In the car this evening Lily asked, “Daddy, when does that show with Stephen Hawking come on?”
” I don’t know. We can check when we get home. Why do you ask?”
“There have been a lot of commercials about it. He says he knows how the world will end. I think I’d like to know how the world is going to end. Don’t you want to know?”
“Sure.”
“I don’t think Mommy knows. She’ll probably want to know, too.”
“I’m sure she will.”
“I think it’s important.”
On the way to school this morning, Lily glimpsed a mourning dove: “Daddy, I saw a mourning dove.” And with that one observation, the following narrative unfolded:
“I think it was Butter, Daddy.” (I had dubbed two mourning doves that frequented our back yard last year, Butter and Garlic. Later, B & G were joined by a half dozen friends, who were all taking advantage of us dumping piles of bird food on the patio. Within a week a hawk turned up on Lily’s play set and the doves were seen less frequently.)
“Do you think our friends are still around, honey?”
“Yes, and they have a new friend, too!”
“Who’s that?”
“Toast!” Peals of triumphant laughter.
As our drive continued, it turns out that Butter and Garlic and Toast occasionally played with a hummingbird, but eventually that friendship disbanded in favor of a fourth mourning dove called Berry Bush. While B & G were boy birds, T and BB were girl birds. The occasional fifth bird, Greckle — who was not a grackle, was also a boy bird. They liked to play games in a field on Mount Vernon, the street on which we travel on the way to Lily’s school, and therefore won’t be far from our new home.
Perhaps you’ve heard of Tantrix, a game of sturdy hexagonal tiles that in its solo version encourages you to try to make loops of increasing difficulty or in its official competitive version pits you against one or more opponents to see who can make the longest line.
As is our wont, nothing stops my daughter and I from taking interesting game objects and put them to different uses. (I believe this practice began when I couldn’t remember what the official rules were for marbles, which wouldn’t have done me or her any good since she, at three years of age, wasn’t a very good shot and I wasn’t much better.)
Our version of the game is just as fun and offers some interesting possibilities: the purpose of the game is to score the most points and play proceeds thusly:
We’ve talked about changing the game so that players draw a “hand” of tiles so that they can set themselves up for “big plays” of multiple points, but we are not there yet in our game play to try that.
This morning, as Yung struggled to gather her hair into a pony tail and get a hair band around it, Lily announced that “adults can do twisty things.”
Yes, it’s true, we told her, but some adults wish they didn’t have to.
In the car on the way home from gymnastics yesterday, Lily announced to Yung that she was growing “tired of reading.” I think she framed it a bit in terms of being “a big girl now.” Both a bit tickled by this and a bit concerned — Yung is the truest lover of books I know — Yung simply asked why that was. Lily replied that the books she read were not very interesting. They were, in fact, boring. Not at all as interesting as the stories she played, as she put it, with her toys. Those stories are more complicated, “more things happen in them.”
Yung’s response was that as Lily got to be a better reader, she would encounter more complex stories that would be more interesting. In relating the story to me, Yung expressed a bit of concern that we keep a lookout for how this response develops. Me, her folklorist husband who, yes, loves books but loves the things people make for themselves and each other too, I just grinned.
While I was gone, Lily had to spend a bit of time on Friday in day care associated with her school while Yung worked. The place was full of her cohorts, and apparently at one point she and her good friend Sydney, whom she has known since they were both 2, got in an argument. This is how she reported it to Yung tonight:
“Mommy, Sydney thinks she can do anything as long as she has permission. But that’s not right. She can’t do everything.”
Yung agreed but didn’t pursue it since this story was coming as she and Lily were lying in bed and Lily was clearly protracting bed time.
“So I said to her, if your mommy gave you permission to drive the car, could you do it?”
Sydney paused and admitted, no, she could not.
“If your mommy gave you permission to eat candy all day, could you do it?”
Again, no. And then apparently, Lily followed with: “So, you see, Sydney, not everything is available to you right now.”
Lily turned to Yung, grinning, and said, “You see, Mommy, I made my point.”
We were still on our street on the way to drop-off this morning when Lily asked me a question about the white witch of Narnia. (I should note that Yung has been reading Narnia to Lily. I’m ambivalent about it. I haven’t read the books, but there is, from what I can tell from my glimpses of the film, some fairly lofty topics raised in the novel as well as some violent moments.)
Why does Jades do bad things, Daddy?
Does Jades scare you?
No, she replied.
Do you want to know why she does bad things?
Yes.
And so I tried to explain that Jades is a character in a story. She’s not real. She’s pretend. And because she isn’t real, there’s no way to know why she does what she does unless the story tells us. I was beginning to wind up a long exegesis on the subject, remembering all the times I had tried to communicate the same idea to my undergraduates, when Lily interrupted me to say: “She does bad things to make the story more interesting.”
Well, yes.
It’s always interesting to see your child’s proclivities. You can’t help but compare, and contrast, them to your own, seeking continuities and discontinuities, trying to fathom what’s nature and what’s nurture. Lily likes to diagram things (just like me):
According to Lily, this is “a map to a city. On yellow, and black, roads you go slow. You stop on red roads. You go on green and blue roads. And on purple roads you go fast fast.”
Lily prepared this diagram last summer around this time when our air conditioning compressor died. She drew this to help me fix it.