Zer Netmouse

Rosie has a swim meet first thing in the morning, so she took a shower and her father braided her hair, knoxed it, and set it in a bun. While the knox (gelatin) set her hair into a hard shell, she sat practicing her Russian on Duolingo and I trimmed and buffed her toenails and fingernails.

She has started cutting her own nails but just like anyone has a hard time staying on top of her smallest toes, and she has recently tended to want to wear her fingernails longer than is practical for a violin player.

When I was 11 my sister sometimes cut my nails, and in my memory she was nearly always irritated at me when she did so, because of the clicking of my fingernails on the piano keys, she said, when I practiced. I did not get very far on the piano, but I did master cutting my nails short and smooth and round.

I am not irritated when I cut Rosie's nails. I like to do it when she lets me. After I finished, she put the phone down, started her sleep cd of assorted classical music, and asked me to read to her.

I am presently reading to her from Anne of Green Gables. At the beginning of the series Anne is also 11, so this feels pretty appropriate. We are on Chapter VII. As I read the voices I can almost hear the voices from the Canadian miniseries of the same name. I have a copy of it but Rosie has not seen it yet. I hope in another year or two to watch it together.

She drifted off quickly and i must to bed myself/ We have to get up tomorrow and drive an hour and a half before we are due at the meet at 8 AM.

Goodnight.

Rosie turned 6 this year, and as usual she has a birthday Season rather than one party. On her birthday proper, it was a Thursday and she had dance class, so she just opened presents from us and Grandparents, had dinner with me and her dad, and Uncle Chris skyped in to join in singing Happy Birthday before she blew out six candles stuck in a slice of cheesecake.

That Friday her aunt Sarah flew in for a visit, so Saturday we had a sort of "family" party with some close friends, and we had a small ice cream cake with strawberries, and another round of singing and presents. And having Sarah visit was a gift in and of itself.

TODAY we have the "friends from school" chaos, I mean, party, and it's going to be here at the house as well. It would have been easier to go to Chuck e Cheese or a similar place like most of her classmates have done, but once we got a house with a pool she had her heart set on a pool party, so we have a lifeguard friend coming over as well as 8-10 school friends, and we got a Slip and Slide type slide which we still haven't set up yet, in case the pool gets boring. There's still a big pile of boxes in the living room but I worked hard the last few days getting boxes *out* of the playroom downstairs and setting it up with toys, and Brian installed the cat door to the utility room, so we can lock them out of that, so I'm hoping the kids will pretty much stay out of the living room because it's boring compared to the pool, the sun room, and the play room.

I just really hope no one sprains or breaks an ankle or anything, because the yard is full of trip hazards we haven't resolved yet. And the party starts in 3 hours and I'm still cleaning.

I'm trying not to freak out, though. Or as I imagine Chuck Wendig might write, "I'm not freaking out! YOU'RE freaking out. Just shut UP over there with your stupid 'freak-out' face."

Cupcakes are made and will be frosted once Brian and Rosie get home. I'm going to get back to sweeping and vacuuming, and then we will put up decorations.

Wish us luck!

The Rosie kiddo is now sans tonsils and adenoids and plus tubes in ears. Her surgery was shortly before 9 this morning and we headed home from the hospital by 4.

Her cuddle of choice was my old stuffed Stitch, because, as she put it, "He keeps away the bad dreams even without the dream catcher." She knew she would go to sleep for the surgery. When she woke up enough to realize she was in pain, Stitch was there but she still panicked a little and they rushed to bring me in. I comforted her and held her hand while the nurse gave her some painkiller, then I stroked her forehead and sang and hummed until she fell back asleep.

I was slightly surprised what my brain decided to use to sing her down just then, and I thought I would record that and the other songs I sang to her as the day went on and from time to time she got tired and went back to sleep.

First I started with the old round, "Hey, ho, nobody home." I was surprised with myself until I got to the line, "Yet I will be happy, very happy," and thought maybe it wasn't such a strange choice after all.

After that it was "Everthing's All Right" from the soundtrack to Jesus Christ Superstar. No mystery there. (In case you're not familiar with it, it starts out with, "Try not to get worried, try not to hold onto problems that upset you. (Oh) Don't you know everything's all right yes, everything's fine." )

That was followed by "Summertime" from Porgy and Bess, which I've been using to sing her to sleep since she was a baby. ("...so hush little baby, don't you cry." ... "there's a-nothin' can harm you. With mama and daddy standing by. ")

Later, when we were back at home, I surprised myself again by singing the Beatles' "Here Comes The Sun". ("And I say... It's all right.") Again, maybe not so strange.

And just a little while ago, after she woke crying and I have her the dose of ibuprofen she was due? "Swing low, sweet chariot."

All good songs. And the other parts of the day went fairly well too, all things considered. Now it's time for me to put myself to sleep.

Sing me a song, won'tcha?

Not long after it came out, Neil Gaiman sent Rosie a copy of Chu's Day. He signed it to her and drew a little bird inside, advising her to "make big things." When we first read it, she immediately remembered that she had a stuffed panda bear, and asked me to get it. I thought it was cute, her playing with the panda, so I recorded a video. There was music playing at the time, and then the audience claps, so her voice is kind of quiet, so I put it in my "learn to edit and improve this" file and never got back to it. But I just looked at it this morning while doing something else and thought it was worth sharing anyway.



(Youtube jumps straight into my other videos after that, which are also generally of Rosie...)

Unlike anyone else in her pre-school class, Rosie walks to school. We live only a few blocks from her school, plus I like the opportunity to connect her to the outdoors and teach her about how to dress for every kind of weather. She has turned out to be very observant. The other day we stopped to pick up a snail and watch it relax and wander around on a piece of cardboard. Another morning we picked up a leaf that had frost on it and carried it inside the school to see what would happen.

("It melted!" "From what?" From the warm all around us!")

This week it got very cold, and very windy. I dressed Rosie up appropriately, and we walked anyway. Before we headed home she stopped to watch whirling dervishes play with the leaves near the entrance to her school. A moment later, she commented that the wind at her back made her feel like a bird.

Along the way home, she found a heart-shaped leaf and gave it to me. I suggested that we could do a rubbing of the leaf when we got home. She declared she wanted to do it with a red crayon. Worried that it might blow away, we put it in her backpack. She admonished me not to let us forget it.

We didn't.

The other day, the first frost day, there was also sunshine. Under one tree, it was very pretty, with the branches hanging down all around us, large oval leaves heavy and gold. I had not brought my phone with me and announced we would just have to take pictures with our minds. "You can't take pictures with your mind!" she told me. "Sure you can," I explained. "You just look and try to fix it in your mind so you will remember." She was willing to try.

Further along there was a tree that had been bright red earlier in the Fall, one of the first trees to turn. Now it was almost bare. She complained that the tree looked sad and ugly with no leaves. I agreed that sometimes Fall was like that, and trees did look sad and bare with no leaves. I added though that once winter comes, I think trees can look very pretty with snow on their branches. She agreed, but stayed there a moment, looking up at the tree.

"Goodbye leaves," she said. "Hope we see you again soon."

Amen, kiddo. Amen.

Rosie had no school on Friday, due to parent teacher conferences, so another parent and I swapped time watching our kids so we could attend our respective conferences. He and his daughter also joined Rosie and I for lunch. Then that evening Rosie and Brian and I went out to dinner With Justina Ireland and family, the first chance for the two families to meet each other since Justina and I met at the Baltimore Book Festival and I learned that they had also recently moved to York. Everyone got along well, though Rosie got a little melty near the end (having already had a long afternoon of sharing with a friend) and was really jealous of how well Justina's 6-year-old could draw. The food was really good too -- an authentic Mexican place on the East side called Guadalajara.

Saturday was Brian's birthday, but I wasn't there for the first half of the day because Justina and I headed out early to drive to Arlington for the SFWA business meeting at WFC. Justina is a YA spec fic author who is thinking about joining, while I had put an item on the agenda that I needed to be there to speak to. We hung around after the meeting chatting with people (nice to see Steven Silver and Stephen Leigh), had an early lunch with Steven Gould, whose family Brian and R and I had gotten to know during our time in Albuquerque (almost all the male friends I ran into were named Steven.. what's up with that? Thanks, Howard, for being the exception), then we headed back to York (about a 2-hour drive, and I really appreciated that Justina drove the whole way - my early waking time was catching up to me). Then I scrambled to make the cake for Brian's birthday with Rosie, after which I headed out to see Box Trolls with Brian - my arranging for a babysitter having been my most significant present for him. She was such an awesome sitter I left her responsible for taking the cake out of the oven. It was a delightful movie and nice to just sit and relax together for a bit, especially since he's just getting over a cold and I'm fighting it myself. Back to the house for dinner, presents, and cake, and I enjoyed watching Brian and Rosie play a little rocket-race game on the birthday card we'd found for him.

During her parent teacher conference, Brian and I both learned more about Rosie and how she is at school, and shared with her teacher some of our concerns and questions about how she is developing in general. We learned she is the youngest in her class -- a young 4-year-old in a class where 5 out of the 12 students have already turned 5. Accordingly, she sometimes has trouble getting other kids to play with her, since she hasn't learned yet how to join in with someone else's game or idea rather than trying to get people to do what she wants. And she isn't always good at sharing.

Cognitively, however, she has already accomplished most of what they look for by the end of the year. She can recognize most of the alphabet, understands what numbers mean and can count to 20, and can draw neat geometrical shapes, for instance. She loves to draw right now, and also to dance. Her teacher described her as dramatic, energetic, and enthusiastic. She said she did a really good job talking about her trip to the Indian Echo caverns the other day at Show and Tell. Mrs. Snyder gives each kid a turn on their own day to do show and tell all by themselves, rather than having a big shared show and tell once a week. It seems to work well. Rosie really looks forward to her next turn at Show and tell. Last time she shared some feathers that she found by the lake when we went to a park with her grandmother Mary while we were in the Seattle area.

Hopefully as we get to know more people in the area, she'll have more playtime and practice sharing. Brian and I will try to help her develop her social skills some ways her teacher recommended.

All in all, I'd have to say it's been a pretty good weekend. And we get today to just be quiet and clean up the house from all the cooking and Rosie's playdate... :)

Last night after dinner Rosie wanted to rollerskate "dressed like Elsa" so she changed into a blue dress and her skating gear and rollerskated on the deck, where she did a bit of her dance recital routine _on skates_ for grandma and grandpa. We were impressed. Then she took a turn on the driveway and sidewalk with me and skated in to her bath, as she put it.





This morning she skated to school--from the car to the classroom-- with the help of her friend Lila, as it turned out.

She isn't yet to the stage of pushing off and gliding on alternating feet, but she's gone from only keeping her ballance on a rug to being able to skate on any surface, and sometimes balance on one leg briefly, as she did last night with her dance routine.

We don't have a TV. We have screens, but they are all computers, and we don't subscribe to any television services. A friend of mine recently asked me, "Can you tell me a little more about why you guys don't have a TV at home? [...] Did you grow up without a TV?"

I didn't grow up without a TV, but my parents were very restrictive about TV watching. We also only had a little black and white TV until I was about ten. But they would watch the news, and Sunday Morning, and we were allowed to watch cartoons on Saturday mornings. When I was in Junior high I remember I would watch more TV but I found it kind of... understimulating and usually folded clothes or did jigsaw puzzles at the same time. Sunday evenings I would frequently do jigsaw puzzles and watch Star Search, 21 jump street, and Star Trek. Most weekdays I didn't watch TV - I did my paper route, read, danced, did sports, chores, or did things with friends-, and we almost never watched it during meals.

I also remember watching Cosmos, Nature, Sesame Street, 3-2-1-contact, many Jacques Cruseau documentaries about diving in the sea, and other educational stuff. The Olympics and other sports. And televised live theater, and miniseries - as a family, we watched North and South, and some British miniseries I only remember now because it made it impossible for me to maintain a southern accent when I was in the play Tom Sawyer - I kept slewing into a British accent.

But most of my young childhood, like I say, there was only this little (8 or 10" screen) portable television, and then later the television was in the basement rec room. We would watch movies there, too. On very rare occasions we might have dinner in front of the TV. But it wasn't an always-on sort of thing I see in some households these days. And we didn't ever have any video game consoles.

After college I moved in with my boyfriend, and he had game players, and at one point we moved into an apartment that had cable. Suddenly we watched tons of TV - reruns of the Simpsons almost every day, lots of movies. And we played video games. Later I really regretted all the wasted time (not to mention weight gained by lack of active lifestyle). When I was working on my Master's thesis, I still had a TV, and found myself retreating to it when I was struggling, and losing whole afternoons on things I didn't even want to watch. Later, when the cable co. became our internet provider, and they kept calling to see if we didn't want cable tv too, our response was "Can you give us back all the time we'd spend watching it?" They stopped calling.

At the same time, we had a big screen movie setup in the basement, but when I was on my own I found I almost never used that, either. I'm much more interested in reading or doing something active, interactive or productive, most of the time. --Which can include screen time, don't get me wrong; long hours on the computer. And for a while working on my thesis I lost time to video games, too. Now I don't play them any more.

I do let Rosie play video games, though - some on my phone, some on pbskids and sesamestreet.org and whatnot. And when she's older we'll likely get whatever gaming equipment is really popular. In high school, my friends and I hung out at the house that had gaming stuff, room to hang out, an open attitude toward feeding lots of people, and relaxed parents. When Rosie's older, I want that to be our house at least some of the time.

Right now, I want her to develop the skills, but not the addiction. So she has her own computer with a one-button mouse, an old laptop in the living rm we play dvds on, and is learning to use my two-button mouse, she has a kindle fire, and sometimes hits the buttons on the phone to call relatives or hang up. But we go days with no screen time for her, sometimes. Some days we also sit at our computers, both of us, for about an hour. I find I'm more comfortable with that right now than limiting it to half an hour a day, or whatever. I'd rather let it be a thing you sometimes do if you want to than an everyday habit.

Rosie's favorite TV shows right now are Doc McStuffins (Amazon/kindle) and Dinosaur Train (pbskids), and that's perfectly fine with me.

As for me, I watch Castle on Hulu.com, and we have DVDs of shows and films. Used to have netflix. Might again sometime. I'm sometimes sad I can't get shows other people are watching on TV at the same time they're watching it. But that's changing - more is coming to the internet, where there's good stuff to watch whenever you want to watch something.

I think video is a valuable teaching and storytelling tool, but I also think it's important for parents to read to kids and to tell them our own stories--and encourage them to tell their own stories, both verbally and with art and movement. And just as important for them to get time to play outside and with their hands and imagination, and with other kids.

Rosie has started to get bored with many of her old bedtime songs, like "Somewhere over the rainbow" and "The rainbow connection," and has declared she doesn't like some others, like Wendy's lullaby from Peter Pan. So I have started to sing her story songs from "Really Rosie" and "Free To Be You and Me," and also Land of the Silver Birch, a Canadian native canoeing song I learned when I was young (various lyrics are out there - these were the words I learned but I learned the rhythm part as "boom-didi-ah-dah, boom-didi-ah-dah, boom-didi-ah-dah, boom").

The one song from Peter Pan that she still likes - and asks for, last, before I say goodnight and leave - is my secular alteration of "Tender Shepherd," which is the song Mrs. Darling sings to her three children at the beginning of the play, before they meet Peter Pan. Rosie and I call it "The Counting Song." These are the lyrics I sing:

Tender Shepherd, Tender Shepherd
Let me help you count your sheep.
One in the meadow,
Two in the garden,
Three in the nursery,
Fast asleep.

Tender Shepherd, Tender Shepherd
Let me help you go to sleep.
One, say goodnight and
Two, close your eyes and
Three, safe and happily,
Fall asleep.

(Fall asleep 2X, fading)

This clip is pretty close to how I sing it, tunewise.

Rosie had a tiny splinter in her foot today, so I had to hold her foot still while Brian took it out with tweezers. Thankfully I had recently told her the Aesop's fable about the Lion with a thorn in his paw, which I reminded her as she lay there crying and I gave her a hug.

"You were like that Lion," I said. "You had in a thorn in your paw, and you couldn't get it out by yourself, so daddy helped you and took it out."

She repeated that idea back to me, then went over to Brian and sweetly gave him a hug. She said, "Thank you, Daddy cat, for taking the thorn out of my paw."

"You're welcome, Baby cat," said Brian.