brainflak.com

Boo: Put out your hands like this.
Daddy: Like this?
Boo: Yes. Now play this.
Boo: [chanting and slapping hands semi-rhythmically]
Lemonade.
Crunchy ice.
Beat it once.
Beat it twice.
Turn around.
Touch the ground.
Kick your boyfriend out of town.

[a pause as she stares at me intently]

I win. Now let’s play cards.

Put on your cute-protective goggles, take whatever patent medicines you use to protect against cuteorphin overdose, and view Boo:

This morning, over the “baby” monitor, I could hear the girls having quite a discussion:
Boo: I dreamed I was playing with the baby.
Panda: What baby?
Boo: I don’t know.
Panda: What BABY?
Boo: I don’t KNOW!
Panda: But WHAT baby?
Boo: I DON’T know!
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Yesterday I got to play the greatest game of hide-and-seek of my life with my two-year-old pal. Here is a transcript:

Boo: We’ll play hide and seek.
Daddy: Ok. Do you want to hide or count?
Boo: I count. You hide.
Daniel. Great. Will you count to ten?
Boo: Noooo…
Daddy: Will you count to twenty?
Boo: Noooo…
Daddy: Will you count to seven and a half?
Boo: Noooo…
Daddy: Will you count to ten?
Boo: Yes!
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Barnacular Vision

A neighborhood boy, desperate to get inside and get access to the Panda, snivels and pleads with Boo to let him in. Boo finds the interaction delightful.

It was written just today. I couldn’t quite make out the words, so she had to read it to me:

“Once there was a little girl who walked in the street. She didn’t tell her mama. But she didn’t even get run over by a car. That was good. She didn’t want to, so that was the good thing, ending of her madness. Her name was Annida, and you don’t even know what happened to her because there’s only two pages – one with words and one with her picture. And then she found a golden goose, but she was caught in a trap. And that’s the end.”

My daughter was putting on a series of brief and largely nonlinear puppet plays using some little rod puppets I had made for her, with myself and a neighborhood boy as the audience. Each story ended with all of the characters coming on stage and announcing the moral of the story. For the first story the moral was:

“All persons love all chocolate milk”

but the other four-year old present protested: “Um, excuse me, not everybody likes chocolate milk,” causing the Panda to revise the moral:

“Everybody loves chocolate milk who isn’t allergic to it.”

The second story, which seemed to involve a zoo, frequent and involuntary changes to people’s names, and many bitter recriminations between the little bird and the little robot, ended with:

“Chocolate milk is made of the people you share it with”

which I think is an important thing to keep in mind.

In case you’re finding this all a bit too Family Circus, the neighborhood boy piped up shortly afterwards with a bit of Dysfunctional Family Circus-appropriate dialog:

“Pretend that blood is spraying out of my armpit”

which I agreed to do, in my own, quiet way.

Kids at this age seem to want to poke around the edges of the concept of death, as when a few days earlier the Panda, speaking of a school friend who apparently enjoys learning:

“He likes to learn until his learning bobo-head is…dead.”

I like to think that my learning bobo-head is, much like my daughter’s, still among the living learning bobo-heads of this world.

The Panda, followed by Daddy (carrying Boo) enters the garage. She pushes the button to open the garage door. As we shuffle towards the car, the door rumbles slowly up, and Panda looks at it thoughtfully for a moment before she speaks.

“Daddy,” the Panda asks, “Are garage doors strong?”
“Do you mean the door itself, or the motor that lifts it?” asks Daddy.
“The motor that lifts it.”
“Well,” says Daddy, “it’s fairly strong. Strong enough to lift the door, anyway.”
“Is it strong enough to lift a child?” asks Panda, with profound casualness.
“No,” Daddy replies firmly.
“How about a four-and-three-quarters-year-old child?”
“Definitely not.”
“Maybe just slowly?” she asks hopefully. Daddy’s reply is serious and graphic.
“No. It’s not strong enough, and it’s a very dangerous machine,” he explains. “It would break, but first it would catch her fingers. Then she’d fall and there would be horrible injuries. Not something we’ll ever do, right? Never, ever.”
“O.k.,” answers Panda cheerfully.

Start the day with a cruciform nap

When the baby Christ-child has a bad cold, there can be an unconscious prefiguring of certain unfortunate events to come.

Oh wait – it’s just my little Boo, so everything should be fine.

When I get sick, I typically lose the ability to sleep, but when Boo gets sick she sleeps and sleeps and sleeps, much as here mother does. Much more sensible, really.

Riding Boo 1

If posting photographs of one’s kids all over the Web as though everyone wanted to look at them, and gushing about their wonderfulness until no one can stand it anymore is wrong, then I don’t want to be right.

Boo is now getting to the point where riding on the little pink babymobile is almost as urgent a need as practicing her walking, but until fairly recently she wasn’t fully aware that it was meant to go anywhere. It was prized as one of the few objects in the house she could climb up on.

Unfortunately she appears to be convinced that the cats are also among the things she can mount, which may lead to unpleasantness. We’ll hope for the best. The cats are pretty clear on this ‘no one scratches the kitten’ rule, so it should be fine…