Ball in the hall

“No hopping on Mommie’s head!” I said. Caroline obediently moved to my ribs and started jumping again, “Wake up, wake up!”

So much for nap time, my try to lull C into sleep with contagious snores clearly wouldn’t work that day, so I sat up. I went the lazy way first – “Go get a book, and let’s read.” But: “No book no book!”
Drawing? No.
Ball in the hall? No.

“Are you sure? Ball in the hall C, with buckets.”
      “Oh-kay,” she cracked in her teenage toddler voice.

Caroline set up the buckets herself, two small pails that travel with her every day to the playground to help out on sand pit excavations. I grabbed three balls and we lined ourselves up in the kitchen hallway. If a ball even hit a bucket, it was a score; a ball bouncing into a bucket, cause for a Caroline toss to the ceiling celebration.

By the time the game petered out, I’d taught her to roll the ball rather than throw it and she’d hit the buckets twice to much excitement. She loved running down the hall to fetch the balls and then running back to try again, running with her baby legs kicking out in front and sideways as she went. My kick came from watching C begin to understand that we could use the rules of the game to make playing a challenge, and fun too. For once she took turns and shared out the balls. And she knew to step away from the buckets, far enough away that she just might miss, and it didn't bother her to roll once and again and then run to pick everything up and try once more, because in the end it was about the doing it and not the winning that we liked, when we played ball in the hall.

Filed under: toddler_tales games

Pronunciation – Help!

I just installed Lingea Lexicon on my new computer. It’s an excellent Czech English dictionary that I’ve used for several years as it is fast and includes what I imagine to be useful examples. For instance, thanks to Lingea I know the correct preposition to use - "o", should I need to ask someone to shout for help. “Křik pro pomoc”, the literal translation, probably wouldn’t get me as far.

Of course, even knowing that I should use “o” and “pomoc” together is no guarantee that anyone would understand me if I yelled “křik”. It has the ř in it, that devilish letter that twists my tongue about and renders my speech unrecognizable unless I’ve had lots of practice on a word, or simply learned the way that Czech lispers get around it. So when I saw in the Lingea installation package that I could add a pronunciation option using only 6 more MB of hard drive space, I said “báječný nápad!” - “super idea!”, and hit go.

Five minutes later and installation complete, I typed in “křik” and looked for the pronunciation button. No sign of it, so I clicked over to the English translation, found the button and confirmed that “shout” spoken by a British man can sound very dull indeed. English to český, Czech to anglický, after a few more dictionary flip floppings I had to conclude that yes, there was pronunciation for all English words, but no, there wasn’t any for Czech. It is, after all, a phonetic language. And if just anyone learned how to say “křik,“ how would one know the Czechs from the foreigners (or lispers) among us.

Rybanaruby introduces the hep cats of Manesova

“It’s the fifties, in four color,” I thought when we walked into the bar last night. Most of the audience was dressed in black, men in turtlenecks and cords, the girls in leotards and short skirts, everyone wearing a serious face. The audience beat along on African drums, listening to a band with a bushy faced guitarist and a white bereted drummer who rattled and glocked his way through songs like a kid discovering the drum settings on a synthesizer and used mini-chimes to skin crawling effect. It could have been a video documentary of a jazz happening, somewhere in the U.S. in 1952, except for the colors - red yellow and orange from the scarves the girls wore casually draped, and from the ethno print cloth softening the bricks behind the stage. We were just for a moment trying out something that maybe hadn’t had a chance to happen here, years back under communism, so why not now.

Not unusual, that feeling I get sometimes, meeting up with an experience that would feel, today, so contrived in the U.S., but seems so normal here in Prague. Maybe it is just me, rebelling against my built-in irony filter, fine tuned to cringe at my own and others naïveté, but I find it endearing and liberating even that people can still go to jams and listen to hep cats play the night away, banging with their own hands too to help along the music.

The bar: Rybanaruby, Manesova 87, Prague 2.

Filed under: Prague music jazz 1950s

Czech mushroom sauce

I’m waiting for a very slow email to come in, so thought I’d pop by and say hi. It’s another wonderfully sunny day in Prague and I can hear the kids from the high school across the way, on the sidewalk and street, catching up with each other during break. If I looked out the window I’d see them from the top down - heads hoodies and baggie jeans accented with cigarette, headphones, or both. Inside, Caroline has set up her plastic stove right in the middle of the kitchen and she and Marie are cooking up a storm. Marie brought in a big basket of mushrooms today, fresh from the countryside south of Prague: Penny Buns, Orange Birch Boletes, Brown Birch Scaber Stalks, maybe even a Slippery Jack. Already, cut into pieces, they are on their way towards the collective hegemony that is mushroom sauce, ready to serve over steamed dumplings for lunch. It smells delicious, but I’m glad I snapped a shot of the mushrooms in their basket, so many shades of brown, and beautiful. Outside, the bell rings. The kids make one last crackle of noise, like birds rising from trees, then flick their cigarettes away and head back in to class.

Filed under: Prague mushrooms cooking

Football fan in Prague

I don’t know what it is, the weather – cool, sunny, with wind carrying the hint of a bonfire. Or maybe the light – that sideways glance you get of the sun that brings out the color in Prague for one last time before it retires with November and everything goes grey til spring. But most likely it’s because my university’s football team, the Vanderbilt Dores, a quite remarkably bad team for years on end, has won 4 out of 5 of our last games.

But here’s the thing. For one season at least, I am following football. Every Sunday morning I jump to the New York Times to click open "Saturday College Football". I read the entire listing, and call up my football fan friends in Prague (all southerners or southern alums) to chat over the litany of team wins that we have, for the moment, learned by heart. When my dad calls, I ask him for his predictions, and that night I listen to my brother’s college radio show and pick the analysis out of the fun. And it all seems somehow exotic, but nostalgic too, in a land where football means soccer and tailgate parties and college sport leagues don’t exist.

Bang Head on Floor Dumb – adventures in iPod formatting

Will’s back! The celebration just keeps on happening, and between sipping Starbucks, reading new books to Caroline, and listening to Will play his steel guitar, (all items freshly lugged over the seas) I’ve been getting to know the iPod I sent Will for his birthday.

Working your way around an iPod takes about 30 seconds. It should be Edward Tufte’s next case study in design usability. Blinded by its hockey stick learning curve, I thought I’d just go ahead and hook it up to our computer, download some more music and be ready to roll the next day with a pod full of tunes.

Will was a little wary about this. “Maybe wait until tomorrow” he said. Blithe me replied “Baby this is just a computer, if there’s anything I know, it’s computers!” and disappeared into the dark cave of our study. Dark because it backs Caroline’s room, and her sole window shines into it. Dark because a little light while C is falling asleep and you have a baby on the edge. It was 8:30 and I’d just finished the routine of songs and stories, wuv yous and night nights. I was ready for some music and solitude.

I popped the port connection into the computer and started up the installation process. Very very shortly afterwards the ominous words “Formatting iPod” appeared on my screen and I watched as the little blue thermometer crept towards done.

Within seconds, Will’s first collection of 136 tunes (downloaded from a Mac) had disappeared. Stone cold with dread, I flipped on the light then, to get a better view of the wreckage, and saw the cd slip case for the first time. “Install software before connecting iPod.” Crimey-ola!

I’m still not sure what would have happened, had I remembered the cardinal rule for installing drivers (1st install the driver THEN plug in the device). I know the Pod needed to change its format from Mac to PC somehow, but perhaps we could have saved those songs. It’s not in the documentation. But here and now I do declare that I will at least try to read and follow the instructions, next time. Cross my heart.

Filed under: geeky music

My third car is a Prius

...environmentalists need to be less preachy. Mark Katz, a humorist and former speech writer for President Bill Clinton, said Americans might be more willing to take up conservation if they could first laugh at their own consumption. His suggestion is a bumper sticker for S.U.V.'s that reads, "My third car is a Prius," a reference to Toyota's popular electric hybrid vehicle.

Following Katz's advice in the New York Times's "It's Not Sexy Being Green (Yet)" I put together this bumper sticker and briefly uploaded the full version to CafePress. But good sense (and copyright laws) prevailed. Still, if anyone wants the full version for your own car I'll send the png to you for free, and add TM to the Prius too!

Educational Activities for a Rainy Day

This weekend was a long one for C and me. Will is in the U.S. visiting with his family following his granddaddy’s funeral on Thursday. He’s back tomorrow morning and we’re going to mob him at the door.

Will’s trip coincided with (or perhaps prompted?) Caroline’s crib boycott. She can fall asleep on the bed at night, but she just can’t fall asleep for a nap and so she’s sleep deprived and grumpy and so am I. All was not a loss today, though, and here's the list to prove it. Please refer to today's title, before we begin.

1. Actively listen to children's TV show with child: translated every time Barney said Eins Zwie Drei!
2. Get kids involved in cleaning up and simple cooking activies: cooked eggs for lunch while Caroline perched on counter to help. Bonus, showed off best clean up practices for smashed egg on floor, courtesy of helper.
3. Work on expanding your child's food palette: experimented with sardines for lunch. Reverted to Bird’s Eye Custard for dessert to take fish taste away (“phoey”, only comment from C). Supplied piskoty (Vanilla Wafers) for dipping and extra space filling.
4. Encourage child to learn how to count everyday items: C counted sippy cups accumulated during nap. I applauded her ability to say “one orange sippy cup, 2 orange sippy cup, 3 orange…”
5. Demonstrate how to do something by practicing it yourself: showed off my own best napping practices until C tired of demo and wacked me hard on the head. Dizzy, yet awake, illustrated weaving from room around obstacle course of overturned toy chest(s).
6. Help child learn to play on her own: handed out child-safe scissors* and colored paper, drew several flowers to cut out and left C to her own resources (* really wonderful, they truly just cut paper and that only on occasion).
7. If an activity is a success, try expanding its potential: Returned from 9 minute break to find a happy C and frayed paper collection. Attempted to turn paper into attractive fringe hat. Following tears and incriminations turned hat back into many many many armed octopus.
8. Create parallels between child's enthusiasms and everyday activities: discussed swimming during bathtime as C is pro swimming (it involves octopi and making waves). Attempted to persuade that it also involves getting hair wet and may even include soap. Failed in persuasion (this time!).
9. Teach child to use words when frustrated: Worked on encouraging negotiation skills while attaching diaper and pajamas. "In a case like this, saying ‘I’ll trade you moo for the prison garb’ is more effective than kicking, go ahead, you try!"

Filed under: toddler_tales creative lists

Rhymes with, looks like…

Orange! C says, triumphantly pointing out the orange table in Kleine Bär. Broon Bear. Blue boat. Red shoe, purple balloon. Everything this week is color and while she is showing off her yellow jacket to me before we go out on a walk, I am marveling at how she learned colors, in English, despite her lazy parents. I’m guessing the credit lies with one of her babysitters, Lucie, who is part of our family of wonderful sitters and the most creative of them all. Sometimes I take notes on the songs and games that she teaches Caroline, so that we have something to do on rainy Saturdays when C gets tired of my favorite rainy day past time - creating personalized coloring books (it doesn’t require any talent I don’t normally possess except complete self mortification – usefully stocked up so that I don’t care when my carefully rendered drawing of Christopher Robin gets annulled by magic marker for the third time in five minutes).

Our relationship with books has changed generally, because Caroline likes to help out now, listening carefully until it’s her turn and then jumping in with the rhyme or the key word on a page. Dr. Seuss is great for this, and I’ve become a fan of his nearly indestructible board books. Mr Brown Likes to Moo, The Foot Book and There’s a Wocket in My Pocket all have Caroline rhyming or even singing along (Try Mr Brown set to "Turkey in the Straw"). Sometimes she guesses the rhyme when we’re reading a new book and it is always fun to hear her guesses. There’s a Nink in the... "Pink! "

Filed under: toddler_tales words Seuss creative

C at 2.25

Only the other day, IMing with a friend, I mentioned that Caroline seemed to have, sortof, kindof, and maybe, gotten over temper tantrums. I’m the superstitious type, so I added that of course she was still disagreeing with me, just not so loudly, so lengthily or at such a high pitch. These days, when she yells I say, “Use Words” and if she needs more help, I get down on the floor to look her in the eye and distract her or try to come up with some way of letting her save toddler face. “Mommie down,” she says, and it almost nearly works. All well and good and truly I find my shoulders at least an inch further from my ears than in the months of her terrible two tantrums when she once screamed for an hour before I remembered that DVDs existed and turned on Winnie the Pooh.

But now that C can rationally tell me what she wants and why, she has also remarkably progressed towards something approaching cunning. She used to insist that everything be “sama,” or “by herself,” but now she mostly doesn’t bother, she simply fetches her stepping stool and does what she will. This morning she decided she wanted the anchovy fish sauce from the fridge, and while I was making up the beds, she carefully poured a stripe down her table. So now most of our food has disappeared from the lower refrigerator shelves and we’re hiding any dry goods we don’t want her to reach on the top of a wardrobe that even I need a ladder to reach.

Caroline is better than a trumpetful of “Taps,” because I know that if I get up after she does, she’ll have her cereal out and half poured and a tea mug sloshingly full of apple juice on the floor. She’s gone cold turkey on her crib and sleeps in what she calls her “big bed” until day break when she comes in to wake me up for milk and then climbs in to either sleep or kick the covers around until breakfast. No more baby mush for her, she likes “big” cereal too, so I crush it up and stir in some yogurt and she spoons obligingly away, feeding herself, her pet of the day and occasionally even me.

There are some things better left a mystery. This may seem obvious for such topics as, say, children’s poop, or the age of your favorite murder mystery sleuth by her 15^th book. But sometimes you learn something, just an everyday thing, and you’re stuck. Knowing it. Forever.

I should restate. Knowing something is never my problem. Being aware, being constantly aware. That’s what gets old. And right now I am hyper aware every time I look at my computer. Which is to say, a lot of my cognizant time.

It started so innocently, with a request to redesign an application to look more friendly, less techie, something like Windows XP, but you know, not. If a client asks you to design something to look like Windows XP, you understand two things – 1) there is a lot of documentation about how you can do that, and 2) there is a lot of copyright protection out there to keep you from simply copying and pasting. Because you can’t (and nor would you of course want to) just copy and paste, the documentation is key to finding out what exactly defines the style and why it gives clients warm and fuzzy feelings.

After extensive reading and analysis, or at least a lot of Googling, I feel confident in stating that this warm and fuzzy feeling we all get when we open XP is because of the icons. This is old news, but have you every really thought about the change? No more flat icons. Hurrah for the 3D look. Everything is designed on a grid, so that your icon looks poised, ready to zoom out of its window, into the deep interior of Windows. Microsoft has even helpfully defined the drop shadow that nudges it along that 3D path (2 px by 2px and 75% though in my opinion 50% is all most icons can stand). And, okay yes to drop shadow, but no more black outlines. Instead, color. Bold and friendly colors get the thumbs up throughout (I can even send you the palette, just ask). And big, the icons have gotten bigger and they are no longer just your old 8Bit models. They’re 32 now, glad you were wondering.

So now, when I look at my screen, instead of feeling warm happy thoughts about the cute little envelopes in my Outlook window, I think "super concept icons" and consider how they follow their XP style guide, their depth, their color palette. And then I open Yahoo! and I ponder how they have interpreted that look (and is it really okay that they have their envelope tilted but not on a perspective grid?), and I click to Itunes, and to Firefox and consider some more. It's exhausting I tell you. And I worry that my own icons are going to look as derivative yet boring as Yahoo!’s do, but then I think, hell the client isn’t paying us enough to worry about being derivative yet dull. Let’s sweat the big stuff. Like you know, kids' poop. But maybe I’ll save that story for tomorrow.

Friday, just past 5. Business done, Caroline at the park, Will at work, house clean. Not enough time to start a new project, read, call relatives, but time enough for music. And really, what else would you want to do on a perfect September Friday, when opening the windows into the light filtered by fall reminds me, and in fact recreates, that feeling from years ago when Friday and the weekend stretched out endlessly and turning on music meant I was officially finished with school/work, at least until infinity ended and Sunday arrived.

Light pouring in, headphones on, I hit play.

I’m on a roll with the Times this week, but it is just hard to pass up a story called Many Women at Elite Colleges Set Career Path to Motherhood. I love a long title like that, it is so pseudo academic, only missing a colon and a quick blurb to really make it sing. What do you think of „Daddies put your wallet away: studies show..., or „From Ivy Tower to Crib Side: Many Women...“ Hmm...

Similarly pseudo, in my humble opinion, is the way that the author, Louise Story, examines her facts. Already lambasted by Jack Shafer in Slate for replacing a survey’s hard numbers with those editorial no nos “many“ and “seem,“ Story should be called to task for her truly unoriginal reading of the information that she did gather.

The basic thesis of her article is that, of the “many women“ surveyed at Elite Colleges throughout the land, “many“ declared that rather than follow a typical career path, they would “put aside their careers in favor of raising children.“

This is all fine and well as an opener into examing the current (privelaged) teenage psyche and its feelings regarding gender roles and career opportunities, but Story goes on to simply hammer this statement into the ground over and over, missing the chance to ask so many interesting questions.

My questions? Besides, “girls, who is going to be paying off those student loans?“ They aren’t exactly ready for national distribution but the gist is as follows:

1. Did you decide to go Ivy as the best way to meet the man of your (financial) dreams? Is your undeclared major MRS?

2. What happens if your MRS degree fails and you don’t meet Mr. Right and/or have children?

3. What do you perceive is a successful career track? How does this differ from what you would like to do?

4. Do you feel that you can compete more successfully off of a career track?

5. Do you believe that a successful career demands the equivalent amount of stress and effort as what it took to successfully enter and excel in your Elite College?

6. Have you ever changed a diaper or gone without sleep for weeks on end?

And finally...

7. Do you think guys are suckers for agreeing to work full time all the time, and staying at home a few years is just retribution for having to remember where the lightbulbs are, make all the phone calls, travel arrangements, and so forth? And do you really think it is that easy?

Oops, the last I should ask a few years later I guess. They are still in college after all, we don't want to shock them with reality too soon!

Grit Your Teeth Reading

Four friends thoughtfully forwarded the article. Its title – Yoga, Ya’ll– had me hitting delete, once twice etcetera (I'm not a yoga fan, and run from indiscriminant use of ya'll). Tonight though, scrolling through the NYT, enjoying insomnia and a fast internet connection but about to run out of news to read, I caught the story again, in the Times’ just launched Funny pages. After all, I like funny. I thought I'd give it a try. I just forgot how local funny can be.

“Yoga, Ya’ll,” by Elizabeth Gilbert, is all about a southern yoga class and its vowel-extending instructor. The writer objects to the instructor’s accent, mocks her use of ya’ll and her yoga abilities. One thousand words later, she winds up her tribute to alienation with an obligatory I’ll-get-used-to-it-somehow ending that leaves you thinking, yeah right.

It’s a story that goes in my bookmarks folder “I don’t hate it, I don't, but everyone else seems to.” And it once again confirms to me how prejudiced New Yorkers can be about the South. I’m not talking cab drivers, fruit stand owners, investment brokers, but editors and writers who talk so reasonably about the eight sides of every issue, but when faced with the states beneath the Mason-Dixon line start to worry about being made to squeal like a pig, imagine violet romances, or mock the stupidity of the locals.

I notice it particularly with the Times. They seem to thrive on writing about the South in this quaint yet scary country within a country sort of way (noticeable throughout its coverage of Katrina). I have to wonder what a certain Alabamian editor did to the staff* during his recent sojourn as executive editor because he certainly didn’t expand their perspectives on the possibilities of how to write about a part of the U.S. I’ve seen referred to in their pages in the last two days as Dixie and the Ya’ll Zone. To me this is the equivalent of newscasters calling the midwest the land of white bread, or California, hippieville. It's just not the right thing to do in a national newspaper and I have to wonder why the South falls outside their editorial realm of respect.

*It’s easy to imagine force feedings of ketchup-based barbeque, the maniacal over use of idioms designed to annoy, straw hats and white shoes, long lectures on legendary football coaches. Reading up on the fellow, I found at least two of these traits well-documented. Any bets on which ones, ya'll (or should I say youse guys)?