MyThreeDaughters

I got home and they were outside. Fontaine pushed through the front door ahead of me.
“Wow, I’m glad this day is over,” she said. “Now, I can finally take this thing off.”
She pulled her right arm toward her and ducked out of the arm sling. She’d had the day off school, and for some reason decided it would be cool to appear to have a broken arm. So she took the canopy fabric off a baby doll stroller and used it for an arm sling.
Earlier that day, Wife had apparently attempted the old reverse psychology trick, like when Grandpa Walton caught Jim Bob smoking a cigarette and made him smoke a whole pack until he got sick. Wife told Fontaine that if she found the arm sling to be so desirable, perhaps she should wear it for her entire day off school.
Fontaine, sharing the stubborn redhead trait with Wife (yeah, this isn’t good, but Wife never reads the site anyway), decided to do just that. So for a full kid work shift, Fontaine kept it on. Fumbled through lunch, rode her scooter one-handed, discovered she couldn’t climb trees past the first limb. Lord knows how the whole bathroom use thing went down.
“I couldn’t do anything,” she said. “We went to two playgrounds, and I couldn’t even do the monkey bars.”
She had, by her own account, a pretty lousy day off from school. All from a self-inflicted fake injury.
Lesson learned? Doubtful. Maybe Wife should have made her wear the sling – and use her one good arm to smoke a whole pack of cigarettes.

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I read this in The Washington Post the other day, about pregnant moms strapping things to their bellies to play sounds to start educating kids before they are born. My only thought was: I’m surprised all of us from previous deprived generations aren’t dumber than dirt.
Here are a couple of key passages, and I’ve taken the liberty to extend these thoughts/quotes to their obvious conclusion. Just to make the meaning a little more lucid. (My kids don’t know that word yet, because we didn’t play a books-on-tape Thesaurus to them before they were born.)
“With such names as Lullabelly, Bellysonic and FirstSounds, they offer up everything from soothing tones to foreign languages as they promise anxious parents a better, calmer baby.”
Other programs include Trigonometry, Calculus, String Theory and Arabic.
“With that in mind, makers of prenatal learning devices think that the period between 18 and 40 weeks is an opportunity to give soon-to-be-born babies a head start. (The BabyPlus slogan? “Your womb . . . the perfect classroom.”)”
For your emerging MENSA member, these sounds approximate those of Charlie Brown’s teacher. Wah-WAHWAHWAH.
“They’re much more ready for ‘Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star’ or ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’ than they would be,” Logan says.
And a child who is un-prepared for “Twinkle Twinkle” is a terrible thing to waste.
“I teach middle school in Montgomery County, and they focus from kindergarten on up how to get into college. I’ll take any step to get ahead of the game to help her learn basic fundamentals, to succeed and be the best she can be.”
Few know it, but during the admission interview at Harvard, they ask the candidate to sing “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.” Candidates unable to do so are sentenced to community college.
I might add just one thing to this profound movement: Why stop there? Why not, soon as that baby pops out, put an iPod on her?
Life’s too short, and these days, there are far too few opportunities to be pelted with information.

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Looking in my rearview at the grill of an SUV: Yo, Julie, it’s me. You know the Jetta. You trying to remove one of my bumper stickers with that faux-safari cattlecatcher on the front of your four-wheel drive?
Yeah, they’re back. Moms hell-bent on making the start of school, of not letting Emma or Michael or Audrey or Jackson miss one minute of pre-school circle time.
Honda Odyssey “mini” vans, Range Rovers and Land Cruisers and Ford Expeditions, all keeping their kids safe while they view my presence as the equivalent of a log in a bog.
Railroad tracks approach.
Uh, Julie, you’re speeding alongside me in a lane that’s going to end. You know that, right?
I, of course, have been driving this same street at the same stinking time every stinking day of the summer, but the time to yield has come.
These moms are focused. Locked in. They’ve got their yoga pants and game faces on.
The Jetta putters toward the tracks. Julie parallels us, oblivously, no apparent plan in mind.
Oh, I see, Julie. You’re coming over, huh? Don’t sweat that signal, baby, I gotcha. Just seeing you juice the gas and swing over into my lane? That’s a pretty strong signal itself.
Don’t worry. The Jetta’s probably got one air bag working, as opposed to the nine in your car.
We’re cool.
See you at school, in 18 seconds.

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There it is, a seemingly innocuous plastic flute. I think Aunt A gave it to one of them in one of her ever-popular Dollar Tree El Cheapo Cornucopia Christmas gifts.
Extremely popular immediately. Kids started playing and kept playing and playing and very soon there was the scene out of “The Grinch” where the Grinch was imagining the kids below playing their woozles and kerfloozles and scrunching his face up, but now it was Aunt A saying, in a really high pitched voice, “Hey, see those holes on it? If you cover them up, it plays more than one note!”
The seemingly innocuous flute has now been around for nine months, and I keep hearing it and finding it in the middle of the floor at night. I know it cost one dollar (precisely, when is Dollar Tree, of Chesapeake, Va., going to step up and advertise in this space?). I’ve cordoned it off on the kitchen counter, for rapid and un-sighted disposal, but I know it’ll sit in the landfill for a bajillion years, what with the chemicals the Chinese factory workers used to coat it.
(Oh man, there went Dollar Tree, I guess.)
Donate it? You really think a poor single parent needs that racket?
I guess it’s got to go. Trash stash time again. Long as I get it under the coffee grounds, that’ll keep prying hands from discovering it.

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Two nights ago, the first before Fontaine’s first day of second grade at a new school. I’m tucking her in. For a change, the tough redhead wants to snuggle and talk.
Are you nervous about school tomorrow?
“Yeah, a little.”
That’s O.K. I remember being nervous before the first day of school every year.
“That’s what Mommy said…You mean boys get nervous too?”
Yeah. You know what boys get nervous about? What girls think of them.
“Daddy?”
Yes.
“I read a comic book about a boy who got so nervous before school that he forgot to put on his underwear, and when he went to school his pants got caught on something and fell down and everybody saw his private parts.”
Oh my goodness!, I said.
(We don’t have any comic books in the house, I thought.)
Well, I said, there you go: If you get nervous tomorrow, just think, “Well, at least I am wearing underwear.”
She laughed and laughed.
And if you give the wrong answer tomorrow, just think, “But I have underwear on!”
She thought that was even funnier, and she went to bed telling me, “You are the craziest boy I know.”
So the next morning, the first day of school, when we arrived she didn’t want to get her picture taken. She was being the seven-year-old 14-year-old that she can be, I just said, “Hey, Fontaine, get up there by the school sign. I want to get a shot of you with your underwear on.”
I said it just to her, so as to avoid arrest.

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I don’t know what to say. Where does she get the moves? Not from me, not from Wife, unless she’s been holding out.
Nature beats nurture.
Here’s Rosebud cutting some serious Dollar Tree rug. Lord knows, I didn’t even know she was down with Sade.

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Rosebud is about to come of age. Endure a little family hazing ritual. Pass a milestone that every child in this family has encountered.
See, we have a kitchen island. It has a one-inch thick granite countertop. When we had the kitchen done, the guy said a lot of people like an overhang on the back side of the island, for extra room, so we have 9 inches of extra room that we are able to take advantage of by junking it up with crap.
As our children learn to toddle and then walk and then run, they like to zip around the island and the short ones can short-cut the cabinet and run under the 9-inch overhang with no problem.
But, oh, they grow up so quickly, and one day a child will be short-cutting and the next day a child will be — WHAMMMM!!!!
I mean, head snapped back and soft-kid forehead still stuck to the granite while the feet kind of keep going and fly forward. Like something the Roadrunner causes to happen to the Coyote.
And the thing is, the other day I watched as Rosebud, who previously had a good four inches of clearance, short-cut under the countertop. A curl of her Blaze Orange hair clipped the underside of the granite.
It’s a matter of weeks, maybe days.
There’s not much I can do to stop this.
It’s a mistake that the first two have made, but only once.
I guess we’ll let it happen, console the poor thing, and say, “Welcome to the club, Rosebud.”

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This is really bad. But the girls wail all the time. There is no difference in tone or fury between getting a pebble stuck in a shoe and, say, losing an appendage.
So it was the other day, a few minutes after I’d gotten home from work, right as they were getting back from a day with the grandparents.
The two younger ones had just entered the house when I heard the nuclear-alert-level wail from down at the sidewalk. I didn’t expect much…
Until Fontaine headed toward me and I saw a mouth FULL of bright red blood. So much bright red blood that I couldn’t see her teeth, some of which I guessed weren’t there anymore.
Her flip flop had gotten hung up, and she went face-first into a concrete step. Inside, we saw that one baby tooth had been knocked clean from her face, and a part of her front permanent tooth had been chipped off, un-clean.
This missing tooth, amid the hysteria, the moaning, the undecipherable yelling, I discerned presented a huge problem for tooth fairy related reasons.
“I’ll find it,” someone called out, and to my surprise, that was me.
I ran outside. There perched on the second step was a big chunk of enamel. It couldn’t have been ripped out of there better if Uncle Crazy had followed through and tied a string to it and the other end of the string to a door knob and slammed the door.
Tell you one thing, she may have lost a tooth, but she bloodied up those steps pretty well.
Meantime, Fontaine’s top lip swelled up like one of Pamela Anderson’s. Pamela Anderson’s lips, to be clear on this.
Fontaine put that smashed-out tooth out for the tooth fairy.
And the tooth fairy must’ve felt as bad for her as Wife and I did, because the next day, Fontaine reported that she got $10.

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Rosebud did not want me to put her to bed. She wanted Mom.
I persisted. I kept reading a bedtime book. She persisted, too. And here’s how it played out, an anger-fueled hiphop remix of Margaret Wise Brown’s Big Red Barn.
By the Big Red Barn in the great green field, there was a little pig who was learning to squeal.
I WANT MOMMY TO PUT ME TO BED! I WANT MOMMY!!!
There was a great big horse and a very little horse.
I WANT MOMMY TO PUT ME TO BEDDDDDDD! DADDY TAKE OVER WITH THE BIG GIRLS!!!!
And on every barn is a weather vane of course, a golden flying horse.
MOMMYYYYYYY! DADDY, YOU TAKE OVER WITH FONTAINE AND ELIZABETH! MOMMYYYYY!
There was a little toy house, and a young mouse
NO READ THIS BOOK!!! I WANT MOMMY TO READ BOOKS!!!!
She grabs the book out of my hand.
I step out of the room, go downstairs to get something to wipe the tears from her cheeks and something to mop the blood off the side of my face from my burst eardrum.
I return to the room and wipe her face.
“Are you ready to be tucked in now? I have this nice blanket.”
She whimpers a “yes.”
I tuck her in and say goodnight.
And they all lived together in the Big Red Barn.

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There is a rule of thumb for taking kids somewhere: I think it suggests that you allow 10 minutes per child to get them and their stuff rounded up and out the door. So for you math-heads: Three kids equals 30 minutes.
Yesterday, a first-hand experiment (taking them to the beach) produced a corollary to the rule of thumb:
For each minute you plan to spend on the beach, you need to spend an equal amount of time packing.
It took us from about 9 a.m. until 10:45 to pack: wash grapes and cherries, slice bread and cheese for snack, wash travel cups and load with ice and water, find sand shovel and bucket bin, beach umbrella, extra diaper, wipes (in case), small cooler, beach towels, drying off towels.
And then the back-breaker: smear ‘em up with so much suntan lotion that, by the end of summer, they’d still blend in with a polar bear.
One hour forty five minutes, and we weren’t staying overnight.
Once at the beach, the girls again successfully divided and conquered.
Rosebud, 2, only wanted to play on the beach blanket with wife. No going to the end of the water because it was “scary.” Elizabeth, 4.75 years, wanted to play at the edge of the water. Fontaine, 7, wanted to go in deep and bob over the waves.
So wife and I are tried to patrol a front that stretched from the blanket to about 50 feet in the water.
A couple of times, one of us tried to dispatch Elizabeth from one end of the line to the other. It’s like when the receiver goes out for a long pass in football, and the quarterback throws the ball and it gets hung up in the wind.
“OK, go straight to Mommy, see her up there?”
Heads straight, sees a shell, looks down, staggers toward the wrong blanket.
“ELIZABETH, NO, MOMMY’S OVER THERE!”
Wander. Stagger. Sea shell. Airplane. Wander. Stumble. Gosh I love them, man this is great, I remember the ocean when I was a kid, all the sand would get in your swimming suit and pile up in your…
“NEXT TO YOU! TO THE RIGHT! NO, WRONG BLANKET!”
Ah, there you go, there’s Mommy.
Now, where’s Fontaine?!
Stayed on the beach for two hours, bettering the new corollary by a full 30 minutes.
(As long as you don’t count the unloading and clean-up).
Let’s not count it, and call it a win.

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