FUD: Fear/Uncertainty/Doubt

‘Ware! May 22, 2008

Dropping Amy off today at preschool, I noticed they had a big wooden castle set up complete with knights, dragons and royalty. Amy wandered over to investigate and found the dragon, which she waved threateningly at me before placing in the castle courtyard, inside the walls. I did the “ooh, a dragon, how scary” thing and she laughed before looking sympathetically at me.

“No, Mum, the dragon’s not scary,” she said in a teasing voice. I said yes, I was scared, so Amy picked up the dragon, placed it in a nearby wire basket, then picked up the basket and carried it through to the bathroom where she put it up on the highest shelf she could reach.

“You can’t see it now, Mummy, so it’s not scary,” she told me.

“Life is partly what we make it, and partly what it is made by the friends we choose.” - Tennessee Williams April 13, 2008

Ethan has become a big schoolboy fish in a small daycare pond. When we pick Amy up after school, the four-year-olds rush to gather around Ethan, hug him, ask to play tag with him, show him the cool cardboard-box truck they’ve made that day. I caught him being hugged and kissed by two girls the other day in the middle of a game of Duck Duck Goose. One of the girls in lives just down the street from us, and seems to really like Ethan, so I invited her to our house last week (via her mother).

The two of them, and Amy, had a fantastic time playing, riding their scooters, eating ripe figs and grapes and Kit-Kat bars for afternoon tea (the chocolate bars being a gift from our visitor (via her mother)) and playing board games when it got cold outside. After they’d eaten and returned outside, I came out to put a jacket on Amy. Ethan came up to me in the middle of a race with his friend, and leaned to whisper in my ear, “I like her!”

It was adorable. I think he was taken by surprise; he tolerated her at daycare because she was one of his adoring fans, and I don’t think he cared one way or the other that she was coming to play. But then it turned out that she liked scooters and Megablocks and playing BiJingo just like he did! She was actually kind of cool! And so they could be friends. Aw.

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Also, Ethan has written a book. About Spongebob. I will follow up with photos and translations of his phonemic-style spelling.

Thistle-toe and Whine December 15, 2007

Today, being as close to Christmas as we can get without it actually being Christmas, we finally got our tree. I have been putting off the purchase of a fake tree for a long time, because although fake trees always have that nice symmetrical look and would probably actually look stylish and attractive given my haphazard decorating and non-matching ornaments, I actually enjoy the whole process with a real tree. Everything from the trudging out to tag the one we want in mid-November to collecting it, figuring out how to get it home, setting up the darn stand, and cleaning up dead pine needles for weeks after, it’s all symbolic of Christmas to me and I want to keep it that way for Ethan and Amy. So yeah, no fake tree for us again this year; instead another wonky, bedraggled-looking branch of a much larger tree with sagging twigs and castoff needles everywhere. Love it. Its look is much improved by the addition of a multitude of homemade decorations from bread dough, shiny cardboard, and popsicle sticks, all with some amount of glitter. No, really, I love it.

This year the kids have also celebrated, in a minor way, Hanukkah. Their preschool provided a menorah and dreidels for the children to see and play with because one of the girls is Jewish. It was a novelty for me as much as them because I don’t know any observing Jewish people and so what little I know of Hanukkah is academic.

The other day I mentioned that of the six Christmas cards we’d received to date, only one had any religious imagery (we’re not at all religious, but still). I said something to Mike about the lone card with Sweet Baby Jesus being held by Mary, which led to Ethan’s very serious explanation about God being real and Jesus being God’s son and his friend at preschool told him so, ergo true. This ties in nicely with Ethan’s first Easter service last year from which he returned to tell us that Jesus was old and lived in a cave with dinosaurs (Jesus + cave + old = dinosaurs, obvs).

Amy’s newest and weirdest sentence structure to date is “I can want to [fill in the blank]!” When we go somewhere: “I can want to come too?” When she wants us to watch her jumping: “You can want to watch me!” I keep telling her that sure, it’s okay to want to, but that doesn’t mean nothin’, but she just looks at me like I’m the crazy one.