MyThreeDaughters

When I was growing up, my brother and I hardly ever played this one game that my daughters do. We never pretended to be Mary and Laura from “Little House on the Prairie.” We probably would have done that if we wouldn’t have been: outside throwing tennis balls at birds; or finding the dams built in the stream by the kids one neighborhood over and knocking holes in them; or down in the basement, trying to figure out if we could build a fort in the crawl space (Conclusion: Nah, too stinking uncomfortable even for kids).
But the girls play Little House; Fontaine’s always “Mary” because she’s older, and Elizabeth is “Laura,” because she’s in the middle and she has brown hair. And listen, Elizabeth is sweet, but don’t try to tell her she’s not Laura, because she is.
It is difficult sometimes to remember, like today, when I broke into a lecture about hitting, because Ol’ Half Pint has been breaking bad lately and whacking her sister: “Now look, Elizabeth, it is never OK to hit, and I don’t care if she teases you or does whatever, you have to learn to ignore (etc, etc with the adult stuff where you turn into your parents times twenty, etc etc with me trying not to say bad words or scream…blah, blah)…because people in this family don’t behave violently!
Elizabeth, do you understand me?
Elizabeth…?!
DO YOU UNDERSTAND ME?”
She blinks the blue eyes up at me:
“I’m Laura,” she says.
Oh my.
WWPD.
What Would Pa Do?

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Fontaine’s fried.
Stick a book report in her, she’s done. It’s the end of her kindergarten year, and she hates school. She hates homework.
That is correct, anyone who hasn’t had a school age kid in the past decade, she has homework. Every night. Oh, right, they don’t get homework on weekends, because after all it’s (SCREAMING PROFANITY GOES HERE) kindergarten!
That’s how they do it nowadays, because we have standardized learning and standardized tests and standardized schools and standardized kids. (In fact, now that I have used it several times, what the heck kind of word is “standardized”?)
Let’s see those hands parents…who among you wants your kid to be “standard”? Can you say “average”? Can you say, “middle-management interchangeable cog”?
Anyway, never too soon to get cracking, so, homework in kindergarten. Seriously, she actually does math.
We found out today that, due to the standardized tests being taken by the third graders, there are no gym, music or art classes for the rest of the year. I suppose those teachers are needed to monitor the standardized tests, in case the third-graders try to cheat their way into Harvard. Ivy League schools must be concerned about being crushed under the influx of geniuses applying in another decade or so, thanks to all this standardized learning.
Or, as the wasted almost-six year old put it this morning, “Why does school have to last 16 hundred fifty-nine thousand sixteen seventy ninety days?”

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I always give my wife heck because she wants to get her hair colored, in order to achieve the purity of her “natural” hair color, which in her mind means the color when she was seven.
And so it was, the other day, that Elizabeth informed me (a lifelong blond) that I had brown hair. So OK, OK, it’s, uh, darkened up a bit over the past 50 decades.
But then, the other day, Miss Bright Blue Eyes went around the family surveying our eye colors and announced that Daddy’s are gray.
Gray.
I told my wife, “Brown hair and gray eyes, that’s a combination you don’t see often. I could completely disappear against a winter sky.”
Brown hair and gray eyes…I bet I could vanish from sight in a pile of mud and sticks. Hey, I’m looking for a new job; maybe I could be a beaver.
So I’m taking votes on which fake eye color I should choose. Chart included.
Such a contest could be the event that tears asunder the three readers of this web site, in a bitter two-to-one final vote.
May the blondest man win.

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I took down Paris Hilton.
She was on the site for a few days, the post below about being famous, but it seemed weird to call up the girls’ blog and see her glam mug on there.
There are other ways to be famous. A girl born these days could be famous any way she wanted, especially for being smart. Or she could just be smart. No fame. Lie low. Live well.

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At breakfast this morning, Fontaine announced, “I want to be famous.”
She’s almost six and has probably become used to this response – actually, it’s probably precisely the response she wanted – but the questions came fast after that:
What do you know about being famous?
Who told you about being famous?
What’s being famous mean?
“It’s when everybody knows you.”
OK, OK, smarty pants, so you know what famous means.
So, naturally, I mentioned one of the more noble paths to fame.
“Hey, you could invent something that saved a bunch of lives.”
(I thought about saying: “Hey, I could get lucky and sing a mind-numbingly repetitive country cross-over hit, wait 15 years, then pimp you out to Disney for a Tween show,” but I refrained.)
Flashing through our minds? Home-girl blondie up there, famous for being rich. I was a little scared to Google her, because you know, famous for that one thing? The one that *accidentally* got released on the Internet, which led to her getting famous by having a show about being famous and stupid?
If people just hadn’t confused “infamy” with “fame,” well, maybe heads wouldn’t turn when Six-year-old said the word.

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Sometimes, I was thinking, it pays to be the only guy. We were at the dinner table, and for once a conversation erupted instead of a screaming contest.
It wasn’t really a regular conversation, but a little girl one.
Fontaine: “I’m the Queen and…”
Elizabeth (interrupting): “I’m the Princess!”
OK, you’re the Princess.
Seemed that, since the two higher ranking female roles were snapped up, Mommy became the “Princess Knight.”
Leaving aside whatever role of servitude might be set aside for the poor 11-month-old sister, I said, Well, what am I?
“I guess you’re the King,” Fontaine reluctantly agreed.
YES! I’m the King.
Nice…
“But I’m the Queen,” Fontaine said, “and the Queen rules the castle.”
Oh.

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If you have a kid, you end up going to a lot of birthday parties. Sometimes, just for one kid, you might have stretches where there’s a party every other weekend.
So I was at one today, with Fontaine, for a girl who turned six. It was at a bowling alley, what with most first-grade girls being all about hooking their fingers into a 10-pound ball and heaving it down a lane, then kicking back with a Bud Light. (Oh wait, not really.)
So I was standing around talking with the girl’s Dad. I looked over the table of a dozen or more kids snarfing down cake.
Did you invite her whole kindergarten class?
“No, we couldn’t, we just went down the list and asked her who she wanted. We were hoping for *regrets*,” he said.
Oh yeah, regrets, regrets only. That’s funny, hoping for them.
“People call and they feel bad telling you they can’t come,” birthday Dad says, “but we want the *regret* too. I’m thinking, ‘You want the regret, we want the regret, come on, just give us the regret.’ ”
Hearing all that, I think back with such regret…about a couple of parties for which we didn’t send regrets. How happy we might have made those Moms and Dads.

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Last Saturday, the two older girls and myself were out in the back yard. I was trying to get some weeds pulled and rubbish removed, so was delighted when the girls found something to do that required little Dad maintenance. We found a couple of earthworms and they started a *worm farm.* Whenever I moved a log or something (you’d think I was talking about The Back 40, but if I am, it’s 40 feet) and found another worm, I delivered it to the worm farm. Fontaine (almost 6) and Elizabeth (3 and a half) got dirt and pulled grass for food and shelter and covered the worms up.
I worked, they played, it was great.
When a worm would try to escape the farm, I would hear Elizabeth say, “Oh, no you don’t….” and drag the poor sucker back home.
Elizabeth became the worm doctor. And don’t think Dad doesn’t dig two things about that: his three and a half year old girl loving to play with worms and hold them and get dirty hands. Plus, I figure if you aspire to be the Anything Doctor, that’s pretty good.
Ten minutes passed and Fontaine came over: “Daddy, we need some more worms, because all of ours either died or broke in half.”
Oh man, what happened to the worms?
“Well, Elizabeth is the doctor and she stretches them out first to measure them.”
The worms were good for, I’d guess, about 45 minutes of wholesome entertainment, which surpasses the total amount of time they have spent playing with most of the Christmas presents we got them. If only Elizabeth could get a tiara to stay on a worm.
Today, a week later, it was caterpillars that the girls got into. We found some really colorful ones, and they made a house for them, and got greenery for food, and some water. Fontaine said at one point she got one to drink water out of a crevice in the porch. “He must’ve been thirsty, because I think he looked up, and I saw a bit of a smile.”
The girls think these things are going to become Monarch butterflies; I think they are going to become whatever bag worms turn into.
Oh, what a grizzled old fart I am.

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Cock-a-doodle-do?

Tomorrow is Saturday, but we will wake up at the same time as every other day: 6:30 to 7 a.m. We’re on daylight savings time right now, or it would be 6. Our kids don’t change. They are like farm animals.
It’ll start with one of them popping open a bedroom door, then making the floorboards of the old house moan, then the other one will get up. Even though our neighbors have kids, their house will be dark. We NEVER sleep in.
A couple of weeks ago, I told the almost-six-year old, “Now, tomorrow is a weekend day, you can sleep as late as you want.”
“I know,” she said, “Mommy told me that too.”
One time, my neighbor Paul asked Fontaine why she got up so early on weekends. She said, “Because I’m afraid I’d miss out on something fun.” (Anybody know anything fun going on at 6:30 a.m. on a February Saturday? Well, there isn’t anything…we’ve looked.)
About a month ago, crusty-eyed on a dark Sunday morning, I begged to know why we all had to be up so early. Was there something, some noise or whatever that woke them?
“Well, I heard that rooster, and I knew it was morning,” Fontaine said.
“Yeah,” said the three-year-old.
I heard that, I said, that wasn’t a rooster…it was a crow!
So, for the city kids, I’ve posted a couple of pictures. We can fire up the computer tomorrow morning and look at them: We’ll be up with the birds.

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We still sleep with the “baby,” the nearly 11-month-old baby in our room. Her room is a walk-in closet (hey, it’s nice and big and bigger than most kids have for a bedroom). But every morning, when I hear one of the older girls pop open her door, I scramble out of bed, grab some clothes off the floor and try to get out of the room before she comes into our room and wakes the baby.
So, I was doing this on Sunday, and my back was stiff, so I grabbed my jeans and long-sleeve shirt and carried them out of the room to meet the three-year-old in the hallway. The nearly six year old joined us while we were going down the steps, when three-year-old announced:
“Daddy doesn’t look good with none pants on.”
Two things: For the record, again, I did have boxers on. Second, I’ll have more than boxers on from now on. And three: Wait ’til their in college and I get a pair of those giant sunglasses that go over your other glasses. How good is Daddy going to look then?

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