Posts About Sg

I’ll have more to post later, but was playing with Lightroom conversions to black and white and wanted to post a couple of the results. These both are pictures of reactions to the large tank at Atlanta’s aquarium.

On Christmas eve we went to church with the extended family who had gathered on the Outer Banks. It was a “contemporary” service, which, in case you’re not in the know, means that the music is terrible. Nothing against the particular musicians involved in this story. Just like all their, ah, contemporaries, they are somehow caught up in a madness that causes otherwise rational men and women to say “you know what would be great? If we took the part of church where Bach goes and filled it instead with CCM containing the lowest possible theology-to-schmaltz ratio.”

Anyway, Sg, you seemed to really enjoy it. Here’s a series of pictures AT took while you were sitting on my shoulders, over the course of which you progress from hesitant to ecstatic to gouging my eyes out to hanging out with the big kids.

Sg,

That you are doomed to be sort of a nerd was obvious from that time last year, at the zoo. We were watching the gorillas being fed. You said something like “I see a monkey”, and your mother and I, nearly in unison, replied “gorillas are apes, sweetie.”

Your descent continued this morning when you learned the word “cephalopod”. It began with you telling me that your octopus was a person, and I broke it to you that no, in fact, your octopus was not a person. Soon I was asking questions like “is Daisy a cephalopod?” You would say “no”. When asked who is a cephalopod, you said “octopus!” By the time we got to daycare, you were also admitting, when asked whether there were any others, that the squid (“skid!”) is also a member of the class.

Maybe tomorrow we’ll discuss why, if one is going to be pedantic (which one should probably not be), octopodes makes more sense as the plural form of octopus than does octopi.

For now, behold these members of the class/subclass cephalopoda coleoidea: the fearsome octopus! the mighty squid! and the stalwart and redoubtable Tummi Gummi of the deep, the cuttlefish!

Octopus picture by Flickr user OCVA, used under a CC Attribution-No Derivative Works 2.0 Generic license

Squid picture by Flickr user Nick Hobgood, used under a CC Attribution 2.0 Generic license

Cuttlefish picture by Flickr user Nick Hobgood, used under a CC Attribution 2.0 Generic license

Sg, this song has become something of an obsession for you. And I can see why – it’s kind of catchy. You’ve started trying to sing along in the way someone sings along when they don’t really know the lyrics (“uh mmm mmm sevens ah um mmm living room”). Below Seven is a song that you discovered you liked today. We listened to it on the way home, and then when you were getting ready for bed you were walking around your room picking things up and singing “pick it up! pick it up!”

(Because YouTube is a medium only slightly more permanent than a sand mandala, and for future reference, the first tune is “Seven” by They Might Be Giants. The second is “Pick It Up, Lay It In The Cut” by Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings.)

It’s obvious that the story of this weekend begins on Friday morning. But a point isn’t a pattern (except to the schizophrenics), and I didn’t see — couldn’t have seen — where things were headed until about 7:15 Friday night, when you and I were on the way home from day care.

I was really tired, not only from the day’s travails, but from a few really busy weeks at work, the last couple of which happened to coincide with a couple of busy weeks for AT at work. For almost two weeks, AT and I daily answered the question of who would stay at work until midnight, and who would work from home after putting you to bed.

And I was tired from changing the tire in Atlanta’s un(s/r)easonably cold weather at the end of a long day. It was very cold. Like the actual low yesterday was -12°C. I didn’t have gloves, so my work with the heat-leeching metal tools was punctuated by pacing, hands in my pockets, until I could feel my fingers again.

And you were tired. I could tell as soon as I walked into the daycare. I’m not sure whether it was that I was too tired to be a good parent or you were too tired to be a good kid, but the ride home started to shape up to be pretty rough. You were asking for things that didn’t exist, or asking for things using only really vague pronouns. I wanted to hand you what you wanted, but couldn’t figure out what that might be. I eventually opted to put on some music.

I had fairly well tuned you out when I realized that you were repeating “I want another one; I want another CD, daddy.” I was relieved — hitting “next” on my blackberry was well within my abilities. And lo, I was downright pleased when the song that came on was a favorite. For me, it is one of those that freezes the moment you first hear it in time, so that every time you hear it a little bit of the initial wonder remains.^* Here’s that song:

You stopped kicking your feet when the song began, and your glazed stare out the window briefly focused. You were quiet for about a minute, and I was pretty sure you were having the same reaction I’d had. Then you said: “I don’t like this one. I want another one.”

See, that’s the moment I should have been able to plot out the course of the rest of the weekend. First the tire, then the solid blow to my pleasant delusion that you and I are two manifestations of the same spirit. The trajectory is obvious. Or it would have been if I hadn’t been so tired, so disconsolate.

I was so tired and crabby that I didn’t notice the third datapoint when it was staring me in the face. When AT came home and declared it “cold in here”, I told her she was crazy. She directed me to the thermostat, which told me two things: (1) the indicated actual temperature was about 8°C below the set temperature; and (2) the heating system, which was set to “auto” (and which therefore should have been doing its best to replace the missing heat) had simply given up. I suddenly felt how very cold it was in the house. By morning the house was more than 15°C cooler than when we’d left for work 24 hours earlier.

So you went to spend the night with grandma and granddaddy. AT and I stayed at home, because I had to be north of town to get a new tire at 7:30am, and AT had to be at work at 10:00am. A hitherto unused electric blanket saved the evening. But when I had to get out of bed in the morning, I suddenly felt a great sympathy for the people who stepped out of their warm Boeing into the Hudson River on Thursday.

After grandaddy brought you back home, you stayed with Haley for a few hours while we were at our respective offices. AT called me as evening approached to let me know she was leaving the office, and could give me a ride if I wanted one. A few minutes later she called to tell me that someone had broken into the car.

A window was smashed, and we think that the only thing taken was a purse that has been doubling as a light-duty diaper bag. I imagine that the thief was probably disappointed. I’d bet that the purse is in a garbage can not two blocks from the parking lot. (Although Donnie pointed out the possibility that the culprit was someone whose baby really needed a new diaper, in which case they probably got exactly what they wanted and needed.)

So that’s the weekend so far. It’s Saturday night now, and Monday is technically part of the weekend this go ‘round. So who knows what other joys await.

There are bright spots too, by the way. You seemed to enjoy the song after “Greenman” very much, and I can’t complain if you’re a Critters Buggin’ fan (even if Raimondi isn’t the most interesting song).

^* And how I was all like “this sounds like XTC, except for how it’s completely awesome”.

I got these really good pictures of Ian and Sg on Thanksgiving, where Sg is really fascinated by a mitten and Ian is trying to help her put it on. Here’s one:

Here’s another, all creepy perfume commercial styles:

Here’s the fun stuff: this is an accident, where I thought I was in aperture priority mode when I was really in shutter priority mode and I ended up with a like 10 second exposure.

I kept it because I thought it looked like shoegazer album art:

And if you just hit “invert”, you get a Boards of Canada album cover. (Ain’t that always the way?) Voila.

They did finally get the mitten on.

She’s been modeling counting for some time, but only yesterday seemed to make the one-to-one correspondence connection between the words and the number of things being counted. Next stop: Gödel’s incompleteness theorems!

(Please feel free to not comment on the stubbiness of my fingers or Sg’s raging case of bedhead.)

We got these cheapo plastic chairs from Ikea for the kids at Sg’s birthday party to sit on. I’ve checked with AT to be sure, and she agrees that Sg has spent the vast majority of her discretionary free time over the past two day stacking and restacking these chairs. It’s a funny passion, or a sign of serious mental illness, one.