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?”