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