They don't grow on trees

Let down your hair

Once upon a time, I had one child who followed the rules and one child who broke them wantonly. That time has ended.

Part 1:
When we went to Disney World in May, Elisa's hair looked like this:

Her curls aren't quite as curly in Colorado, but her hair was past her shoulders and her bangs were thick.

On Friday evening of last week, Tory looked like this:



Part 2:
Saturday morning seemed like the start of a great weekend. The kids had heeded my warning to stay quietly in their room until the Good Night Lite told them it was past 7am. The sky was bright blue and beautiful. I got up and started making bacon for the kids and they scampered down into the kitchen for breakfast.

I stared at them for about twenty seconds before I figured out what was different, and then I shouted for Mike. When he showed up, I told him to look at the kids.

He looked, and said, "What am I looking for?"

I said, "Look at their HEADS."

He said again, frustrated, "What am I looking FOR?"

Then he said, "Oh. Their hair."

Then I had one of those bright and shining parenting moments where I cried, and then I shouted at the kids, and then the kids cried. It was not what I would describe as "good" parenting. If you look closely at these photos, you can see the tear tracks on their little faces.





Mike suggested that I consider calming down, and I suggested something rude to him. Then I gave it some thought and realized that perhaps I wasn't handling the situation in the absolute best way, and helpfully stormed out of the room. Mike, on the other hand, started calling hair salons to get an emergency appointment.

Part 3:
There is a genius who works at Veda Salon in University Village, and she did the best she possibly could have done under the circumstances. If you know what you're looking at you can still see the crazy, but at a quick glance it just looks like Tory has her bangs pulled back and Elisa has a real fondness for Rosemary's Baby.







We all learned an important lesson this weekend, but I'm pretty sure it was a different lesson for each of us.

Happy birthday to Mike

Mike turned 30-something today. This is his last chance to turn 30-something, if you know what I mean.

If you let 3 & 5 year old girls pick out cards and birthday presents for their dad without providing your own input or commentary on the process, you might end up with a 39 year old man gaining possession of: three fish-shaped clips for bags of potato chips, one piece of pink plastic that cuts sandwiches into two hearts, one birthday card that says, "DED LOV ELISA", one anniversary card featuring bears on the front and the words "We're hotter than ever!" and "DAD TORY" (with the Ds backwards and the A upside down) on the inside, one oinking, grunting keychain flashlight in the shape of a pig with LEDs for nostrils, and a pack of farm animal silly bandz rings.

Elisa got on Tory's case for not spelling 'dad' with an e. Poor Tory. She was pretty sure it's supposed to be spelled with an a because she had asked me yesterday and I had told her the traditional d-a-d spelling, but I could see her wavering in her convictions when Elisa told her she was wrong. I didn't offer an opinion in the dispute, by the way. Nobody asked me.

Career plans

Do you want to know what a perfect weekend morning looks like? It looks like that.

Elisa showed up in the kitchen one morning a few weeks ago with her hair in a ponytail, and it didn't seem that strange or noteworthy until Mike realized that the household doer of hair - me - was still snoozing upstairs. I'm not sure when I thought kids started doing their own hair, but I didn't think it would be just after turning five. Lately Elisa's favorite style is a low bun plus every barrette she owns.

Today was both the first and the last time the kids did finger painting at home. We bought a kit somewhere for a couple of bucks a few months ago and I'd been keeping it in reserve because it seemed like such a great activity.

Anybody who's read this blog or met these kids could probably have predicted the results better than I did. First, Elisa doesn't care for finger painting because it makes her hands very dirty. Second, Tory has perhaps never met an activity she likes more than finger painting. Third, I do not ever want to deal with the aftermath of Tory finger painting again.

By the way, Tory is going to be an astronaut. We told her she'd need to learn a lot of math to be an astronaut, so now she's learning math like gangbusters.

Elisa is going to be an acrobat. I just realized that we should tell her that acrobats need to know a lot of math too.

Running away with the circus

Big day, big day, big weekend. On Friday the four of us took the afternoon off work and school to see Alegria, the Cirque du Soleil traveling show that had come to town. Mike and I have seen other Cirque shows, but this was the first time we took the kids to any kind of show. They've been to see exactly one movie in the theater, and it was only a qualified success; Elisa doesn't tend to like experiences she hasn't already had, and neither kid likes loud noises.

Alegria was new and bright and crazy and loud and despite all that, everybody loved it. Mike and I knew we would, but we knew what to expect. Elisa loved the acrobats best, with a tie between the act with two long trampolines that crossed in the middle and the flying trapeze act that ended the show. She leaned over and whispered, "THIS IS AWESOME!" over and over. Tory ran hot and cold on the acrobats but fell in love with the singers and musicians and dancers.


We sat in the third row on the floor and could see every breath, every bead of sweat, every twitch of every muscle of those remarkable specimens of humanity on stage. The artists may do the show 8 times a week, but I don't think it's ever exactly easy. Familiar, yes, but that's not the same thing.


Saturday was the kids' last class at The Little Gym, where they've taken gymnastics for the past 18 months. We had a 100% fantastic experience at The Little Gym, from being able to have the kids in the same class despite their age difference to helping Elisa gain the self-confidence to match her natural abilities to celebrating every achievement of every child no matter how inconsequential it might seem to an outside observer.


We love The Little Gym, but we've moved over to a big gym for the kids to take classes. Elisa really, really wanted to go to a big gym and we finally felt like she was ready to give it a try. We spent a few weeks taking overlapping classes at both places, to see how it would work out since we'd had a catastrophic failure at the same place when Elisa was 3...but this time she was hooked. Tory loves the big gym too, since it has the clear advantage of having trampolines, but the kids are now in different classes and will probably follow different tracks from here forward if they both keep taking gymnastics.


I'm conflicted about some of it, to be honest. Gymnastics can be an intensive sport in many ways, and I've got two very different kids with very different needs to look out for. Elisa, though, isn't conflicted at all; she can't imagine anything better.

Telephoto

I upgraded my camera a couple of months ago, and got a deal where amazon.com gave me a $200 credit toward a $225 telephoto lens as a bonus. I couldn't pass up paying $25 for a telephoto lens, so I bought it. Then it sat in my camera bag untouched, because I couldn't figure out what to photograph. I haven't been taking that many pictures lately, since it's wintery and cold and dark and oh, right, the 50-hour work weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas. But mostly, a telephoto is good for photographing things that are far away and I couldn't think of anything far away.

And then I realized that I could photograph the deer. They're everywhere in our neighborhood; I'm pretty sure I could go out at any given time and find at least half a dozen of them just by walking around the block. If I walked around two blocks, I could probably find a dozen. I've never really photographed them because they're not all that interesting, but they are, it turns out, just the right distance away.


Here's my favorite story about the neighborhood deer. Once upon a time, we had some friends visiting. It was a cold winter night, I think with snow on the ground and a glorious full moon. As the friends were leaving for the evening, we were all standing on the front porch and looked over and saw a beautiful buck standing on the snow, bathed in moonlight. He was just gorgeous, and we all stared. Even Mike and I, who see deer all the time. And as we watched him, breath sucked in at the sight of his strong, serene beauty and wild nobility, he hunkered over and took a righteous dump.

Have yourself a....

A few days before Christmas we had the kind of frost storm we get about once a month from October through April. There's no snow on the ground, but when we wake up in the morning every branch, every light post, every spine of every yucca plant is covered in frost. It's usually gone well before noon, and when it melts it steams up from the ground. It's beautiful while it lasts.

Christmas was wonderful. It was the first year we'd ever stayed home without any family visiting, and I was afraid we would be lonely and feel like something was missing the whole time. It was different than other years and Mike did miss his family a lot, but it was also calm and low stress and we started our own new traditions at home. We had fondue on Christmas Eve, and bacon and hot chocolate on Christmas morning.

After the gift frenzy in the morning we went out for a hike, at Elisa's request. That girl loves a hike. Garden of the Gods was packed full of people and dogs, and was warm in the sun but cold in the shade.



After the hike we spent the rest of the day hanging out and enjoying all the new toys. There's a lot to be said for a quiet holiday...and if you've never played with a stomp rocket, you've been missing out.

Scats and booze

This year, for the first time, the kids made Christmas wish lists. They understood the concept of Santa last year, but they weren't able to wrap their little brains around the idea of asking for things they would like. My, what a difference a year makes.

Elisa's list starts out with something that looks a lot like "scats". Mike and I really love the concept of asking for scats for Christmas. Mike says, somewhat uncharitably, that he wouldn't be surprised if I asked for scats for Christmas one day, given the amount of time I've spent over the years examining animal droppings in the yard. He thinks my interest must be genetic, because he suspects that my dad would enjoy examining scats too. He bases this suspicion only on personality traits my dad and I share.

In my defense, we have a lot of wildlife wandering through our yard. Ten shiny dollars says that you'd examine the scats too if you thought they might have come from a bear or mountain lion.

According to Mike, there is no defense for looking at poop.

I don't know if my dad would find scats fascinating, but it does seem like a possibility. We've never discussed it.

Elisa's wish list item, sadly enough, is not actually scats. It's "5 cats", and refers to a set of five small stuffed cats that comes in a little house that she saw in a catalog. OH THANK GOODNESS it does not mean that she wants five living, breathing, scatting cats for Christmas. Santa may be made of magic, but we already have litter box issues in this house.

Tory also asked for scats, since she wants to be just like her sister. We're fairly sure, however, that she would be happy with any definition of scats Santa could come up with. Tory is an odd little bird.

Our favorite item on Tory's list is booze. I mean books. She asked for books. But from across the room it looks like booze, and who couldn't use a nip of something toasty to get through the holiday season?

------------------

For anybody not familiar with the interpretation of preschooler handwriting....

Elisa's wish list items, in order of their appearance:
- 5 cats
- Pinkalicious (a book)
- Pillow pet (it's a pillow, it's a pet, it's a pillow pet!)
- Choo choo train
- Dollhouse
- Books
- Baby care center (the biggest, pinkest doll accessory seen in a catalog)

Tory's wish list
- 5 cats
- Choo choo train
- Christmas tree toy (something Tory made up, but Santa - possessor of infinite googling power - managed to find)
- Booze
- Dinosaur

Elisa, age 5

Elisa turned 5 today.

At this time on November 28, 2005, she was in an incubator, on oxygen and being fed through an IV. She weighed 4lbs and I could cup my hand from ear to ear over her tiny head.

Today at her fifth-birthday breakfast, Elisa ate six pieces of bacon.

Did I ever tell you about her name? Mike and I had a hard time choosing it, at first. Since she wouldn't come from our bodies, we wanted to give our baby a name that would be full of the history of our families. We wanted to welcome her with the love of generations.

Ellen and Alice are Mike's grandmothers, and from a combination of those two names we started with Elise. Tina is Elisa's birth name, given by her birth mother and on her original birth certificate. That added the -a that got us to Elisa. Alah and Elzada are my grandmothers, and I'm pretty sure my Grandma Betty must have been an Elizabeth. Those names fit in with Elisa also.

Elisa's middle name is Judith, after my mother.

And here we all are, five years later. Elisa likes bacon and cheeseburgers and Lightning McQueen and princesses and spends as much time as possible upside down practicing headstands and handstands and doing flips on the rings. Her fashion sense is keen and I have been known to change my own outfit because she thought certain aspects of it weren't a good idea. She loves her sister like crazy, despite the bickering. She likes Magic Treehouse and Ramona and Jenny and the Cat Club books, and Cricket and Highlights magazines. She loves cats and dogs, but mostly cats. She can read quite a bit, but will never do it on demand. She ain't no show pony.

We are such a lucky, happy family, and our five year old Elisa is one of the biggest reasons.

Identity

I went to the climbing gym yesterday. 

When I was 22 and living in Boston, some friends from work asked if I would like to go to a climbing gym with them.  As soon as they said the words, I realized that I wanted to do that more than almost anything else I'd ever heard of.  They taught me how to belay after work by slinging a rope over a light fixture in a conference room, and then we went to the gym.  It was a Tuesday in 1999.

About 20 minutes in to my first time at the gym, I realized that climbing was the thing I'd been missing as I stumbled through life.  It was a thing -- the thing -- that made me feel more like myself than anything else.  I climbed first on that Tuesday, and then went back on Thursday.  On Saturday, I went back again and bought shoes and a harness, and for the rest of my time in Boston I climbed two or three times a week.  I would work until 6, get to the gym at 6:30, and stay until 9:30 or 10pm.  Some people went to nightclubs or bars, but I went climbing. 

I'm good at climbing in a way that I've never been good at anything else.  Not amazing, not astonishing, not really good enough for competitions, but that's not what I mean. It's that when I'm climbing, my body just knows what to do.  It's something about balance and strength-to-weight ratio and an oddly specific flexibility.  And when I'm climbing, it requires such focus that everything else flies out of my mind.  No matter what else is happening in my life, I literally can't think about it while I'm climbing the walls. 

After Elisa came home, I went back to the climbing gym before I went anywhere else without the baby.  After Tory was born, I went back to the climbing gym at 3.5 weeks postpartum.  During the incredibly tough year of 2-under-2, I went climbing after the kids were asleep as often as possible.  Climbing has gotten me through a lot of rough times.

Then last winter, climbing started to hurt my knees.  At first it was just the most extreme movements, where I would put a foot above waist level and then stand up on it.  After a few weeks, it got to the point where I couldn't climb anything without pain, so I went to see an orthopedist and ended up with a couple of surgeries.  Nobody could make any promises about whether I would be able to climb again, and I tried not to think about it.  In August, I was talking to Mike's uncle and he said, "If you can't climb, that's going to mean you have to rework a big part of your identity."  When I forced myself to think about it, I realized he was right and it made me scared.

Yesterday a plan for the whole family to go up to Denver and see some friends fell through, so instead we all went to the climbing gym.  I've been able to use the elliptical and walk and kind of hike for a few weeks, so it seemed like time to try.  I had been wanting to see what the kids did at the gym, even though I already knew what that would be, and Mike wanted to support me because he knew I was terrified.

It went ok.  I only tried a few things to see what would happen, and there wasn't any horrible pain.  It's not the same as before, and I don't know how much I will be able to do or if my climbing experience will be the same, but I'll be able to go again. 

The kids were also a mixed bag.  Elisa refused to go up the wall at all, which I expected.  Tory refused to climb higher than about 3 feet off the ground, which wasn't what I expected, but on the positive side she tried three different times.  I don't think I'll take Elisa back until she gets a lot older or asks to go, but I'll take Tory with me and let her hang out at the gym in her harness while I climb.  I think as time goes on she'll be interested in trying more things and climbing higher. 

That's a pretty amazing sentence up there, the part about "while I climb".

Zoos should be on flat ground

We went to the zoo yesterday and walked around.  It was a nice family morning that was remarkable only because of the walking part.  Our local zoo is built on the side of a mountain - 'Mountain' is part of the name, even - and walking around it is about the same as taking a rigorous hike.  I haven't taken any rigorous hikes since last winter, so it was a big deal for my knees.  All the walking went ok, although I've been a little more sore than usual today. 

 

Mike or one of the kids was holding this stick.  I learned a lot about how to photographs birds poorly yesterday.   The little jerks don't ever stay still.

 

 

I don't usually take pictures of animals in their enclosures, but this grizzly was playing to the crowd.

This picture gives a nice view of Tory's unauthorized haircut from a few weeks back.  The rest of her hair is in a braid, but the chopped part isn't long enough.

 

This one looks like a serious still life of People With Bird, but in reality it was deafening and there were a hundred birds zooming everywhere.

 

Tory is always up for perching on a statue.

This zoo has an abnormally large number of abnormally interactive giraffes.