Still Can't Read

Claire was in her room looking at a pile of her books before bath time this evening. Then she brought a big board book into the bathroom where I was drawing her bath and getting everything ready for bedtime. She asked me to read the book, and I said sorry, not right now, I am busy. She threw the book down and started crying. Usually she gets a little annoyed, but not that upset, when I tell her I'm busy. So I asked her what was the matter. She looked down, with tears in her eyes, and said in a quiet voice, "I'm too little to read it." It was so sweet and sad. Then Kit showed up and read the book to her and cheered her up. I am afraid Claire has a pretty long wait before she can read books "all by her own self", as she says, but it is nice to see she is motivated.

Many New Questions

Claire has started to ask some rather interesting questions about the world.

For example, you may recall that she likes to pretend to be working at a fast food drive-through, sticking her head out and saying, "You want a combo? You want cheese?" It still cracks us up. Lately, she has extended this game to sit-down dining, holding a notepad and crayon in hand, saying, "You want bar-b-que? You want Diet Coke?" Anyways, the other night at dinner Claire said, "Combo? What's that? I've never seen a combo." It must seem funny to her. Every time you ask for a combo, you get a hamburger, fries, and a drink instead. But what the heck is a combo? It must be some kind of food. Does it taste good?

Claire also noted recently that she has never seen a dinosaur. This is a pretty remarkable observation. She has seen most of the other animals we talk about, at least at the zoo or the aqauarium. She has seen elephants, lions, meerkats, whales, sharks, birds, and countless other fun animals. But what is with these reclusive dinosaurs? There is no dinosaur display at the zoo. I told her that is good because they are awfully big and fast and scary, to which she agreed, "Yeah!" and did a big roar sound. I also told her they have a dinosaur skeleton on display at the airport, but that did not especially interest her.

She also seems to be grappling with the seemingly arbitrary distinction between girls and boys. This topic came up during dinner when her school friend Nathan was mentioned as being a boy. "Girls and boys. What's that? That's silly!" This one I could not readily explain other than to say that they're all just kids. But she has a good point. Why do you have to specify someone's gender every time? You might as well use different words for kids with different colored hair.

It is a strange and confusing world indeed.

Catching up

The last couple of months have really gotten away from Kit and me. It has been sort of a perfect storm. Being chief resident at Emory takes up lots of Kit's time on top of her regular demanding work. Plus she is constantly studying for various massive tests to complete her residency. My job at Verizon got out of hand trying to deliver an especially difficult project ("Option 4 IP Provisioning Automation for MLFR") under tough circumstances. And we are trying to get our house cleaned up and remodeled to sell this spring, as well looking into our upcoming living situation in Dallas. Fortunately, we had many visits and a ton of help from the grandparents, which really helped save the day. My parents came to Altanta and watched after Claire for the better part of a weekend while Kit and I scrambled about. And among many other things, Joyce even painted our whole kitchen all by herself.

Of course, this is a blog about Claire, not about Kit and me. But it is interesting to note that this has probably been the most challenging few months in our lives. Fortunately through all of this, we have managed to keep Claire mostly happy and healthy, although she did have a runny nose through most of January.

But niceties like this blog fell out of the routine. Now things have cleared up for me at work for the moment, and it is time to catch up on this blog. I am afraid I have missed a few funny / interesting / cute things that Claire has done lately, but I am now going to backfill some things I still remember. Plus I had some written down in rough draft but never published all the way back to last November. I will probably not catch up on everything, but as I get these finished some entries will magically show up "before" this one.

Varied Musical Tastes

In the continuing theme of moving to Texas, I have put together a "Texas Tour" playlist on my iPod, completely made of songs about Texas places. Kit originally had the basic idea to do a Texas mix, but it turned into a fun little project for me. Most of the songs are pretty mellow, and we listen to it sometimes during bath time. The playlist features things like Patsy Cline singing "San Antonio Rose" and Arlo Guthrie singing "Streets of Laredo". Claire does not react much to those particular songs, but she seems to enjoy "Galveston", of which we have on old Gordon Calcotte country/surf version and a nice newer alt rock version by some band called Sparklehorse. Claire will sometimes say, "Let's sing about Galveston!" She also seems to enjoy the Lightnin' Hopkins blues song, "Goin' to Dallas", of which she will sometimes say, "That was a good one" when it is finished. Then again, these are two of my favorites, so maybe she is just tuning into that.

But Claire's real favorite music is The Countdown Kids and their renditions of toddler classics like "Old McDonald Had a Farm", "The Wheels on the Bus", and "Frere Jaques". She tries to sing along and occasionally clap. The Countdown Kids helped make the six-hour car trip back from Florida back to Atlanta in December more bearable by just keeping Claire occupied for a couple of hours. She also seems to like The Wiggles, who sometimes accidentally appears on our TV after Calliou or Curious George, but Kit and I try to avoid them just because they are kind of creepy and annoying.

Claire can even sing a couple of songs somewhat successfully all by herself, such as "Itsy Bitsy Spider" and "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star". It's just so sweet to see her sing; she concentrates real hard to remember the words, and she gets a big smile on her face when she finishes the song.

Barney for President

Tonight we watched the news coverage of the 2008 Iowa presidential caucus over dinner. There was a lot of talk about the race between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton for the presidential nomination.

Claire was apparently paying attention, because after dinner, as she was playing with her Barney the Dinosaur stuffed animal, she started saying, "Barack Obarney! Barack Obarney!" over and over. She would do well in an actual caucus meeting.

Goodbye, High Chair

Claire has been recently resisting sitting in her high chair. In the last day or two as we started to put her in her high chair for a meal, she started to specifically ask to sit in a regular chair. "I want to sit there!", she says, pointing at one of the normal adult chairs. So we tried it out a couple of times, and Claire did just fine. We use one of Kit's big, thick pathology books as a booster to make things a little easier, but even that is optional. She doesn't mind reaching up high to grab her food, and she seems to revel in how big and independent she is becoming.

So today, as part of our massive and ongoing cleanup and de-cluttering efforts, we moved the high chair down into the basement "loading zone" area to eventually donate or sell. It's yet another step to Claire gradually becoming a big kid, and perhaps a fitting way to start off the new year.

Riding the Rails

Today is a funny day, a single work day sandwiched between Christmas week and New Year's Day. I was planning to send Claire off to Grace for the day, who had last week off, but it turns out Grace is still in Florida visiting her family, and does not plan to be back in Atlanta until Tuesday. So I unexpectedly have Claire for the day. After all the recent hustle and bustle of the holidays, and all the recent travel, and working on the house, I am going back to an old routine -- just me and Claire, taking an unplanned day off. Losing the day to unexpected circumstances is tough, with so many things to do and so little time. But that is to worry about later; today Claire and I are going to have some fun with our day off!

I was initially thinking of going to the zoo, but it was foggy and cold and wet, so spending a lot of time outdoors did not seem ideal. But I felt sort of couped up and wanted to get out on some sort of adventure, preferably something new. With Claire's continuing fascination with trains, I thought it would be fun to take the MARTA train somewhere. Something about zipping around the city on the train in the fog on New Year's Eve sounded fun and adventurous. It seemed like a very Curious George type of thing to do.

But where would we go? We finally decided on Underground Atlanta because it was right by the main downtown MARTA station, and it had plenty of fun stuff for Claire to see, including, according to the web site, "caricature drawings and fortune telling, homemade candy, delicious dining and souvenir shopping."

So I packed up a small survival and dining kit (diapers, wipes, a drink cup, a bib, a fork, and some snacks), and we headed out to Lindberg Station. As we hopped on the train, Claire gleefully yelled, "All aboard!" We grabbed the only free seat, with Claire sitting on my lap, next to a sort of rough looking guy with greasy hair, hunched over sleeping (or pretending to sleep). The train car was largely full of middle aged women all dressed in the same goofy black and yellow outfits, as if for some sort of Georgia Tech pep rally. As we headed into town, the train filled up with more and more Clemson fans. I guess there was a football game today, but fortunately things did not get too tense between the GT and Clemson fans. One of the GT ladies said something about a parade and pointed at the rough guy next to me, jokingly saying, "We should put him on charge." She looked at me and said, "I hope he doesn't wake up mad." This was just funny, not scary; that guy looked harmless enough, and besides, he was way smaller than me. Once the train cleared up a bit, though, we did move to a more "comfortable" seat. During the ride downtown came the requisite Claire comments and compliments from all the GT ladies, with Claire introducing herself to our neighbors and saying, "MARTA train" over and over with a big smile.

We got off at Five Points across the street from Underground Atlanta. and didn't get 10 steps onto the sidewalk before Claire saw something she liked. There were about 10 pigeons cruising the sidewalk among all the pedestrians, hunting and pecking for food. Claire liked to see real birds up so close, and she insisted that we stay for a good 15 minutes just watching them, laughing whenever they flew around a little bit.

I finally dragged her across the street, and there was more great stuff to look at. They were setting up for the big peach drop, which is Atlanta's version of New York's big apple drop in Times Square. There were food stands and lights and generators everywhere. Claire was almost constantly saying, "What's that?" as we walked along. The camen the big wide stairs into the Underground, which was another prime attraction. We walked down each step, probably 100 of them in all, Claire enjoying every step. Awaiting us at the bottom of the stairs was a big bouncy moonwalk, like the one Claire had loved at the Kit's pathology picnic a few months ago. I steered us clear of the moonwalk, as I knew we would not get a step further if Claire discovered it.

Inside the Underground were more wonders. We saw big colorful balloons, lots of CHristmas lights, life-sized paintings of Dora the Explorer and Mickey Mouse, a big wooden train, and lots of little kid-sized rides, including a school bus, a fire engine, and a tug boat. I wasn't sure if Claire would be hungry yet, at it was only 11:30 or so, but when we checked out the food court, Claire said, "Daddy, let's have some dinner." So we split some lasagna and pizza, which Claire ate very, very slowly as we watched all the people around us.

It was getting late (in Claire terms), so we gradually worked our way back to the MARTA station, dodging pony rides and mini-carousels along the way, stopping for one last look at the street pigeons on the way back. The train was delayed, so I had to hold an increasingly tired and grumpy Claire at the platform for 15 minutes. We looked at the MARTA system map for entertainment, and Claire pointed out where she thought Mommy was.

The train ride back was different than the one down. Instead of colorfully dressed football fans, almost everyone on the train this time was dressed in dark winter coats, with dark hoods and hats, looking sort of glum and serious, or just tough. And then there was Claire, in her little pink pants and yellow jacket, happily taking her own seat on the aisle next to me. The train was pretty quiet. As the train took off, Claire said -- no, yelled -- "Here we gooooooo!" with pure glee. I could see some of the stone-faced passengers crack a bit of a smile. Then Claire started talking to the guy in the seat across from her, who looked like a tough hip hop artist along the lines of Dr. Dre or Big Boi. She said, "He's happy!" The guy smiled and said hi. Claire sort of made friends with him, and he was very nice about it and said, "Is she always this happy? She is one happy kid." Eventually Claire turned her attention back to me and said, "You're pooping" over and over. I saw some of the people around us cracking smiles again. We finally got off the train, saying goodbye to all of our unlikely friends, waving as we walked away, fetching a couple more smiles for good measure.

We had a good adventure today, worthy of Curious George, but fortunately lacking the disasters that normally accompany George. Yes, another forced day off, and another good one at that.