It’s a bit of an understatement to say that Nora, who can’t stand to ride in the car for five minutes because she can’t stand being strapped in and immobilized for that long, was somewhat displeased. I held her hand for a bit, but the dentist wanted to tie her down so much that even her hands weren’t free. The dentist, a pleasant enough Mexican woman, told me to stand on the other side of her if I was going to be there at all. I did, but Nora kept begging me with her eyes and words to let her out of the constraints that eventually I had to leave, because there was no way I could convince her that staying put was a good thing.

So I sat in the waiting room listening to her scream for Poppy, which she later, adapting to the Mexican dialect of the dentist, converted to papá. Frankly I’m surprised she didn’t finish the 40 minutes of torture dental care completely hoarse, because she screamed the entire time. Several times I had to get up from my seat in the waiting room and go to the bathroom to wipe tears from my eyes and blow my nose. It took all my willpower to not rush into the dental examination room and fling the dentist against the wall and rescue my poor baby.

If you can stand it, here’s an audio recording I made from outside the examination room.

When she was released, she came and hugged me more tightly than she ever has, clinging to me for a solid ten minutes while I spoke to the dentist, made her next appointment, and got the bill. The dentist recommended that we go buy an ice cream and then take some generic pain meds. I think she was referring to her patient and not to me. We bought some ice cream and went home to medicate, Nora with some children’s tylenol, and I with a glass or three of Rioja. It took Nora no time at all to revert to a happy little tot, while I was still traumatized by what I had witnessed. Ever since, I have been praising Nora for her good behavior and bravery at the dentist, and I let her watch several episodes of Dora The Explorer, her current reward activity of choice.

Ignore the white foam, as this was just after a toothbrushing. Note the black hole on the other side of her mouth and the horrible twisted nature of her bottom front teeth. The dentist said that Nora has particularly weak teeth.

Her local anesthesia has worn off already and she seems none the worse for her morning of dentistry. In the long run, until she reads this blog entry, she might not remember this event at all. All the better for her.

The doors opened upwards, like a Dolorean.

The vehicle really was gorgeous. When we were choosing virtual seats, Nora was initially confused that it didn’t have any backseats, where she normally sits in our car.

“Roll it to me, Poppy! Fast!”

I’m sure some car savvy reader can tell me the model of Mercedes?

Every time we rolled it across the table to each other it felt a little bit like that famous scene from Thelma & Louise.

Just what every car doesn’t need: a giant toddler.

We had a great time with the vehicle.

I once not-so-famously declared that “The monkey alarm doesn’t have a snooze button.” I was referring to there being no way to delay having to get up in the middle of the night to deal with a screaming baby. That is still the case, somewhat, as I have to get up on average about 1.5 times per night to spin Nora back around so she’s sleeping the proper direction in her bed or calm her after a nightmare or find her teddy bear which has been brushed off onto the floor. When it comes to getting up in the morning, however, I have devised a bit of a snooze button. Normally she will get up and open the door to the master bedroom where I am sleeping – her mother having left for work hours before – and say whatever is on her mind. It’s rarely “Good morning!” and is usually “Where is Mommy?” I greet her and give her two tasks, putting on her slippers (about 10% of the time she’s already done that before entering) and go take of her diaper, put it in the trash, and then empty the rest of her bladder contents into the toilet. This can take up to four or five minutes to do if she gets distracted doing other things, and I can lie back down and wake up more slowly.

Sometimes I become so impressed by Nora’s ability to reason through a problem or situation that I start attributing more intelligence to her than she really has. For example, she’s quite good at thinking through a dependency tree such as “What do we need to do to get ready to go to daycare?” She can list putting toys away, brushing her teeth, putting on her coat, and turning off the lights. But she, like most normal three-year-olds, does not yet have a well developed Theory of Mind, an understanding that other people have feelings and beliefs and intentions just like she does.

One day last week she was in a pouty mood when we took our daily trip to the grocery store. In the store, she refused to say buenos días to anybody. On the walk home, and later at home, our discussion about her behavior went like this:

Erik: Nora, you have to say buenos días to people.
Nora: Why?
Erik: Because people like that and then they like you and they are nice to you and might even give you things.
Nora: Okay.
Erik: So why do we say buenos días to people?
Nora: I don’t know.
Erik: I just told you. Would you like me to tell you again?
Nora: Yes.
Erik: We say buenos días to people because that’s the nice thing to do and they like it, which, in turn, makes them want to be nice to us. Do you understand?
Nora: Yes.
Erik: Okay, so why do we say buenos días to people?
Nora: I don’t know.

…repeat thirty times…

Erik: I’m going to tell you why, and then I’m going to ask you why, and all you have to do is say what I just said, okay?
Nora: Okay.
Erik: Because people like it and want to be nice to us. Okay, why?
Nora: People like it and are nice to us.
Erik: YES! Good girl!
Nora: [wiping a tear] Can I have a hug now?

Perhaps that was a bit cruel, but it was interesting to see the limits of her comprehension. Every day since, she has said buenos días to our friends at the supermarket without fail.

The only thing better than a chocolate bonbon is eating one with Mommy.

One of Nora’s new favorite games is to take some object, like a ball or a bracelet, and hide it somewhere on her person, usually underneath her, if she’s sitting, or behind her back or up her sleeve, and then ask “Where is [the object]??” What she wants is for her mark the other player to place great importance on finding said object and search around for it. Sometimes she will suggest that the search be moved to another room in the house. After the object can’t be found, she whips it out and proclaims, “I found it! I found it!” I normally only have the stamina for about four or five rounds of this before losing interest. The key to stopping the game, I’ve discovered, is give no reaction whatsoever to her miraculous discovery. If you seem surprised by her reveal, even if you have refused to search, the game iterates again.

The state of the offspring is strong!

She also is full of stories that a more mature mind might not discuss, like today when we walked by a bar, she told me about one time when she and her aunt were stuck in the bar’s bathroom and they couldn’t open the door.

Three year olds should definitely be treated as social moles spying on their own families. We can no longer freely criticize people that we know from the privacy of our own homes because she’s capable of parroting anything to anybody.

I recorded the following interview with her today to capture the state of her language skills. She will often go off onto tangents about things she experienced months ago. Her language for temporally positioning events is still pretty rudimentary, with “yesterday” meaning any time in the past.

The video starts with the end of her sentence, “What are you gonna do?” when she saw me setting up the camera.

We will know if she got in to the school near our house at the end of next week. After we finished filming, I gave her the camera to “take me a picture”.

In the mornings, when we are goofing around reading books or playing with toys, sometimes I’ll wonder aloud about what time it is. When Nora hears this, she goes to find my iPhone wherever it is (sometimes it’s in her hands at the time), and she knows how to exit the active application, lock the phone, and then press the home button to show the lock screen which displays the time. She then holds it out so I can read it, often with a “Here’s the time, Poppy!”

Nora has started following the plot of television shows for the first time. She now responds when Dora asks a question, for example. She likes Dora The Explorer a lot, but her absolute favorite program is a Canadian cartoon called Caillou, about a little boy and his family and the adventures they get into. I had never heard of Caillou before, but Nora already has a Caillou doll that speaks Basque very loudly.

We have applied for Nora to start school in September. For obvious reasons, we requested the school that is literally 20 meters from our front door as our first choice. They choose applicants based on a points system, which ranks criteria in more or less like this, in descending order of importance:

• Does a sibling already attend?
• How close does the child live to the school?
• How close is the parents’ workplace from the school?
• …other criteria involving disabilities and household income.

So we score very highly on the proximity criterion, but there are only twenty slots available for the three-year-old class, and we’ve heard rumors that there is a mass exodus of kids that are wanting to switch from another school to the one we want, so there might be competition. We will hear who got in in May. Our fingers are crossed…

The state of the offspring is strong!

Once this month, rather than open my door and say, “Poppy, I want to go downstairs have have some juice,” as she usually initiates our waking days, I woke up on my own and heard a BRAAAACK sound, like velcro being ripped apart, from the bathroom. Then it happened again, BRAAACK. I guessed what it was, and peeked in to confirm. She had managed to take off her blue outer pajamas (used to keep her warm when she inevitably kicks off her blankets) all by herself, and was undoing her diaper (the sound I’d heard) by herself, and was already up on the potty relieving her bladder. I was so proud and showered her with praise. This was especially nice since it came after a series of mornings where she would wake up crying and demand that all operations I described above be done for her while she sobbed. She has done this several times this month.

Nora continues to grow at a pace that can only be detected by her shrinking clothes and ability to reach things she previously was unable to reach. She can now easily see over tables and counters and sinks that were previously at forehead level. She can’t quite reach the button for the elevator yet, although I make her try once a week.

One aspect of parenting that I suspect will only get more and more interesting over the coming years is noticing what my daughter’s peers think is important and how she expresses these concerns to me. For instance, she is all the time performing some physical action and then announcing proudly, “I know how to do this, but you don’t know how to do this!” Often these actions consist of some way of twisting her hands together or a bizarre walk or a facial expression. At her daycare she is now the senior class and she and her classmates possess a physical agility and strength that is orders of magnitude above the drooling babies they are around. I’m convinced that they spend a great deal of time inventing new movements and sounds and expressions to one-up both their peers and the underclassmen half their age. The funniest episode of this was when she flicked her long blond locks like the women in shampoo commercials do and declared that “Poppy doesn’t know how to do this!” She’s got me there.

One day this month, when her mother went to get Nora from daycare, they had the following conversation:

Mommy: Did you play with Rubén at daycare?
Nora: No, he wasn’t there.
Mommy: And Jimena?
Nora: No, she wasn’t there.
Mommy: And Mario? And [several other kids]?
Nora: No, no one was at daycare today.
Mommy: And [daycare worker] Maria? Or [daycare worker] Adela?
Nora: No, I was all by myself.
Mommy: So who prepared your merienda?
Nora: I made it and ate it all by myself.
Mommy: And what did you do all alone at daycare?
Nora: Nothing. Once, I crossed the street all by myself without holding anyone’s hand and went to the candy store all by myself to buy candy.

Such a vivid imagination! When I told the daycare workers, they laughed at her creativity.

The other day, Nora announced that she had to go do pee-pee, so she headed off towards the bathroom. I asked if she needed any help, and she said, “No,” and continued into the bathroom. She came out immediately, however, and walked over to me and said, “Thank you for asking!” before running back to do her business.

Today, when I was walking with Nora around town, we had to take a particularly narrow sidewalk beside a road where the cars go pretty fast, so I moved around to take her other hand so I would be the one on the side of the sidewalk adjacent to the road. Nora said the following:

Poppy, why did you move to that side? So Nora doesn’t fall down into the road and get hit by a car? If that happened, you would be very sad because you wouldn’t have Nora anymore, and then Mommy would come home from work and you would have to tell her that I went away. And you’d have to buy another Nora.

I told her she was right, but that it would be impossible to buy another Nora, and gave her a big hug.

The state of the offspring is strong!

Bowling is hard. Perhaps the rules should be revisited?

Her first innovation to the game of bowling was realizing that a straight perpendicular line is much easier to hit than a triangle of pins.

Her second innovation was to drastically reduce the length of the bowling lane.

Dresses! That thing that says “RANO” is a set of individual chocolate bars with the letters of her name.

Her birthday cake. Zorionak is “congratulations” in Basque.

I love cake photography. Even more than cake.

I had been coaching her all morning about how she’s going to have to blow out candles. The moment has arrived!

Huff and puff and…

Blow!

Yay!

A doll and crib.

Feasting with family.

Here’s your piece, dear blog reader! Enjoy!

Happy birthday, Nora! I love you more than I can put into words. It’s kind of hard to believe that you didn’t even exist just a few years ago. This last year has been my favorite year so far, and I feel as if I’m really getting to know you. I’m very much looking forward to continuing our lives together. Happy birthday, my love!

Enjoy…it’s all Euskera to me.

Contrary to life in the US, life in Spain consists of personally knowing your own butcher (mine is my neighbor, Bruno), seeing – and often choosing – the cut of meat that is fed into the meat grinder to produce the exact quantity of ground meat that you desire, or asking your butcher to slice the chicken breast actually off the chicken and then into fillets for you.

Today, my butcher and his family were proud to be planning to feast on some piglets this weekend. With no provocation whatsoever, he brought the little piggies out of the walk-in fridge to show my daughter and me how adorable they were, even in death.

Morally, my view is that I would rather exist than not, which opens me up to eating a wide variety of animals, as long as they are killed humanely. If you wish to not see dead animals, look away now.

Oink! They look a bit like a barbershop quartet.

Little piggy bottoms.

Five snouts.

They looked awfully cute draped over the counter like this, as if they were awaiting drinks at a bar.

Nora liked them.

This is only the second time she has allowed herself to be picked up by Bruno, our neighbor and butcher.

Cute little oinkers.

While familiar with the phrase “not by the hair of my chinny chin chin”, I never knew that piglets actually have little whiskers on their chins!

If Nora hadn’t demanded my phone to snap pictures, I would never have noticed how interesting they look from her angle down at the ground.

I wish my supermarket friends a marvelous spit-roasted porcine feast this weekend. ¡Que aprovechen!

On a toasted sesame seed bun!

Homemade french fries!

And some faux-german beer from Barcelona to round out a healthy American meal.

Because of Saint Joseph’s status as surrogate father, today is also when Spaniards celebrate Father’s Day. At daycare, my daughter made me a little paper necktie that says, “¡Te quiero, Papá!” and a card that reads, “De tu mano voy a aprender lo que mañana voy a ser.” (From your hand, I will learn what tomorrow I will be). Both are scribbled on in a variety of crayon colors. Silly, but doggone it if a tear didn’t well up.

A proud father.