my dilemma

Although I love the Monterey Bay Aquarium, I couldn’t work there.  It makes my blood boil to watch empty-headed tourists take one flash photo after another straight into the aquarium glass, scaring the fish.  Not only are the fish learning to avoid the glass, the tourists are getting nothing but photos of flashes reflected in the glass.  Ugh.

We took the family to the Monterey Bay Aquarium for Labor Day weekend.  Although we’ve taken Maddie there before, we knew she’d get much more out of it on this trip.

Before we left, we explained to her how we’d take her to see fish, turtles and otters.  Before long, the anticipation began to take hold of her.  She’d ask us if she’d see, “Fish?”  “Yep,” I answer.

  “Turtles?”  “Yes, Maddie.”

  “Otters?”  “Yes, Maddie.  It’s going to be fun!”

  “Birds?”  We roll our eyes at each other.  The aquarium does have birds, though.  “Yes, Maddie.  Birds, too.” 

  “Birds!!”  This will apparently be the highlight of the whole trip.

  Yep, whatever, Maddie.  Like I have to drive you over an hour away to see birds.

  Anyway, we get there, and we take Maddie straight to the Outer Bay exhibit, where they have big sea turtles.  She likes them.  Then, we take her straight to see the sea otters.  She likes that, too.  This trip is going pretty good!

  Next, I take her to see the octopus exhibit.  The big octopi are always hiding, and never moving.  It’s actually a lot more rewarding to watch the cuttlefish.  At least they do something.  But this time, the Giant Octopus is resting in plain view, and it’s white, in stark contrast with the surroundings.  What an opportunity!  I lift Maddie up, and she identifies it immediately.  I look for my wife for a split second, and when I look back, the octopus turned a deep red.  Wow!  I wonder what that means.

  Then the octopus lunges for Maddie!  It grabs ahold of the glass right at Maddie’s face.  Maddie gets a little nervous, so I back away from the glass.

  Then she starts wailing and reaching for the octopus!

  I bring her back to its tank, and she can’t get enough.  Every time I said, “Ok, that’s enough.  Bye bye octopus,” she’d start tearing up and asking for “more octopus!”  I had to hold her there for the better part of half an hour, even though the octopus didn’t do much else.

  We never made it to the bird exhibit, and Maddie never noticed.

Lillian and I were sitting on the kitchen floor torturing Aaron.  He’d be sitting there, and he can’t get away, because he can’t crawl yet.  But he does love to touch things and feel new textures.

Except for one.  There’s this sleek, velvety toy that we put in front of him.  He touched it for all of two seconds before he decided he didn’t want anything to do with it.  So naturally, we put it in his lap.

He wiggled, and was able to kick and scoot the toy away from him.  Well, we just loved that.  So we’d put it back in his lap, or take his little hand in ours, and place it directly on the silky toy.  He wouldn’t know what to do, and we got major laughs out of that.

Maddie had had enough of this.  She walks over, grabs the toy, and walks it back to the toy chest and puts the toy away.  But we weren’t done yet.

“Maddie, bring the toy back please.”

She looks at me, but doesn’t move.

“Maddie, bring the toy back now.  Please.”

She still defies me.  Apparently, she didn’t like the abuse we laid upon her brother.  So I give her the ultimatum:

“Maddie, bring the toy back right now, or … or Daddy’s going to go get it.”

Nothing.

“I’m serious Maddie.  If you don’t bring that toy back this instant, I’m going to go get it myself.”

She acknowledges the gravity of the situation.  She hesitates, but she doesn’t give in.

“Maddie, I’m going to count to three.  One…“

She dashes for the toy chest, digs out the slippery toy, and runs it back to Aaron.  Threat averted.  Lillian and I look at each other, pleased with ourselves.  Nothing better than fooling/torturing your offspring.  We also know I’ll never be able to pull that one off again.

Lillian and I have been pretty frustrated with Maddie.  She hasn’t been communicating as clearly and with the same sophistication as the other kids her age.  She says the bare minimum required to get the job done.  Usually she can get what she wants with one word and a finger pointing in a particular direction.

Today, Maddie noticed that Lillian brought ice cream home from the store.  She’d been excited about it from the moment the ice cream came in the house until after she cleaned her plate for dinner.  (Which is another story, she never does that.)  Finally, ice cream time was upon us, and I
started scooping the stuff into bowls.

Lillian told Maddie that she wouldn’t get any ice cream until she was positioned correctly in the high-chair.  Maddie quickly climbed up into the high-chair, turned around to sit forward, and twisted left and right looking around, asking, “Where’s the bib?  Where’s the bib?!“

She said it clear as day.  I’ve never heard her say “where” or “bib” before.  Much less composed into a grammatically correct sentence.

It’s been said before, but it’s still true: ice cream makes Maddie smart.

Emergency Update:  I’m not ready to update my online album yet, but this picture needed to be posted!  Note that this picture wasn’t staged, but it also isn’t what it looks like.  Aaron isn’t emerging from the blanket.  He can’t go forward yet.  He’s backing into it.  🙂

I recently moved this web site to a new hosting company so that I could play with some server-side features.  It’s been a great deal of fun getting some perl scripts to work, and setting up a couple of cron jobs.  Getting that working for the first time gives a sense of accomplishment.  For a moment, I feel like, “yeah, now this web site is turning into something.  Now here’s a useful record of this time in my life.”

Then I come to my senses.  As much as I enjoy this web site, it isn’t my gift to posterity.

We just watched The Life of David Gale.  I liked it.  David said of someone, “She left the world a better place.  It’s a small thing, but very difficult.”  That made me think.

As much as I like to tinker, write program, and play with this web site, in perspective they’re not my life’s work.  My children are it.  Everything takes a back seat to making the world a better place for them, and raising them to enjoy living harmoniously in it.  I don’t know if I’ll succeed.  But I do think they’ll be here longer than this blog, so I better do my best.

We took the family to the company picnic today.  It was progressing nicely enough until we took Maddie to the crafts table.  At the crafts table, kids could paint on fans or glue sparklies onto blank photo frames.  I first offered Maddie a fan, but she wasn’t interesting in painting.  So I grabbed one of the blank frames and handed it to Maddie.  It was pliable, and she liked that.  But I couldn’t convince her to start decorating it.

When I tried to show her what to do and applied some glue and a sparklie to the frame, Maddie lost it.  She had a total meltdown.  She threw herself onto the dirt, and start squirming and kicking and crying.  She smeared face paint all over.  She became mud girl.  We eventually left without saying good bye to anybody, Maddie screaming and twisting in my arms the whole way.  It was too humiliating.

We were all in a bad mood, and it was a long hike back to the car.  Lillian offered to go get the car, but I was having none of that.  She wasn’t leaving me with the kids.  Oh, no.  I got the car.

When I came back with the car, Lillian had cleaned up
Maddie’s face.  Maddie was looking back into the park at a trolly car, and said “Byebye train,” happily.  She was in a good mood again.  Like the meltdown never happened.  We couldn’t friggin’ believe it.

Maddie’s really been devouring her books lately.  “Really” as in, “literally.”

Lillian came in to wake Maddie up from her nap, only to discover the room littered with pages of one of Maddie’s board books.  Some of the pages had bites taken out.  And some of the litter was sopping wet gobs of pulp.

For the past few days, we’ve been waking up to Aaron cooing in the mornings.  It’s been pretty nice.  The sound of a baby delighting in his toys and surroundings is a pleasant way to start the day.

This morning, we woke up to the sounds of a frustrated baby.  These weren’t the familiar sounds of a child content with the world.  Oh, no, these were the sounds of a victim of some Dantean torture device.

I groggily made my way to his room, and opened the door to see what was the fuss.  Aaron was on his tummy, and had backed-up to the foot of the crib, and was busily squashing himself against the railing at his feet.  He was looking at the other end of the crib with great concern.

I looked at the other end, and soon realized from what he was fleeing.  Toys.  His favorite toys.  He wasn’t intentionally backing away.  He was trying to crawl to them.  It’s just that he hasn’t learned “forward” yet.  Both he and Maddie seem to have learned “reverse” first.  And until they learn forward, every time they try to approach their toys, they end up backing away, and
getting more and more frustrated.