Baby Ada is growing quickly and is doted on by everyone in the house. She says mama, dada and da dun (all done). There has been some discussion about whether she also says "Hi!". The rest of the time she babbles nonsense that no one can understand...but it sounds like we should be able to. She also waves goodbye, claps and dances. Occasionally she will sign all done, but most of the time when you ask her if she is all done she just looks at the ceiling fan. She crawls, climbs up on furniture and wrecks havoc around the house (although baby Darwyn still has her beat in that regard). She is just starting to stand on her own unsupported, so she will probably walk in the next few months. She loves to play peekaboo and be tickled and she has also just started playing chase. She self feeds and tries to feed others as well. She finally got two teeth at ten and a half months. She continues to be very sunny and easy going. Anyway, enjoy a few cute videos I captured on my phone of her milestones (and a couple cute photos thrown in for good measure).
Video of Ada first learning to crawl (sorry it is sideways):
Ada plays wears the baby:
Two videos of Ada with Cats. Ada loves animals. The second video is mediocre but includes nice audio of Ada babbling.
Max has turned six! There was a time I truly believed that he would NEVER be six. He had a great birthday party. This year he wanted a pokemon party. I know nothing about pokemon, so Jose helped plan things. We played a couple pokemon games...had a pokemon cake and played the now obligatory chase dad around the yard game. Chasing dad the super villain was so popular last year that it is now a staple party activity. This year I had to participate (I did not have the excuse of being pregnant). Dad and I were a pokemon team called team rocket. We had a pokemon battle with the kids. They had to tag us six times to win. It was very popular.
Traditionally we have asked for no gifts at our kids birthday parties, but my kids have now caught on that other children get gifts at their birthdays, so this year things were different. Max wanted presents. I sat him down to talk to him about gift etiquette.
Me: If someone gives you a present Max, you need to say thank you and be grateful.
Max: What if I don't like it?
Me: Even if you don't like it. You pretend to like it.
Max: Isn't that lying?
I went on to try to explain the intricacies of lying. How it mattered who you were lying to and why. And that in this case, you were lying to prevent hurting someone.
Me: Besides, if you are grateful for the gift someone gives you, they are more likely to want to give you gifts in the future right?
The lesson really stuck. Max definitely wanted more gifts in the future and "it will hurt others" is usually a very effective motivator for him. He was careful to REALLY appreciate every gift at his party. The kids sat around him in a circle. With his first gift he received a beautiful homemade card. To make the paper card shaped, it had been folded in half twice then illustrated on the front and in side. But if you unfolded the paper the whole way one side was completely blank. Max took out the card and unfolded it so he was staring at the blank side. Then his whole face lit up in mock adoration.
Max : Oh wow! I really love it!
Later Darwyn offered Max a card. She had gotten him a gift, but forgotten to make a card. No problem, Darwyn is a big advocate of recycling. A day or two earlier she had made a card for some new children she met in our neighbourhood named Oliver and Avery, but hadn't given it to them yet. She grabbed this card and offered it to Max.
Max: (slowing sounding out the words) To O-l-i-v-e-r and A-v-e-r-y.......uh....Oh THANK YOU DAR!!!! I really love it.
Darwyn beamed. Max may not be the best actor, but he is a sweet little boy and his acting was good enough for her.
Greta took the kids tromping down the Laurel Creek trail this afternoon with other kids from another family as part of "forest school". They took along some scrap lumber to make a fort or treehouse. They found a great spot by the creek---a large, sideways growing tree. They nailed a few pieces of plywood and two-by-fours into various parts of the tree to make a "cave", a fort, and a few other structures I never saw.
After dinner we returned to the site so the kids could show off their creation to daddy. We arrived to see their construction completely destroyed only a few short hours after it was built. Some pieces of lumber and duct-taped tree branches had been launched clear across the creek, the rest were strewn about on the ground. Someone had littered a cigarette package along with numerous cigarette butts.
Naturally, the kids were upset. Darwyn was melancholy but Max was especially hurt by the incident. At first he seemed fine---perhaps he hadn't yet grasped the meaning of what he saw. He burst into tears all of a sudden, saying, "If we rebuild it they'll just come back!" It was another one of those moments in which a parent can see a piece of his child's innocence disappear.
Max's words haunt me. What broke him was not the fact that his fort was wrecked, nor the fact that it was wrecked by some idiot vandal. Rather, it was the realization that he was trapped. There was nothing he could do to recover. He could build it again, but the vandals will just wreck it again straight away.
His words resonated with me because I have the same tendency to obsess about every bad thing that ever happens to me at the hands of some malicious jerk. I'm a law-abiding citizen, so I cannot take revenge. Even if some crime had been committed, it would be hopelessly impractical to seek help from the authorities. The only remaining conclusion is that I need to pick up sticks and move somewhere else where I hope no one will bother me. This line of thought turns even the most trivial of bad experiences into a feeling that I'm being oppressed by pure evil. Talk about first-world problems!!!
Maybe my tendency to blow bad experiences out of proportion is not so unusual. But it sure was eerie to see Max jump straight to the same feeling of helplessness that I often feel. If it looks like heritable behaviour and it smells like heritable behaviour...
After talking it over as a family, we decided the kids would write a note to the vandals. The note will explain that this fort was built by Max and Darwyn and their friends, and that they were very sad to see it destroyed. We'll laminate it and tack it to the tree.
It probably won't have any effect on anything, but at least we'll feel like we did something rather than nothing. We'll all hope that one or two vandals will see the note and feel guilty, and maybe our efforts will hasten them toward the day when they finally snap out of their herd delinquency phase.
