MyThreeDaughters

I heard this thing on NPR about people who try online dating, and how some of them pay professional profile consultants to write their blurbs. Professionals who know to write “enjoy the outdoors” instead of “live in a tent.” And people who understand the opposite sex.
They charge as much as $2,200, but the NPR interviewer in his NPR-y dry style allowed that gaining true understanding of the opposite sex might be a “relative bargain” for two grand.
Around here, I get a boat-load of such advice, and I don’t even have to pay for it.
Why just this morning, for instance, Fontaine was dragging butt as usual getting out of the house for school. I, her driver, was as usual trying to lay low and be calm but eventually my head exploded and I turned into a drill sergeant.
COME ON!
WE NEED TO LEAVE NOW!
LET’S GO!
We walk out the front door onto the porch.
She turns around to say goodbye to Mom for the 27th time.
We make it down the steps to the sidewalk.
C’MON, WE HAVE FOUR MINUTES TO GET THERE.
She strolls at a pace that indicates she wants to relish every second of this lovely moment of her childhood.
School starts at 8:15, Fontaine. It’s not my rule!
“Daddy,” she says, calmly, explaining, “you can’t rush a lady.”
That one stopped me for a moment. Where the heck did she get that? She’s six.
O.K., Lady, just get in the car.
Twenty-two hundred dollars, was it?

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I’m going to document this, so I know the exact day that it happened.
It was Saturday. I had long had an itch to hear “Benny and the Jets,” and I had gotten an iTunes gift card for Christmas (Should I make like a real blogger and link to iTunes? Nah.) and I downloaded it. I plugged my iPod into our Bose Sounddock (Again, nah) and started playing it.
Fontaine had recently shown an interest in the piano, and I pointed out the piano parts, as I took a trip back to riding on the school bus in the ’70s and hearing that song.
Fontaine feigned interest. It was an extremely mild form of feigning.
I looked at her. I looked at Elizabeth.
“I know,” I said, “someday you’re going to tell your friends: My dad was so un-cool. He made us listen to old music all the time…
I barely finished, when:
“You’re already not cool, Dad.”
“Yeah,” Elizabeth chimed in. “You’re not cool, Dad.”
(Context: They’re six and four.)
I’m not? I thought I was hanging in there. Oh wait, I mean, “still could kick it.” I might be slow, but I can text.
I may not link, but I do blog.
This is so discouraging.
I’m going to have to find a way to get my cool on.
Wonder how I’d look with a Hannah Montana backpack?
They still call them “backpacks,” don’t they?

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Elizabeth got herself dressed for bed tonight. She promised a surprise.
She showed back up in: a skirt, a longsleeve shirt under a sweater, tights and, the coup de grace, her headband to hold back her hair.
“I’m tired of having to get dressed in the morning,” her four-year-oldness proclaimed.
I suggested that the headband might be uncomfortable for sleeping, but she insisted it would be plenty comfortable.
The thing is, wife and I wonder what she’s readying for. Sadly, we can see no great excitement that lies in the day ahead, the day before the day before Christmas.
Wife figures Elizabeth will be the first up, bide time in her room for a while, eat some breakfast, be bored and sucking her thumb by 10:30.
But a new day it will be, and Elizabeth is going to tear into it…having already leaped the stifling hurdle of getting dressed.
If she could only sleep with breakfast stashed in her cheeks like a squirrel, and just wake up and start chewing.

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It seems to me that there was an old Saturday Night Live skit called something like, “The Couple Who Wouldn’t Leave.” It was 2 a.m. or so, in somebody’s living room, and the host couple would hint around about going to sleep, and the visiting couple would say something like:
“Hey, got anything else to eat around here?”
Or, “Is that your phone? I’m going to make some long-distance calls.”
I wonder how that would play out, if the person was a first-grader. It might be even funnier, more rude, more shocking.
Like, if your wife brought home a friend of your first grader for a little after-school play. What if the first-grade visitor, before getting out of the car blurted out:
“Your yard looks bad.”
(Hey, you know, haven’t seen a lot of garden tours in December. Wonder why?)
For some reason, after this, my wife lets her in the house. She comes in, strips off her coat, throws it on the floor and runs upstairs.
(Make yourself at home, sweetie. Mi casa es su casa.)
Back downstairs, she looks around and declares: “This house is such a mess. Do you want me to clean it up?”
(Whatever my wife said was nicer than what I would have said, which would have been, “Sure, start with the basement. Try not to breathe in too much asbestos or lead paint.”)
Anyway, then the little charmer goes over to the fridge, opens it, and says: “What do you have for me to drink?”
Wife gives her some orange juice, and she goes off to play for a while, until she pops back in: “Next time I come back, I want more orange juice.”
Now, the Dad perspective here, the purely selfish Dad angle, is: This kind of behavior, this kind of day for the wife, really doesn’t make for a smooth entry home after a day at work.
It really doesn’t help with the overall, shall we say, household karma.

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It was about 11:15 Sunday morning, when Fontaine became bored with the family’s lack of leadership.
“Alright everyone, we’re having a family meeting!” the six-year-old announced.
Wife and I were slow to report to the conference/family room, so once I plopped on the couch, Fontaine declared:
“O.K., we’re starting the meeting.”
A chart had already been drawn up, offering various options as to what the family should do next. The choices were: Church; Walk; Playground; Just Play Outside; Drebble a ball; and Eat Lunch Now.
The Future Middle Manager instructed that she would be voting first, but I interrupted.
Can each person only vote once, or can we vote for more than one option as second and third choices?
There’s always some loser at work who makes a meeting longer by asking questions like this, so I thought I’d be that guy.
Middle Management seemed pleased to hear this question, and allowed that each could vote three times.
Middle Management then cast its vote.
I went second.
“Just Play Outside,” I called out. Middle Management nodded in seeming approval.
Wife arrived and voted for Dribble a Ball.
“Dribble a ball!?” Middle Manager chortled, as she made the tally. “I thought no one was going to vote for that.”
Dribble the Ball, it seems, is like throwing a vote to Ralph Nader.
Next up, four-year-old.
“Elizabeth, it’s your turn.”
“I’m not Elizabeth, I’m Sarah.”
(Forgot, we were playing the pretend-I’m-somebody-else game during the family meeting.)
Finally, we all finished voting. I thought.
“O.K., who needs to vote again?” Middle Manager called out.
So we all voted again.
I looked at the tally sheet.
Church sure got a lot of votes, I said.
“That’s from Mr. Moose,” Fontaine explained, glancing at the stuffed moose sitting near her. “He voted three times.”
Oh man, the unpredictable Moose vote swayed it. Shades of the old Bull Moose party. Church in a landslide.
Wife then noted that it was already 11:30, and church was out of the question.
Meeting adjourned/exploded into chaos, and we all went and stood in the kitchen.
I popped a bagel in the toaster. Two other voices said they were hungry.
And in the end, an option that garnered no votes won: Eat Lunch Now.
No sweat. Fontaine got the chart, put 28 tallies after Eat Lunch Now and declared it the winner.
Never too late to have a clean outcome.

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It’s about 45 miles from here to Williamsburg, where we headed last Sunday to dump…to avail one set of the grandparents of the opportunity to spend the afternoon with their lovely and pleasant granddaughters.
It usually takes us about an hour to make that trip.
But this time, it took us: One Thousand And Eleven.
I know this, because shortly after we hit the interstate, Fontaine began counting.
One…two…three…four…five…
Elizabeth sat next to her and sucked her thumb.
Four hundred and fifty eight…Four hundred and fifty nine…Four hundred and sixty.
We did the five hundreds.
We did the six hundreds.
We played music, we talked, we looked at stuff, and all through it came the constant, dedicated drone of time marching on. Slowly.
Very slowly.
We did the seven hundreds, and at seven hundred and ninety nine, we forgot where we were.
So we did the six hundreds again, and the seven hundreds again.
Rain pounded the windshield.
Numbers pounded our brains.
I looked in the rear-view at Elizabeth, sucking her thumb.
At that moment, I kind of wished Fontaine still sucked hers.

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Check out those organic turkeys in the picture.
(That must be organic grass they’re walking on.)
But they look like…
Oh, I know what you’re thinking. They’re chickens. But they’re turkeys. Let me explain.
Wife phoned me from the grocery store before Thanksgiving, and the options for the big, traditional meal were: giant turkey breast, for our little nuclear family, or a smaller organic chicken.
Fontaine, we figured, she’d try some. Elizabeth, at the age of four, appears to have somehow staked a claim as a vegetarian (Fontaine, on the other hand, says if there’s no meat, there’s no meal, and refers to people who even eat vegetables as “vegetarians.”) Rosebud, she’d pour milk on some turchicken and throw it on the floor.
We went with the chicken. But we were afraid the girls would be disappointed without a turkey (see: Pilgrims), so we just decided to refer to the organic chicken all day as “The Turkey.”
<i>How’s the turkey coming along?
Ooh, the turkey is smelling good.
Anybody want a turkey leg?</i>
They’d just seen “A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving,” which presented a final hurdle. They found out about the wishbone.
I don’t really know what part the wishbone comes from, but upon some (my nearly-vegan sister has probably dropped out long ago, so I will continue with this sentence) rooting around in the faux-turkey carcass, I pulled out a bone in the shape of a Y.
So that proves it; it was a turkey.
There’s no Y in chicken.

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Every night before bed I read books to the two bigs. Each gets to pick one book. Every night, of late, Fontaine has chosen a tome of A.A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh stories. Each chapter is long, and written with some pretty high-end dialogue and language for a six-year-old.
Elizabeth’s four, and she can’t stand this book.
But last night, Elizabeth gets her jammies on first, then chooses her book: A.A. Milne.
“I’m going to pick this,” Elizabeth says, “so Fontaine can’t pick it.”
Interesting move, I thought.
Now you can find much psychological jive on the internet about sibling rivalry. And in fact, you can find much jive about almost anything on the internet. I love a news story that validates itself by saying, “A quick search of such and such produces x-thousands hits on Google.” Guess what? A quick search of, say, purple monkeys produces 674,000 results, so maybe someone should write a news story about purple monkeys.
Bottom line is: the number one cause of sibling rivalry is having a sibling.
So Fontaine comes out and sees what book her younger sister has chosen.
“She can’t pick that. I was going to pick that book.”
I explain, for the fifth time during these evenings, that if sister picks your book, and you then pick a book, that’s like getting to pick two books.
Elizabeth then says: “O.K., you can have this book.”
At that point, Fontaine’s not going to pick the Milne book, because she’s decided she’s not going to pick a book Elizabeth wants, thereby allowing Elizabeth two books.
Fontaine picks a different book.
Then, in a pirouette that I didn’t see developing, Elizabeth walks over and chooses yet a third book.
We sit on the bed to read.
And I realize what’s happened.
We’re not reading Milne.
Elizabeth wins.
The book she can’t stand has been shelved for the night.

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Prometheus had it good.
(Note: Read previous entry if that statement seemed to come out of nowhere.)
As you remember, three days ago Fontaine and I tidied up the family room. Put away every single item (that was not on a shelf…come on, get real).
So I am sitting, right now, in that living room. And what, you nine readers of MTD.com might be wondering, can I spy with my little eye from where I sit?
I spy a pillow from the couch in the middle of the rug. I spy a board book, a journal, a princess tiara, an Animal Baby book, a Winnie the Pooh pop-up song book, a pack of baby wipes, a pair of toddler pants, a purse, blanket, generic Etch-a-Sketch, a smaller generic Etch-a-Sketch, a zip-lock freezer bag full of widgets for some other toy, a memory game, a sandwich bag of crayons, a reservoir for a humidifier, one dress-up shoe, a single crayon, a piece of paper with a drawing on.
And a plastic stencil with the letters O through Z and some punctuation marks, including a semicolon. Ever seen a four-year-old write a sentence containing a semicolon?
I can see all that stuff without standing up.
Strewn about the floor of one room.
Prometheus could be strapped to a rock in this room; the vulture would never find him.

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That’s Prometheus.
You might remember his story. Prometheus, in addition to apparently being quite buff as shown in the painting, stole fire from the gods and gave it to the people.
The gods didn’t like that, so Prometheus, being unfortunate in that he was living back when the Greeks were always looking to write tragedies, was sentenced to having his liver eaten out by a giant vulture. The bad news for Prometheus, and the good news for the vulture, was that every night Prometheus would grow a new liver and the next day the vulture would swoop in again and eat it.
Torture, repeated daily.
Which brings us to the parallel between the story of Prometheus and trying to have a clean house when you have kids.
Fontaine and I straightened up the living room today. Put everything away. Wife vacuumed the house.
But when you have a one-and-a-half year old, this won’t last long.
Stuff will be dragged out of cabinets, CDs will be taken from their stacks and placed randomly around the house. Tiny toys will be picked up and strewn about with other tiny toys that don’t belong with each other.
Clothes will be removed from dolls, the dolls left in an upstairs bedroom and the clothes brought to the kitchen.
Organic sweet potato baby food mush will be intentionally tossed down and splatter orange pock marks for six feet in all directions.
The vulture will swoop in again and eat Prometheus’ liver.
But he had it worse.
Not like we clean the house every day. That would be torture.

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