She talks about taking her computer (she mispronounces ordenador as denador) to work, and also staying home to work like I do. She also mentions the “Mommy took a big bag of money from work!” allegation that I mentioned earlier, adding the spurious claim that her mother “hides her money on the floor under her computer”. I did search for said treasure, but in the end, I had to conclude: Myth BUSTED. Her abuela playfully tries to get her to give up some of the riches, but Nora counters with evidence that her abuela already has money in her wallet.

Let me provide some context for the second video. Nora’s abuela is currently out of work on medical leave because she has a problem with her knee, and she has to go to physical rehabilitation a couple times a week. Also, Nora went to the doctor yesterday with her mother because her mother’s got an ear ache, so a lot of their conversation is about doctors and medicine.

They discuss las barracas, general term for carnival rides or booths that trucked into small towns in Spain during that town’s holiday week. Nora remembers them well from the time she spent with her Spanish grandparents over the winter solstice holidays. Sometimes she likes to ride them, but she has a very low tolerance for noise and centripetal force.

At one point she switches gears to talk about Parchís, a Spanish board game that is a cousin of the game I know as Parcheesi™ (they share a common Indian ancestor), that Nora and her abuela like to play together.

Her gestures are so hilarious in this video. I’m sorry it’s so long, but the cuteness refused to wane enough for me to stop recording or make an editing cut.

What blows me away most about the current stage of my daughter’s mental development is just how observant she is at noticing causes and effects and intuiting the motivations behind the agents in her world. Of course she probably asked her mother “Why are we at a the doctor?” about seven hundred times when they were there, but she has understood the reasoning and generalized it to “when someone is sick or part of them hurts, they go to the doctor to get cured”. The daycare workers tell us that her verbal and reasoning skills are considerably more advanced than her peers. And yet, her ability to identify colors, numbers or letters are at about the level of a sleepy dachshund. No doubt those abilities will arrive soon, but it’s truly fascinating watching her develop. I’m enjoying every minute of it.

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Another time, I was downstairs working when I heard someone get up upstairs and go to the bathroom. Then I heard the person leave the bathroom and close a bedroom door. It had to be my wife. Two minutes later, the stairway light came on. I went to investigate and found Nora standing at the top of the stairs – blocked by the toddler gate, thankfully – peering down at me silently. I put her back to bed. Later the next morning, I mentioned to my wife that she’d woken up Nora the previous night, and she said she’d never gotten up. So perhaps Nora went to pee on her own? Who knows…

I have taken another step back from Nora’s regular bedtime routine, opting to sit on the floor out in the hall, rather than on the guest bed while Nora falls asleep. It’s a step in the right direction, and Nora seems to be taking to it well, although sometimes she will get up and come check on me and be ordered back to bed.

Our bedtime routine has also taken a turn for the adorable. When I tuck her in and give her a hug, she usually says, whether I have or not, “Poppy! You haven’t shaved today! Tomorrow you can shave, okay?” Then she demands to kiss my nose, each eye, each ear, and hair. These moments are so precious to me.

The magi brought Nora a cash register, complete with toy foodstuffs and money. She absolutely loves playing with it, saying often, “What do you want to buy?” When her playmate chooses an item, she says, “I have to scan it!”, and she presses the button on the toy bar code scanner, causing a loud BEEP sound. Then she declares, “You have to pay!”, but is more than willing to open up the cash drawer to give her playmate some money to pay for the item. Her business model is slightly flawed, but then she’s not in it for the money. Occasionally, the bar code scanner gets magically transformed into a telephone and she holds it to her ear and talks to Rubén, who, despite actually existing, has taken on a primary role in her cast of imaginary friends that she talks to around the house.

This month we had to bid a fond farewell to Nora’s favorite daycare worker, Nela. Nora and Nela have always had a special relationship. For instance, Nela was the first person to be allowed to braid Nora’s hair. She had decided to leave daycare work, for which she’s certified, and start a children’s clothing store in town. We will still see her around, and Nora would be “graduating” out of daycare this September anyway, but it’s sad to see her go. I took this photo of the two of them on Nela’s last day.

Several times this month, upon seeing me open the cabinet where we store Nora’s medicine, she has said, “Poppy, what are we going to do? [cough! cough!]” I suppose that, after having to deal with a sick child that refused medicine to the point where she had to be held down with almost all my weight, I’ve got to be in favor of pharmaceutical companies erring on the side of “too appetizing” for medicine, and pretend hypochondria is just a consequence we’ve got to accept.

This month I learned that two-year-olds still fall for the “Please close the door…no, from the other side” trick. Sometimes when she’s in my office picking items off my desk, asking inquisitively, “What is this? To do?” I have to ask her to leave so I can continue working, and this trick is working wonders at the moment.

I recall learning this song before I knew what the heck a submarine was, and I’m pretty sure that Nora still doesn’t even know what “yellow” means. It holds a special place in my marriage because of a special night in a bar in the Scottish highlands when we had a particularly fun time singing it in a large crowd. The fact that we can learn songs without having any clue about their meaning still amazes me.

Nora is definitely to the age where one must be careful of everything said around her, because it will be repeated without filter to anyone she has even a little confidence in. Her mother brought home about fifty 1, 2 and 5 euro-cent coins, totaling maybe 2€, from a jar she’d been throwing loose change into at work. Next thing we know, Nora is saying, “Mommy took a lot of money from work and gave it all to me!” to everyone in the local supermarket. Of course they know that Marga’s not an embezzler (or do they!?), but every single one of them remarked about how Nora’s phrasing didn’t make it sound very good.

How much longer is this post? A little bit, but not too much.

I recently had to following conversation with Nora…

Erik: Ow! Don’t hit me with that toy.
Nora: Why?
Erik: Because it hurts, and I don’t like things that hurt, do you?
Nora: A little bit. Sometimes. But not too much.

She’s not really a moderate masochist; this is her canned diplomatic response to any question requiring a yes/no or quantitative answer. e.g. Do you want some juice? How much do you love Poppy? Are you a Democrat? You have to admit that it’s a clever, if utterly meaningless, response you’d expect out of the most agile politician. She’s not yet three; no need to commit to any positions yet.

The state of the offspring is strong!

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Drinkin’ mah coffee.

It’s cute to watch her make bilingual mistakes. It’s rare that she attempts a direct translation from one language to another, but when it happens sometimes it can go wrong. I remember when I learned Spanish, I had great difficulty with the words “todavía” (still) and “ya” (already), particularly as they were combined with “no” to form phrases: ya no = not anymore; todavía no = not yet. I know I’m not the only one who gets confused by this, because Spaniards make the same mistakes going the other way. Anyway… That was a long preface to tell you that the other day Nora said “already no” when she meant to say “not anymore”, which I found cute.

One weekend this month the weather was really horrendous and we had no plans, so we spent most of Saturday and Sunday at home. At one point when we were bored and getting on each others’ nerves a little, my wife suggested we play with the Wii, which, like most gaming consoles, sits dormant after the initial novelty wore off. The only game we thought Nora might have any shot at playing was Wii Bowling. We set up a “three person with two remotes” game, with me and Nora going first and third with one remote, and with her mother bowling second. We explained to Nora how she had to hold down the button, swing her arm, and then release the button at the end of the swing. It was pretty complicated holding her finger on the button, swinging her arm, and pulling her finger off the button to demonstrate. About her third turn, her mother said, “Why doesn’t Nora use my remote instead?” I said, “No, that won’t work since we set up the game for her player to use my remote.” To which she repeated, “Why doesn’t Nora use my remote instead?” Aaaahh, yes! An excellent idea. So for the rest of the afternoon, we bowled with Nora swinging her mother’s remote while I, seated on the sofa with my remote hanging out of sight, flicked my wrist in time with Nora’s flailing. It worked perfectly. A little too perfectly, in fact, as Nora won almost every game. No matter what I did when playing for my character (Nora made me stand up and do it properly), I could never best the wrist flick that was controlling Nora’s ball.

Nora has begun a strange habit of asking for things with a negative question. For instance, rather than ask, “May I have a cookie?” she’ll say, “I can’t have a cookie, can I?” Rhetorically, it’s a terrible way to achieve your objectives. “You won’t hire me, will you?” isn’t going to advance your career. Negated boolean questions are also annoying because no one is ever clear what “yes” and “no” mean in response to them. The social norm is for “yes” as a response to “I can’t take my tricycle to the park, can I?” does not mean “That’s correct”, but it means, “That’s not true; yes, you can take your tricycle to the park.” It’s just confusing. Perhaps a case could be made that playing the poor “I never get what I want…” victim could be a potentially successful strategy, but it’s certainly not something I’d want to encourage. I suspect it’s just a phase, but it’s a strange one. Here it is in action:

Several weeks ago, at a local bar, the bartender gave her some chocolate euros, disc-shaped chocolates wrapped in foil to look like big 1€ coins. With no subsequent mention of them at all, weeks afterwards, she had some coins – she asks for money before she pretends to “go to work” in “her office” so that she can bring back the coins afterwards having “earned money at work” – and she started prying at them saying, “Let’s see what’s inside!” It took me several minutes to realize that she was referencing the chocolate euro coins from weeks earlier.

My two year old loves bar hopping. Often, as mentioned above, she will suggest we go in a bar that we walk past. She likes them because there are stools to climb on, flashing slot machines to bang on, and the bartenders often give her a little piece of bread or candy or something. I don’t need much of a push to enter a bar for a glass of wine, so she can be a dangerous influence on me. It sure is cute, though, when she says, “Let’s go to another bar!”

I’ve been trying to get her to apologize when she does something bad by accident, but it’s not going very well. She knows what to say when I prompt her, “What do you say?”, but with no prompting, she never initiates the apology herself. Today she did for the first time, but said the wrong thing. She said, “Poppy, I stepped on you by accident. It’s okay, I forgive you.” Hmmm…

As we finish out 2011, the state of the offspring is strong!

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Another difference between the two cultures is that Spaniards don’t put presents under the tree. The presents are all saved, hidden, until either Epiphany on January 6, or Christmas Day for families that have been influenced by foreign cultures. Personally, I think one of the best parts of Christmas is the anticipation and mystery involved in having to look at your gift for weeks before you get to open it. If that’s not the whole point of wrapping paper, I don’t know what is.

My two-year-old daughter, Nora, doesn’t quite understand Christmas yet. The idea of waiting to receive and open presents, and certainly any threats of them being dependent on behavior don’t sink in. But she did enjoy the novelty of setting up a plastic tree in the living room and decorating it with ornaments.

Every tree needs a good base. Wow, that’s profound.

Separating every sprig is the secret to making an artificial tree appear full.

My apprentice observed my work very closely.

Every year I’m surprised at just how tall our tree is. I always remember it as being tiny.

First the lights!

All this tree preparation is exhausting!

My little tree decorator.

It occurred to me the other day that families with toddlers who don’t yet understand the lust of consumerism should just pair up and exchange toys between households rather than buy new plastic crap. In the face of novel toys, the kids probably won’t even notice some of the old toys are missing.

May your solstice celebrations be jolly.

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My in-laws are visiting at the moment, so that means that they sleep in the guest room with Nora. Normally this is no problem whatsoever, but since Nora has been requiring so much extra-crib attention lately, and the switch to The Big Girl Bed is so drastic, it was a risky proposition last night, switching her when her room was already fully occupied.

Initially we weren’t sure how to handle her transition to a big bed (whether to buy bed rails, etc.), but I came up with the idea to use the trundle bed, a bed that rolls out from under another that we have in my office to start her off close to the floor in case she rolled off. The trundle bed has spring loaded legs that, if you pick it up, will release and raise to the level of a normal bed. But for Nora, we’re leaving it initially low to the ground, barely higher than the mattress alone would be.

Ready for bed on Big Girl Bed, Night #1. Yes, we have childproofed those unfortunately placed outlets.

She was pretty excited about being in The Big Girl Bed, and was happy to go to sleep last night. From 22:00 to 1:00, everything was great. I went to bed just before 1:00, and at 1:15 I was awoken by Nora’s cries. She had woken up and, unable to feel around to the bars of her crib, had gotten spooked like those times that all of us have when we wake up in a hotel room and aren’t entirely sure where the heck we are for a few minutes as we slowly regain consciousness.

I got her back to sleep and slipped off to my room, only to return two minutes later. This happened about five times in a row, until at about 2:00, I brought her into our room where we’d “hidden” the crib and placed her in it. She seemed delighted at first to be back in her comfort box, but she never really got to sleep and soon started moaning with discomfort like she has been lately. We tried to talk her down for another thirty minutes before it was too much to bear and Marga escaped downstairs to the office and Nora took her mother’s place in bed next to me, where she and I tossed and turned all night, including several unconscious two-year-old fists slamming into my face throughout the night.

We knew the transition would be difficult, and it definitely has been so far, but it’s just been one night. What is really needed, I think, is several nights when I can spend the night in her room in the guest beds and talk to her to calm her down when she wakes up disoriented.

We…shall…see…

UPDATE: Night #2. I slept in the same room with Nora, and most importantly, left on a nightlight all night long to give her visual orientative stimulus whenever she did wake up. We took two trips to the bathroom and woke up about five other separate times to cry for a bit and reposition the blankets, but overall it was a very successful night spent entirely in the Big Girl Bed. When I got up, she looked like this, sleeping perpendicular to the bed:

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Why, oh why?

We knew it was coming, and it’s here: The Why Phase. Her new favorite thing to do is to walk up to you and say, “What are you doing?”, and almost before you can answer, she’s asking, “Why?” I can normally last for about two Why iterations before I end it with “Because it is,” and stop responding to further inquiry. At this point, I think that only about 20% of her motivation in these interrogations is curiosity and a thirst for knowledge about the world around her; the other 80% is just a desire to have a conversation, and she’s learned that asking someone about themselves and then asking follow up questions is a great way to get people to talk. It’s more of a thirst for language than anything else.

Did you know that if you go to any Wikipedia article and click on the very first link in the article, and then click on the very first link in the next article, continuing on and on like this avoiding loops, you will eventually end up at Philosophy? This works for any starting article. Try it.

The same is true of answering repeated Why questions. You can retard the spiral, but sooner or later, you’ll find yourself crossing the epistemological event horizon.

Never has this been so well demonstrated as in Louis C.K.’s stand-up routine about having children. I watched this before my daughter was born and it only gets more and more true with each day of parenthood. Like everything Louis C.K. does, it’s both extremely hilarious and extremely vulgar. NSFW language. Viewer discretion is advised. The best bit, about non-parents criticizing parents, starts at 6:18. The Why bit starts at 7:19. It’s very guay.

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Nora: [cry] Daddy! Daddy! Give me your hand, Daddy! [cry]

Daddy: Nora, do you want me to sit down [in this comfortable chair near the crib]?

Nora: [cry] No! Give me your hand, Daddy! [cry]

Daddy: Okay, if you don’t want me to sit down, then I’m going to leave.

Nora: [wail] Your hand! Daddy!! [cry]

Daddy: Okay, I’m leaving. Let me know when you want me to sit down. [leaves the room]

Nora: [screams]

[30 seconds of suffered punishment]

Daddy: [opens door] Nora, would you like me to sit down?

Nora: [sob] Daddy, sit down! [sniffle]

Daddy: Okay, I’ll sit down, but only if you sit down [in your crib] too.

Nora: Daddy, sit down.

Daddy: If you won’t sit down, then I’m going to leave.

Nora: [sits down fast] Daddy, sit down.

Daddy: Okay. [sits down]

[30 seconds of enjoyed reward]

Daddy: Nora, you need to lie down.

Nora: No.

Daddy: [starts to get up] If you won’t lie down, I’m leaving.

Nora: Sit down! [lies down]

Daddy: [sits back in chair] Good girl.

Nora: Daddy?

Daddy: What?

Nora: Daddy?

Daddy: What?

Nora: Daddy?

Daddy: What do you want?

Nora: Daddy?

Daddy: [silence]

Nora: Daddy?

Daddy: Nora, you need to be quiet, okay?

Nora: Daddy?

Daddy: If you won’t be quiet, I’m going to leave.

Nora: Sit down. [shuts up]

Once I can get her to lie down, be still and quiet, getting her to fall asleep is usually just a matter of 3-4 minutes of sitting in a comfortable chair in the dark. I could keep going, successively moving myself further out the door, but I don’t mind a nice contemplative sit at the end of the day.

Of course this isn’t a new and innovative parenting technique. Behavioral psychologists call it successive approximations, in rhetoric it’s called moving the goalposts, and when the mafia does it, it’s called extortion. It’s a common method used by the powerful to get the weak to do what they want them to do.

I’m sorry, but due to budget concerns, we’re going to have to cancel your pension program…although…the accountants say we could afford it if you could work on Saturdays.

Like all manipulation, it can be unethical, but it doesn’t have to be. Whether your raising rent, freeing hostages or haggling on cheap flights to Larnaca, it’s a good negotiation technique to have in your toolkit.

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Needless to say, it has been a rough week for us. I can say, however, with total certainty that losing a fetus that you’ve never met cannot be compared with the loss of a child. It is disappointing to have the happy future you have been planning for months be ripped away from you, but I have no doubt that we’ll be just fine.

The termination took place this afternoon. It would have been a boy.

Rather than feel sorry for us, I ask that those of you that do have fully formed children, give them an extra hug today and appreciate your good fortune. Our two year old, Nora, has been a beacon of happiness for us in this storm.

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“You can go cry in the kitchen, or stop crying and stay in the living room with me.”

“You can sit in your stroller and have a cookie, or stay on the ground without one.”

Note that these are fairly sophisticated conditional sentences, but she, even at the age of two, totally understands the two options and usually picks the one I want her to pick, thus being fooled into thinking that she’s autonomous and in control.

I’d love to squeeze another ten years out of this manipulative technique, but I secretly hope she figures it out sooner…in which case I’ll simply have to fall back on the old classic: Because I said so!

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Some advice for potential fathers… When your wife is waiting for the results of her pregnancy test, saying, “You know, according to quantum physics, until we actually observe the results of the test, you’re both pregnant and not pregnant!” is not a good idea.

We’re batting a thousand. Two pregnancies for two attempts. [insert marksmanship joke here] I know what some couples go through with fertility problems, and it makes me feel very blessed to be so fecund.

No sonograms or anything yet, as we’re still in early days. Most people don’t mention their pregnancies until they have an ultrasound to post, but I’m so pleased that I can’t wait.

Wish us luck!

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