She Has No Idea How Tempting That Sounds

I work at home, which can be tricky on Mondays and Fridays when Fiona is home from preschool and Mommy looks after her. Just now I ducked out to the kitchen to get a cup of coffee and Fiona came running up to tell me she was a brave knight in need of a mission. I told her a dragon was attacking my castle, so she charged off to do battle. Two minutes later, when I was back at my desk, she came into my office to tell me the dragon was dead and ask what else I needed.

Realizing I'd provided an opening that I shouldn't have, I leaned down to let Fiona know that I was still working and couldn't play with her right then.

"But you've been working all day!" she protested. "You must be tired."

Not wanting to let on how right she was, I broke the harsh truth to her that grownups do, indeed, work all day long.

"That's too much," she said. "Do you want to take a nap?"

Now that she mentions it...

Gargadguous

Fiona just created her own board game.

It all started on our lengthy return trip car drive this afternoon. Now that she's outgrown naps, Fiona's discovered something about travelling to and from the Berkshires: three hours is a long time to sit in the car. This afternoon as we packed up, Fiona kept saying she didn't want to go home because the drive was too long. I told her we could play games on the drive to pass the time.

"We'll play Chutes and Ladders without the board," she said. I laughed; that wasn't exactly what I meant.

Fiona had some birthday money to spend, so we stopped at a store about 20 minutes into the drive and let her pick out a toy. She found a music set that included a harmonica and a kazoo, and she played those happily in the back seat for quite a while. One of the nice things about a harmonica is that even if the person playing doesn't know what she's doing, the natural harmonics on the instrument make it tolerable enough to listen to. Which is why we didn't let her play the xylophone that was part of the kit.

But eventually she got bored with her harmonica and asked to play a game. I suggested we go through the alphabet and name something that started with each letter (I figured that's about as close to an alphabet game as Fiona was ready for). We went from A to F before Fiona lost interest and wanted to play Chutes & Ladders instead. So we pretended to be rolling dice and climbing up ladders or falling down slides for a few minutes until Fiona announced that she'd won.

Bored by that, Fiona announced she was going to make up a new game about a butterfly who has to climb a ladder. If the butterfly touches the leaf, you lose.

Fair enough. What was impressive was that as soon as we got home -- about two hours later -- Fiona got out a piece of paper and drew the game board. Three different ladders with a leaf at the top of each one.

Then she got out another piece of paper and wrote the "rules". The rules looked something like this:

FIONA
MOMMY
FAO
LEBD

In other words, whatever letters she could write.

Finally she needed to make the game piece. Here's where things got really creative. She found two combs and her kazoo and put them together--each comb was a wing, and the kazoo was the butterfly's body. Impressed at her resourcefulness, I helped her attach the wings with a rubber band.

Then Fiona had me cut out a piece of paper in a circle, and she wrote the numbers 1-4 on the paper to act as a spinner.

Now, I'm not going to pretend this board game was remotely decipherable for either adult in the house. We would each take turns "spinning" and then climb the ladder to try to grab the prize (I'm not sure what the prize was). If you decided that you had grabbed the prize, you had to fly the butterfly up in the air and shout out "gargadguous!" If you decided that you dropped the prize, the butterfly fell to the ground and died. We all shared the same butterfly.

There was a trophy at the end of the final ladder. Fiona wound up winning (shocking, I know). I'll be sending the specs over to Milton Bradley later this week.

More Scientifically Observant Than I Am

A few minutes ago Fiona was holding a spoon and looking at her reflection.

"Daddy," she said. "I can't get it right-side up."

I told her that because of the way a spoon is shaped, her reflection would always be upside down in a spoon. I told her Aunt Kathy could probably do a better job explaining the science, but that that was how spoons worked.

"Not in the moose book," she said.

A few Christmases ago Fiona got a book called The Useful Moose, about a girl who becomes friends with a trio of moose. The moose help around the house and turn out to be naturals at cleaning up.

I've probably read that book to her 50 times, and never once did I notice that on one page a moose is looking at his reflection in a spoon and the reflection is right-side up.

Now, technically the moose could be looking at the back of the spoon, but still... that's remarkably observant, and not just by the standards of a four-year old.

Periodic Parental Boasting in 3-2-1:

Fiona can count backward from three without a problem.

Fiona can count backward from ten and only occasionally reverse a number (i.e. 10-9-7-8-6-5...)

This evening at dinner Fiona counted backward from twenty and only needed to be prompted twice.

I guess from here it's only a short way to getting her to do the alphabet backwards and then she can pass a basic sobriety test. (I imagine the police might have other concerns than DWI, however, if they pulled over an erratically moving car and saw Fiona behind the wheel)

When Fiona announced this evening at dinner that she was going to count backward from twenty, I honestly thought she was attempting more than she could handle. Shows what Daddy knows.

Daddy Weekend

Andrea was out of town for the weekend so I had my first extended (i.e. more than one night) solo parenting job in a few years. Things were significantly easier this time around; it's a lot less exhausting to take care of a four-year old than a 20-month old.

Saturday we mainly stayed around the house and had a visit from Poppa and Grandma (which gave me a chance to move the car in that great New York game of finding a spot that will be "good for Monday"). Sunday we took the subway down to Soho (and walked through 40mph winds!) to go see Hansel and Gretel at the Manhattan Children's Theatre.

Fiona's seen a few plays now and has had a great time at each one. Last month she went to see Max & Ruby with her Mommy at Theatreworks, which is probably the main children's theater in the city. She had a blast at that one, and came home talking about all the silly things that Max did. But she knows Max & Ruby from the Rosemary Wells' books and the cartoons on Noggin. When I asked Fiona if she wanted me to read Hansel & Gretel to her (I once had a writing teacher who said that there are four must-have books for a writer, one of which is Grimm's Fairy Tales), she didn't want it; she didn't want to know too much before she saw the play (other than that there was a boy and a girl and a bad witch). So I didn't know how much to expect Fiona to understand about the play.

The play started... and it wasn't very good. Now, I think there are two primary rules for criticism:

1. does the piece accomplish what it's trying to do?
2. was it worth doing?

#2 comes into play less than you'd think, and generally only with stuff on the real fringes. But #1 is incredibly important, so when I say that the play wasn't very good, I'm talking about as a piece of theater for children, not in comparison to Streetcar Named Desire or anything like that.

The book writers set the play in Appalachia and put a weird framing device on the play where the brother & sister characters heard half the story of Hansel & Gretel in the very first scene, and then the framing device was more or less dropped. The rest of the scenes moved fairly ploddingly through the story points, without trying for any devices that might involve the (generally young--Fiona's was about the average age) audience. There were no lazzis involving bread crumbs or candy, the witch didn't do anything to spur jeers from the kids... to my mind, when you have a room full of four-year olds in your audience, the last thing you should be doing is training them that theater is all about sitting quietly in the dark and not connecting to what's up on stage. And the audience at the play was quiet.

So I was expecting Fiona, who's never been shy about sharing her opinion, to tell me that the play was a little boring. But she said she loved it, and when I asked her at the end of our weekend together what her favorite thing had been (I figured it was going to be our trip out to Fatty's for dinner), she said it was Hansel & Gretel. And she definitely understood what had happened in the play when I asked her questions about who had done what (even if she didn't always understand why).

Now, it's two days later and I don't still hear her talking about the play, so I think I'm right that the play didn't wind up leaving a great impression on her the way Max & Ruby did. Kids remember what they really like: you can show a group of kids Beauty and the Beast and My Little Pony's Minty Christmas and they'll swear they love both, but the Disney classic almost always winds up getting the real love. But it's clear Fiona thinks there's something great about sitting in an audience watching live people sing and dance and act out stories. Now if only we could figure out where on earth she gets that from.

Tough Tuesday

Fiona's been relatively healthy this winter, at least by four-year old standards. She's had a sniffle she's never quite been able to shake, but she stopped coughing at night quite so much, and she hadn't had to miss any school since October.

On Tuesday Fiona started coughing at about 5:00 a.m. and didn't stop. We decided to keep her home in the morning to keep an eye on her, expecting that we'd bring her in for the afternoon.

She kept coughing.

And coughing.

Sometimes she'd go a minute or two between coughs, but never more. Any time she blew her nose everything was clear, so we knew she didn't have anything viral, and we were reluctant to take her to the doctor in that situation since they almost always look at her and say "it's a cold, run a humidifier, blow her nose regularly..."

She kept coughing, and now her breathing was starting to sound a little more labored. We'd reached mid-afternoon. Ten hours without a break in the fits.

We took her to the doctor.

The doctor took a quick listen and told us we were right to bring her in. Her chest was full of mucus, and if we'd waited until the next day she would have been in real distress. They had her breathe into a nebulizer and prescribed some steroids to help her get back to normal.

So now we have her on drugs that she hasn't had to take in years. It's considerably easier this time around, and her condition improved almost immediately, with steadily reduced coughing after seeing the doctor on Tuesday, and almost no coughing now. We kept her home on Wednesday but she was back in preschool today and having a great time. The only downside is that the steroids make her a little quick to anger (toddler 'roid rage!), but she stops the heavy ones tomorrow, and we're glad to have our daughter back after a rough day out of the blue.

Not Watching the Super Bowl

When we explained to Fiona that it was Super Bowl Sunday and we were going to watch football during dinner, she immediately protested "but we can't watch TV during dinner!" Funny how she never brings up that rule when she's watching Noggin as we're setting the table.

So we agreed that she could watch a movie in Mommy and Daddy's room while we watched the game. Five minutes later she'd wasted no time getting comfortable. She even dragged her little table into the room herself so she could eat there.

I'm pretty sure we had better drama going on the living room TV. Wow.