Milestones

Sometime over the last couple of weeks, Marcel began reaching the light switch without getting on a stool or chair.  Just prior to that, Marcel learned to turn door knobs.

Meanwhile, Tristan combined two skills–turning over and putting something in her mouth–when she rolled to her side, pulled her pacifier into her mouth and went to sleep.

The biggest development on the new achievements scale, however, was when Marcel peed in her bed.

This had never happened before because, frankly, my wife and I were conscientious about putting Marcel in pull-ups at bedtime.  This night, however, we weren’t conscientious.

The next morning, Marcel jumped into our bed and got under the covers.  Everything was unusual about this.

Normally, if she wakes up before us, she just calls for us to come get her out of bed.  If she does come into our room, she usually declines getting into bed and, instead, urges us to take her downstairs for chocolate milk and television.  On very rare occasions, she’ll get into bed with us, and she did just that this time.

And when she did, I noticed that her pajama pants did not match her pajama top.

Mismatch pajamas aren’t just rare in our household.  They are nonexistent.  My wife is a stickler for things like that, so when Marcel hopped into bed with mismatch pajamas, not only did my antenna shoot up, but my mouth shot open.

“Marcel,” I queried, “what happened to your pajamas?”

“I changed them,” she responded.  She refused, however, to explain why.  She just got into our bed as happy as could be.  Like mismatch pajamas, Marcel changing her bottoms is nonexistent.

Even as a newborn, Marcel never much minded dirty diapers.  I distinctly remember telling our favorite Argentinian musician how grateful I was for that trait, only to have him educate me on the pitfalls of rarely-changed, over-full diapers.  Warnings notwithstanding, Marcel and I came to learn the consequences of delayed diaper changes the hard way, including Marcel becoming comfortable with wet and soiled underwear…while sitting on the sofa.

So to hear say that she changed herself, unprompted, raised all kind of alarms bells.  I got out of bed to check on her room.  When I entered her room, I found an even more startling thing:  I found a made bed.

Now, my wife is about as anal about makign the bed as she is about storing pajamas in matching sets, but I never seen her teach Marcel how to make a bed and never seen Marcel actually care about making a bed.  I mean, she’ll tell that it’s her job to make the chocolate milk, cook the dinner or plant the flowers.  She does not, however, tell you that it’s her job to make the bed.  But that morning, it was.

And it was my job to unmake it.

When I pulled back the covers, my suspicions were confirmed.  The tell-tale wet spot revealed that Marcel had peed in the bed.  But far from being upset, I was grateful.  Marcel was finally ashamed of messing herself.  And, for the next couple of days, Marcel insisted on going to the potty before the “rain and mud” came.

We’re told we aren’t supposed to shame our children into potty training.  I’m not sure we could if we were allowed.  (She’s way too cute to punish, really.)  But, given the results, I was sure glad Marcel was willing to take up the cudgel.

 

Dear Children

Dear Children,

On November 5th, 2008, the junior U.S. Senator from Illinois, Barack Obama, became the first black president of the United States of America.  It wasn’t supposed to happen.

Black people first came to the Americas as slaves. For the next three hundred years, Africans and Americans of African descent–in short, your ancestors–were held in legal bondage in the United States, mostly in the South.  It took a civil war, which ended more American lives than any war since, including two world wars, to end the practice.

For the next century after that, however, African-Americans were still subject to Southern laws of segregation–referred to as “Jim Crow” laws–that were so callous and brutal that African-Americans weren’t much better off than their slave forbears.

Though there were considerable opposition from every corner of American society, the plight of African-Americans in the United States was allowed because the myths surrounding African-Americans were disseminated for so long, through so much of society and were so pernicious that even African-Americans themselves began to internalize and believe them.

That’s why in February 2007, even after then Sen. Barack Obama had been making a strong case for his candidacy with record breaking fundraising, that an African-American state senator from South Carolina, Robert Ford, endorsed a different, and white, candidate for president of the United States, arguing that he wanted to protect the Democratic Party from Barack Obama.

“Every Democrat running on that ticket next year would lose,” he argued “because [Obama's] black and he’s top of the ticket.”

Republican’s, presumably, agreed. There were three special elections in 2008 to replace Republican members of Congress that had left office since the 2006 elections. The last two were to find replacements for Southern seats in the House of Representatives (Louisiana and Mississippi). In these two races, Republicans pointedly tried to tie the Democratic contenders for those seats to presidential hopeful Barack Obama, clearly trying to play on the history of race in America.

But it just wasn’t American–black and white–hatred of African-Americans that threatened Obama’s historic candidacy, but it was also black hatred of their plight in America that threatened Obama’s candidacy.  Frankly, white Americans’ fear of black retribution has played as much a part in undermining American unity as white injustice against blacks.  That’s why the revelation of Obama’s long time pastor’s own hostility to America nearly doomed his historic candidacy.

Recognizing that the discussion of race in America was poison to his candidacy, Obama first tried to breeze past this particular controversy like he had breezed past the general issue throughout his campaign.  Ultimately, though, he was forced to confront it with a March 18, 2008 speech that tried to not only save his campaign but even tried to re-write the rules for how noble Americans attack the race question in the future.

Within two months, and despite Ford’s fears, Republican hopes and, maybe, because of Obama’s speech and candidacy, those Southern down ticket seats went to the Democrats, in one case for the first time in over a generation. (The third, for the seat of former leader of House Republicans, Dennis Hastert, also went to the Democrats.)

I would argue that the coup de grace to Ford’s argument, however, did not come until Monday, May 19, 2008. On that day, U.S. Senator Robert Byrd endorsed Barack Obama to be the Democratic nominee for President of the United States of America.  This is remarkable, in part, because his home state, West Virginia, gave the nod to Obama’s final competition for the Democratic nomination by a 41 point spread.

More darkly, this is also remarkable because Robert Byrd was a member of the Ku Klux Klan, joining at 24 and, eventually, rising to be the president of his local chapter. Then, as a member of the U.S. Senate, Byrd set the record for longest continuous filibuster by one Senator when he spoke against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 for 14 consecutive hours.

Thus, with his endorsement of a black man for president, Sen. Byrd bucked history.

And thus, on November 5th, 2008, the United States of America made history.

Love,

Dad

 

Congreve’s Rule v.2

We have iPods older than our children, courtesy of their AC uncle.  I loved mine so much that I’ve since got an upgraded model that allows me to carry pictures of my children and already I’m looking hard at the newest one which allows you to connect to the Internet.  My wife, on the other hand,  hardly uses hers.

But she did on Thursday.

I not sure what motivated her, but she called me from the car to figure out how to play it through the car stereo system.  She stuck with my confused direction long enough to actually get it going.  She must’ve loved it, because her iPod was sitting and playing in the dock of our iPod speaker system playing which, heretofore, I used pretty much exclusively.

As always, it was nice to come home from a day’s work.  Unusually, though, all of my girls had gotten there, first.  And, even more unusually, good music was wafting throughout the house and my oldest girls were cooking.

The memory is hazy, now.  I’m not sure if we had eaten or had yet to eat, but Corrine Bailey Rae’s “Breathless“ came up on the shuffle playlist.  It is a beautiful song, at once light and airy, yet warm and sensual.  It is a love song but it’s also a call to relaxation and good, easy living.

I was moved to answer the call so I picked up Tristan and started dancing. I held her cheek to my cheek and, with eyes closed, slowly twirled and twirled.  When I next opened my eyes, I was shocked to see my wife holding Marcel and dancing, too.  Marcel, for her part, was practicing her slow-dancing skills by lovingly, and hilariously, caressing her mother’s locks.

And so, I think my wife’s iPod has successfully made the case for more use or, as in the words of Corrine Bailey Rae:

“I get so breathless, when you call my name/I’ve often wondered, do you feel the same?/There’s a chemistry, energy, a synchronicity/When we’re all alone/So don’t tell me/You can’t see/Oh!”

 

A token of my love

I’m getting a tattoo.

I can’t say that this was a lifelong dream.  Though I never specifically articulated this to myself, I looked on most tattoos as the unconsidered whims of the bored.  Anything that could be so important that it would be worth permanently emblazoning on your skin, I reasoned, did not need to be worn on your sleeve.

Then Marcel was born.

With her birth I realized that, unlike most important things–such as God, country or alma mater–your child will pull away from you.  It’s a necessity of their life.  The more they pull away, however, the more you want them close.  And nothing is as close as a tattoo.

With Tristan’s birth–and my family probably complete–I could design a tattoo that would accurately reflect all of my children.

I wanted this tattoo to be more than just an accurate protrayal of my children but also an inspiration to them.  I wanted it to represent more than just my love and devotion to them, but also to inspire them to be the kind of women that I think they can become.  And so this tattoo not only symbolizes them but it also symbolizes the things I’d like to bequeath to them.

There is a symbol for my family.  The family that birthed me and raised me made me the man that is worthy of being their father and, I think, is a foundation for their own growth and prosperity.  There is a symbol for my faith which guides and inspires me and could play the same role for them.  There is a symbol for duty, because that comes first.  There is a symbol for ambition, because anything that’s worth doing is worth doing better than anybody else.  And there are symbols for me and my daughters.

We still have some decisions to make about the design but, aside from colors, changes will be only in the margins.  Then, the tattoo will probably take many hours over a month’s time to complete.  When it is done, however, I will have a lasting tribute to my daughters.  And knowledge of that, perhaps, will follow my daughters throughout their travels.

 

Gooooool!

For the past four weeks, with the exception of one rain date, we’ve spent Saturday mornings at Marcel’s soccer practice.

Much to my chagrin, Marcel has never evidenced much interest in playing ball of any sort.  If I turn the TV to football, Marcel falls out into a spasm, as if I’d taken away her lunch.  Her various sport toys collect dust, while Marcel turns her attention to the music, art and kitchen toys.  Even as a baby, the only attention she would give to balls that I rolled her way was the occasional attempt at chewing them.  There’s so much value in team sports, however, from fitness to socialization, that I’d thought we’d give it a try, anyway.

We couldn’t just show up, though.  We had to get equipment, including her own soccer ball. Somehow, someway, Marcel must have heard about soccer–we’re a football household–and was intrigued by the prospect of getting equipment for playing the game.  So, when I told Marcel that we would have to get soccer equipment, she got very interested.  In fact, she even queried about it over and over.

“Soccer?  We’re going to play soccer?”

Eventually, we got to the sporting goods store one school night.  Here, we started to get off track.  We started in the section with shin guards.  I was a little befuddled by the selection.  Apparently, soccer equipment had come a long way since I played in high school.  Things were further complicated by the fact that Marcel wasn’t as interested in the selection as I was, but preferred the opportunity to run wild in a new environment, instead. It took quite an effort to corral her long enough to choose a pair.

The next sign of trouble was choosing the soccer ball.  Ignoring the classic white and black hexagonal design, as well as a sleek blue, silver and white number, Marcel settled on a pink version.  I admit that I briefly  wondered if a girlie color would impede a competitive spirit but quickly shrugged it off.  Style and heart, I concluded, need not be exclusive to each other.  After picking out a BPA-free water bottle, we finally headed over to the cleats.

There, we came across a mother-daughter combination buying cleats, too.  That daughter was significantly older than my Marcel–5 or 6 years older, at least–and she knew what she was doing.  Marcel was fascinated by the girl and her routine of trying on, then testing, her cleats, and she couldn’t wait to mimic the girl with her own sprint through the store.  Finally, I thought, Marcel is interested in sports.

Then soccer practice started.

She was good for the first half of practice.  She not only played close attention to the instructor, but she even did a fair impression of his moves.  Keep this up, I thought, and I’ll be able to buy tickets to the 2028 Olympics!  Then Marcel noticed the playground equipment.

A sly smile spread across her face, then she made a mad dash for the colorful jungle gym, without even once looking back at her soccer ball.  I grabbed her up before she reached paydirt and carried her back to the  square patch of grass marked off with tiny, orange traffic cones that served as our “soccer field”, and told her to finish practice.  Her interest lied elsewhere, though, namely this new game of “catch the playground” with her dad.  Ultimately, the only way I could get her to focus on the soccer instruction was to bribe her with the promise of a brownie.

Over time, her interest  flagged so much so that, by the most recent practice, Marcel was no longer asking about soccer.  On the contrary, she was openly protesting even having to put on her cleats.  Still, we made the trek out to practice, with me struggling to find ways to motivate and inspire her to appreciate the sport.

For the first few moments, nothing came to mind.  I stood by her as she stood by her ball looking at the practice from our forlorn corner of the square.  Eventually, the instructor asked everybody to carry their ball to the center and start stretching and Marcel grudgingly complied.  Then he started slowly running around the square and, as Marcel and the rest of the students dribbled behind him, he asked the group to try to hit him with their balls.

Then Marcel hit him.

Then I lost my cool.

“Yeah, Marcel,” I yelled, jumped and clapped!  For the past five minutes, Marcel had, slowly, got more and more engaged, which was thrilling enough.  And she also had exhibited new skills in controlling her ball.  This also thrilled me.  Most importantly, however, when I spontaneously cheered, she beamed with joy, which thrilled me even more!

Maybe she was just happy that she hit the coach and won the game.  But maybe my cheering was the means I had been looking for to motivate and inspire her through practice and, maybe, even to the Olympics!  Maybe I was the one who had hit paydirt or, as that famous, Spanish-speaking, soccer announcer Tony Tirado would say, made “Goooooooooooooool!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

So, when the class had moved onto the new drill–a pseudo-jumping jack, except the kids kept their hands on their hips and jumped around their soccer ball–I started cheering wildly, again.  Marcel, however, didn’t beam this time.  Instead, my 3 y.o. flashed a 13 y.o.’s embarrassment and impatience and shouted me down with a very stern, “Daaaaaaaaaaaaad.”

And, thus, it appeared we had both got a little ahead of ourselves.

 

New Dog’s New Tricks

Sometimes, Tristan creates a vacuum in her milk bottle, which stops the flow of milk.  I suppose every baby does it.  Marcel did it, but I learned to regularly pull the bottle away so as keep the flow steady and the cries at bay.  By the time Tristan arrived, however, I must’ve forgotten the trick because she regularly creates vacuums.  Amazingly, Tristan figured out the answer to the problem all on her own.

Often while I’m daydreaming my way through Tristan’s feeding, or whatever the hell it is I’m doing, Tristan realizes that the milk has stopped flowing.  Any other baby would start crying but fail to recognize that, just by opening their mouth, they have let air into the bottle which, in turn, allows the milk to flow again, thus making further cries unnecessary.

Of course, any baby would make this mistake.  After all, they’re just a baby!  Apparently, though, Tristan isn’t just a baby because Tristan doesn’t cry.

Instead, when the vacuum occurs and the flow dries up, Tristan starts pushing at my fingers.  She’s trying to push the bottle in my hand out of her mouth.  She’s not strong enough to actually move my hand, of course, but she is strong enough to get my attention.  When she starts pushing, I pull the bottle away, we wait for the telltale bubbles and hiss to stop and, when it does, she opens her mouth and I pop the bottle back in.

Obviously, she could achieve the same affect just by opening her mouth but, given her age, her way is mighty impressive to me.

 

A Gathering of Old Men

When people criticized us for spelling Marcel’s name in the masculine form, I joked that I would’ve called her “Jack” if I could’ve gotten away with it.  A truer statement is that I would’ve called her “Seymour”.

Marcel, like all babies, came out looking like an old man.  More specifically, she had short hair and was wrinkly.  In addition to all that, her hair was jet black and with loose curls and her face came to a point at the nose.  I couldn’t shake the notion that she looked so much like those huddled masses that paraded through Ellis Island in the early part of the last century.  So I jokingly called her “Seymour”, which was most popular during the years between WWI and the Great Depression.

Tristan, in her own way, also inspired an old man’s name.  Her short, loose curls where golden and her face was perfectly round.  Her head was huge, however, and her bottom lip is so full that it often droops.   Sometimes, when her mouth is open and she gives you that blank baby stare that you don’t think there’s a thought in her head.  At those moments, she looks like a “Gus” to me.  That name was last big during the Industrial Revolution, so it’s old enough for her, too.

 

You Are My Sweetheart

Several pre-Tristan months ago, Marcel sang to me.  But she wasn’t trying to be affectionate.  She was trying to be mischievous.

I had wanted her to finish dinner with us.  She, however, wanted to watch television. She tried to slip away from the table but I grabbed her.  I had intended to spoon feed her, which is sometimes the only way I can get her to eat her meals.  She, however, tried to distract me. She grabbed my head, looked deep into my eyes and, with a slight smirk, sang…

“You’re my sweet-heart.”

This caught me off gaurd.  It’s a beautiful sentiment–the kind of sentiment that a father dreams of hearing from his daughter–but, given the circumstances, not a sentiment at all expected.  Moreover, I had never heard that song sung by anybody before, much less Marcel.

I think Marcel suddenly realized that she liked it as much as I did, though, because she sang it, again.

“You’re my sweet-heart.”

I needed to know from where this came.  I tried to use my eyes to ask the question by looking into Marcel’s.  She, however, became embarassed by the emotion and evaded my gaze by fiddling with a button on my shirt.  When I pressed and angled to find eye contact, anyway, she wrapped her arms around my neck and hugged me close.  She didn’t totally let go of the sentiment, though.  In fact, she sang it again.  In my ear.

“You’re my sweet-heart.”

I was thrilled by this song, and confused by it, too, because I didn’t know where it was coming from and agitated by it, as well, because the confusion it caused interfered with my joy.  I had to know why I was so lucky, so I queried my wife. She, however, was just as confused as I was.  Meanwhile, Marcel became frustrated and hit me on my chest then sang, again.

“You’re my sweet-heart.”

Maybe she became frustrated because she thought I was ignoring her song to talk with her mother.  In that moment, however, I felt that Marcel was waiting a beat between verses so that I could respond with my song, and had only become frustrated because I wasn’t chiming in.  But this was just a feeling and only hesitantly, for fear of breaking the spell, did I echo my big girl.

“You’re my sweet-heart.”

And she responded.

“You’re my sweet-heart.”

Then, it got more amazing.  Soon, she didn’t wait a beat.  Instead, she kept singing.  Only now, her voice sang along with my voice and my voice sang along with hers.

“You’re my sweet-heart/You’re my sweet-heart.”

Soon our common verse and common metric also became a common note and common tone.

“You’re my sweet-heart/You’re my sweet-heart.”

“You’re my sweet-heart/You’re my sweet-heart.”

“You’re my sweet-heart/You’re my sweet-heart.”

Then, as magically as it began, it crescendoed.

“You’re my sweeeeeeeeeet-heaaaaaaaaaaaaaaart!”

After a beat, Marcel let go of my neck and turned to sit in my lap.  I tried to hold her close but she calmly wriggled free and walked into the tv room.

 

R.I.F.

One of the things Marcel does while she passes time on the potty is “read.”  When she first started pottying, she “read” books about going to potty.  That’s because “reading” then wasn’t about the “reading” as much as it was about the pottying.  Now that she has the pottying fundamentals down now (at least, in theory), we’re broadening our potty library. So I am also taking this opportunity to broaden the mission.

Specifically, I’m trying to teach Marcel how to read.

I remember learning how to read when I was 3-4 years old.  I think I was laying on the kitchen floor when it first clicked.  Either the youngest or the oldest of my three sisters was my teacher.  I definitely remember that it was “The Daddy Book,” by Stewart. We don’t have it (at least, not yet), so I went with her request, “Green Eggs and Ham.”

I started with the title.  It took a bit for Marcel to see that I was referencing the symbols on the cover, instead of just saying the words like she was.  I had to touch each word to make the point.

“This is ‘Green’.  This is ‘Eggs’.  This is ‘and’. This is ‘Ham’!”

Marcel nodded her head solemnly then did her own pointing.

“What’s this?”

“Green,” I answered.

She moved on to the next word.

“What’s this?”

“Eggs,” I answered.

“What’s this?”, she continued.

“And,” I continued.

“What’s this?”, she again asked.

“Ham,” I again answered.

She nodded solemnly again, then patted me on my shoulder and congratulated me.

“Good job.”

 

Timeless Wisdom

Despite being one of the most beautiful people I’ve ever known, my mom always had a grounded perspective on beauty.

Perhaps it’s because of what she learned from one the stories of fighting for civil rights in her deep south, hometown.  She, and others, were at a demonstration when a member of the authorities questioned, in a syrupy sweet, Southern drawl, why she had joined the demonstration.

“Don’t you know that we love you?”, he sincerely asked her.

My wife never heard that story but she’s no less grounded.  Whenever I forget myself and praise my daughters about their good looks, my wife is always there to correct me.

“Tell them their smart!”, she scolds.

If my daughters have heard that story or noticed the scolds, they haven’t let on, but I’m sure that they’re getting the message.  For instance, Marcel didn’t hesistate to test out her new safety scissors on one of her braids the other day. One inch less later, my children have proven that they won’t let their beauty get in the way of the pursuit of knowledge.