Team Lank

"O say, can you see?..."

"...O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave!"

As always, Alice watches eagle-eyed and then demands in on the action. Here she climbed the podium, stared at me intently, and kept singing a loud "Da da!" until I'd repeat "The Star Spangled Banner" for her--over and over.

***

Edith may have medalled in the holly-branch fencing competition as an individual, but for the most part it is teamwork these days, at home and at school. Edith and Alice are having ever more fun with each other, as Alice comprehends most of what is said to her now and is making her own wishes very clear. The girls seem to complement each other well: Alice is generally patient and resourceful, able to cope with being turned away from a special art project or prized book of Edith's and find something of her own to do nearby when prohibited from big-girl activities. In general, however, Edith is exceptionally generous with her things and her time, and we don't have much squabbling. Alice dotes on Edith but also loves to ham it up herself, and the two excel at making each other laugh. And Tom and I admittedly enjoy having a new ally in our corner when Edith loses her still-short temper over some triviality and Alice mocks her. "Aagggh!!!" screams Edith angrily over a piece of bread dropped on the floor. Alice stares at her, then perfectly matches the "Aagggh!!!" Tom and I smile down our sleeves. For her part, Edith joins us in head-shaking when Alice appears ready to hurl herself off the bed or climb over the back of her high chair.


Yet despite her incessant one-year-old mobility, Alice already appears poised to follow her sister in an avid love of reading. Her first request most mornings, repeated throughout the day, is "Buh! Buh!" as she heads for her bookshelf to find one of her favorites. (She now has strong enough preferences that I just added a sidebar library list to the blog for her.) Her daily reports from daycare also often say that she requested to be read many books. Book in hand, she settles into our laps and pages through sequentially, asking us to name unfamiliar objects or pointing to favorite objects and naming them herself (as she did throughout the Ash Wednesday service with the book I brought in an effort to keep her quiet. "Alice sure knows her words!" said more than one member of the congregation.)


Transferring literary knowledge to life the other morning, Alice approached a sleepy Bismarck, planted herself in front of his nose, and cheered, "Do[g], go!" In general, she appears to be a more instinctive animal lover than Edith, keying in on Bismarck, wanting to feed him treats, and expressing concern in the mornings that he get to go outside.

Edith's love of animals tends toward the plush variety, for whom she plans and builds elaborate homes, towns, and kingdoms--shades of her Uncle Peter. Today we operated a bird hospital for her toy seagull, Fly-Out-For-Fish Seagull (nickname: Fly-Out -for-Fish), and his three babies. She continues to have a boundless imagination for pretend play but even more often these days is enthusiastic about conducting projects. She wants to build a fort and have a pretend battle like the children in Roxaboxen, or she envisions a bridge from her dresser to her bed, or we're trying to create perfume. As always, she insists on others' participation in these activities, which can be an endurance test for those of us with less imagination or enthusiasm for the task at hand. Oh, how we look forward to the day when Alice is up to cutting and stapling together cardboard skyscrapers or mixing smelly potions!

In the meantime, Edith does have enthusiastic participants in her classmates. One of the joys of recent months has been seeing how close she and the seven other kids in her pre-K class have become. It's such a pleasure to hear her talk about them with intimate knowledge and appreciation of who they are and of the fun they've had together. She runs into school in the morning eager to see them and often isn't ready to leave in the afternoon. This past week she faulted us once for arriving fifteen minutes earlier than usual, cutting short her play time. Another day when we arrived, Mr. Allan was calling out the names of kids who would take the first bathroom run of the morning. The four named kids got into a huddle, piled up their hands, and chanted, "What's gonna work? TEAMWORK!" and then ran off to the bathroom. Okay, I'm not sure what team potty use looks like and maybe don't want to know. But the general sentiment was great.

We enjoy the other kids in her class ourselves and have fun in the afternoons looking with Edith and Adam in detail at the underwater village they created together at the sand table or admiring the clown make-up she and Ruth applied to each other. The school's philosophy of letting children's interests guide both the daily activities and the curriculum seems to work especially well with the pre-K kids, who seem so comfortable and at home in the free-flow space for which they have assigned weekly responsibilities but in which they also enjoy a fair amount of freedom.

Edith's class has been deep into a study of ocean life for some time now, and most days our trips home are punctuated by lessons in the eating habits of baleen whales or the function of echolocation. Her newfound interest in science is a delight to her non-scientific parents. In addition to sea life, she and I had a great conversation the other day after she asked, "How can I lift my book if gravity is pulling everything down?" So we have been talking gravity for several days now--and with it, mass, density, and force. This evening she was getting a heavy bottle of apple juice out of the refrigerator, and as she heaved it onto the counter she was saying,

"Oof! You've got a lot of mass, apple juice! I know it feels like the apple juice is giving me a hard time, but really it's the gravity pulling on the apple juice. But I'm just saying, 'No, gravity, my muscles can pull harder on this apple juice in the opposite direction to lift it.' But they can't pull hard enough in the opposite direction on the house."

Other recent Edithisms that we've enjoyed, as she adopts a new set of verbal quirks and mannerisms:

"My, but Torrey upsets me! He almost always has his shoelaces untied. When we go on walks at school, Ms. Neelam knows that I am bothered because I almost always walk right behind Torrey, and I have to keep my eyes on the sidewalk the whole time to make sure I don't step on his laces and trip him. It frustrates me."

and

"Will illusion be on television tonight?"

Illusion?, I ask.

"Yeah, illusion. You know, where they lie on their backs on the sleds and go shooting down the track?"

Our lives these days may feel like the luge, hurtling us around blind curves on the edge of our runners, only barely hanging on. But Tom and I feel blessed every day to be on a team with these kids.

When you work for the Masters of the Universe...

...they remind you repeatedly, as forecasters warn and lesser beings run for cover, that whatever may rain from the heavens, their educational mission is too important to be interrupted and the show must go on. And since they are masters of the universe, weather sent by lesser divinities is nothing they won't conquer.

So having heard the cocky confidence, the contemptuous dismissals, and the unmistakable guilt tripping in their statements Tuesday night as the storm moved in, I found it nothing short of miraculous to wake up Wednesday morning to a text message stating that all classes were canceled. Apparently everyone who was anyone at Princeton found it equally hard to believe. Our power was out at home, but when it returned at the end of the day and I checked email, I saw that the official cancellation was followed by an immediate round of tsk-tsking by middle managers who expressed their surprise and urged us to make up the classes: they seemed afraid to be caught looking neutral about, let alone pleased by, a day off.

And today we were indeed back in the saddle, though schools were still closed, though most campus events involving anyone coming from more than five miles away were canceled, though all paths were ice, and though the main door to my department was unopenable due to the wall of snow in front of it. In a meeting with top brass I heard elaborate disavowal of anything to do with the closing and thinly veiled scoffing at it. A new flurry of emails from middle management continued to urge making up the "lost" day. Imagine: An event not of Princeton's making, yet the university had to bend to it. Never doubt the secular liberal intellectual elite thinks it runs the world.

My class discussions today focused on Booker T. Washington's appeal for an educational system in which students' own manual labor on campus would both aid the institution and contribute to their own moral improvement. But the students I polled spent yesterday organizing mass snowball fights and building igloos in which to have their evening cocktails, while unseen hundreds of staff braved treacherous conditions to get in from points far outside the Princeton housing market to labor round the clock clearing paths and making food for the revelers. "We are a residential campus," said the top brass. "We don't close." "Employees choose to live outside Princeton at their peril," said one myopic graduate student.

But never mind. Many of us got a day! And a good thing, too, since with power lines down at both ends of our street, white-out conditions, and two little kids in a cold dark house, I wasn't inclined to go anywhere. The dedicated electric company workers got the power back on by noon, with only a few shorter interruptions thereafter, and from then on we enjoyed ourselves thoroughly.

"This is nothing, Edith. When I was little, a real snow used to come up to your waist..."

At midmorning, after the first wave of snow, conditions still seemed manageable.

But by afternoon, a brief jaunt outside was enough to create a mini-mountain of snow on one's head.

The cause of the power outage was a tree that felled two telephone poles and a bunch of wires at one end of our block. The PSE&G guys were out there all day...

...well into the afternoon whiteout conditions. Around 5pm a snow-laden line next door came down. This morning as we headed out to the university, we encountered police at the busy Harrison Street intersection of our street guiding traffic around yet another set of downed wires. They also pulled us over and forbid our going any further until we cleared the 18 inches of snow off the roof of the car.

The snow didn't affect tourism in Mousetown, where a bevy of visiting animals listened to an address by King Cherry, a mouse, and Queen Golden, a filly.

Edith was transfixed by Ghostbusters--she kept protesting it was too scary but couldn't stop watching and when it ended, asked to watch it again.

We also made Valentines cupcakes.

Tom packed some up, and we brought them to the workers in the cherry pickers. Along the way we met about half our neighbors, out shoveling for the second time that day, knowing they'd have to do a third round in the morning. It was nice to have an easy conversational opening with everyone; we haven't met so many people since moving here. Among our new acquaintances was a family two doors down with a four-year-old boy who will start kindergarten with Edith next year. Tom pulled the kids together in our sled.

Snow day!

Edith and I had been rooting for another snowstorm as in December, and we got it this past weekend--though not like our relatives to the south. This was one of those storms that really tapered off toward the edges, and while Mom-mom and Pop-pop were stranded in blizzard-like whiteout conditions in Delaware and Philly got 28 inches, we got about 9, and our friends a bit north of here on the Garden State Parkway got 2 inches.

But it was good for one day's worth of enforced family time at home, for which we were grateful. With the YWCA closed and Tom's Saturday teaching obligations canceled, he and I took turns spelling each other with the kids for a rare morning of sleeping late.

Tom went in to do some hospital visitation around noon, just as Alice went down for a nap, and Edith and I built a town out of scrap cardboard and milk jugs before getting to work on her Valentines. (I cut out the construction paper hearts; she addressed and signed them.)

Sometime in the afternoon, Edith asked out of the blue whether she could get herself an engagement ring, since Torrey seemed to be taking a long time about it. That led to her planning her wedding more extensively, a conversation for which I got out the video recorder at the tail end.

After spending most of the day in the house, we finally roused ourselves when Tom got home from work and went to check out what Edith's babysitter had long described as the perfect little sledding hill behind her house. We called over first to make sure it was okay to take them up on their invitation to check it out, and Claire and her parents all wound up coming outside to sled with us, which was lots of fun. While Alice watched warily from the sidelines, Edith really got into it. Here she enjoyed going down with Claire and Claire's mom, but by the end she was going by herself. She was very proud of the family distance record that she and Tom set, too.

Fears at four

Since we were talking in the comment section on the last post about preschoolers and fear, I thought it was worth mentioning my exchanges with Edith tonight after bedtime. Tom and I have been told that four is the age of fears, as children start to be aware of the many things that can go wrong. It certainly seems an apt description of Edith, who in the last year has expressed all sorts of anxieties that weren't on the radar screen before.

At the same time, we are frequently reminded that her fearfulness, like that in a dream, doesn't track predictably with what adults would expect to be frightening.

Like tonight. A few minutes after I'd put her to bed under her canopy listening to the Odyssey on CD, she called me back in.

"I heard a noise," she said. "Like a rustling that won't go away." I'd noticed that noise when putting her to bed and identified it as the noise made by air from the vent blowing her trash-can liner. I moved the trashcan, and the noise stopped.

"Oh," she said in relief. "I thought it was maybe the floor starting to catch on fire."

I left, but a few minutes later she called again. I asked what it was this time.

"I wish you wouldn't close my canopy that way, so that it looks like a mountain," she complained. I tried to figure out what she meant and saw that she was pointing to the "V" made by the negative space between the two edges of the canopy curtain. I pulled the edges together more tightly, so the gauze completely surrounded her with no gaps.

"Is that better?" I asked.

She nodded, snuggling down into the blankets once more. "When you close it like a mountain, it reminds me of a volcano, and it makes me think a volcano might erupt in my room." Then suddenly she sat up again, looked around her at the gauzy canopy, and asked with evident satisfaction, "You know what it reminds me of now?" I couldn't guess. "It's like being in the Land of the Dead! You see why? Like, the mist all around Odysseus. Cool. I'm sleeping in the Land of the Dead."

And she lay down with a smile and closed her eyes.

Interpretation requested

Last week was "O" week in Edith's pre-K. As part of studying the letter "O" they watched a live-action video about an aquarium where the staff kept finding dead sharks floating in the deep sea tank when they arrived in the mornings and couldn't figure out why the sharks were dying. (Yes, I was a bit surprised that this was deemed pre-K appropriate, but what do I know?) Finally the staff staked the place out overnight and discovered that the blue-ringed octopus was squeezing the sharks to death.

So Edith tells us all about this in the evening on the way home from school. The next morning I mention it to Mr. Allan when dropping her off (in the guise of, "Hey, so this account of Edith's sounded wild--did I get this story right?).

Yes, said Mr. Allan, that was one fierce octopus. And, he said, the three girls in the class kept begging him to run the part where the octopus is caught squeezing a shark over and over again. Edith laughed and nodded. Meanwhile, said Mr. Allan, the boys covered their eyes and said they couldn't stand it. Torry covered his eyes and nodded.

Was this simply a small sample of kids whose reactions happened to break down along gender lines? Or does this one bear some gender analysis? Anyone?