School Daze

Havana sat down on the sofa and read her book outloud to us. It was a combination of words, and sounds that could be words in a toddlers head. Sometimes the wordsounds were looped together poetry-like and sometimes clumsily piecemealed into sentances apparent.
Then Havana looked up from her book at her audienced parents. "Zip your lips!" Havana quietly commanded, adding, "Throw away the Key!" And then with an appropriate pause for full emphasis she raised her finger, "And listen to me!"
This re-enactment was our first exposure to life inside Havana's story time at her pre-school. We figured it was some kind of outside influence, as she topped her lesson with the hilarious, yet utterly serious, "I've told you 5 times!"
Those poor bloody pre-school teachers.

"No One Likes a Boss"

Family mottos, like the family silver, are most commonly associated with the rich and those that try to ape them. But if a family motto is no more than the parents establishing its own slogan, its own moral banner, why should we not have them too?
So we have one. It's not in Latin and it has not found a home on a wall in our house, but Havana can recite it on command. It's short, as mottos should be and, we hope, pointed. However, just as I was helping Havana recite it, she broke out into a parallel family motto. Aparently Karen has also already established a motto with Havana. One sounds very similar to the other and each was born unaware of its motto-dopple.
So, after a half dozen recitations of "No one likes a boss," Havana broke out into Karen's family motto, the appropriate, "nobody likes a Princess."
So there you go. Two social systems for one. Capitalism and feudalism. We have them covered.

The terrible draw of the Chupee-pacifier-sucker

"that looks good - what is it?"









"and where can I get one?"

the hoarse whisperer

Havana recently got a cold, which may be connected to her last bout of teething, which has given her a rhaspy vocal tone. This has only added an edge to her new fixation with whispering. Now she's whispering with her hoarse voice, communication has taken a few short steps backwards.
Whispering is normally associated with secrets and not with notions such as, "I want my crayons out" or "can I play with my clay." These passtimes are hardly clandestine in our house.
The whispering coincidentally became the fashion some days after the newborn moved in. When there is a diaper to be changed or lactation to be done, someone wanted something else at that same moment. The struggle over parental attention was a war that needed to be fought and won in Havana's eyes.
Timing is important in such a struggle. Almost 6 months after Havana has been potty-trained, she now began to hide in a corner while her mom was totally pre-occupied with breast feeding Ilyana. Then she we would walk in the room bow-legged, with a lump hanging down from her pant seat. This worked. Now, while I'm at work, Karen has been known to jump up with baby secured to the nipple and chase down the dirty bomber. And all three have to make it into the bathroom before a major cleanup is required.
The war to win back full parental attention in one mind, still needed to be fought. Yelling hadn't worked. Ignoring her parents was not going to work and would also defeat the object. So, the whispering had begun. And low and beyold, one parent would stop what they would be doing and ask the other parent, "what did she say?" And it went on, "Hey, Havana what did you say?" She would reduce the decibells and increase the body language, which lured her prey in even closer. The cold and aquired hoarse voice was an asset in this fight.
Finally we cottoned on. We could've begun whispering, as parents, in retaliation. But we're not the children in this relationship. So we didn't. Well, Karen thought it was an immature response if the truth were known.
We still stoop down and ask her to repeat herself as a small concession to a small person confronted with a big change in her world.

Not exactly what we ordered

The three of us were equally excited about the eruption into our world that is Ilyana. Two of the three of us had a closer concept of what to expect from this new development. We did what we could to prepare Havana. But like birthday parties or friends about to visit, sometimes the event is so exciting in a small person's brain that it doesn't allow room for details. Such was Ilyana's birth and consequent first month of life.
Havana has done all a girl could do to get Ilyana to act like the sister she expected. She prodded. She poked. She pulled limbs. Yet Ilyana has not yet acted like a baby sister should. She doesn't talk. She doesn't walk. She can't play. She hardly engages in the simplest of all communications: eye contact. And eye contact. That's okay for teenage love but hardly the first rung of play. And that's what Havana believed we ordered: a playmate. A sister.
Eventually Havana will get a reaction out of Iyana, something more complex than a wail. And even if it's not what she thought we ordered, she doesn't want it returned.

Baby sister born: July 20th 2006

Finally, Ilyana emerged from her mothers bump and joined the rest of us. She came out fighting, screaming and kicking, but is slowly ajusting to our less warm and cozy world.
Havana has been a big sister since Ilyana moved on from being a worm in her mom to being a little baby in her mom. She is dotingly fond of her new playmate and is not too upset that we won't let her tattoo her yet.
Her tattoo days will come.

Karl Marx never said it'd be easy

Raising a child in an anti-capitalist household has its unique challenges. How do we help her see the importance of solidarity and the emptiness of Disney Inc. is an ongoing process. While we encourage her to pick up Marxist literature, das Kapital is a little short on the important attractive pull of goofy images that draws 2-year olds to the page.
Havana and a couple of comrades went out last Sunday to the flea market to give out flyers for people seeking to fight capitalism. Essentially the flyers had things like - "trouble with your landlord, trouble with your boss?" We were looking for a new direct action case to fight for the Campaign for Renters Rights.
Havana was pretty well behaved. She even gave out a few flyers.
A few days later Havana picked up a few flyers on our dining table and handed one to Karen, "are you in trouble? Are you in trouble?" she enquired to her mother with an empathetic look on her face. Karen had missed the flyering and slightly confused asked, "in trouble with who?" to which Havana, thought twice and answered with the only authority figure she could think of: "in trouble with teacher?"
She had picked up from her 4-year old buddy Joaquin that being in trouble with teacher was something to aspire to. As Lenin said, three steps forward and two steps back.

Language, Thought Development and Music

When faced with difficult questions, in particular when her parents are asking her to recollect a common moment, Havana has developed a method. I ask her, do you remember such and such, to which she replies, definitively, "Yes." Encouraged that we are about to have a real conversation, I then ask her the same question, and she glazes over and says, "Tell me!" It goes something like this.
Dad: tell mummy what we did at the park today, do you remember?
Havana: Yes
Dad: well, what did we do?
Havana: Tell me
So what we have here, clinically, is either a child that honestly can't remember anything about what she did at the park today, or can't be bothered to think about it, or doesn't want to get drawn into an innevitably boring conversation at a semi-adult level.
Anyway, the new development, what I call the West Side Story phenomena, is the latest tool our daughter has developed to avoid adult-like conversations.
Havana has over the recent months developed her singing voice. What it lacks in carrying a tune it makes up for in unintentional comic content. Unfortunately, as loving parents, however bad Havana's singing is, it always sounds beautiful to us. For the untrained ear it can be compared to the singing of a happy drunk, a meandering tune that loosely strings together a combination of actual words and phrases, alongside slurred incomprehensible ones.
Karen has never liked Musicals. She conceives them as movies with plots that are irritatingly inturrupted by songs. She considered the Crouching Tiger movie in a similar vein: a plot irritatingly inturrupted by fight scenes.
Well, now after we have repeated the "Tell Me!" saga outlined above, instead of it ending there, Havana has begins to express her inner happy drunk. She just goes off into her own musical composition.
As we attempt to introduce a dialogue she replies by breaking out into song, deliberately aiming to irritatingly interrupt any adult effort to plot a conversation.

Genius and "the name"

Alongside, cleaning behind the fridge and under the bed, our "to do" list got one item shorter this week. With four weeks left in utero, Havana's baby sister finally got a name that has stuck.
For several weeks, months ago, we had the name Catriona, which we thought was pronounced as it looks. We emailed a comrade with that name and found out that it should be pronounced kat-ree-na, which undermined the integrity of our bubble, one which finally burst when we learnt of its roots in a certain Saint Catherine. As concious athiests, we struck that one off.
SO. We kicked around many, many names until Karen told me that we needed to cross the name thing off our "to do" before the baby arrives list. So I suggested we each pick 10 names and sit down and come up with an agreed top 3 list.
Then, out of nowhere, a Name appeared to me. It was a creation of genius. It met our 2 requirements. It was political and it sounded good. I was proud of my own brilliance.
June is currently the month of the 30th anniversary of the Soweto Uprising. A movement of grade school students against the apartheid regime in South Africa which ended in bloodshed, but spirred on a huge movement which eventually brought the apartheid regime down.
Okay, I figured to myself, Soweto doesn't sound like a girl's name. However, I a small reshaping, created, "Soweta." Politically great, and it sounded beautiful. Our quest was now over.
"I've got it" I explained to Karen, "its as good as Havana! It's brilliant!"
Well, that was 2 weeks ago.
I have since run into various friends of Karen, who had heard of "the name." Karen had dismissed the name outright for sounding "just aweful" and then one by one I would overhear her friends joking about how bad "the name" was. I had outdone myself this time.
However, "the name" as it is now known with derision, did help give Karen that small push into deciding an entirely different name which did stick. Ilyana.

The World Cup, TV and the cost to family-pet relations

We considered it our first gift to Havana. When Karen was pregnant with her we got rid of the TV.
Like all households, capitalism flowed in through every pore. Magazines that came home. Junk mail that came through our door. Pop ups on the computer. Radio commercials. We figured we wouldn't keep The Man's machine in the house with its sitcoms that weren't funny and ads for things we didn't want. Stopping short of putting it out on the street, we packed the TV away. That was 3 years ago.
We forgot about the bloody World Cup.
So we dug the thing back out and switched it back on. With help from the lad across the street, we were able to get enough reception to distinguish one team on the pitch from the other.
Havana was of course mesmerized by the new machine. Her clay, crayons, books, lego were discarded as yesterday's fleeting interests. They could hardly compete with the TV.
While in Wales earlier this year we had watched a couple of televised Chelsea soccer matches. My brothers and I grew up in West London, home to Chelsea Football Club. The CFC tattoo on my forearm was all that remained of my strained relationship with Chelsea.
Havana, however, immediately recalled the games we had watched in Britain and when Argentina and Ivory Coast walked on the field, sensing the excitement in the room, she quickly began chanting, "Go Chelsea Go." I explained to Havana a couple of things mum and dad had picked up as internationalists watching the World Cup. We generally supported the least economically advanced team in each game. That seemed to be the socialist thing to do. I consoled Havana also that Chelsea was not a country and would not be playing in the world cup.
I explained that although Chelsea has a single geographic location, it would need to develop a seperate language, seperate cultural identity and lead a succesful movement for national soveriegnty before it could qualify for the World Cup. She listened intently, looked back at the TV and took off where she left off, chanting "Go Chelsea."
In what may seem like an development unconected to the World Cup, Havana has also been developing her pet relationship skills. She now recognizes her place in the combat hierarchy in our house. She is below Karen and I, below our cat, Milou, who can kick any kid's ass, but above our other cat, the appropriately named, Kitten. She chases Kitten, picks her up by her bottom half and generally manhandles her. Her relationship with Kitten is frequently the basis of tedious life lessons on sensitivity and bullying.
During the Holland game today there were many shots at the goal by Serbia and the 7-foot Dutch goalie made many great diving saves. While watching the Argentina game, I noticed out of the corner of my eye, Havana standing upright on one end of the sofa. Her arms were outstretched, she pushed down and dived all the way to the other end of the sofa, as if to catch a shot at the goal. Unfortunately, the recipient of the dive was Kitten, who in a moment of stupidity had fallen asleep, awoken by 28-lbs of 2 year old landing full force on her.
Kitten lived to see another day. I don't know if she'll survive the whole month of world cup games. Perhaps in her small pet cerebrum, she blames the TV for the increased violence in her home.

simplifying the complex can backfire

Sunday morning the three of us are in bed. Havana is leafing through a book. Karen and I are splitting the weekend edition of the capitalist Financial Times.
I turn the page to an ad. It's for some high-end resort in the Carribean. The image shows a woman walking on the beach with a bellboy five steps behind carrying, we presume, her bags.
Havana peaks over and, without encouragement, explains the ad as she sees it.
"That's a worker and that's not a worker" she clarifies. Initially, I was a bit stunned. We hadn't begun our indoctrination on the issue of class and image. But I figure we're making big progress here, so I push the envelope a wee tad.
"Yes" I confirm to her and add, "worker - good" and then point, "bourgeois bad!" She looks at me with furrowed eyebrows. So I repeat, "worker -good, bourgeois - bad!" To which she retorts, "No, daddy, she's not bad. She's a woman."
Outwitted again.
Well, as one stickler for political clarification once said, "theory is grey, but the tree of life is green."

broken sleep and breaking rules

The onset of another teething period has once again cut us all adrift from our full night's sleep. Perhaps the move from her crib to her big girl's bed is interrupting her sleep. Maybe the move into her new room is interrupting her sleep. Whatever the cause, the effect is self-evident: sleep for all the primates in our small tribe has become a more precious commodity lately.
There's not much we can do about broken sleep, however, as parents we can establish some rules for the road that hopefully leads our tiny offspring off to sleep.
When she got bumped up to the monkey room out of her baby room we made some concessions to smooth that process. After her good night story and we depart, she would call out for us, with new and improved excuses: she needed to poop or pee, or she needed a drink. What parent could ignore such demands?
Then there were others excuses for not sleeping. Armed with her newly expanding vocubulary and her very basic conversational skills, she would attempt to engage her parents intellectually. "Daddy, what's vovo and grandpa's dog's name?"
Family trivia exercises were not about to be added to our daughter's very short list of legitimate bed time excuses.
For the first week after Havana was liberated from the cell-bars of her crib to her big girl's bed, it was as if that old crib had left behind an invisible force-field around her new bed. Such is the power of established routine, that it NEVER even occurred to her that she could get out of bed and wander around her room.
Until that one night. The substance of her new reality finally dawned on her. And she began to vacate her bed. We had, perhaps mistakenly, conceded to allowing the light to be left on after we left her. This was a genuine attempt on the part of her caring parents to soften the blow of moving out of her crib.
She began asking for the light to be left on. That should have been a clue. We thought we were helping her transition, but in actuality, we had once again been outwitted by our 2-year old.
We would walk in on her doing all sorts of prohibited past-bedtime activities. We caught her in the act on many occasions. Pj-ed, with her sucker in mouth, looking up innocently with a dozen books scattered over her bed.
Now, as her parents leave her to sleep each night, so too the light once again goes off.
Did she complain? No.
She probably figured she had a good run for her money, but that the law was innevitably gonna catch up with her. And it did.

Know your Ripes!

Havana calls me once or twice a day while I'm at work. (Mom dials.) Our chats normally consist of her telling me what she's doing at that very moment: "I'm eating cereal, daddy" or "I'm reading a book, daddy."
Yesterday while in the car, she told me that she wanted to buckle herself into her carseat while her mother was wrestling to get the job done. I told her, "tell mom, you have your rights!"
Now its her common refrain, except its her ripes,not her rights. She told me today that I had no ripes and that she had taken them from me.
I'm not yet entirely sure what her notion is of her rights. Its probably somewhat of a fusion between some basic human rights and the concept that you should always get that which you demand.
Unfortunately her Miranda rights have yet to be exercised.

Monkey room finished, 2-yr old moved in

Joking, as a blunt instrument of deceit

Resistance to blatantly non-play activities such as teeth cleaning or getting dressed,has been on the rise lately. Havana's blind compliance to adult wisdom has all but disappeared.
When getting ready for bed, we have to close Havana's door or its chasey chasey down the hallway. Last night, at PJ time, she hid in her closet. I enquired on her intensions. "I'm peeing" she said. I immediately switched into cleanup mindset until Ms. Innocent added, "I't's a joke."
Cracking a joke goes beyond simply knowing right from wrong.
From a marxist perspective Havana understanding a joke is her first step into the world of dialectical thought. Joking is not about right or wrong. It demands a basic understanding of the contradiction between right and wrong. Humor I once saw described as objective reality clashing with subjective expectation. To be able to joke one must recognise right and wrong as a single component, opposites united.
But for Havana this new development of being able to joke is most important for another reason. Joking can now be added to Havana's increasingly endless arsenal of excuses for delaying her innevitable bedtime.

Challenging the existing power structure

Havana and I were driving down the road in the truck. Her, car-seated next to me. It was a little warm so I rolled down the window and rested my elbow out into the fresh air. Then a little voice says, "don't do that!" I had no idea what she was referring to. This is not uncommon.
"Close that!" she adds, pointing at the window.
I attempted to engage her in a conversation on my intended goal of opening the window before she finally got to the point: "put your arm in......both hands on the wheel!"
There are now no areas of our life which remain uncontested in the struggle for power in our family.

painting the monkey room

After existing in outline for over a year we finally began to paint the monkey room. This will be the girls' room. Its a jungle mural that my brother painted in outline. Mostly monkeys plus a tiger, lion, snake and sundry tropical characters.
Completely incapable, at this point, of painting within any kind of line much of our time was spent figuring out ways to allow Havana to enjoy herself without doing too much damage to the mural. One was to give her the green paint to color the grass at the bottom. Another, we figured out as we went, wast to water down her paint so dramatically that it could be wiped clean later.
We've been talking about painting for a couple of days. As we entered the room, she turned to me and said to me, "I'm so 'cited." As we get older we learn to control our 'citedness, at our own loss.

Valley of the Witches

Each wet morning, Havana has been walking down to school hand-in-hand with her cousins here in Cymgwrach, south wales. The village name means Valley of the Witches and the public school uniform emblem is a witch on broomstick.
The school seems well funded with small class sizes and warm staff. Saint David's Day was cancelled last week due to heavy snow and so yesterday all the kids dressed up in their traditional welsh costumes for school, including the teachers.
We have four adults and five kids aged 1 to 7 packed into a 3-bedroom terraced house this week. Havana naturally loves it. She is magnetically drawn into the collective self-discipline and chaos of the existing community of kids. She loves sitting to the table for meals with her cousins, but has also slightly overcome her fear of TV, unable to resist the gravitational pull of her young kin.
Last night was bath night, which was a high energy event, but not as crazy as the potential inherent. Havana stood on the weigh scales and announced some sequence of incoherent numbers to everyone,as she does, then walked over to 3-year old Robbie, hugged him circumferentially and announced that she wanted to `scale him' next. He was saved only by the proverbial shortness of attention spans.

The overtures of Onur

Karen's sister and her husband from Toulouse wanted an authentic local breakfast. Stewed tomatoes, bacon,fried eggs and mushrooms all sitting on top of a fried slice (of bread). Pierre concluded that the role of the slice was to absorb the lion's share of grease and that it should not itself be consumed.

Food aside, a 3 year-old across the restaurant kneeled on the back of his plastic bench seat scoping out Havana. Kids have radars for each other when in the adult world.

"Look at that boy's eyes" our daughter exclaimed. We had fed the girl before coming out and conceded to let her wonder the floor of the cafe (pron. caff). She headed towards the young lad and stopped, distracted by some detail which would only distract a 2 year-old.

The boy moved quickly off seat and ran up behind Havana grabbing her and planting a sweet one squarley on her cheek. Stunned, she ran back to us. Some moments later he returned with a lollipop, handing it to her and returning to his seat. This appeared to be a turning point in their relationship and Havana was once again walking in his direction.

Caught off guard by a second kiss, once more she returned to her corner at the bell.

Onur is the son of the Turkish family that ran this authentic british breakfast cafe. This time the 3 year-old was sent over by his dad to brush some lost egg into a dustpan and some moments later to bus a dish or two. Onur seemed both hardworking and unencumbered by male-emotional restraint. A healthy combination for overtures to a young girl.

Finally, a kiss was accepted over the back of one plastic bench seat backed up to another.

As we stood on the windy train platform some minutes later, Havana edged in close to me and asked me, "where'd my buddy go?" The hard cold truth is that she will probably never see Onur again.

Wales Bound

For days we rehearsed the words. “Where we going Wednesday?” “To Wales,” Havana would reply. “How we getting there?” “By Airplane!” she’d reply. Finally she got it. Despite having virtually no concept of any distance of time beyond the immediate, she figured that we were eventually going to Wales and we would be getting there on an airplane.
I knew it had seeped in when she got concerned after I informed her that all three of us would be sleeping on the plane. She responded with a little furrow on the brow asking, “but who’s going to drive the plane?”

Parenting and the Piano Man

Rico called me last night. Rico’s a carpenter and is part of a close-knit group of us who were involved in leading a massive wildcat strike back in ’99.

Next week our family’s heading out to visit my mum and brothers back home and so Rico and I got onto talking about parents.
Rico had a ‘strict’ step dad. He made him pick out the branch that he was going to whip him with. If he ran away, his dad would wait till he was in the shower and catch him and whip him there. My dad was cut of a similar cloth. When we were kids he was a police officer and a violent man. Rico and I joked about how different we are as dads, compared to our own dads.
Karen and I are deliberate parents. There are a lot of theories on methods of early parenting out there. From the ‘let them cry’ theory to ‘attachment theory.’ The method of parenting Karen and I use is closer to attachment theory, although we aren’t about to have our child sleep with us in our bed till she’s a teenager.
Every parent should do whatever they think is best and we don’t judge any parent. But that doesn’t stop us having an idea or two about what we think is best.
The ‘let them cry’ theory, of letting babies cry themselves to sleep, in our eyes, is a method that leads to a kid with a weak sense of self and more likely to be insecure. This method seems to be less popular with working class parents and more popular with parents from the management class.
Karen did a review of Oliver James’ book They F*** You Up – How to Survive Family Life, which anyone can pull down at http://bringdownbush.org/h-r/tfyu.htm. To us, the ideas and evidence of this book confirmed that if you teach a child values of solidarity from the day go, that you will raise a stronger child. We’re trying to raise a fighter that can survive the horrors of this capitalist world.
Back to the phone call. Rico is also trying to dump a piano on me. He’s been long irritating his neighbors with the sounds of this instrument that he ‘appropriated’ about 5 years ago. Rico’s piano skills always sounded beautiful in his own head, but to the rest of the world, that’s where the pleasure started and ended.
Finally, the piano got moved out of the front room and out to pasture in his backyard. Rico not only severed its former rank, but further humiliated it by covering the thing with a big blue plastic tarp. I could tell he was wracked with guilt.
Rico tried to convince me, “it’s only been out there 3 days!” As I inched in interest, I could almost hear his pulse rising, “I could put in my truck for you tonight!” he said.
After I hung up, I pictured Rico stepping out the backyard and patting his piano reassuringly. There was some hope.
I’m gonna call back tomorrow and check with his missus on the piano’s dimensions. Karen remembers the piano being the size of a full-sized truck.

Sweetness and the Proverbial Projectile

In less than a minute, Havana put her entire little body into 3 violent heaving vomits. Two of them as she walked in the front door, and one on her way to the bathroom to clean up. She was drained. Some kind of stomach bug.
I tried to reassure her by telling her that she should feel better now. I think she did. Its not possible to take a bullet for your little one when they’re sick. But human empathy can cut like a knife too.
Karen, in her current state, got a bit more nauseous than one would normally be by that particularly evil penetrating smell.
Well, we cleaned Havana up and lay her down on the sofa. A comrade was over who’s visiting from New Orleans where he’s been fighting evictions. Havana listened to our boring conversation and began to drift off in her cozy blanket comfort zone. For nigh on two years she has only ever slept in her crib. For the first time since she’s was a tiny wee bairn she nodded off on the sofa. Now and then we'd all stop talking and look over at her slipping deeper and deeper into sleep.
She lay there. Innocent, shell-shocked and drained. As sweet as life could possibly look.

Love and Construction

An older worker one time told me that any human environment without women would tend to be a bit short of love and decency. All-male gatherings can nurture the worst side of our half of the species.
Today, working on a construction site, is not all roses, but women have made their way in person only negligibly. However, with the advent of the cell phone, for the first time on jobsites, you hear the 3 words once absent from the workday. The most popular way to seal a goodbye on the cell, “I love you.” Hard hats, nails, cuts and bruises and love.
That’s one side to the story. I heard a workmate talk extremely condescendingly to someone on the phone the other day. He was directing someone in a really abusive fashion. Was he talking to a child? I asked if that was his girlfriend he was talking to. He said, “No. My mother.”
What a friggin world to bring a young girl into.
Anyway, while I was perched 6 feet up on my scaffold this morning I got a cell call from Karen. Havana got on and gave me a “happy valentines day.” And a couple of I love yous.

body functions and the climb out of shallow waters

As a fourty four year old I frequently discover new body misfunctions. Something doesn't work the way it used to. Something does something you wouldn't expect it to do. I'm not on my cellphone sharing the celebration of any of these new discoveries. When you're two its different. Except without the cellphone.
Last night on the way out to eat Eritrean food with a friend in the back with our permanent rear-seated passenger, she shared. 3 times. It probably felt pleasurable, as it can when it's not repressed by awkward social etiquette. She also knew it was funny. Two year old funny. Body function funny, but notable. Here on in begins the long climb towards a mature sense of humor and depth. From this shallow recognition of farting begins the long, slow, drawn out, primitive accumulation of humourous material. Now and then she will take a big leap forward towards less shallow jests, but they will be small leaps. And one day we will turn around and she will make a joke that we will laugh at as equals. Perhaps an insight into the complexity and contradictions of life, perhaps something emotionally messy, but she will make it and the "I'm farting" exclamations will fade into a distant memory of more simple world with simpler pleasures.

The little voice and the worm

Another little development is her ‘make my day’ voice. Sometimes I’ll ask her to repeat herself or ask her to
say something louder. She doesn’t do “louder” on command. We know she does louder, but not on command. So instead when I ask for louder, she’s started doing this deeper voice thing instead. She will do it for emphasis too. She goes down an octave that isn’t in concert with her size or age. I get drawn into copying her and then we’re both at it. I think that she thinks that this is her powerful voice. But she’s probably not going to test it outside of the safe place of her home for the near future.
Finally, we have another little sod on the way. 14-weeks today. We refer to it as the “worm.” Havana’s all about kissing the worm in mommy’s belly. She’s very happy that she’s going to be a big sister.

Learning the Scottish Kiss

There have been injuries also this week. I have a browned eye. I never really noticed that children’s craniums are so much larger in proportion to their bodies than adults’ heads. Now, we all like a cuddle.
On the sofa, on the floor, on the bed. But some small people’s body mechanics are less fine tuned than our own. We’ve started to call it “the wrecking ball.”
When you’re in close proximity to it, it can come at you from nowhere. Like all small ones, she is always and forever bumping that little head of hers. We have not helped the process. We try and play down adversity. And naturally it backfired. She thinks nothing of accidentically whacking us with the back of her skull.
During the early 1980s in Britain, I remember the head butt had a big comeback in pub fighting. It was affectionately known as the “Glaswegian (or Scottish) Kiss.” Of course in Glasgow they probably called it something else. I witnessed this harsh fighting method used in many brawls and was once the victim of it. We all wish our children could benefit from our own mistakes. Havana is, I feel, on a clumbsy and unconcious road to developing her Scottish kiss.

Resistance or Curiosity

She woke us in the middle of the night last night. It was a single cry. She had cried out, “Why?” We’d hoped
we weren’t rearing an existentialist. Although she did only cry it out once and then effortlessly fell back into slumber.
Like all of our little species we process stuff at night. Havana hit the ‘why’ stage some time back. It’s not a word that is simply used to express innocent childhood curiosity. It’s also an abbreviation of “why the hell should I do something just because you tell me and just because you’re my parents.” The abbreviated version saves energy, allowing for greater frequency of use. Karen and I, in response, have not yet reduced ourselves to her level by blocking her with the parental monosyllabic expedient, “because.” Possibly, a more worn out, drained, future version of ourselves will succumb to this.

some will say you brought it on yaselves

When her mom asked her to put her shoes on, two-year
old Havana kneeled down, resting on her feet, uttered
the 3 words every parent fears. “I’m on strike!”
Naturally, this was not her first strike. She had been
on strike on many occasions before. It mostly involved
food preference issues or an unwillingness to
cooperate with an innevitable diaper changing. But
this was her first articulation of her method.
In some ways it was a senseless strike that was going
to hurt her own cause. Her parents were not going to
take her to the revered “park” without her shoes on.
The strike collapsed within less than a minute.
However a new tradition had been established and there
was no going back.
Where did the words come from? It’s hard to say.
Perhaps we as parents had brought it on ourselves. We
had, after all, on occasion accused our two-year old
of being “on strike”. But it was never said as an
encouragement. We think it came from a library book we
took out, “Click, Clack, Moo” where the cows go on
strike against Farmer Brown. Public libraries!
It’s behavior like this that cause parents to dread
their child learning to read and write by themselves.

politenesses and social integration

In the last few weeks Havana has been increasingly engaging in politenesses. for a couple of weeks everytime we tried to get her to say "thankyou" by coaxing her with the word "thankyou" she kept saying "your welcome". then she got it. Now its "thank you daddy" for this, "thank you mommy" for that. Its a bit sickening, well, you know nice.
Karen as Havana's primary care giver has helped Havana become this fairly secure little human being, to which I am ever grateful.
So yesterday we had a surreal experience. We're out having breakfast. Karen on one side of the table, Havana high-chaired in the middle and me on the other side. Lil' H motions to karen with one arm, Karen leans in, Havana puts her arm over Karens shoulder and then does the same for me. Then she says, "I love you
big guys!"
It was pretty stunning. Anyway, it was probably the best moment of my life in just a short second. Now I'm getting sickening