown, things worked out well.

In the evening of the first day that we were together, at my parents, Marcel scampered around desks and over sofas and chairs to close the shutters at my mother’s request. Closing the blinds–we had aluminum blinds, not the plantation shutters that are there now–was the first chore my younger brother and I ever had and I was moved to see that that chore was now hers. Later, on the ride to the big city for school clothes shopping, Dad played one of my all-time favorite childhood songs, “Everything Must Change“. For some reason, the irony wasn’t readily apparent to me…but it became so.

As Marcel thrilled to a boardwalk I did not know, I grew tired and became eager to leave. I tried to put Marcel back in the stroller to speed our return to my parents’ house but she fought and so, where my younger brother cried to stop, my young daughter cried to keep going. And the song, if not my hopes, proved true.

 

No Cheese

Marcel loves pictures but is ambivalent about being the subject. I didn’t expect that.

My youngest sister’s daughter loved being the subject of pictures when she was Marcel’s age. She would literally bring you the camera. We even have a picture of her bringing a camera to the photographer so that she could have her picture taken! Now THAT’s a ham.

We don’t have any pictures of Marcel bringing anybody cameras, but we do have a picture of her going ga-ga over a pile of magazine pages torn out by her mother for inspiration on fashion or furnishings.

Also, the two photographers in her life, my dad and her Southern Belle godmother, also happen to be two of her favorite people.

So because of her genes, early behavior, and obvious preferences, I thought she’d love to be photographed. But she’s not so hot on it.

She does love pictures. When the camera comes out, she’s quick to look beyond the lens to examine the camera. We have plenty of pictures…great pictures…of that. And she loves my dad and Southern Belle as much because they let her look at the picture display on their digital cameras as because they’re family that love her back. But if you’re trying to take her picture to teach her how to be a ham instead of to show her the picture, like my niece (that I’ll call Hammie) does, then she won’t necessarily be cooperative.

For instance, Marcel’s first daycare had picture day, recently. School pictures are important to everyone, right? They certainly were for my wife and I and, so, we were very excited that Marcel was about to take part in this great American tradition for the first time. I was particularly excited because I got to pick out her clothes and dress her. Marcel, however, wasn’t so excited. She pouted throughout the entire photo session and not one picture featured her with a smile.

The session wasn’t a total waste though. The daycare has a great program where, for free, they put the photo in a digital database that police can access if Marcel were to get kidnapped. They gave us a photo id card that features her picture and an ID number that we can give to the police so that they can quickly track the photo down. For that purpose, this glum picture is perfect! In that picture, Marcel’s expression simply shouts, “Will somebody save me?!?”

There was no saving her from Hammie, though, who, like all the women in my life, is pretty damn resourceful when it comes to having her way. Hammie had this ingenious plan to use Marcel’s growing excitement over learning new words to trick her into taking better pictures. Thus, the directive to smile, “say cheese”, would be camouflaged as instruction on a new word.

Unfortunately for Hammie, Marcel is pretty damn resourceful, too. She knows how to have her cake and eat, too, by both learning a new word AND avoiding those hated photo shoots. Thus, when Hammie held the camera up and directed Marcel to “say cheese”, Marcel responded with a wave and a curt “No cheese”, then walked away.

 

Home

My parents had Marcel for a week. At the end of that week, I came to pick her up and spend another week with all of them vacationing in my hometown. Because of work commitments, my wife couldn’t join us until late Thursday night of the second week. Thus, my wife hadn’t seen her only child for nearly two weeks.

This wasn’t altogether a bad thing. My parents got to have Marcel all to themselves, without having to share her with my wife and I. Additionally, Marcel got to bond with her paternal grandparents and establish her own relationship with them. Moreover, my wife and I got to be a little bit selfish and pay attention to ourselves. My wife got an extra week to be selfish. All of these things are good things, but they aren’t necessarily easy.

Aside from one weekend to attend my wife’s youngest cousin’s wedding in Cancun, Marcel hasn’t spent one night without at least one of her parents. She knows and loves my parents but eventually she missed her own parents. She woke one morning, I’m told, forlornly asking if we were still at home working.

We missed her, too. I was originally scheduled to join her on Sunday but came up a day early because I desperately needed a “Marcel fix”. On one phone call, meanwhile, my wife started crying because she hadn’t seen Marcel for so long. Her frustration was exacerbated, I’m sure, because we stopped putting Marcel on these phone calls because Marcel got so upset when they ended.

Thus, I was especially excited for my wife’s absence to end. I even kept Marcel up late (not a hard thing to do at my parents) so that she could escort me to the post-10 pm pick up at the bus station.

We rushed into the station because I wanted Marcel to see her mother enter through the gates. We beat my wife into the station but, because a big woman crossed Marcel’s path and distracted her, Marcel didn’t immediately see my wife. I had to point her out. Fortunately, my wife didn’t immediately see us, either. She walked straight for the front door, where she obviously expected to see us. We, however, had come through a side door.

As my wife strode along, Marcel stopped cold. She couldn’t believe her eyes. Her mother’s two week absence must have seemed like an eternity to the two-year old. Then she did believe her eyes. And she ran, face beaming, hands held aloft over her head, feet fast and sure, toward her mother.

I thought to warn my wife for fear that Marcel would run into her legs, tripping her, and causing the two to tumble across the bus station floor. The wonderful patter of Marcel’s feet must have been warning enough, though, because my wife quickly turned to her. And then my wife’s face beemed, her hands reached out eagerly and welcoming, and her feet stood wide and steady, ready to catch her running child.

And then they embraced.

And in their embrace, hours from the place of Marcel’s birth, hours from the place of my wife’s work, in the middle of a bus station, those two found home, again.