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First, it was small, and we had to use a roof rack pretty much any time we wanted to go anywhere or do anything. Second, The Prius had this horrible habit of getting broken into and, more recently, getting its roof rack stolen. With two kids under the age of five, we knew we were going to replace our car in the next 18 months — so, all of the above added up to a desire to throw in the towel a year and a bit early.
Years ago, we decided we were going to buy American for our next car (USA! USA!) and we went to the dealership basically only looking at Ford’s. Escape. Flex. Explorer. My Texan wife decided that the Escape was too small, even though it was 237 times the size of The Prius. I vetoed the Explorer, because I’m the one that has to street park that beast.
So we settled on the Flex. Until, thank god, we walked by a Jeep on the way to our final test drive. Whew.
The Prius is dead. Long live The Prius. Oh, and happy birthday, Sparkler.
Sparklet and The Mighty Quinn are both obsessed with Jimmy Fallon’s Classroom Instruments segment. It began with “Let It Go” (naturally) but has progressed as far as “Blurred Lines” (thank God they don’t understand the words).
and, amazingly enough, it wasn’t a front for something else — she actually picked out presents that they would like, and didn’t ask for anything herself.
my little baby is all growed up.
they said, genetically, she looked to be in great shape and, even if she weren’t, genetic tests likely wouldn’t yield anything interesting or “actionable” regardless.
she did point out however, completely unrelated to her profession, that sparklet has knees that naturally hyperextend — so the sum total of today’s damage is we now need to go to New Balance and buy her a pair of new shoes.
i’m okay with that.
there is a statistical possibility that what we see on the cheek could actually be something else, so they goop-ed her up and took a sonogram just to be sure.
fortunately for her, the television just happened to be playing “the muppets” — once upon a time, her favorite movie — so she got to sing along with mommy, while they rubbed a ultrasound wand around her cheeks.
for the first time for either kid, while we were eating dinner in the zoo’s snack bar, he just walked right out the front door — looking for mommy, who had taken sparklet to the bathroom about five minute earlier.
fortunately, the dad of a family who was sitting near the door saw him wander out and assumed that something wasn’t quite right.
but it’s officially the end of the innocence for the parker family.
also, children’s national medical center — which is about 12 blocks from our house — has a specialty clinic that treats them on site.
so, once again, we get the strange “luxury” of being the parents of kids walking into a major pediatric hospital with entirely healthy kids. i know that someday that likely won’t be the case, but it’s hard not to feel blessed that something so minor is our most major children’s health issue.
oh, well. she was a good girl at school this semester, and it’s never to early to start bribing kids for good grades. actually, scratch that. she’s in pre-school so it’s waaaay too early.
you guys sure this parenthood thing doesn’t come with a manual?
case and point: when we decided to change practices, it took us 8-10 phone calls and 12+ weeks to get our records transferred — and after confirming that they’d be ready on morning of our appointment with the new pediatrician, it turns out that the records hadn’t been signed, and so they couldn’t be turned over to our new doctor.
good riddance.
in other news, the mighty quinn is still in the 97th+ percentile — 36 lbs and 36 inches, which i think officially makes him round. sparklet is 40″+ now, which puts her well on the way to the 2028 women’s olympic volleyball team.
the best bits were her reviews in the class room. lots of words like “loving” and “maternal” and they said she has a really good heart. which makes us happy. you can teach classroom skills and classroom manners, but harder to teach kids to be good human beings.
the week began with a orientation meeting with the teachers, a mixer/playdate with the other kids, a school beautification day spent gardening, obligatory school supply shopping, and then — finally — a real first day in the classroom.
(more backstory on Bancroft, here.)
looking back, it all went, mostly, without a hitch. couple teary eyes from mommy and papi on the first walk over. two or three days of “i don’t wanna go” at the end of the first full week. but now, she owns the school — and the teachers seem pleased as punch to have her.
we’ve got absolutely nothing on the agenda sans going to the beach, and taking advantage of the pool that came with the house. aaand, doing whatever is necessary to forget that we’ve voluntarily moved into a house with four kids under the age of four.
that said, in an eight day trip, it really only effected our plans once — and even then it probably shouldn’t have. (only one day did it thunder, but it was so distant that we probably could have swum if we wanted to.) we made sure it was going to be nice before we did the national park, but other than that we didn’t even really have to schedule around it.
plus — rainy season meant WAY less people, which seems like a completely fair price to pay.
the idea started 18 months ago, when the lady sparkler and i decided we wanted to go to the Osa penninsula — a location I had worked on a lot while i was at large, unnamed conservation organization.
but, after 9 months of talking to people who had been to Osa, we quickly decided that we were more likely to bring back both of our kids (alive) if we went somewhere else. then, after another 3 months of deciding whether or not coming back with all of our kids was a priority for us, we decided to go somewhere else.
manuel antonio is still on the pacific side of Costa Rica, and still has access to some stunning beaches and rain forests, and is a little more family friendly. though, i should point out, the miami airport is not. stunning. or family friendly.
but, it’s all trade offs — and the miami airport is all that stands between me an 7 days of sitting on the beach.
the district provides universal pre-school and pre-kindergarden, but only has a set number of seats available so makes people go through a lottery process — even if you live in boundry for the school you want to attend.
as a result, we “got” to apply to half a dozen public schools and about three dozen charters, all to make sure sparklet has some place to go in September.
we made it into Bancroft, our first choice, and didn’t even get wait listed. we also lucked out by getting into E.L. Haynes, Appletree Early Learning in Columbia Heights, and one other whose name is escaping me, so we would have had options had Bancroft not come through.
our favorite moment though, was the rejection letter we got from one of the most prestigeous pre-schools in the city, which read something like:
congratulations! you’ve made the wait list for our school, and are 697th in line for a position in our pre-school class. we’re proud to say that we had over 700 applicants this year…
think that qualifies for not understanding the audience you’re communicating with, or at least not personalizing your messages to their specific recipients.
for several months now, i’ve been poking fun at my “crappy” canon 20d — mainly because i’m pretty sure my iphone, even though it cost half as much, has a better zoom and twice the resolution.
so, i threw my 20d under the bus — well, more specifically, i tossed it to my camera deprived father — and my beloved family got me a brand-spanking new 6d for my birthday. it’s unreal how well this camera performs in low light, not to mention the cropping that i can do now that my resolution has quadrupaled.
i, quite literally, don’t know what to do with myself i’m so happy.
“Tali, I couldn’t be more thrilled and blessed to introduce … Oliver Jude Elleithee [who] arrived [Saturday] at 8:15 a.m. –12 days early, totally healthy and raring to get a head start on life. (Personally, I blame the Georgetown Hoyas’ terrible first-round performance … for creating enough stress to induce early labor.) … 7 lbs., 9 ounces. 20 1/2 inches.”
Best Animated Feature
Best Musical
Best Original Song
i won’t bother to announce the winners, because we’d be redistributing trophies, back and forth just about every day for the rest of our lives.
as of yesterday, i was nearly two months behind in blogging — the longest cold spell since sparklet was born three-plus years ago.
good news is that not much happened:
the mighty quinn is tottering on the edge of crawling (and has been for most of the last two months.) he’s on to baby foods, and just this week started some real food (blackbeans, just like his sister.)
he’s also officially a beast, off the charts on both height and weight. seriously, however big you think he is — double it. and then double it again. and then burn whatever you thought you were thinking.
for her part, sparklet (who just turned three) is having entire conversations now, mostly with herself. she makes up songs from scratch, and they are often are laden with not-so-hidden messages. (“riding on ca-rou-sels is funnnnnn! i’d liiike to riiide on a ca-rou-sel todaaaay.”)
moreover, she has figured out how to say the two worst words in the world — “no” and “just” (eg. “no, no, no, no, i don’t want to eat lunch, i just want a snack.” and “no, no, no, no, i’m not eating — i’m just checking to see if there are snacks in the bag.”)
finally, i realized that i have ten tons of unused vacation days that i’m going to lose in December if i don’t start taking them quick — so i’m cobbling together a better-late-than-never paternity leave from random days across the remainder of the year.
oh, and that election thing happened. oh, and i got an iphone that takes neat panorama photos. oh, and halloween happend (sparklet was a fairy, and mighty quinn was yoda, and we picked pumpkins). and, oh, this is my 2,000th post since 2004.
back in the saddle, and i hope it lasts.
the mighty quinn loved his beer, fwiw.
even so, i’m pretty sure this is the most recent sign that the apocalypse is upon us.
… and sparklet got to look at a fire truck up close when someone smelled a gas leak in the street in front of the house. win, win.
the early evening was made a little more exciting by a string of thunderstorms that came through right around bedtime, but that didn’t slow the under 6 year old girl demographic who used the extra time to jump on an air mattress for two or three hours.
sparklet didn’t go to bed until well after 10am, but she was asleep before her head hit the pillow.
the mighty, mighty boigs are throwing a backyard camping “thing” the second weekend of august, so we had to run out and grab something bigger than the one-man backpacking tent i have in the basement.
of course, it turns out the tent that we — well, she — picked out is bigger than our back yard, back patio, back porch, front porch or back balcony. frankly, it’s bigger than our basement, but i found some way to set it up to make sure it was whole.
can’t wait to get it setup in somebody else’s yard.
but, some of the bloom has come off the normal sleeping rose, too, with more-than-occasional wake ups at 2:00am and then a very “helpful” young girl hoping to help with the 5 a.m. feeding.
thank you sweetie, but we’ve got this. really.
so, we’ll keep going for a couple more months, and then just take over the “share” full time for now. by the time spring rolls around in 2013, we’ll have a better idea of what the future looks like — we’ll know what school sparklet will be attending the following fall, and quinney will be getting close to a year old.
then, we’ll think about taking on another family. but, for now, it’ll just be sparklet, quinney and maria — which seems like it will work out just fine.
she’s memorized brown bear, brown bear by eric carle, and can parrot the whole thing, front to back. she yells out the various animals and here’s to you! by david elliott, and she will call out random words from whatever else we’re reading — the protagonist’s name from madeline, “aaaaaachhooo!” from bear snores on, and the “beep, beep, beeps” from little blue truck.
it’s only a matter of time ’til i bust in to her room at midnight and catch her reading harry potter under her sheets.
my beloved wife saved every single piece of clothing sparklet has ever worn, because she was absolutely certain we’d be having a girl. now that we (at least temporarily) think we’re having a boy, we have six or eight tubs of girl cloths that could be looking for a new home.
i’m horrified — how can a child possible wear all those clothes in a little over two years?
dropped off mommy and sparklet in front of the building, and then went to look for parking. about 15 minutes later, i found parking about 10 blocks away. needless to say, i arrived well after the class had begun.
i snuck in, turned around to put my stuff down, and by the time i turned around i had a baby girl’s face planted into my stomach. she had run the length of the room (with 10 kids and 20 parents watching) to say hello.
life is pretty good.
with about 30 minutes of forethought, we went shopping at World Market for a dining room table last week. all of our chairs are frail, and not certain to survive another sparklet-like force of nature. four of them are actually heirlooms, which makes them both more fragile and the ramifications of said fragility to be more pronounced.
fortunately, sparklet’s old enough to help with assembly.
speakingof which, sparklet is old enough to repeat everything we say. on the way back from buying our table (cheap, president’s day sale!) we drove up to our house (8pm on a Saturday) and found parking right in front, which I celebrated by saying:
holy crap!
sparklet was equally enthusiastic in her response, testing out the phrase in five different tones, emphasises, and vocal qualities.
it doesn’t appear to have stuck, thank God — but the warning shot went low across our bow.
in the aftermath or Thing Two’s second X chromosome turning out to be a Y, the biggest shift has been in his room. No longer satisfied with peach walls, plum carpets and floral patterns, we’re in the process of repainting and redecorating.
(I’ve also set aside the “Madeline” wall sign — though, admittedly, I’m not throwing it out until “he” pops out and I get the official confirmation.)
Part of the bedroom reorg is that the white french provincial furniture we inherited from my grandparents is now going into sparklets room (above, top) and sparklet’s slightly more gender neutral furniture is sliding into Thing Two’s room in substitution (above, underneath).
We’re also painting both their rooms a light green — there by reducing the 137 things they’ll argue about some day to a more manageable 136.
This argument reduction effort was actually kicked off last week when I saw a “Thing Two” decal in Target that sparklet and I eventually put on his bedroom door. It was officially the first time I saw something in wanted for one child that made me say “oh, crap — what am I going to buy for the other.” Fortunately, there was a stack of Sesame Street decals (with sparklet favorite Abby Cadabby) on the next display over.
That might bring the list down to 135 1/2.
sparklet quickly fell for kermit, and has helpfully volunteered to care and steward the Muppet until a time that Thing Two can care for him himself.
this quickly prompted a Saturday morning viewing of the original Muppet Movie, which sparklet loved. of course, wewatched the “Edited for Toddler” version, which involves daddy skipping from song to song to song (running time: 35 minutes).
at least we now have an alternative to hearing The Jungle Book over and over again.
we read one of the six every night, and mommy usually does another when she wakes up in the morning. she know’s what page her favorite story starts (Madeline in London, the one about the horse for Pepito) and avidly yells the pagenumber (“227!”) if you’re not turning the pages fast enough.
actually, her favorite game right now is opening our Madeline anthology and flipping throught the pages herself to find the start of that story (“found it!”) which is her favorite because, as she says, “I rode horse, too.”
we rarely hear her get out of bed in the morning anymore, but occasionally we’ll here a great “thunk” as she hits the ground to check if I’m under the door. she’ll usually stay there until I reach underneath and grab her hands a few times (I actually mistakenly grabbed Tiger’s tail his morning) before she decides to come out.
I’ve decided that she actually is pretty cute.
we’d been watching (with great concern) her developing a cocky “i get this whole walking thing” machismo, which has been quickly turning into a steady stream of bouncing off tables, getting thrown off playground equipment and falling down stairs.
this morning we hit our first major milestone of a two year old: she fell down a flight of stairs. fortunately, it was indoors (from the second floor to the first, and not the 27 concrete steps we have out front) and fortunately everything is fine (she was up and moving in seconds, with nary a scratch).
but it was #%&%$# horrible.
she was climbing, and must have made it up to the very top, because it sounded like she fell for a full 30 seconds. when she slid into the ground floor, she did so on he back — bouncing her head down the last three steps.
not good.
regardless, we’re counting our blessings — she’s fine, and she’s now (visibly) being more careful on stairs. no blood, no bump, no bruise, no foul.
that which does not kill us scares the bejeezus out of our parents.
“take on me” from a-ha was perfect for spinning. abba was generally well received, although she dropped “i do, i do, i do” by the second chorus. we’ll never play “forever young” by alphaville ever again, ever (and my heart is absolutely crushed by her response to one of the top ten songs of my childhood).
the big hit of the morning (i’m going to hell) was belinda carlisle, but she made up for it with her love of dexy’s midnight runners and (eventually, after i was horrified by her response to “mad about you”) the go-go’s. oh, and she was thoroughly confused by madonna’s “like a prayer” but hey, aren’t we all.
but, she reserved her most poignent critique for biz markie.
she’s taken to yelling “song!” when she wants us to turn on some music, or (worse) in the 2 seconds between songs. a few seconds after “just a friend” came on she yelled “song!” and, when i said that it (technically) was a song, she yelled “song!” again.
this quickly escalated to a chant (never heard before) of “new song! new song!” — which didn’t abate until i kicked the music forward to “pretty in pink” instead.
everybody’s a critic.
she kept crying “my tree, my tree!” and was utterly inconsolable. so i did what any good father would do — i started quoting from eulogy scene for Tiny Tim from the muppet christmas carol:
It’s all right, children. Life is made up of meetings and partings. That is the way of it. I am sure that we shall never forget [our tree], or this first parting that there was among us.
father of the year.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T663iqvfk0A
granted, we saw the tree — but it was so packed that the cab had to let us off three blocks away. pedestrians we’re walking down the center of 49th, because there was no room on the sidewalks, and cars couldn’t make it through the crosswalks anyway.
turns out sunday mornings at 8:00 am are a little different.
we could have bowled down 6th ave, and hit neither person nor automobile. we actually got to see the tree, and could have skated if one of us wasn’t either pregnant, or horribly unskilled, or two years old.
oh, and the fact that it was 24 #$%@ing degress out probably helped, too.
it’s our first family vacation since exactly a year ago, when we were in Costa Rica for a friends wedding. We haven’t been in new york together, in an even longer time — not since five and half years ago when we got engaged.
it’s also sparklet’s first train ride, which is great timing considering her recent obsession with all things choo-choo. speaking of obsessions:
we’ll be here through Tuesday — my family used to come up to new york every winter for years and years, to see the decorations and the store windows, and we’ll be doing just about the same thing.
it’ll be good.
Each year we throw a party withe free food, free alcohol, and all the holiday specials you can stomach. In exchange, you just have to bring a plate of whatever Christmas treat you’re making for friends and family this year.
2011 is the fifth year that the lady sparkler and I have done it, but the tradition actually goes much, much farther back.
When I was at the college of William and Mary, the students of the theater department threw a party each year called “the grinch” — which ended the night with a showing of the dr. Seuss animated special during which you were expected to drink each time the word “who” was sung or said.
Every who down in whoville liked Christmas a lot.
But the grinch who lived just north of whoville did not.
For the record, there are 39 uses of “who” but that ignores homonyms like “hoo” but also the songs and choruses, like:
Fah who for-aze, dah who dor-aze, welcome Christmas, Christmas day…
needless to say the winner was whomever was still standing after the first commercial, which was pretty much limited to the people who weren’t playing along.
Over the years, the format of our party has changed, but we’ve developed a couple rules:
and, we still close the night with the grinch in honor of our holiday party ancestors — long may their livers live.
mommy had to sing about 20 minutes of twinkle, twinkle after the lights went out — a shockingly long time considering her current repulation for the easy manner with which she goes to sleep.
of course, we’re spinning this as a “present” for sparklet, but in the end she’s got to get out of the crib because thing two is going to need a place to sleep in the spring.
UPDATE: the following night it was back to normal, with a quick hop into the new bed and snoozing just 5 minutes later.
sparklet made it through the first one okay, but found the latter a bit dull — at least until the bears and the monkeys started singing and dancing, at which point the jungle book became the greatest movie ever.
the new app is “elmo’s monster maker” which lets her pick a muppet and then add custom eyes, noses, and hats. you can also have elmo come out and take a virtual snapshot of your monster, and our ipad photo gallery now has 200 pictures of monsters in various states of creation.
the funny part actually comes from sparklet’s new pronunciation of the word ipad by saying “i-pay-yad” — like the 65 year old southern lady that she is.
i wish i was making this stuff up.
unfortunately, the shirt has died — the elbow ripped open after months and months, and years and years of wear. it’s been replaced with not one but two more shirts with snaps, but i’m sure they will never be as loved.
rest in peace, green one with the snaps. rest in peace.