Posted by Allen on October 11, 2008 under Kids, Politics | 
The following conversation took place this afternoon between Kelsey and Brandon, both six years old, while riding home from apple picking:
KELSEY: Â We’re gonna vote for Obama.
BRANDON: Â John McCain wants to make it so kids won’t have any money when they grow up.
KELSEY: Â Yeah, that’s why we’re gonna vote for Obama.
BRANDON: Â Me too, I’m voting for Obama.
A pause.
BRANDON: Â John McCain sucks.
Posted by Allen on March 16, 2008 under Kids |
I’m far too exhausted from helping throw a fantastically successful birthday party to write up a proper post, but I didn’t want to let the day pass without marking the occasion of Kelsey’s turning six. SIX! How in the hell did that happen?!
Happy birthday, little (well, not quite so little anymore) girl!
Posted by Allen on September 16, 2006 under Kids |
Lost
On Monday, we lost Alex.
Any of you who know Laurel know exactly who Alex is and how traumatic these last five days have been her, but for the benefit of those of you who don’t:
Alex is the Beanie Baby lion Laurel has carried with her everywhere for more than a year — and a year’s an awfully long time when you’re still four months from turning three. We’re not sure just how old Alex actually is, but his worn, matted mane and general state of manginess lead us to suspect he’s been around quite awhile; Laurel found him in a box of old toys which used to belong to her cousins while we visiting them sometime last summer, and he’s seldom left her arms since. (The “Alex” comes from Alex the Lion from Madagascar, a movie she first saw around the same time she discovered the toy.) Alex is, in a way, part of the family: he’s never been “Laurel’s lion” or “Laurel’s toy,” but always, always “Alex.”
The last time Alex was seen was at the grocery store on Monday. Terry knows Laurel had him when they went in, but she didn’t have him when they got back to the truck with the groceries. Terry went back into the store and went up and down every aisle looking for Alex, and she left her phone number with the customer service office. She’s even been back twice checking with the store’s lost and found and called once.
But it’s obvious at this point Alex is gone.
Laurel, understandably, has been distraught all this week, though she hasn’t been able to express exactly why — advanced though her speech skills might be, expecting her to communicate emotions of that complexity is a bit much. She’s had a hard time going to sleep (Alex slept cradled in her arms every night) and has taken to pulling out her hair in anxiety. She’s been carrying around a small puppy Kelsey had given her a couple of weeks ago, but we can tell it’s just not the same — she likes the puppy fine, I suppose, but she’d had her heart invested in Alex. Unlike Kelsey, who happily flits from Most Favoritest Friend to Most Favoritest Friend with the wind, Laurel and Alex have stuck together solidly for almost half of her life.
Not quite as understandably, I’ve also been distraught this week. Every time I think about Alex’s absence, every time she asks where he is or sullenly says “I miss Alex,” I find myself having to fight back tears. (I’m sure that shatters the image of me as Tough Stoic Manly Marlboro-Man-Without-The-Marlboros so many of you hold of me.) Most of it simply has to be my not wanting to see my daughter upset, I guess, but I’m wondering if there’s be something more to it that I can’t quite get at, some childhood trauma of my own I don’t even remember.
Regardless, my daughter was upset, so I jumped into action Monday night. I crawled out of bed in the middle of the night, hit Google, and found and ordered her a replacement Alex… not sure whether I’d be able to pull off the switch, but feeling like I had to give it a shot. (Part of me felt like I was in a bad sitcom, some episode where my neighbor asks me to watch his dog while he’s on vacation and I accidentally kill the dog through some bizarrely contrived negligence and try to buy another one that looks just like it hoping my neighbor will never notice but of course he does and I learn Valuable Life Lessons about Facing Up to My Responsibilites and Lying Is Just Wrong. Or something.)
Found
Terry’s been prepping Laurel the last couple of days for Alex’s imminent return, pulling out the kinds of fantastic lies that could really only work on small children still gripped by their imaginations: “Alex went on vacation! He went to a spa to relax and get himself cleaned up, and when he comes back he’ll be prettier than ever!” We weren’t sure how much she bought it — two-and-a-half years old or not, she’s a really, really smart kid and we wouldn’t have been the least bit surprised had she seen through our film of bullshit. But we had to try.
This afternoon, a small box was waiting for us in the mailbox when we got home.
Both girls were asleep in the truck, so I grabbed the box and we drove around a little more so we could examine Imposter Alex before presenting him to Laurel. He’s not exactly the same as Original Alex; in addition to his much better overall health, his eyes are a little different and the underside of his jaw is white, details we were hoping she wouldn’t notice. (My suspicion is that Original Alex was actually a cheap knockoff of Imposter Alex, who has his pedigree: he’s an Authenic Ty Beanie Baby.) But the body’s largely the same, and I was counting on that being the aspect she’d focus on: how he felt in her arms.
After we got home and got the girls inside, I snuck back out to the truck, cut the tag off and set Imposter Alex up on the ground right outside the front door. If we were going to ride this lie, we were going to ride out to the end: Terry knocked on the wall where Laurel couldn’t see, and we encouraged Laurel to go answer the front door. We helped her pull the door open and directed her gaze groundward, where Imposter Alex was looking up at her expectantly.
“Oh,” she said quietly. “Oh.” She looked at Imposter Alex for a minute.
And then she picked him up.
And she didn’t put him back down for the next three hours.
“This is Alex,” she said to Terry later. “He’s my lion. He’s very special to me. He came back to me.”
(Here’s where I completely demolish the rest of my image as Macho Man Holt by admitting that after it became obvious Laurel was accepting our ruse, I cried. Hard. I felt like I’d done something Good: I’d managed to alleviate my child’s pain and anxiety. I realize there’s benefits to your child learning how to cope with loss and grief, that children need to learn to deal with those emotions, but dammit, not just yet and not with her very favorite toy.)
Epilogue
The book Kelsey picked out for me to read to her tonight was The Velveteen Rabbit — a book she’s never had me read to her before, a book I wasn’t even aware we had. If you know this story at all — and being that most of you were once kids, you most likely do — you can appreciate why that book hit me a little hard tonight. (If you don’t know this story, I’d like to introduce you to my good friend Google.)
I hate The Velveteen Rabbit. I’ve always hated it, ever since I was Kelsey’s age. Tremendously. (That hatred either is symptomatic of whatever real or imagined childhood grief guided my actions this week… or possibly was the root cause of it. I’m honestly not sure.) Yeah, okay, it’s a happy ending for the rabbit and al, but I’ve always felt just awful for the kid, who had all of the toys and books which were meaningful to him taken from him — especially that damn rabbit.
But when I got to the end of the hated story tonight, I tried to reframe it within the context of Alex Lost and Alex Regained, and it made me hate the story a little less:
I imagined that some night, Laurel (who’s maybe five or six now) will be sleeping peacefully in her bed when she’ll be woken by a noise just below her window: a soft, playful growl. And she’ll go to the window and look down into the bright, clear night to see a majestic lion standing beside the swingset in the backyard, smiling up at her with a familiar spark in his eye, moonlight dancing through his mane. And she’ll look down at the now-well-worn lion in her arms, the lion that she can’t remember ever not sleeping next to her. But she’ll smile at the familiar-looking lion in the backyard and she’ll wave and maybe she’ll blow him a kiss, and then she’ll climb back into her bed and snuggle down next to her Alex and return to her peaceful sleep.
Posted by Allen on September 15, 2006 under General, Kids, TV |
Ever since the move, I’ve been feeling more than a bit on the, shall we say, constipated side creatively. What with the new job and all, I haven’t felt good about writing anything during the day while at work (both because I’ve been trying to make a positive impression and because I’ve been really friggin’ busy since the day I started here, and that’s not likely to ease up any time soon). At night, I’ve been doing some freelance work for a friend and when I haven’t been, I just haven’t been able to unclog my backed-up wordflow.
But I don’t like the fact that I haven’t written anything lately. I don’t like the fact that my online empire has grown so stale during the last six weeks or so. As a friend pointed out a little while ago when Terry mentioned the aforementioned creative constipation: “The video of K is cute and all, but…he should think about fiber.”
So this is me thinking about fiber.
It’s not that I haven’t had stuff to day, but rather haven’t been able to organize anything in my head to make a coherent post out of it. Thusly, coherent posts be damned, and let’s move on to a bullet list, shall we? Maybe doing so will be like Metamucil for my brain.
- North Carolina is just beautiful. Most of the days for the month we’ve been here have featured bright blue, mostly cloudless skies, nice breezes, reasonable temperatures, and lots and lots and lots and lots of green. (We do live in Greensboro, after all.) But man, when it rains here? It friggin’ rains. Forget those pansy little “rain showers” we got up in New England, the kind where you can’t even hear the rain on the roof, the kind where you’re actually surprised to discover it’s raining when you step outside. Here, we get real rain, big ol’ honkin’ drops that hit your skin like heavy bullets of water — this ain’t rain that’s gonna sneak up on you. It’s not quite torrential Florida rain, at least not that I’ve experienced yet, but the first time it rained on us here was yet another reminder that we’re back in the South (along with Waffle House and the ability to buy beer and wine in grocery stores).
- Monday night, for those of you haven’t heard, is Sorkinalia (a.k.a. the debut of Aaron Sorkin’s Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip). I doubt it’s much of a secret that I’ve been looking forward to this holiday for more than a year. But unlike the ridiculous amounts of anticipation I built up for Superman Returns, my expecations for Studio 60 are a tad more reasonable. It doesn’t have to be the best TV show I’ve ever seen; it only has to be better than most TV shows. Given that Sorkin’s behind it, I think that’s a reasonably safe expecation for me to harbor. I encourage every single one of you out there to watch it Monday night at 9 EST on NBC; I hope to be posting my thoughts about it on Tuesday.
- I think I want my DVR back (we didn’t get one when we set up our cable in the new house). Too many new shows I want to try out and no way in hell I’ll be able to sit down and watch them all at broadcast time. Having little kids makes being a TV fan difficult, I swear.
- Speaking of little kids, hearty congratulations are in order for my buddy Jeff Newberry, who recently discovered he’s going to be a first-time dad. Good on ya, Jeff! I fully expect to hear about you reading poetry to Heather’s belly as she hits the latter stages of her pregnancy.
- Also speaking of little kids, Terry’s got her report on Kelsey’s initial foray into organized sports up over at Mother Mirth. Terry was all witty and wistful and pensive and stuff so I didn’t have to be.
Posted by Allen on September 4, 2006 under Kids, Pop Culture |
We only have a cassette player in our Jeep. We’ve always planned to install a CD player at some point, but never have had both the spare cash and the gumption to get it done at the same time. And for the last two-and-a-half years, we’ve only had one tape to go in that cassette player, a tape that Kelsey got in a gift bag at a friend’s birthday party: Wiggly Safari, by The Wiggles and Steve “The Crocodile Hunter” Irwin.
I’ve heard this tape, no lie, a thousand times over the last couple of years. I know every bit of it by heart. This isn’t to say that I like it, oh god no, but it’s become one not-so-small swatch of the fabric of my life — and it’s practically been the soundtrack to Laurel’s life, to the point where she doesn’t want to listen to anything else when we’re in the truck. (Heaven forbid we try to turn on the radio — she starts crying immediately, begging us to put in The Wiggles. The child doesn’t much like change.) Hell, the first song on the cassette is about Irwin himself (“Crocodile Hunter! Big Steve Irwin! Crocodile Hunter! Action MAAAAN!”).
So that’s why I’m a little bit surprised at how sad I feel about the news of Steve Irwin’s flukey death from a stingray barb to the heart while filming in Austraila (though, like many others, I’m not truly all that surprised that he went out in this manner). More days than not, I wind up listening to Irwin’s thick accent, his voice not quite able to contain his infectious enthusiasm for the animal kingdom — I’ve certainly never heard anyone else so fervently insist that camels have beautiful lips and eyelids.
Rest well, Steve Irwin. I’m sure you’ll live on in the speakers of my Jeep for some time to come.
Posted by Allen on July 3, 2006 under Kids |
The younger child issued us a warning today.
Let me first say that we weren’t intentionally neglecting her. Since she’s a child who really prefers being left alone, we thought we were doing fine by her; she had some time alone with the Little Einsteins while we each did some work upstairs. The older child flitted back and forth between the upstairs and downstairs like an A.D.D. bumblebee, so we asked her to give us status reports about the younger one’s behavior and mood.
“She’s fine, Daddy,” the older one said. “I think she’s sleeping.”
No, she wasn’t sleeping. She wasn’t quite being evil, either, but evil certainly was afoot. Notice was served to the parents: Keep it up, leave me alone for this long again, and you’ll live to regret it. Alternatively, you might not.
Her messages had all of the forethought and cunning of those Jacques Saunière initially left in the Lourve for Robert Langdon. [1] First was the diaper; I found the child lying naked on the floor (much in the manner M. Saunière himself was discovered), her diaper removed and resting a couple of feet from her head. The diaper, thankfully, was empty except for some urine; this was Warning One.
I could have had a toxic poop stew in there, Father, and could have used my butt like a big poop paintbrush. Consider yourself lucky.
I then turned and noticed Warning Two, which was actually her most devious as it called back to one of her most infamous (and messiest and mother-traumatizing) misadventures. The bottle of Cremora was on the floor in front of the television… unopened, but threatening. The child knew — she had gone to fetch the Cremora (don’t ask me how she knew where it was or how to get it, but she did), knowing the spine-tingling, nerve-jangling message it would send to her parents, especially her still-scarred O.C.D. mother.
I could have opened this and made it snow right here in the living room. But I didn’t. You remember that.
Warning Three was in a similar vein to Warning Two: an unopened tube of K-Y jelly sat menancingly on the coffee table. I don’t even know where we keep this stuff, yet the child had found it, had left it out in the open where she knew we’d see it — and would notice that it hadn’t been used to lubricate the rug.
Nothing is safe from me, Father. I know your secrets. You may think you can hide your little toys for a while, but I’ll find them eventually. Remember.
Honestly, I’m not sure what Warning Four meant: she’d removed one of the collapsible poles from the bag holding the tent we sometimes set up for the girls in the playroom. And she’d managed to un-collpase it, to extend it back to its full six feet and leave it on the kitchen floor; perhaps it was a dastardly trap, or part of one which she hadn’t had time to complete before the siren call of the Little Einsteins beckoned her to rejoin them.
God may work in mysterious ways… but I am more mysterious than God.
The final warning was by far the most disturbing. While I was collapsing the tent pole back down, I heard what sounded like a high, muffled barking. The barking clearly wasn’t Tommy, the great dumb dog who follows at the children’s heels hoping to catch the occassional falling Cheerio, and I didn’t think it was the older child, who was upstairs. I tiptoed carefully into the playroom, following the sound, looking amongst the scattered toys with trepidation, and then I saw it: hanging from the crossbeam of their easel was a stuffed mechanical puppy, blowing gently in the breeze from the open window, the string around its neck suspending it above the floor and causing it to bark over and over in a sad, strangled wheeze.
This time, the puppy, Father. Next time… you.
I surveyed her devious messages of mayhem and walked back into the living room. I looked down at this naked child, one arm a pillow behind her head, two fingers of the other hand stuck in her mouth in her common comfort gesture. She noticed me staring at her, and I’m sure she must have seen the fear in my eyes: she smiled wide around those two fingers and laughed, that beautiful laugh which normally tickles my soul… but on this early July afternoon, that laugh, that mellifluous, horrible laugh drained the blood from my face and made me shiver cold.
(This article was also posted at Mother Mirth, where the wife normally writes much more frequently and more eloquently about the children than I do. You should read her stuff. And I’m not just saying that because she could withhold sex from me if I didn’t. I swear.)
________________________________________
[1] If you didn’t find the opening to The DaVinci Code particularly cunning, feel free to substitute a pop-culture reference more to your liking. And tell me in the comments what it was so I can file it away for later plagiarism.
Posted by Allen on June 5, 2006 under Kids |
I gaze down at Kelsey, her sweet face illuminated only by the low light from the hallway, and we work our way through each of the precise steps of our nighttime routine: nosey-noseys, big kiss, big hug, ear check [1], and then the part where I tell her to stay in bed until morning. (This exhortation often doesn’t work, but I say it every night regardless.)
Then we get to our multilingual grand finale.
ME: Te amo, Kelsita.
KELSEY: Te amo, Daddy-cita.
ME: Je t’aime, Kelsey.
KELSEY: Je t’aime, Daddy.
ME: I love you, sweetie. [kiss on the forehead] Night night.
KELSEY: I love you too, Daddy.
She rolls away from just a little, eyes barely open with the weight of impending sleep. But then she stops, raises her left hand toward me, tucks the middle two fingers under her thumb and extends her pinky and forefinger:
KELSEY: Booyah.
I must make so very sure to thank my thirteen-year-old nephew for teaching her that.
(This here, my friends, is my two-hundredth post on Do or Do Not. Well, technically that’s probably not true — there’s some older posts that I removed for various reasons, so I probably actually passed 200 a couple of weeks ago. But WordPress assures me ths is my 200th active post. So… yay me, hooray for perseverance and consistency, yadda yadda. Not bad considering a month ago I was thinking of junking the site altogether.)
Posted by Allen on May 29, 2006 under Kids |
Kelsey had been upstairs in the bathroom by herself for quite awhile — probably fifteen minutes or so. It’s not unusual for her to spend that much time in the bathroom, and I wouldn’t have thought much about it if we’d been at home. But we were at her grandmother’s house, and I decided she’s been in there long enough.
Jeff was standing near the foot of the stairs, so I asked him to yell up to Kelsey and make sure she was OK. I stood up and followed behind him just to be sure. We both stood on the stairs as he called in to her:
“You OK in there, Kelsey?”
“I’m doin’ good,” came the muffled voice behind the door. “I’m combing my hair.”
Satisfied that she was fine, I started back down the stairs… but then thought better of it, turned around and went back up to the bathroom.
I knocked on the door and told her I was coming in. She didn’t say anything. I pushed the door open… and the first thing I noticed was the sickening quantity of honey-brown hair in piles on the floor. Then I looked up into her eyes, open wide with fear (that “Oh shit, I’m in trouble” look in them). And at the pair of hair-cutting scissors still in her right hand, still held up near her head.
I’m cutting my hair, she hsd said. Not combing. Cutting.
I don’t remember yelling or screaming or anything of the sort, but I know that Terry was standing in the doorway behind me in a matter of seconds.
“It’s just hair,” I told myself as I picked Kelsey up and hugged her tight to my chest, stroking the ragged mop that remained on her beautiful head. Yes, it was just hair — but I cried as I tried not to think about what else could have happened to a four-year-old alone in a bathroom with a sharp pair of scissors.
(Pictures of her handiwork and the new ‘do after the jump.)
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