MyThreeDaughters

Rose will be two next month. I read last year that redheads often have an advanced ability to learn languages.
Rosebud hardly shuts up. She probably gets it from her sisters. Often in this house, at least two, sometimes three or four, people talk at the same time.
I don’t mean, talk a little and then, “Oh, sorry, go ahead.”
I mean, full on sentences, paragraphs, stories, everybody weaving a yarn without regard to anyone else.
Rosebud, again, she’s less than two, says words like “actually” and phrases like, “These shoes fit me well.” One of her first phrases, an absolutely essential one in this house was, “I talking first!”
Tonight, driving her home from one of Fontaine’s school events, she pointed to some triangles of quesadilla in the console of the car (we always keep some there, just in case) and said: “No like the quesadilla. Throw it out the window.” (I’m not a fan either. It’s a long word that means, in Spanish, “Mexican grilled cheese sandwich.”)
So, driving down a fairly major thoroughfare in a not-very-major city, I zipped the window down and chucked a couple of slivers of quesadilla out toward the sidewalk.
Man, kids give you an excuse to do some fun stuff, don’t they? Next time you’re feeling a little glum, I suggest hurling some quesadillas out the window. It’s quite satisfying.

That’s the back of Fontaine’s red mane in the photo

Ever wonder, or scoff snidely, at the freaks who wait until mid-January to put their Christmas tree out on the curb? Well, I’m about to put ours out in May. Here’s why:
My name is Lon, and I’m a Tree Killer.
I never pictured myself as one, growing up spending most of my time tromping through the woods, building dams in the stream down the hill, “needing” hip waders as a 14-year-old to better pursue the trout.
But things change. This past Christmas, which, yeah, was like half a year ago, wife and I decided to save money, get a tree we knew was “fresh cut,” and in fact save at least one Christmas tree from being cut off the side of a mountain, so we whacked down an evergreen that we planted in the wrong spot in our backyard.
OK, precisely, I got a saw and cut it down.
Fontaine stood off to the side, saying something like, and I’m pretty sure this is accurate: “Boys will just never understand girls. Girls like to save trees, and boys like to cut them down.”
For clarity here: I was the boy. (Though I haven’t looked lately, pretty sure I still am the boy).
So we used that evergreen as our Christmas tree, and to stifle the on-going environmentalist uprising around here, we agreed that after Christmas we would prop it in the backyard “for wildlife habitat.”
That was early January. It’s still there, though I have yet to see a budding Eastern Cougar population in our urban backyard.
And even if I did, I’d still be the tree killer.
Fontaine now vows she’ll spend the rest of her life avenging the cutting down of this 7-foot tree. She’s truly become quite a tree climber, and as soon as she finds one that’s about to be cut down, she says she aims to climb it and camp out there until the bad chainsaw man goes away.
I say she can go ahead, take her $7 trust fund and spend the post-college years in a Redwood. It’ll be a short st

I never remember my parents complaining about this shi, this stuff, but surely they must’ve when we weren’t around. (Overly) organized sports, what a pain in the rump.
Fontaine’s T-ball league is like the U.N., like when one country with about 300 people blocks a global environmental treaty that would halt global warming.
Team pictures are Saturday. You have to arrive 30 minutes ahead of photo time. If you don’t come for the pictures, you can’t play in the game that day, because these days if you don’t have a picture of your kid doing it, they didn’t do it.
So for missing the team picture it’s a one game suspension. For a six-year-old girl who plays on a team called the Pink Sox. (Oh well, it’s the same penalty as failing the steroid test.)
You pay a $75 entry fee, but have to take turns working in the snack bar, doing maintance on the fields, selling raffle tickets.
I never heard my parents complain about any of this. Maybe they should’ve had a blog.

Wife had the three daughters at the dollar store a few days ago. What a great place (and what an opportunity for a shrewd advertiser like Dollar Tree, which could sponsor this blog for cheap and grab the attention of at least five mothers with household purchasing authority).
But back to their shopping. At Dollar Tree (based in nearby Chesapeake, and a finely run operation…wink) even a cash-strapped mom can let each kid pick out one thing. Cost: three bucks.
Fontaine chose reading glasses. Magnification of 1.0. They are silver wire-rimmed, a la Sting in 1987.
We are bad parents. We have no idea if they are right for her eyes, but they are right for one thing.
You’ve heard “Clothes make the man.” That being well-dressed brings about a change of the level of respect for that person by others and the person himself?
Well, glasses are making this kid. She puts them on, it’s like Clark Kent becoming Superman. Attitude change. For the way better.
She can be an aggressive agitator. A psychological scab-picker with poor Elizabeth. She puts these glasses on, she’s Mahatma Gandhi.
She had them on at dinner. I was coming down on Elizabeth about sliding some plate of food all over the table, and I grabbed it from her. That made her more upset.
Then the Bespectacled One spoke: Couldn’t she just have it? Wouldn’t it be worth it, to keep the peace?
I looked at wife, and she at me.
“A DOLLAR?!” I said.
We cracked up.
Sure, we’ll take her to the optometrist. We think she probably needs something, but I don’t care if she goes cross-eyed, if she wants glasses she’s getting them.
(Just kidding, more or less.)

That’s one of Fontaine’s dolls in the picture. As you can see, she drew glasses on the poor thing.

Elizabeth turned four and a half today. That makes it her “half birthday.”
We started doing these when one of the girls was about to be born, and we knew that baby would overshadow the other girls, so we had a half birthday. (I just checked with wife to firm up the details on that. She confirmed that was the case: “Something like that,” she said, “I don’t remember.”)
No gifts on half birthdays. We just do cupcakes. And of course sing a round of “Happy Halfbirthday to you.”
But we let this one get away. Elizabeth had a friend come over to play. For dinner, wife made macaroni and cheese cupcakes, which the four-and-a-half year old said were “too cheesy.”
Asked to eat something, anything, for dinner before she had a real half-birthday cupcake, she said she was full.
Given a little gift of princess stickers by her elder sister, who came up with the idea all herself, she barely said thanks.
So, I swear, we are seriously considering cutting the number of birthday celebrations in this house in half. Cutting all the way back to…one a year.

You may think you know when your half-birthday is, but you can’t be sure until you check the Half Birthday Calculator. Really, there is one.

The latest in egg-technology, Moms and Dads. I give you the talking egg.
Seriously, how many days until you dunk these in water and then lift up a bunch of garbage in the kitchen trash can and bury them under it? (C’mon, like I’m the only one who’s ever disappeared an annoying toy that way.)
Two days? One?
I’m going to stick with the old fashioned means of finding over-hidden easter eggs: Waiting until they stink enough to home in on them.
But hey, if you are a parent of young kids and you don’t have enough beeping, honking and talking stuff in the house to annoy you, go ahead.
A clutch of electronic Easter eggs runs $14.99.

Back when I was growing up, I remember there for a while my parents asking other adults whether they had a junk drawer. I think both asker and answerer always felt better to know that the other people were junky enough to have a whole drawer.
Flash forward, and American culture has coursened. We don’t have a junk drawer, we have “crap bowls.” We had one and it got filled with old batteries, glue sticks, valuable pieces of paper, a baby monitor, maps, key chains, keys that aren’t on chains and we don’t know what they open.
Then we got another crap bowl, and that got filled with paper objects, like surveys that we intend to fill out some day, and flyers for programs we’d like to attend, a torn piece of paper with a baby sitter’s phone number on it.
Then some other things piled up, in piles, on our kitchen counters and island, and wife got a plastic yellow bin to put all that crap in so she can go through it some day when she has time.
I predict it’ll be “some day” in 2025.
I was explaining all this to a friend, while he was over one night watching basketball and both of us were complaining about crap and neither doing anything about it.
He said he and his wife got tired of the crap piles on their kitchen island. They got a table, to trap all the stuff as it came into the house, to prevent it from crapping up their island.
Now they have junk piled onto a table by the front door and piled on their counters.
I blame it all on flat surfaces.
Maybe on every flat surface in the house, we could install pigeon spikes.

Tomorrow is school picture day for Fontaine. First grade.
We discussed it tonight at dinner. We suggested that, after dinner, she go upstairs and pick out an outfit.
She informed she would be dressing as a caveman.
(I sensed she might have school-picture day confused with an amalgam of Halloween and a Geico commercial, but I let the string play out.)
“I’m going to wear a dirt skirt and a headband made of sand.”
Princess Elizabeth barely looked up from what she was doing, i.e., not eating dinner.
“When it’s my picture day,” Elizabeth said, “I’m going to dress pretty.”
Now, I’m not saying anything was meant by that. I’m not saying it’s always the beautiful ones who can incinerate a rival with a few well-chosen verbal smart bombs.
What I am saying is: Ouch.

There for a little while the other night at dinner we were actually having a conversation as though we were a family of humans.
Elizabeth told us about her day at pre-school, then Fontaine explained that they had an assembly at school. A musician.
What kind of instrument did he play, or did he sing?
“To be honest,” she said, “I can’t really remember. He did Twinkle Twinkle Little Star and I started falling asleep right away.”
Flashback: Six-plus years ago. First baby. Colic. Refused to be put to sleep, screams at us all the time, we hold her and sway with her and sing songs over and over and over again.
Songs like, “Just What Makes That Silly Old Ant” and “Rock-a-bye baby” and “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head” and “You Are My Sunshine” and “Twinkle Twinkle.”
Funny, one of them finally worked. Six years too late.
That’s one slow, time-release lullaby.

The image is called “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star,” by Japanese artist Chiho Aoshima.

I used to work at The Sentence Factory with a reporter who claimed you could conduct an entire interview using one phrase:
“Why is that?”
No matter what the subject said, the reporter could get a more detailed answer by just responding, “Why is that?”
Further answering…
And again, “Why is that?”
I found myself on the wrong side of this circular illogic the other morning. It seems at some point every kid goes through the phase in which you say something, and she just responds, “Why?”
It started like this: Rosebud, sit down and I’ll get you some breakfast.
“Why?”
Because, I need you to sit down, so you don’t fall off of that chair and get hurt.
“Why?”
Because you insist on standing on the chair for every meal and you’ve fallen off about fifty times and ended up crying like a wounded animal.
“Why?”
I guess because you’ve seen how your sisters react when something bad happens, so you think the proper way to respond to an accident is to scream as loudly as you can and disturb as many people as possible.
“Why?”
I don’t know, it just started with Fontaine and she had colic and screamed at us for four months and then she got rid of colic and continued to yell and then we had Elizabeth and we told Fontaine that if she didn’t tone it down, Elizabeth would get loud, but she didn’t and then you came along and picked it up from the two of them and now the house frequently sounds like I imagine the crowd would at a pro wrestling event.
“Why?”
Because, that’s why. Just because.
Now sit down.
Please.
I’ll give you a cereal bar.
“Why?”
Because you like them.