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.

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!

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!

Under my care, she has had a total of zero bladder or bowel control issues. I haven’t had to change a single wet pair of panties this month, with the solitary exception of the night when I forgot to put her nocturnal diapers on, and we had a little 4:00 AM wetness to deal with. I’d hate to jinx it, but if feels like we’ve crossed a milestone.

One day this month, I was tasked with every husband’s favorite chore: buying feminine sanitary towels from the local grocery store. Nora saw me take a packet off the shelf, and immediately asked, “Why does Mommy wear this diapers in her panties sometimes?” Jeez! I wasn’t expecting to have That Talk quite so soon. I irresponsibly blew her off with a “I dunno, ask your mother,” the old parental snooze button. This girl doesn’t know her numbers, colors or letters, but it’s like living with Sherlock Holmes, she’s so observant!

Several times this month, Nora has told me, “Poppy, you no can do this!”, and she flings her golden locks with her hand as if she’s in a shampoo commercial. It’s pretty cute.

One morning, she woke up and was a bit groggy. I asked if she was still asleep, and she responded that she wanted to sleep in her stroller. I explained that it was beds that were for sleeping. In less than a second, she came back with “Strollers, too!” Touché. I was expecting to get through the first three years before I started losing arguments.

Every day recently, Nora demands to be “read” – though no books are needed anymore – the story of Little Red Riding Hood. As soon as the storyteller finishes, she demands that it be told again. Her Spanish grandmother is very accommodating and will gladly tell it over and over to her. Of course, any time information is copied over and over again imperfectly, natural selection can occur. I’m amused that my mother-in-law’s telling of the classic Grimm Brothers’ tale includes a memetic mutation I introduced: that the grandmother in the story is sick because she went outside without a coat on. In general, Nora loves stories and books, and being read to is her favorite activity when at home with an adult.

One day we entered the local hardware store, and Nora immediately pointed to the wall full of power tools, like drills and jigsaws, and she said, “Those make a lot of noise. I don’t like that.” It’s true. Whenever she sees me go to our storage closet where I keep the drill, she says, “Poppy, don’t make a lot of noise!” Whenever I did have to use the drill this month to install some lights in our bathrooms, she insisted on being as far away as possible with all the doors closed in between us. She said, “I’m going to close the door so that I don’t cry.” Also in the hardware store, she saw a sewing machine and proudly proclaimed, “Abuela has one like that!” Her ability to generalize concepts and recognize new instances of objects in a similar category continues to amaze me.

The state of the offspring is strong!

Last night, when I was putting Nora into her pajamas, I was hyping today’s parade, telling her that we were going to get up early to go to daycare and put on costumes and parade around town. She was very excited, but then she blew my mind. She said, “You’re not going to leave, right? When we went to see the Belén, you took pictures and left, and I cried.” The accuracy of her long term memory, and emotional sensitivity, continues to amaze me. I told her that no, I wouldn’t leave, and that we would come home for lunch afterwards, but that, after lunch, she had to go to daycare while I worked like normal. She agreed.

All 207 of my photos are available in this Flickr set. Another parent urged me to also create a Flickr group that he can add to, so I’ve created Carnaval en Colindres for that purpose. To heck with the Spanish law prohibiting the unauthorized publication of photos of children. No one seemed to mind last year.

Things were pretty hectic getting about forty kids into plastic costumes, but the daycare workers managed admirably.

Eventually Nora spotted me peeking through the classroom windows taking photos.

Her favorite comfort toy that she demands every day upon being dropped off is this little worm that lights up when you hug it, called Gusiluz.

Adela, the daycare boss, as the evil stepmother. She said she would’ve carried around a hand mirror as well, but she needed a free hand.

Yours truly, Prince Charming. It’s tricky designing a costume that can be worn on the outside of a bulky winter coat.

This particular dwarf followed me around town, holding my hand, and clutching around my leg when I pulled my hand away to take a photo.

This year, as a senior at the daycare for 0 – 3 year olds, Nora had graduated from the push cart to the rope, except that she didn’t stand for that long. That’s her on the far right. The only way I got her to hold anyone else’s hand was to threaten to leave if she didn’t.

The kids from another school were dressed all as pirates.

Another school were hippies.

Some older kids were dressed as African tribesmen. It’s a shock to my American racial sensibilities every time I see how acceptable blackface is in Spain.

A band of big dwarves and little dwarves paraded around town.

At some point, Nora figured out that the one year olds in the pull cart had snacks, and actually managed to convince them to hand her some. She never left the side of the cart after that.

Five Snow Whites, an evil stepmother, and a prince. A couple times I asked if there would be any kissing, to which I responded that my resuscitation services were available should a Snow White lose consciousness, but luckily none did.

Just like last year, I was astonished at the work and planning and creativity that went into the costumes. I was very impressed and had a good time.

After doffing our fantastical plastic overgarments, Nora and I headed to the grocery store for our normal daily bread and food purchases. She demanded to ride on my shoulders the whole way there, and then, when we got inside, insisted that she was tired. I said, “Well sit down, then,” and she began demanding a place to sit down, but I ignored her, figuring the floor was sufficient, and went about my shopping. When she switched to Spanish, another shopper pulled out a crate of milk for her to sit on. Rather than sitting on it, however, she expressed just how exhausted she was by trying to use it as a pillow, as if she was unable to hold up her own head. When we got home, however, she ate all her lunch but finally succumbed to exhaustion on the stroller ride to daycare.

Sooo…sleepy…

Prince Charming and his favorite dwarf.

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.

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!

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!

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.