This One's for Poppa

At dinner tonight, doing the every-parent-gets-there-eventually negotiation over how many more bites the child needs to eat before dinner can be considered complete:

Mommy: That's one bite so far. You need to have two more bites.

Fiona: I need to have one more bite?

Mommy: No, you need to have two more bites.

Fiona: You said one more bite.

Mommy: I said you had one bite already. You need to have three total, so you need to have bites two and three.

Fiona: How about if I just have bite two?

Mommy: How about if you stop being a little lawyer.

Fiona: Don't say that!

Mommy: I can't call you a lawyer?

Fiona: No. Lawyer is not a nice thing to call somebody!

They learn so young nowadays.

Transit from the Five-Year Old Perspective

Driving down the street, Fiona often spells out the words on signs she sees and asks me what they mean. "What does S-H-E-L-L spell? What does D-O-N-U-T spell?" Sometimes she'll identify the word herself and ask for confirmation. This happened yesterday while we were stuck at a light and she looked at a road sign.

Fiona: What does E-H-R-L-I-C-H spell?

Me: Ehrlich.

Fiona: What's an Ehrlich?

Me: It's the name of the road.

Fiona: Why did they name it an Ehrlich?

Me: It's probably named after somebody. There was probably a Mr. Ehrlich or a Mrs. Ehrlich who did something important nearby so they named the road for them.

Fiona: I want somebody to name a road after me.

Me: Well, maybe one day you can get that.

Fiona: (suddenly disappointed) Oh, but they probably have names for all the roads. There aren't any more roads.

Me: Sometimes they build new roads, honey.

Fiona: They do?

Me: Sure.

Fiona: I think I'll go tell the road builders to make a new road for me. Then they can name it Fiona Village.

Floridian Allergies

Apparently Tampa has a whole different breed of pollen from New York, because Fiona's getting hit hard right now. Coupled with a persistent ear infection (the persistence being a side effect of the allergies) that has us on our third round of antibiotics in the past month and a fever that kicked into place on Friday night and we've got a five year old on quite the pharmaceutical cocktail at the moment. I had to make a chart of everything she's supposed to get over the course of the day and when so we wouldn't mess up any of the dosages.

The good news is that, even with the low grade fever, she's still got her personality and most of her energy. We tried to keep her home from school on Thursday (that was before the fever kicked in) but she insisted on going; she's figured out that playing with her friends is more fun than entertaining herself while I work. Plus, it was Dr. Seuss week at school which meant different outfits to show off every day (Monday was silly hats, Tuesday was silly socks, Wednesday was polka dot shirts, etc.).

We'll keep her home tomorrow and until the fever kicks, at which point she'll be desperate enough to get back to school that I should at least get one morning where she's easy to motivate.

OK, off to give 7.5ml of Tylenol to the lil' 'un...

She Didn't Ask This About Anne-Sophie Mutter

Yo-Yo Ma has crossed Fiona's radar a few times in the past few weeks (a cameo on a cartoon, a mention in a book, a picture in a magazine), and we've been looking for different music to give her for her new CD player (she likes to listen to classical music to fall asleep), so Andrea bought her some Yo-Yo Ma this weekend.

Tonight Fiona decided to listen to the CD. As she popped it in, she pointed to the picture on the album cover and said "that's the actor who plays Yo-Yo Ma."

I explained to her that he's a real person, it's not a made up name.

It actually made a nice bookend to a day that started with Fiona asking what "identity" means when she read the word in one of her books. Honey, I wanted to tell her, that's the great question of the last century-plus.

Anyway, she's in bed now, listening to Yo-Yo Ma and playing air cello.