andamu

It was 94F when we landed in Sacramento - coming off a week of mid to upper 70s in the Portland region. The full impact of the heat hit us once we clambered inside the dark blue rental minivan; it took several minutes for the air conditioner to cool us down to comfort level.
During our stay, the evenings were nippy, as were the mid-mornings, except in the San Jos� and Sunnyvale area, and on the Fisherman's Wharf and beach front park in Monterey, especially with the ferocious wind and once the clouds moved in closer and started to spit stray drops at us.
But even San Francisco was mostly warm. We all wore light sweater-shirts, and never needed our jackets that we dragged along all across the city. Never, that is, except whenever Angel Face wanted to take a nap - her thing is that she has to be covered head to toe (well, chin to toe) if she is in an unfamiliar place, and she gets very cranky indeed if her knees or ankles are open. So that is where her jacket (and occasionally even some of ours) came in handy.
Poor creature - twice she fell asleep on public transport, and was rudely awakened when we scrambled to get off. It did not make for a happy little camper at all.
Anyway, when we flew back out from Sacramento, the heat smacked us in the face when we got down at the gas station just before reaching the airport. My memory whispers something along the lines of 97F at me, but it might be faulty.
On Saturday evening we flew straight back into my kind of weather - 60s with cloudy skies and several rain showers for a week straight! It seemed as if Winter had come early - or at least an unusually wet Fall.
Angel Face was not about to concede the (apparent) end of Summer so quickly, however. Sunday morning's run to the grocery store saw her dressed in a polka-dotted keyhole neck and puff sleeved t-shirt and a basque and box pleat denim mini skirt over shorst, with hawaiian flipflops in bright blue with pink hisbiscuses, despite the gloomy skies outside. As they started down the stairs, a few drops found them, and Nini put her foot down and sent her back inside, where she grabbed her (short) rainjacket, and with a jaunty swing of her pigtails, out she rushed and downstairs she clattered, determined for a little while longer to cling to the idea of Summer.

"Some princes don't cut their princesses' nails."
Angel Face (oops, Princess Angel Face) makes this pronouncement as she sits cross-legged on our bed, the Barbie-pink cardboard crown with the Disney princesses all around it perched on her head with her ears sticking through her shoulder-length hair to prevent it from slipping down to her neck.
My precious one is facing her, his legs also crossed, as he gently wields the nail clippers on her little fingers. She has been tickling him, and the sharp little nails have left their mark.
She has been having a total princess-streak lately. She is the princess, mpo is her prince, I'm the queen, and who knows what her mommy is. They live in their castle (the sofa) and he has to go everywhere with her or, as is more likely when he is too lazy to get up, she tells him in a posh voice, "Prince, stay right there. I'll be ri-i-i-ight back!" before running off (No running in the house!) to grab some essential element of royal life from her room.
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The princess fad is a refinement of the lady fad. She has been clamoring since she was two to wear dresses every day, and since Spring she has been putting on her Easter hat and carrying its matching purse all around the house. She wants to be called "Lady," but NOT "Lady Angel Face" - it has to be "Angel Face Lady." (The purse holds aristocratic essentials like Kleenex, a little plastic figurine, the top of a perfumed body spray bottle, a bobby pin and a couple of beads.)
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I wonder from where the stereotypes come. When she sees certain types of toys or clothes, she will ask whether "those are for boys or for girls?" We have never knowingly tried to draw a distinction between boys and girls, between what they like, play with or can do.
She attends child care, but it is at the college with all the early childhood education faculty and students, so it is ultra-politically correct. True, she watches television, but we monitor what she gets to watch, and the majority are educational shows.
We read to her a lot, and we try to answer most of her questions seriously, at a level that she can understand. She has not picked up any ethnic prejudices, but from where oh where does she get her gender identity ideas?

Quick! What was the most fun you ever had on your birthday when you were a kid? That is, apart from the gifts and the party.
For Angel Face it was definitely getting to lick out the batter bowl for her chocolate birthday cake.
She turned four on Wednesday. It is the milestones that make me stop and evaluate the differences. Obviously growth is a continuous, gradual process, and being close to the subject the changes are frequently so small that one can easily miss them. Taking stock at a specific time, comparing to another fixed moment, allows one to mark the growth.
And my goodness, how she has grown. Not only physically (where she has really shot up), but also intellectually, emotionally and in terms of capabilities. It has been a big year for our little one with lots of changes in her environment, lots of new things asked of her, lots of challenges and lots of rewards. And she has handled all of it like a champion, and emerged stronger.
Happy Birthday, Miss Muffet!
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It is turning into proper Fall around here. The morning fog lingers four or five days a week, and many trees have fully turned color.
It is starting to get cooler too, although the temperatures still yo-yos, up one day, down the next. At least they are pulling back from 80 a bit. The combination of sun and 80F is enough to turn the entire (South & West facing) apartment into an oven. Can't wait to move into a better place!
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Needless to say I love Fall, and especially Winter. I like the seasons in general, but Summer is really my least fun time. An unpopular position, but there it is. At least we should be in a better place shortly...

[ progress report ]
We put on the first coat in the family room on Saturday. We made a lot of mistakes along the way, which we hope not to repeat in the rest of the house. Something we will definitely start doing from now is taping the ceiling, because at this stage we'll have to do a lot of touching up to get rid of the blobs of color stuck on the white ceiling.
On Sunday we had a shock: the paint job looked awful! Very uneven color and coverage despite the promise on the paint can of one coat coverage, and the areas where I had patched holes with spackling looked very weird on the orange peel surface. (By the way, have I mentioned yet that I hate hate hate hate textured walls?)
Very dejectedly we painted a second coat (after spraying texture on the patches), this time trying extra hard to maintain thick and even coverage. Another wall that was to be painted the same color turned out the same after the first coat there, despite our improved process. It seems that we will have to do two coats everywhere.
The good news, looking at the dried second coat on Monday (admittedly under artificial light) is that it looks very good, with even coverage. Now I have courage to continue painting the rest of the rooms we decided to paint, although our estimate of the time required has drastically increased.
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[ trick or treat ]
This was Angel Face's first Halloween. Yes, she is four, but she has spent her first three Octobers in South Africa.
On Friday she got dressed in her princess outfit (nothing else would do) and came trick-or-treating here in the lab. We went all out here, with more than 30 candy stations in our building alone, and probably close to a hundred across the site. We had games in the kids activity room, loads of decorations, and quite a few people in costume.
She had a blast!
Then on Sunday evening she was dressed up in ghagra choli, with a fancy bindi and the dupatta jauntily knotted behind her back for a quick, shivering round of trick-or-treating around the apartment complex.
All in all, a rousing success for her first time :-)

And now there is some incentive to take naps: only one candy a day, and that only after a nap!

Angel Face (turned 4 in October) has been infatuated with horses for a very long time now, probably at least a year. And that means mostly the idea of horses. Apart from a petting zoo before she was three, her only encounter with a real horse was during our spring trip to a tulip farm for the requisite photos among the blooms, where for $4 she was taken on four circuits on a pony named Betsy tethered with three others to a central post with arms that rotate (which I am sure has a proper name if only I knew it).
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She still talks about Betsy, who is now "her" horse. Whenever we get to the carousel (every mall here seems to have one) she spends a long time picking out the right horse to get on, and always settles for one that looks either like Betsy (chestnut) or like Spirit (from the animated movie).
When we pass any horses in fields she gets terribly excited, and is liable to sulk if any of us spot a horse somewhere that she missed. At one stage on a recent trip I had to clamber around and use the full extent of the 8x optical zoom on my camera to grab the shapes of a few horses in a paddock way over yonder.
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The area we live in is growing, and has engulfed some small holdings, marooning them in the middle of spreading suburbia. We drive through one of these pastoral areas to get to the house, and I have noticed some horse boarders. Now we DEFINITELY will NOT get her a pony, but who knows, there might be a place nearby where she can get to ride...

Some time ago I got a little stuffed animal at the Credit Union for opening an account. It is a little albino cheetah, with pale fur and a little pink nose. When I presented it to Angel Face at the time she was rather unimpressed with it. Well, she was a lot younger (barely three) and had just moved halfway across the world. She was much more interested in hanging on to the stuffed puppy that made the trip with her.
At some stage the cheetah got stuck under our bed, just about right in the middle where the perfunctory sweeps and vacuumings never reached it. It was unearthed during the preparations for the move, and she pounced on it like it was the most wonderful thing in the world and they have been inseparable since.
Last night she wandered into our room, cheetah tucked into the crook of her arm: "So what do cheetahs actually like to eat?"
Vegetarian like us, she was most distressed to learn that cheetahs eat little antelope like Bambi. Took her a while to digest that fact (no pun intended - well, not much).
This morning I overheard her in her mother's room asking: "Mama, are cheetahs very strong swimmers?"
What amuses me most is not the current obsession or the curiosity, but the turns of phrase, which seems beyond her four years, and comic due to juxtaposition.
But basically, I just love her to bits :-)

Yippee! The webserver is up, so images are back. My precious one found the network card after some diligent digging among the boxes. I have refrained from going in there to see in what state he left the stuff - for the moment I am too happy that everything is set up to worry about things like that.
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At child care, Angel Face's class was about to go on a "field trip." They were to go and find the kinds of food that dinosaurs ate, because "although dinosaurs are no longer around, the stuff they ate are still here."
The kids were asked what they thought these prehistoric animals ate, and some suggested birds and small animals. Angel Face became quite upset, insisting that dinosaurs must have been vegetarian, and so off went the entire class to the garden outside to find some leaves that they might have eaten.
Life seems so much simpler when you are four, doesn't it?
Unfortunately, reality will hold a few nasty surprises for her. Not that she won't have a few surprises of her own: where have you heard of a four year-old convincing an entire class, with most of the kids at least a year older?

fidgerator - Not the fridge, nor the refrigerator; fidgerator!
And it is amazing how frequently the word comes up in a four year old's conversation. Or maybe it is just that we very recently bought the appliance in question for our new house, and it is (seems at least) twice the size of the one in the apartment.
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Angel Face frequently seems to be playing to a script in her head, to some stage director that only she can hear. She would frequently direct us to cast us as actors in her play.
"Nooo, you have to say this:..."
We need to be acting out her ideal of how the situation should progress.
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Typical of her age she keeps repeating things, perhaps in some search for verification or reassurance.
"Will you and me, no you and you and me - will mama and doddamma and peddanana and me and mama - all go to the shops/in the car/wherever?"
This repeatedly enumerating a member is evident even in her counting. Despite the fact that she's known her numbers almost since she has been able to talk, when asked to count her fingers for instance she will start with an arbitrary finger somewhere in the middle, and count them all, and at least one a second time to get to six. Sometimes seven or eight.
Now she does that in three languages, since they are being taught Spanish in pre-school.
Perhaps she is just so enthusiastic about all the things, and about counting in general, that she can't bring herself to stop when she gets to the end. Kind of the 4yo application of the Law of Inertia.

Angel Face, the equestrienne.

I had to go digging for these images, and after I've found them and edited them, whenever I remembered to upload them I was at a different computer, and when I was at the right computer, I forgot. (Age it seems is less kind to some than others.)
Anyway, they are meant to illustrate an earlier entry on her obsession with all things horsey.
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I have all these high-falutin' ideas of making sure that an original of every image I take is saved on a central hard drive, which is periodically backed up to CD or DVD. Wonderful idea! It would help if I were to actually implement it consistently though, wouldn't it?
Come to think of it, I downloaded images at work on Monday, and I still haven't transferred them to home... Rather reminds me of Mr. Knightly who praised Emma's reading list as the best he has seen, if only she would get around to actually reading the books on it.

9.27 p.m. I look up when I catch some movement out of the corner of my eye. The sleepy face peeking around the door jamb is that of Angel Face, who had gone to bed almost two hours ago.

"What is it darling? Why aren't you sleeping?"
The pale little face with eyes at half-mast replies "I need some lovies, Doddamma."

Before she even finishes my arms are open and the pink and purple pyjama-flanneled four year-old is scampering onto the bed and snuggling next to me where I'm sitting on the covers, blogsurfing.

A little while later, still snuggling with gentle kisses planted on her forehead and her tushy rhythmically patted, she asks: "Can you warm me up with the blanket, Doddamma?"

"What do you mean, darling?" "I need to get under the covers," she pouts.

"Hmm, but you need to go and sleep in your own bed just now. Why do you want to get under the covers here?"
"Because my feet are soooo cold."

Now this child usually has ice cubes for hands and feet, so I rush to feel them. Nope, normal body temp. Also understand that at this stage it is a given that she'll be getting under the covers - the conversation is continuing merely for mild amusement.

"No darling, your feet aren't cold," I say.
She reaches down and feels with her hands, and since they're the same temperature she can't feel anything. So she does the next logical thing (for a 4yo that is); since Mommy and Doddamma always check temperature with our cheeks, she calmly reaches down, grabs her foot and places the sole of it flat on her own cheek.

"Hmm," she says, "it doesn't feel very cold."

Me, I'm speechless, and just silently open the covers to let the little caterpillar snuggle deep under the duvet.

"But Mommy, we can have cookies quickly if you stick them in the milky wave."
Nini, only half-listening: "Not milky wave, darling, Milky Way."
Angel Face:"Noooo, Mommy, the milky waVE, where you pop the popcorn!"
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I brought her a pink helium-filled balloon yesterday. She was overjoyed, talking to it as if it was a person.
This morning, she walked dejectedly into our room. trailing the partially deflated balloon:
"Doddamma, Peddananna, see my balloon is out of breath!"
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And she is getting crafty.
After my dismayed exclamation, Nini was commisserating with me over the proliferation of silver hair among my dark tresses.
So little Miss Nosy wants to know what is going on, and Nini points out the way the strands are turning white.
No prizes for guessing that the next question was "Why?"
Coming as it did after a recent streak of naughtiness, Nini said: "Every time you are naughty, one of Doddamma's hairs turn white. Just think, when she walks around, everyone can see how naughty you've been when they see all the white hairs."
It took a little while to digest this, but it had a sobering effect.
Later we're talking about the possibility of a visit from me to Angel Face's Day Care.
"No!" she pipes up, panicky. "You can't come to my school!"
"Why not?"
"Because you have an owie on your tummy."
"Hmm. And why else?"
"Because then my teachers will see how naughty I've been."

We are, more or less, a trilingual household. That is if we ignore all the bits and pieces of other languages that individuals in the house know but do not share with another house member.

So, my precious one speaks Telugu, I know the kitchen variety of the same, and Nini and Angel Face have picked up a word or two here and there; mostly things like nemmadiga(slowly, softly) and emitendi(what? - respectfully).

When Nini and Angel Face first arrived here, Miss PipSqueak (at 3 years old) spoke only Afrikaans, barring a few English words that crept into everyday usage like slang. Within three months she was fluent in English, and in less than six she stopped speaking Afrikaans altogether. She still understood and responded to it, and would translate in one direction - Afrikaans to English, but she lost the facility to go the other way, it seemed.

It took much hard work from all for her to regain the ability to speak Afrikaans, and somewhere along the way she has picked up a horrific American accent, even though she has never heard it spoken in that way.

Bear in mind that mpo doesn't speak Afrikaans (beyond a few words he'd picked up through the constant repetition here at home.) The common language for communication here is English -- it seems fair enough since it is no-one's mother tongue. The trilinguality claim is based on the fact that three languages are heard in the house, not that any one person can speak all three.

Now picture this: Angel Face is in the bath for her nightly marathon play session. She is lead actress, supporting cast, villain, hero and stage director all in one, all the while booming and shrieking and emoting at the top of her voice. The closed bathroom door seems to do very little to mute the commotion.

MPO, in a mock-serious tone from the landing asks "What is going on in there?"

Some enthusiastic but a little incoherent explanation of the scene being enacted pours through the door. "But why are you playing in English and not in Afrikaans?" he asks, apropos norralot. (OorikenE)

"Because all my toys come from here -- they only understand English!"

It seems we go through stages where Angel Face has us continually rolling on the floor with the things she says. Just as well I am mostly recovered now, and laughing doesn't really hurt much anymore.
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The restaurant we went to on Saturday evening has some coloring books and wax crayons, which delights and occupies her. But she is at a stage where she wants someone to "help" her color (read, she wants attention focused on her and her tasks, instead of quietly amusing herself).

So when the whining began for Mommy to help, instead of allowing the adults a bit of quiet conversation for a change, Nini said: "No, we are not allowed to help in these books. You have to do it all by yourself."

The owner loves kids, so everytime he came to our table, he made sure to engage with her after talking to us. This time, when he asked if she was enjoying herself, she piped up: "Please uncle, can my Mommy help me to color in this book?"

Needless to say, much laughter and red faces around!
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Age was a sensitive subject at home this weekend, what with birthdays and all that. It turned out that the worst faux pas was not aimed at me though.

Setting the scene: we are all dressed up very nicely, much more than usual, for our dinner out when we get in the car. However, my precious one is still wearing chappals - as a true South Indian of the old school it has to be either snowing or a job interview to get him to wear closed shoes without duress.

Nini and I are both complaining about how much our fancy shoes (that we never wear) are hurting us, when Angel Face remarks that all the "girls" have pretty shoes, but that mpo's shoes are old.

Teasing her, we try to take the subject further, and she says, "But it is OK for your shoes to be old, peddananna, because you are old."
Hmm. Some further exploration reveals that she, Nini and I are "new" while he is "old."
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These days as a couple we are starting to look like Grey and Greyer.

For me it is still mostly pepper, with a liberal sprinkling of salt; for him it is all salt, with the merest hint of pepper here and there.

In Africa, they call it "Snow on the Rooftops."

Entering through the laundry room after a long day at work, the door barely clicks behind me before I am overwhelmed by a wall of sound:
"Doddamma, Doddamma, Doddamma!"

How can a single almost-five year-old be responsible for so much noise?

In between the greetings, the removal of my ID badge, the kicking off of my shoes, the dumping of my bag and the handing over my lunch box to Nini, Angel Face for some reason decides to race to the landing on the stairs.

"And what have you been doing?" I ask her as a relative calm settles in.
I shake my head, trying to make sense of what she said, because it sounded like "We are watching April, May." I am sure it must be some audio glitch, where my ears did not quite catch what she said, and filled in the detail with like-sounding words.

But my repeat enquiry is met by the same response: "We are watching April, May."

Thoroughly mystified, I wander over to the family room, where the TV is blaring, and plastered with the face of ... Rachel Ray!

It turns out that it was not my brain that filled in the blanks left by ears, but hers.

We now have an official kindergartner in our midst.

They had an ice cream social at the school last week, allowing parents and kids to meet the teachers and one another, to ask questions and see the classrooms.

All weekend we've been hearing about the school name, the teacher's name and the number of her classroom. The prospect of going to kindergarten has also been a wonderful aid to discipline - "No, big kids who go to kindergarten don't do that" etc.

Last night she was awake three times, just too excited to sleep.

This morning everyone was up bright and early (okay, I'm not so sure about the bright part, but certainly early) and off they went to school, after the requisite pictures were taken.

Nini reports she was standing first in line to enter the classroom, so excited she was just about jumpin up and down (Angel Face, that is, not Nini.) Nini just can't believe that her baby is already starting school.

Good luck, poppet. May you always be as excited to go to school as you are today.

We love you lots and lots. And Jelly Tots.

Today we have a five year old in the house.

On October 6, 2000, an Angel Face made her entrance into our lives.

And do you know? She is still as special as in that very first moment.

Happy Birthday, Poppet!

Ratna transcribes the most wonderful dialogues with her children at her blog. One of them, to wit One of those Violin Class trips, sparked my responses about Angel Face's current obsession.

See, Angel Face at five is really keen to have babies.

Our response to this is a litany that goes like this: "After you finish high school and you go to college and earn your degree, you will get your Masters degree and complete your Ph.D. - THEN you can get married and then when you're 35 you can have babies, as many as you want."

So now her story goes like this: "One day when I am big and old and 35 I will have lots of babies, no only two, a boy and a girl, but I don't like boys, so maybe I will have a boy and girl twins, and then I will have another girl....."

This gets repeated umpteen times a day. Then, this morning in a sequel she comes into our room. I'm in the dressing room getting ready for work, so she asks my husband: "Peddananna, can you help me pull up the zipper on my backpack?"

While he is helping her, she states: "I can't wait until I'm 35."

Taken aback, he asks: "Why?"

"So that my mommy can stay at home and look after my babies while I go to work."

First off: to all of you in areas that are affected by the Southern Californian wildfires: our hearts go out to you, and we hope that you and those dear to you are safe.

The company I work for has a huge presence in the San Diego area, right in the middle of the worst hit county there. While the company buildings are fine, the site has been closed all week to allow employees to take care of their needs: a large percentage of them have been evacuated, and several have lost their houses.

We were watching the news with the scary flames, and Angel Face was sitting with eyes getting bigger and bigger. When they showed the maps, she asked where that was, and we told her.

Now, back in March I took Nini and Angel Face to Southern California when I had a business trip to San Diego. We left the weekend before, and went to Disneyland (all of our first times), and then at the end of the weekend, they flew back home, and I went down to San Diego for a couple of days of meetings.

I had planned the whole thing as a huge surprise: I only told maa chellelu three days in advance that we are going to California - and then only because she needed to pack for Angel Face and herself. When we got to the airport, Angel Face still thought that she was only there to see me off. Now luckily she doesn't know that only passengers are allowed past security, so she checked happily through security, and they came "with me" to the departure gate. It was only when the flight was called that she realized that they are coming to California with me - she was so excited she almost cried.

I had told neither of them that Disneyland was on the itinerary, so early on Saturday morning I just told them to get ready because we're going to go out and do some fun stuff. They only realized where we were going when they started seeing the flags. And then I couldn't get the little one to stop talking; she kept running through a litany of the things and people she might see and do.

Her day was utterly exhausting; by the time it was time for us to leave, she was limp, and still she wanted to stay - you know what I mean, don't you?

And since then, every writing assignment she has at school she wants to write about Disneyland.

To get back to the original story: when we told her where the fires were, she said "That's where Disneyland is!" We had to explain nicely that it was in that area, but that it was not Disneyland itself that was burning.

Now, every time the fires come on the news, she looks very sad and scared. Last night she was asking "Is it the castle that is burning? All the towers will make a big fire." At least we can tell her that in among the many sad and scary stories, a little bit of magic has stayed intact.