All posts tagged lily

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 seems that a cat has adopted us. It is at least a mutual love affair between Lily and a calico kitten that has begun to haunt our carport. Yesterday, it got a name: Laten.

We have been asking Lily to tell us her dreams for, it seems, a very long time now. It all began when she wasn’t even a year old and she had night terrors. As someone who suffered nightmares as a child that I still find haunting, I hoped to get her to talk about her dreams and to give her control over them. But up until today, she has never told us, or never been able to tell us, what was the content of a dream.

Today she did. And she dreamed she was in a store with her friend Ava and they were looking at ponies. Toy ponies? we asked. Yes, she said, and then added that there were also two unicorns off in a dark area. We asked her if she was afraid. No, she said. I could see them. I could just see them.

This afternoon on the way back from school, I told Lily that Yung had made an appointment to get Lily’s hair cut by one of her favorite former teachers who is just about done with her training at the Aveda Institute here in Lafayette.

“I know,” Lily said.

“How do you know, honey? Mommy just made the appointment this afternoon.”

“I know.”

“But she just made it.”

“She told me.”

With that, I understood that Yung had told her that she was going to call and make the appointment. We went on to talk about something else, and she said “I know.”

“How do you know so much?” I asked.

“Because I’m smart.”

“Well, you know,” I said thinking I would take advantage of this moment to make a lovely point about life. “You know, Lily, some of the smartest people I know are the ones who know what they don’t know.” Top that, I thought smugly to myself.

“Well, daddy, what if you know what you know?”

Ouch.

Tonight we asked Lily to take a shower: things were running a bit late and it just seemed an easier solution, especially since I wanted to shower, too. Yung-Hsing popped her in just as I was finishing up, and after I washed her hair, I explained she would have five minutes to play in the shower. (Lily resists getting into the bath or the shower, but then she resists getting out of it. We have never discerned the root of the paradox.)

“Okay,” she said.

“Now do you want me to count the minutes down or just tell you when you have one minute left?” I asked.

“Just tell me when I have one minute left.”

“Okay.”

“But, daddy, what happens if I’m not finished?”

“Well, one minute should be plenty of time to finish.”

“What if I’m already finishing when you tell me?”

…

“Should I just finish some more?”

Laudun-2009-0214
Originally uploaded by johnlaudun

We’re back from Iota where we spent the entire day taking in the small festival the city hosts every year. Despite being very nervous about the folks in Mardi Gras costumes when we first arrived, Lily insisted on staying until the Mardi Gras came into town. Wise of her. As one of the first kids they saw, they showered her with candy.

This morning at breakfast Lily announced, all of a sudden, that she remembered why, when she was younger she didn’t like peas and green beans. She thought the peas were grass seeds and the green beans were grass.