Pasta bowls with silver linings

I'm thinking again about Linguistics 114, that introductory exploration to wordplay that I enjoyed freshman year. One of the things we mused on was the idea of compound nouns, and how it is that we understand the implicit relationship between the combined words. The example from class: How do we know that horseshoes are shoes that go on horses, while crocodile shoes are shoes made for humans from crocodile skin? And what would you do if, in fact, you wanted to signal that someone had undertaken the amusing (and foolhardy) project of fashioning shoes for crocodiles to wear? How do you infuse your new compound noun with the right meaning?

I'm thinking about it, because I want to say that we had two snow days this week...when in fact, we had almost no snow at all. But snow day is a familiar compound that immediately signals to the initiated, "days on which school was closed." I can't say that we had two cold days, because although Tuesday and Wednesday were indeed frigid, that new compound doesn't convey the full meaning I'm intending.

But now that I've belabored the point for two paragraphs...

Tom and the girls were both stir crazy after the first day at home. On a bona fide snow day, after all, you can go out and sled and build snowmen and other such delights, whereas on a cold day the whole point is to keep kids indoors. So Wednesday Tom resolved to make it to work no matter what, Alice was raring to go back to bunny school (which was still open), and we decided Edith would accompany me to work as my helper. I have vivid memories of how special it was to go to work with my parents on snow days. Even though I don't have a commuter train trip, a big city delicatessen where my breakfast order is pre-made, and a 19th-story office view to offer Edith, I thought she might get some of the same kick out of participating in the grown-up routine even so. 

I did have the paper clips with which to make a chain. And while Edith completed a paper clip necklace, she also helped me hog out and organize my office, tackling stacks of paper I'd let accumulate since September. (On the block plan, you no sooner organize your books and photocopies and file folders for one class than you're teaching another one.) She learned the art of paper-clipping a stack of pages together (I never before appreciated how tricky this can be at first) and of stacking alternating packets of papers perpendicular to each other. She fetched items from the printer, and at the end of the day she was at first repulsed and then thrilled--in the way peeling the lint from the dryer trap is thrilling--to clean the coffee grounds out of the grinder and wash out the pot and component coffee maker pieces. 

At mid-day we had lunch in the student cafeteria, complete with soft-serve ice cream and impromptu visits with a variety of her friends, all of whose parents had brought them to work and some of whom had no connection to the college but were there eating lunch with their parents anyway because they'd heard it was the place to be.

The best part for me was having unhurried time in the middle of the day to spend with Edith, when we weren't tired or strung out or on the dinner-bath-bedtime clock. And I confess, having her there kept me on task cleaning the office without stopping to check email, in a way that wouldn't have happened otherwise.

The next morning when I told Edith that school was back in session (never mind that the temperature hadn't risen--it was supposed to rise later in the day), she rolled over in bed and wailed, "But I wanted to be your office helper!"

***

Alice also wants to help these days--except when she wants to obstruct, boss, order, defy, command, or dictate, which is ever more of the time. Two years old indeed, and rarely an awake moment that she's not talking. The other day she was testing my patience with exacting commands about how to place her dinner plate and sippy cup, or some such, and I asked, "Alice, why are you being such a bossy boots?" To which she promptly and confidently replied,

"I a pasta bowl."

(I believe she was told so by Fraulein Josephine, four governesses ago?) Impossible or not, she unwittingly earned herself a new family nickname.

***

On the other hand, she was very sweet this evening. We were enjoying a family Friday movie night on the couch, when I rubbed my eye and accidentally pushed one of my contacts out of place. I massaged my eyelid for awhile, but I couldn't get the contact to come down from somewhere up in the crease, and finally I asked Tom to pause the movie while I went up to the bathroom to take care of it. I couldn't find it--could feel it but couldn't see it or get it to move--and was trying to stave off the mild panic that that situation can cause, when with a frustrated sigh, I decided I'd give up and postpone finding it until the end of the movie, so the girls didn't wait too long.

But by that time Alice, who had been asking to watch the end of the movie and had been told they were waiting for Mommy to fix her contact, had decided to help. When I came back down, she decreed, "No! I HELP you!" We returned to the bathroom, Alice leading the way. She turned on the light and then stood there smiling happily, watching me, saying, "I help you. You fix it, and then we watch the end of the movie, Mommy. It okay. I help you." And lo and behold, the contact did slither into view, and I got it out and put it and its mate away, and Alice smiled, took my hand, and announced, "Now we watch the end of the movie." She gave me a huge hug and kiss, then led the way back downstairs.

***

The other fun thing recently has been Edith's newfound love for the Charles Lamb prose version of A Midsummer Night's Dream. I'd read it to her once around Christmas, and found the language fairly sophisticated and of course, the plot turns intricate, and thought it may have been a bit much, even in prose. But this week she asked to read "that funny story about all the people in the woods running around falling in love with the wrong person," and she not only reveled in the absurdist plot, but she exactly remembered all its twists and turns, which is more than I can manage between one reading of that play and the next. She even cast a parallel version with people she knows from school and the neighborhood, stopping the story reading periodically to tell the 2011 Manitou Springs version (in which the lovers meet on Pike's Peak, of course). I wrote and cast my first retelling of a play at age 6. Maybe Edith's preparing to do the same?