Smile

A much nicer day than it looks, a great time playing in the sandbox and trying out new ways to delight. That smile says it all.

Moon motorcycle airplane boat

Lunch outside - smiles all around.




Some of the words from Dear Alex this weekend, that truly surprised and delighted - it's as though she knows all about me, and which buttons to push (in a good way, of course) to get even more love, affection and attention. Every once in a while you have an experience that transcends your expectations, and the genuine surprise and delight that goes with that can transform your outlook.

Moon:
This weekend was like that - low expectations and energy at the start, with both Beautiful Wife and I having had some long weeks, this weekend was an unexpected delight. It started with the trip to the undisclosed location on Friday night, with the usual ritual of bath and bedtime for Dear Alex then the quick trip to the car for the night drive to the house. She didn't really do her usual fall-asleep-in-the-carseat, but instead stayed awake, to watch and comment on the drive and the beautiful crescent moon following us as we drove. Dear Alex was delighted to point out the moon as it came and go behind buildings as we drove. - "Moon, Moon, bye-bye Moon!" BW and I took joy in telling Dear Alex that the moon would follow her wherever we went. There was the usual flurry of activity as we got there and put her in her crib at last, to sleep, then a remarkable peace. It hit me that the house wasn't cold, there was no desperate rush to get the place warm enough for the girl or ourselves - maybe winter is over.
On Saturday, we stayed outside for the whole day, aside from the two hour nap - Dear Alex loves being outside - to the point of calling "outside, outside" at every opportunity, and rushing the door at every chance. I'm more than happy to oblige - the outside thing is my world with Dear Alex, and it makes me feel like I'm actually doing something for her development - the intricacies of navigating uneven terrain, the textures of dirt and leaves and trees and stones and the pointing out of the obvious and subtle cues of nature - things that I love and want to share with her - It's my own way of giving her the world.











Daddy's oooowotercycle, wow.

Motorcycle:
I had the chance during naptime to take the motorcycle out for a bit of a ride and I surely enjoyed it, though I must say that it's been so long I forgot a lot of the "muscle memory" that makes it easy - it was akward at first, but I do remember the laws of physics that make it work
and after a trip around the lake, I was ready to go - the ride was short, but it did remind me a lot of other times and other rides and the way it feels to just go as though there was nothing else in the world - but always, of course with the ever present now of Dear Alex, and how and when I could share it with her -
Dear Alex has a morbid fascination with daddy's motorcycle. It's the "oooowootor cycle! wow! She likes to look at it, will say "motorcycle" (in her funny way) but she won't go near it, or let daddy get on it. If you put her down near it, she'll go up to it and touch it, then scamper away as though she's daring herself. Kind of funny, but of late she's continued the fascination, and will notice a bike parked on the street with the same fervor - I wonder what she thinks.
Airplane:
Another Saturday afternoon treat, that started for me as a low rumble - the sound got my attention, and it was the familar and unexpected sound of radial aircraft engines that grew louder and made me and Dear Alex look up for the source - three WW2 era twin-engine planes in close formation flew low overhead, prompting an exclamation (uncoached) from Alex - Aaapane! aaapane! Who taught her this? She now knows what an airplane is, and will point one out whenever she sees one, without prompting - "aaapane!" This causes me great joy, and I dearly hope I live well long enough to take her flying someday.














Dear Alex tries on the fabulous lifejacket -
or, "ifeacket" - Like me, she likes any sport that requires an outfit.











Boat:
Another new Alex word, and something that we could readily demonstrate - after a trip to the local Wal-Mart where we scored a perfectly wonderful toddler-sized life jacket, BW and I debated whether we should take her out in the boat, and of course, delight won over our better judgement - On Sunday morning we should have been packing to travel home and/or cleaning up, but instead of doing responsible things we went for the immediate gratification of taking Dear Alex out for a ride in the boat - a canoe, really - plopping her in the middle, with daddy rowing as best as possible - Dear Alex was skeptical at first, but she really enjoyed wearing her lifejacket with flowers and took great joy in being on the water with mommy and daddy.

So, a transcendent weekend. The girl is a joy.

Upside down!

Dear Alex has a lot of new words - and she gets things very quickly. As part of her newfound understanding and experiments with the world around her is this exploration of the concept of the orientation of things - She really likes to turn her special Alex chair over, with the delighted exclamation "upside down!, upside down!" Then she climbs up the back - this has a visit to the emergency room written all over it, yet it's truly fascinating to watch. She already has the ability to turn the most-ordered room into a disaster scene in a matter of minutes, and this is one more skill in her portfolio of wanton chaos.

Gratuitous bath time pix

Dear Alex really does enjoy bath time.

Still growing

A favorite face - it may not be the most beautiful picture of Dear Alex, but it captures her personality of late perfectly - Beautiful Wife and I call it the 'crinkle nose' face. It's usually accompanied by a giggle or a squeal of delight, and it's Dear Alex's most profound expression of happiness. I live for that. BW and I got into a conversation this weekend about the nature of things lilscreamie, (not the blog, but the dear girl herself) and it's clear that she's developing quite a personality, and that she really is very smart - that's an easy and obvious self-congratulatory place to get to when talking about your own child, but the conversation was more about how easy it is to forget that she's still really a baby.

Dear Alex watches the world, and listens - and is now at the parrot stage with words - anything you say may and will likely be used right back at you later, sometimes recombined in funny ways. It's her way of trying things out, and it's delightful to get little glimpses of how her mind works. She's at turns questioning, serious, and declarative - and you really get a sense of her take on the world. The only thing that makes you realize that there's still a baby in there is those moments when something goes wrong, and Dear Alex doesn't yet have the words to tell us what's bothering her - or the patience or experience with the world to understand that whatever it is, it's not permanent. Our job, I guess, is to help her through the worst of those screaming moments with patience and reassurance, but we're still having a really hard time understanding what could possibly be so hard about going to bed or having a diaper change?

Keeping up

Dear Alex has been growing by leaps and bounds - and life has gotten so tremenously busy that it's been hard to keep up and keep track of her prodigious growth and progress as a human being, which after all, is what we're here for. (not me as a writer, but as a parent) There was something about the timing of the too-brief trip to Florida that brought home how much is going on with her daily, (5 straight days, including some very long ones) and how much being mindful pays off. I wrote a while back about her stage in language development, about jargoning and such, and now it's ancient history. She's a constant wonder, and It's so much fun to watch her try to make sense of things. Over the last few weeks she's gone from one or two words at a time to contextually (but not necessarily grammatically) correct three or four word sentences - and her enthusiasm for using her new words is a joy to watch - "gofora rideinda car" or the calls for "taxi, taxi" as we walk down the street never fails to make me smile. There's a thousand things just like that that I hope to be able to write more articulately about, and a thousand moments like that in the last few weeks that I hope I'll never forget as she grows and we move on to issues like pre-schools and serious potty-training. Tonight we had a moment like that - Beautiful Wife and Dear Alex took me out to dinner for my birthday(thank you!), we went across the street to the Outback (not for the quality of the food, but because it's easy and kid-friendly and I didn't feel like cooking) and we had a delightful meal - Dear Alex had broccoli and carrots and Daddy's french fries and BW's chicken and macaroni and cheese - the kid likes to eat. During the meal though, she started repeating "moon, moon, moon" and looking up. It took us a while to figure out what she was referring to, and it turned out to be simple - the light fixtures directly overhead were perfect half-circles of light, and they look an awful lot like the perfect half moon that's riding high in the night sky outside my window as I write.

A day at the beach

Well, not a day actually, but we had the opportunity to introduce Dear Alex to the ocean - a trip to the beach, about which the dear girl had mixed feelings. She loves water, and knows her tub, and the lake and can even say "pool" to describe the turquoise water she's gotten so comfortable in. The ocean was something else, something way beyond anything she's ever seen before - it kind of blew her mind. In true Dear Alex form, she gave it a chance, then decided that it was too much. We retreated to safety of the sand, where she ended up having a good time playing.
The beach has always been important to me for so many reasons, probably because I spent so much time there when I was young - It seems that so much of what I remember from my childhood was days at the beach - it seemed endless, playing in the sand, and all I really remember is the beach. I wonder how my parents did it, how they found the time to give me the time in the sand - I can only hope that I can do as much for Dear Alex. I know it's possible, and I so suddenly understand the value of time over 'things' - If I could, I'd spend a month building sandcastles with Dear Alex, just to help her understand physics and engineering and hydrodynamics and how to have fun.

In true Dear Alex form, an hour or so after she had rejected the beach as suitable entertainment, we couldn't stop her from walking back over and over again.

Travels with Dear Alex (part one)

Lil'screamie and family went on an all-too-brief vacation, a few days with Grammy and George in Florida. It was a more than delightful trip, and daddy got an awful lot out of spending 5 uninterrupted days with our ever-changing bundle of delight. First up was getting there - a bit of a departure from our usual care in scheduling travel times to coincide with naps or sleep, we decided to take a 6am flight - I don't think we'll be doing that again anytime soon. Actually, it wasn't so bad - Dear Alex handled the 4am waking in stride, the trip to the airport and through security very well - it was a lot harder on me, and Dear Alex never did go back to sleep. There is something about that early morning rising and the half-concsious bustle of getting to the plane that always puts me in a very different place - by the time I really woke up we were at 35,000 feet in the pre-dawn darkness - BW, myself, with Dear Alex between us, sitting comfortably as though this was something we did every day. For some reason, I couldn't really read, and spent a lot of time looking out the window as dawn spread, thinking about all of the times I've been on an airplane, traveling on business or to visit my parents when they were still alive, and that feeling of time-travel as the plane takes you out of the world you live in every day to some new place with different light and different air. Dear Alex got to climb on daddy and look out the window to see the pristine moon, and was moved to comment - "ish-a-moon, moon". We followed some other airplane for most of the trip south, and I was rewarded by an ever-changing dawn-lit view of a perfectly formed contrail of the plane ahead of us streaming past our wings. I wonder if the guys on the flight deck were having a little fun trying to stay in that little line of cloud.

Walking, walking, walking

Over the weekend, I took Dear Alex out for a longish walk - we wandered over to one of my favorite places - the Conran's by the 59th street bridge - I love to look at the hugely expensive and usually well designed stuff that has no place in our present life. It is, however, a good place to get great kid's books, and it's usually good for an hour or so of letting Dear Alex run around inside when it's cold outside. On this trip we stayed mostly outside as Dear Alex wanted to be "outside" (one of her new favorite words) so that she could walk around in the small park that's behind the store, and that's what this is about. One of the first things you learn (and keep learning) as a new-ish parent is patience - the patience to indulge your child the time and energy it takes to learn and obsessively do the smallest of things over and over again. This day it was walking up and down a concrete ramp, in every possible way. She'd start at the bottom, give a little shout of "up" and stomp her way up the ramp - at the top she'd turn around and give a little shout of "down" and she'd walk down the ramp, at the bottom, she'd turn around, give a little shout of "up" and stomp her way up the ramp - at the top she'd turn around and give a little shout of "down" and she'd walk down the ramp, at the bottom... repeat as necessary until you're freezing, and just a little over the wonder of it all - but for some reason, it doesn't get old - every trip had a nuance, a newness to her - she tried little tiny steps, big steps, a little shuffle, walking backwards (that was new to me) - and if you're paying close attention you get rewarded with watching that brand new brain working out how the world works.

I should point out that this entire walking exercise was an almost perfect repeat of the day before - she really is getting good at getting around.

First haircut

We stayed in the city this weekend, and one of the side effects of that was a little restlessness on BW's part - the need to do something with Dear Alex, so it was decided it was time for the girls first haircut - I was hoping to hold out until she had a little more hair, but BW won. Dear Alex took it like a champ - in fact, I don't think she really noticed. It may have been more traumatic to me. I kind of liked her wild baby hair, but I'm told that this will be better in the long run as more hair grows in more evenly to fill in the bald spots... She actually does look pretty cute.

Alex art

Untitled #782 - pigmented wax on paper. 2007

One of my favorite works in Dear Alex's ever-growing oeuvre -
part of her on-going gestural, action art phase. Note how the almost sculptural soaring forms of the swirls act as a delightful counterpoint to the rigid syncopation of the saw-toothed, aggressive scribbles at the lower right.

If she doesn't stop coloring on the sofa, I'm taking the crayons away.

Generations

It's a small thing, but very important to me - tonight we had the occasion of a family gathering - meaning, of course, a gathering of Beautiful Wife's family for a rememberance of their father. There's BW, her brother D., and her sister, T. - between the three families represented there are six adults and six children. We all gathered at Mr. Chow's on 57th street, and had a few drinks and dinner and talked about family things and skiing trips and the things that kids do, and somewhere in the course of the evening someone said "we're the next generation", meaning the we are doing what our parents did when they were raising us. It's a hard thing to describe. but it got to me in a way that I can't shake.
I come from a small family - Mom, Dad, sisters Tysh and Linda. All I ever really remember is that ideal nuclear family, with visits to my grammy (and her crazy chihuahuas) every once in a while. I'm so happy that Dear Alex will have a more robust family (too many aunts, uncles, cousins to count) to learn about and share life with - as I've said before, I'm a lucky man.
This goes on, of course, because family has become so very important, and it really is something to celebrate - I desperately miss my father and mother and wish that they could have known this wonderful child, and that she might have known them for the wonderful people that they were. Over time, of course, I will tell Dear Alex about them - her other grandparents - the ones she'll never know. That sounds a little bleak, I know, but this isn't really about that - It's more about family and what it means to know that you've got people that care one way or another what happens to you and yours. I've got that - from my sisters to my sisters-in-law to my brothers-in-law to my beautiful wife and the ever present Grammy and George, who baby-sat tonight so that we could have a family moment (without them).

18 months

Dear Alex at the doctor's office

Beautiful Wife, Nanny J. and I took Dear Alex to the doctor yesterday for the 18 month check-up. It's hard to believe that she's already 18 months old - those months flew by - it seems like nothing yet at the same time it's hard to imagine or even remember that there was a time before she existed. Odd concept, that.

Dear Alex is in great health, and was in great form for the wonderful doctor L.
(she cried through the entire visit - perhaps she knew that there was a shot coming) Alex weighed in at 24.2 pounds (with diaper) and is now all of 32.5 inches tall and growing like a weed. Most of the exam was just talking about her development, and I am proud to say that she seems to be pretty smart. Of course BW and I think she's a genius, but it's nice to have a disinterested third party confirm that she's got the verbal skills of a two-year-old. It was kind of fun enumerating her new words and her motor development (the climbing on things, her adeptness with crayons, etc.) Our excitement over her prodigious word skills was deflated a bit by Dr. L., who pointed out that in order for a word to count, it has to be recognizable to a stranger... Oh. You mean that "up-ca" (cup) doesn't count?
We know what she means, she knows what she means...

Are you smarter than a fifth grader?

This really isn't a lilscreamie post, but I don't think it's going to be possible for me to have a real thought anymore tonight - Beautiful Wife found a new television show that I think might portend the end of civilization as we know it - A game show - "Are you smarter a fifth grader?" Well, yes, I am - but the whole concept is enthralling: Get an adult and ask them questions that a fifth grader should be able to answer. (with a panel of fifth graders on hand) Fascinating, in an watching-an-accident-happen-in-slow-motion sort of way. What this says about popular culture sort of scares me, but I can't stop watching in horrified fascination - BTW, so far, I AM smarter than a Fifth grader. Can't wait for Dear Alex to be in a place to quiz me...

Missing Emma

Emma on the ottoman, with a rare guest appearance by Gracie.

I could go on a great length about what a wonderful cat Emma was, but I won't. What's stuck in my head, though, is expressing some of how weird it is to have to put a lot of the feelings away for the benefit of Dear Alex. Alex and Emma had a complicated relationship, to be sure - a little rocky at first, but eventually they became very close. It's a testament to Emma and her patience and affection that she suffered Dear Alex's early overtures with little scratching and nary a hiss. Alex learned a little bit about how to be gentle and kind and caring with animals, and was truly rewarded by Emma's acceptance of her elaborate kisses.
I truly feel bad for Dear Alex - she was down for a nap when I took Emma to the vet, out for the last time, so the girl never saw her go. I know that in time she'll forget, but right now she misses Emma, and a lot of it is heartbreaking. Alex calls for Emma at odd times - "Emma, Emma" and will sit on the couch next to me and pat the couch as I did so many times to let the cat know that it was okay for her to join us. Alex sometimes goes to the ottoman that Emma always hung around on, and just puts her head down on it - it was a favorite location for both of them - Alex could just bend down a little and be right at eye level to plant a big smooch on the cat. I think Emma actually liked it, and really did start hanging around with Dear Alex a lot towards the end, but well before she got sick. I don't quite know what to say to Alex about Emma - as it stands now, BW and I just say that Emma "went away", or that Emma's "not here".

They would have been great friends.

Rest in peace little Emma

Out for a walk.

Little steps

Over last week, the Undisclosed Location returned to it's former glory as the Fortress of Solitude, with about a foot of snow and Ice deposited on the landscape. For a brief shining moment, it's a compensation for the winter-that-wasn't, a reminder of the way of the winter Dear Alex was concieved. We played in the snow today, maybe more for me than Dear Alex, though she did enjoy herself - half the time resolutely pointing, and declaring the obvious - "schnow! Schnow!" We went out onto the lake, with Alex in her bathtub-become-sled until she'd had enough and gave the "up - up" call that indicated that it was time for her to move under her own power. The frozen surface of the lake is a wind-scoured mix of slick clear ice and stretches of wind-blown drifts and we walked for a while - there was nothing for Alex to hurt herself on, so I pretty much let her run (or walk in her funny little way) free. We played a little game of walk and follow. Dear Alex would walk, and I'd follow - with her turning once in a while to make sure I was still there - She got as far from me as she's ever been while out in the world, and it truly was a wierd feeling.
In case you're wondering about the post title - it's about those impossibly small size 5 footprints next to my size 11's that we left all over the place - that I didn't get a picture of before the ceaseless wind scoured them away.

(Lest any be concerned about the safety of allowing dear alex to roam free on the frozen surface of a lake, I want to point out that there was an ice fishing contest going on on the lake while we were out there, with a lot of 200-pound plus men gathered in groups, using gasoline powered augers to drill their fishing holes. We certainly stayed well clear of that, but rest assured - the lake was sturdily frozen.)

Happy Valentine's day

Venus chiding Dear Alex Cupid.

All you've got to do...

A few days ago I was in a vile mood, just tired and truly miserable after a few days working on some 'advertising' concepts for two differnet pharmaceuticals indicated for Alzheimers' and Cystic Fibrosis. Now these are good drugs, but both of them are basically designed to put off or delay the onset of the inevitable decline. It's nice to be working, but sometimes it gets a little depressing - that, combined with this general feeling of no-time-for-anything other than Dear Alex and the fact that it's cold and dark and February just sort of came together to make me hate the world. I parked my ass on the couch, and decided that I wasn't going to move. Beautiful Wife came home and Dear Alex was in a cheery, active mood. Nice to see - daddy didn't want to play.
One of her favorite things is to come into the living room and march up to the radio, adjust the volume, point to aforementioned radio and order you to - "dance, dance" (to me, that's the equivalent of having shots fired at your feet, like in an old movie) BW took her in her arms and spun her around, inevitably making Dear Alex squeal with delight - good for her. She stepped over the line by asking Alex if she wanted to dance with daddy. (If you ask Dear Alex just about anything these days you either get a head shake "no, nope, uh-uh" or an enthusiastic "yeah!") I got the enthusiastic "yeah!" - I shot BW and the poor girl my most withering look (BW called me on that one) but dutifully got up and and did the Alex dance. It's pretty amazing - I discovered that it's impossible to stay in a bad mood when you've got 24 pounds of wriggling, giggling baby love in your arms. She cracks me up.
Thank you for remembering me that, Beautiful Wife.