Seamonkeys

Recently we decided to grow seamonkeys.
If you have never undertaken this endeavor, you should. You buy a little package with three packets. The first has chlorine remover, the second has eggs, and the third has food. The eggs looked like white powder. We put it in and waited. After about a week they looked like this.

You don't have to feed seamonkeys very much, after all they are quite small. Initially you wait a week and then its every other day. All you do is feed them a tiny little scoop, which I let Elias and Sophia do in turn. Sophia really likes to feed the seamonkeys.

Unfortunately, for the seamonkeys, they really like to eat.

"nest-nurturing Barbie"

Sophia is getting more conscientious about handling the baby gently. occassionally. as you can see, she won't wear 2 shoes outside, or anywhere, and prefers none. she has been illicitly picking people's flowers much less lately.
see, she has this natural insolence that makes her seem much tougher than she really is. Don't misunderstand, she is plenty tough, with a host inborn emotional immunities. it's just that it's hard to remember that, like most of us, she gives better than she gets. she has weird ideas abt popular culture and its significance, even at this age. she likes to repeat phrases and idioms she hears on the tv. this means she is paying attention, not letting anything slip past unnoticed, and i love her for it; it also means she too often sounds like the tv. she is a middle child and i understand a lot of what that must mean for her. it should mean for me that i identify more closely with her. but when people lucidly reflect things abt us back to ourselves, it is not always very comfortable.
here she is tending to a nest she created. the one-shoed sophius migratorius.

Cybele the baby-toddler

The other babys had green eyes. The other babys had hair that sat flat onto their heads. The other babys walked a little earlier. But, the other babys turned into baby-toddlers much later. Just three weeks ago Cybele could only stand-step-sit and now she is tearing up the house. She walks like a drunken sailor across entire rooms, finds a surface; table; leg; wall; anything to steady herself, and then moves on to the next room. She owns the floor and demands it readily. She once was likened to a piece of luggage by her father when asked how difficult it was to move from two to three children. That was before she became the baby-toddler. Now she screams for the floor and cork-screws in your lap if you try to make her sit still for a moment.

She moves throughout the entire day with a sense of urgency or panic that somehow she is going to lose this ability to walk and play like her older siblings. She is in constant motion and is supremely difficult to keep up with now. When she falls asleep it is a resignation and she will never admit she needs it, but before she knows it, it is tomorrow and she is running down the hall.

baby-slappin' the man

Cybele has become stronger and more inistent. She insists on her innate entitlement to the floor/ground, wherever we are. Even in the hospital. It seems to me that she enjoys the manual manipulation of toys a great deal. She likes to sit like this ^ and just goes to work. Mary gave her an obsolete remote control ( i am not completely comfortable with where this could lead ), and the baby loves it. It is here sidekick, she rarely feels compelled to lay it down, i'm pretty sure she gesticulates and punctuates her verbal expressions with it. I guess i can understand how she feels. Somehow, either by intuition or observation, she has detected the magical, if latent, powers that are contained within it. The other day she was squirming and demanding the floor, but it wasn't possible; to distract her, i took her hand and smacked my face with it repeatedly. She was distracted, and positively delighted. And the envy of many.

song and dance man

Elias danced more than any baby i've known. he's demonstrated remarkable musical capacity from an early age. nearly as soon as he could talk, he could hum/sing peices of music he'd heard; when it was a peice of classical music w/o words, he would supplement his own based on what he could see out his car window, but the rhythm and melody stayed pefect. he's is off to a scorching start to piano lessons, picking up the two-hand thing straightaway. he is a kind and dutiful big brother, and very thoughtful. i am surprised that at only 5-6 yrs old, i was virtually completely comfortable leaving the baby in his care (for an entire minute or so at a time). he is also immensely strong: i saw him recently carrying his little sister, Sophia (whom you may recall is a stringbean, but a 4 yr old stringbean nonethless), crosswise, like a little baby, with no visible strain. el chico es fuerte como el toro. like his mother, his sneezes come in couplets/triplets. one is never enough.
his piety makes me try harder.

bumblebee

A long time ago, I explained to Elias that he need not be scared of bumblebees because they do not sting unless provoked. Bumblebees do not sting unless they really really mean it, because they only get to sting once and then they die. I didn't think that Elias paid much attention to this explanation because he continued to shriek and runaway any time a bumblebee was within 100 feet of him but about ten months ago I learned that he had indeed paid attention. Some of you may remember a trip that Elias and I took to ny. We were flying from Indy to Pittsburg to NYC to attend Emily's wedding in upstate ny. Cybele was a few weeks old and we were flying out on the last flight of the day and getting into ny late the day before the wedding. Or so we thought. When we got to Pittsburg we learned that we were less than ten minutes too late to board the plane. The airlines, being the airlines, said oops and smiled so I turned to Elias and said "do you think we should drive through the night?". Elias being Elias said yes and off we went. After collecting our bags and collecting a rental car, Elias and I headed off into the night at about 11pm to drive from Pittsburg to NYC. Unfortunately we were interrupted by the rumbling in our tummies as we had forgotten to eat dinner. At 11pm there are not very many options so we did something we had never done before, we went to McDonalds. I apologized to Elias about the food, which I had spent five years telling him we would never eat, and that it was bad and that only people like George Bush ate it, and then I made him promise never to tell Papa. I continued to explain that we would only go this one time. That his first time at McDonalds would be his last time at McDonalds and then Elias said to me "just like the bumblebees". At first I thought Elias was just starved, tired and delusional, but I asked him to explain what he meant and he said, "our first time at McDonalds is our last time at McDonalds, just like the first time a bumblebee stings is the last time a bumblebee stings" Yeah, it was kinda like that.

pickin' flowers

it is not a coincidence that you can substitute her name into 'how do you solve a problem like___?' without disrupting the rhyme scheme. sophia, hmmm...ummm, well. walks on tiptoes, almost all the time. likes baby-dolls. and tv. she is a sprite. has no regard for rules. functional immunity to discipline. calls me 'poppy'. that buys her a wide berth. she's agressively affectionate toward the baby. she can turn it on and off precipitously. when she turns it on, you need a visor. does a pretty damn fine immitation of tom waits singing 'pasties and a g-string'.

Quitting tookies

Sophia turned 4 at the beginning of this month, but her annual check-up didn't happen until the end of the month. Dr. Ducky saw Sophia and then patted me and Tristan on the back for a job well done. I am proud to say that she is in the 90th percentile for height and the 50th percentile for weight, otherwise known as the Gilkey-stringbean physique. I really don't understand exactly how she does it considering she shuns most anything if it is not made from pork or deep-fried (i.e. "I want the chicken with the brown skin all-round it"). Everything did seem to be going well at the appointment until we told Dr. Ducky that Sophia is still using her tookie. The tookie had to stop. We have tried many times to get rid of the tookie, but I just can't say no to Sophia. One time we even decided to put the tookie under Sophia's pillow for the toothfairy to collect. The toothfairy did come to collect and she left a very generous donation, but Sophia wouldn't have it and demanded that she bring her tookie back. The toothfairy has refused to make any more trips to Sophia's bed out of fear that she would need to double-back again later in the night. So the tookie has stayed for 4 long years and become something very near and dear to Sophia's heart. Dr. Ducky was not feeling the tookie love and she said what I have been unable to say, no more tookies. The first night Sophia seemed a little confused about the lack of tookie and told me that she was worried about her tookie. I reassured her, kissed her goodnight, crossed my fingers and that was the end of it. No middle of the night fits, no crying about not having a tookie, just a little whine, some concern for the tookie's well-being and Sophia went to sleep. The second night was about the same as the first. Sophia went to bed promptly and I thought all was well with the world. Unfortunately, when we woke up in the morning we found a chair in the kitchen right next to the cabinet where the tookies live and then as we expected, found a tookie in the mouth of four year old Sophia who really worries about tookies