Her (male) cousins are worshipful acolytes of the Ball God. Last summer, I watched her six-year-old cousin Victor play an astonishing turn at goalie, throwing himself fearlessly among sharp feet in a pickup game. An adult pickup game. Dubsie wouldn’t lunge for a soccer ball in a million years. If a scrum of children is scrapping it out for a ball, Dubsie discovers there’s a flower on the sidelines in need of picking.

Once at a festival I teed her up for a round of Skee-Ball, that game where you roll a ball up a ramp into a target in hopes of winning a stuffed animal. She took a vague glance at the carnival attraction and heaved the ball toward somewhere. The ball missed the target, the ramp, and even the booth, landing in an adjoining stall where it startled a guy selling socks. Her next two balls ended up among the socks too.

Dubsie just laughed. She cares not a whit where the ball lands. She will play a ball game if one forms around her, but the ball is only a prop in a larger plan. It goes something like this.

Victor, Dubsie and I form a triangle in the grass on a soft summer night. I lob a soft one toward Dubsie, the softest ball I can find at the slowest possible speed. It thumps against her sternum and falls to the ground.

“I have an idea!” she says, nudging the ball with her foot. “Let’s put the ball inside the hula hoop. Then I’ll stand here inside the hoop, and you two get your own hula hoops, and you stand inside them! And then we’ll…”

“Dubsie, throw the ball!” says Victor, gaze fixed on the orb.

“…then we’ll throw the ball from one hula hoop to the other. No, I’ve got a better idea. You two come to my hula hoop, and we’ll each stand on one corner, with the ball in the middle, and then we’ll all hold hands…”

“Dubsie!” I say. “Stop with the speech. There is a ball at your feet. Pick it up and throw it to Victor.”

“…sure, Dada, but first you get the ball. Or maybe a rock. Maybe we get Mummy to join us, and then there would be four people on the hula hoop, and that would be good, but maybe we could get one more person to come along, and then we’d have five. Then we could put the ball, or the rock, in the middle…”

“DUBSIE!” Victor cries in anguish.

And so it goes. Dubsie is eventually persuaded to throw the ball, or maybe not, and it goes somewhere close to its target, or it doesn’t. Either way she won’t remember a thing about it. There’s still plenty of time to teach her to throw, and I’m going to try. But I’d put more money on her being the one who makes the rules.

The post The Belle and the Ball first appeared on The Ferris Files.

The post The Belle and the Ball appeared first on The Ferris Files.

The tea shop is a new whitewashed place in the neighborhood. We agreed we would share one. The drink arrived cold and purple. I picked up a straw, one of those fat ones sized to suck up a tapioca ball, and returned to the table. But Dubsie had a word of advice.

“Dada, shouldn’t you get another straw? We shouldn’t share a straw. I’ve been sick, Dada! I don’t want to get you sick. You’ve got to go to work tomorrow!”

I shot a sidelong glance at this five-year-old grandmother of mine and obediently fetched another straw. At least somebody’s being responsible around here.

The post Entirely Too Responsible first appeared on The Ferris Files.

The post Entirely Too Responsible appeared first on The Ferris Files.

I have goodbyes on my mind today because tomorrow is Dubsie’s first day of kindergarten. It will be a happy day, the kickoff to her formal schooling, the inception of friendships we can’t yet imagine, a powerful oar stroke across the Rubicon of girlhood. So much to celebrate, and at the same time, with Dubsie being my only child, I must take a moment to mourn.

Photo of Dubsie by Mara Modayur

A kindergartner doesn’t need the pink moccasins that we slipped on her tiny feet when she couldn’t yet walk, or the size-five tennies that she used to tuck inside my loafers by the front door, literally filling her father’s shoes. Nothing but memories remain of those. There is one pair of pink leather bootlets, with a flower sewn on the ankle, where the prospect of disposal gave us such pangs that we promised we’d bronze them (though they’re still just stashed in a drawer).

Her new school clothes include a pair of orange tennis shoes, size 13. Children’s size 13 shoes are shockingly enormous, and they loom in her closet like teenagers. We also got her a silver backpack that is dismayingly, tragically large — gear for an age we aren’t quite geared for.

Dubsie’s changing pad is long gone, of course. I no longer need to lift her tiny body by the ankles and say ‘pat pat pat!’ in a sing-song voice to entertain while I dry her rump. The species of diapers came and went, each bigger than the next until one day until she slept through the night and they became obsolete. A box of cleaning wipes remain in the bathroom, though they might dessicate before we get around to using them.

Other items, like her blue toddler spoon, linger in a drawer. We don’t need it any more, though that isn’t quite the right phrase. It’s more like I’m setting the table for dinner and need some spoons and why would I grab a different spoon for Dubsie when she can handle the normal silverware? And some time later I notice that the blue spoon hasn’t been touched in who knows how long. I hold it up and ask Do we still need this old thing? And we both contemplate it, Mummy and I, and Mummy pouts out her bottom lip and my eyes gets a little misty, and together we silently recollect the many joyful mouthfuls it conveyed to her mouth. And then, our house being a home and not a museum, we transfer it to the box for Goodwill.

Come to think of it, it’s been a while since she’s used her sippy cups. Those are next for the box. The little tube of Paw Patrol training toothpaste by her sink is nearly empty, and it won’t be replaced because it’s too flavorless for a five-year-old. And the bath toys, uh oh, they are in a dangerous state of inertia; Dubsie ignored them when she showered all by herself last week.

Mummy reached into the closet and pulled out the ingenious, collapsible booster chair that she bought years ago at a convenience store. It used to be Dubsie’s throne, parked at the dining table and flecked with dried oatmeal. Now we only haul it out on Saturday mornings when she watches cartoons. Mummy asked, Can we give this away? NO, I say, Dubsie isn’t ready. Though Mummy knows it is someone else who isn’t ready.

Dubsie’s first bicycle, which she got just last Christmas, is probably next to delete, for crying out loud. She lobbied for a bigger bike and we relented. It’s a great new ride, lavender and decked out with tassels and a kickstand. The first bike, though, is still firmly in my mental embrace, despite being so small that it makes her look like a circus monkey. She rode that bike to preschool, gliding alongside me and darting ahead. This new bike is a swifter steed. So swift that an ambling adult won’t keep pace.

Tomorrow Dubsie will take her first brave steps into a primary school classroom, and that is wonderful. But from where I stand, she will march at the head of a parade — a bobbing cavalcade of onesies and jigsaw-puzzle pieces, of stubs of crayons, of proud but dainty stretch pants, of battered shoes and chewed-on straws, marching into the past, marching into the future, and receding, receding, receding.

The post The Last Day Before the Rest of Her Life first appeared on The Ferris Files.

The post The Last Day Before the Rest of Her Life appeared first on The Ferris Files.

In the last six weeks, she has mastered her balance bike (and is now insisting on an upgrade to pedals); committed to memory significant chunks of the soundtrack to the musical Hamilton, with an astounding vocabulary for someone so young, scrappy and hungry; and skied her first bunny slope, straight downhill without a turn, her mother by her side and her fingers daintily extended like she was delivering little cups of tea. Too fast Mummy! she yelled.

But no accomplishment fascinates me like her learning to read. It’s happening right before my eyes. In the last month, and especially in the last week, she is recognizing word after word: House. Mouse. Water. Glue. Present. Elbow. Mess. Love. Piano. Spaghetti.

This morning she read her first poem, ‘Magical Eraser’ by Shel Silverstein, all the way through:

What a damnably difficult language English is. How does a young mind ever decipher the word ‘eraser’?

To a four-year-old the letters are still barely more than a jumble of lines and swoops. Dubsie’s only been able to draw the alphabet for maybe six months now, and has remained innocent to what tricksters the vowels are. They didn’t seem too different from the rest, just a mellifluous a-e-i-o-u sprinkled among the consonant cousins. But try using them to pronounce an actual word.

I point at ‘Eraser’ in the title of the poem. What’s that word, I ask. She examines it for a long moment. The ‘r’ and the ’s’? No problem  — they’re the hard consonant handrails. But this word starts with an ‘e.’ That letter can be pronounced any of six different ways. Which one should she use?

She vocalizes it like throwing spaghetti against a wall. “aaaa-a-ayrrre-e-e-e-eyssss,” she tries, and trails off.  She looks at me.

eeeeeee, I cue her, pronouncing it like glee. She tries again.

e-e-e-e-erea-a-a-aze…

eeeera-a-a-ahsssuh…

eeeeraysuherrrr…

…eraser!” she says.

Phonemes snap into place like Legos. Her eyes light up. The problem is solved. A synaptic bridge has formed in an instant, and a group of six symbols have magically come to signify that pink and rubbery thing that sheds flecks when she rubs it against paper.

The other day she declared she would read a book. I couldn’t wait to see what she’d pick. I was disappointed when she returned with Alvin Ho, a book for older kids, an austere prairie of words with only the occasional drawing to make it interesting. She’ll get nowhere with this.

She plopped onto the couch and flipped through the pages. Flipped forward. Flipped back. The leaves opened to a drawing and she stared at it. Flipped some more. She examined a group of letters, her lips parted in concentration. I was such a bookworm as a child, spent hours and days lost in the pages of books, and to see my daughter absorbed in one took my breath away. She riffled the pages once more, then tossed the book onto a cushion. “Done!” she said. “I’m done, Daddy! I read a chapter and a half! I’ll read the rest later.”

Yes you will, I say to myself. Yes, you most certainly will.

The post Dubsie Learns to Read first appeared on The Ferris Files.

The post Dubsie Learns to Read appeared first on The Ferris Files.

Photo credit: iStock via Daily News

Why do you cigarette?

Because I made a bad choice when I was young.

Do you like cigaretting?

No, I don’t.

Does it make you sick?

Yes, it makes me sick.

Do you get sick a lot?

Sometimes I get sick.

I’m not going to cigarette.

That’s a smart thing.

The post Why Do You Cigarette? first appeared on The Ferris Files.

The post Why Do You Cigarette? appeared first on The Ferris Files.

She thinks it is a weapon best deployed at close range. She climbs onto my chest in bed and stares into my eyeballs from an inch away, tilting her forehead like a charging bull and knitting her brows. “What are you doing?” I ask, trying to sound afraid in order to mask my amusement.

“You can’t see all the way. That’s what I’m doing,” she answers. She is not actually angry, or even irked; she is experimenting. The only way she knows if she is glaring correctly is if the top of her vision is bordered by her own fuzzy eyebrows.

Dubsie has a universe of expressions, from joyful to exasperated to furious, but this is the first one she is cultivating, breaking down, talking through. Once she works out the kinks it’s going to be a killer.

The post Learning to Glare first appeared on The Ferris Files.

The post Learning to Glare appeared first on The Ferris Files.

Granny diapers are the look for the younger set this year.

We have gotten Dubsie in the habit of sleeping in her own room, but she doesn’t stay there. At 2 or 3 a.m. I hear the door open and find that she’s standing attentively at my bedside with a white rectangle in her hand. The rectangle is a fresh diaper. The one she’s wearing has gotten full, and she’s had the forethought to stop by her dresser on the way in and bring me a new one.

I reach out sleepily and feel her pajama bottoms for wetness. “Did you pee through?” I ask.

“No,” she says.

She’s correct, the pajamas are dry. We just need to replace the diaper. I help her wiggle her pants down to her ankles then undo the diaper clasps. It rolls onto the carpet with a dull sound. This diaper is enormous, bigger even than you would expect on a three-year-old at three in the morning. There’s a reason it’s so big. Dubsie’s night urinations are so ardent, and the proportions of her posterior so large, and so tired are her parents of changing the sheets, that we gave up on the diapers meant for ordinary children and ordered a jumbo pack of Adult Smalls, the kind used in nursing homes. We call them granny diapers.

I am groggy and would be fine with Granny lying on the floor until morning, but this seems to offend Dubsie’s sensibility. She picks it up by a corner and, with her pajamas around her ankles, drags it to the bathroom, places a foot on the step can, stuffs the wet diaper inside, and takes tiny mincing steps back to me, where I help her don the fresh diaper (which, if you’ll remember, she’s retrieved by herself in the dark), and lift her into our bed, where she sighs with relief at finding her tiny white pillow between our two adult ones.

And then my daughter wraps my arm in a bear hug, and services her Daddy back to sleep.

The post Service With a Smell first appeared on The Ferris Files.

The post Service With a Smell appeared first on The Ferris Files.

The game starts in bed on a Saturday morning with Dubsie lying face down on top of her Mummy. Dubsie waits in silent anticipation.

“Skinny,” Mummy declares, wrapping her hands around Dubsie’s forearms.

Next she touches the neck. “Skinny,” she says with a scientist’s precision.

“Skinny,” she proclaims, grabbing the folds of Dusbie’s armpits.

“Skinny,” she repeats while assessing her feet.

One body part awaits, and Mummy’s hands hover over it. Dubsie holds her breath.

“THUNDER THIGHS!” Mummy yells, clapping her hands against Dubsie’s upper legs and shaking them like Jell-o molds. Dubsie squeals in laughter. Her laugh hasn’t changed a bit since toddlerhood.

Everything else is changing too fast — the forearms, the neck, the feet — getting longer and stronger, leaving us with the laugh and her glorious cheesecake thighs, as the rest of her leans toward girlhood.

The post Skinny Skinny Thunder Thighs first appeared on The Ferris Files.

The post Skinny Skinny Thunder Thighs appeared first on The Ferris Files.

We know this because last year we took Dubsie to an audience with a large, fluffy holiday creature, and this is what happened:

That was on a hot April day in Houston, and what could be cuter than our daughter and her cousin cuddling with the Easter Bunny after an egg hunt? Though one did have to feel sorry for the Bunny, whose lot it was to receive a line of sweaty, sugar-crazed children while dressed from head to toe in a fur suit. Dubsie did not feel sorry for him. Dubsie pointed an accusing finger at his dilated pupils and fixed grin and hollered “No… NO!” as if he were some predator whose name belonged on a registry.

So naturally, when my sister offered us a private photo-op with Santa, we were dubious. It was a rainy late November day in Northern California, in the company of a different set of cousins. Santa was making an appearance at Ainsley House, a charming building in the English Tudor style. The trees twinkled and girl tweens in elf costumes handed out candy canes.

Santa addressed Dubsie when she walked into sight. “Well, you’re a cute little girl,” he said. “Do you want to sit on my lap?”

Dubsie walked right up and hopped on his lap.

“What would you like for Christmas?” Santa asked. Other kids had been scheming for this moment all year, but Dubsie was utterly unprepared, since her parents had assumed she harbored a distrust for cartoonish white-haired creatures.

She looked toward us expectantly for an answer, and finding none, she turned back toward Santa and couched her answer as considerately as possible. “What do you have?”

The post You’d Better Watch Out first appeared on The Ferris Files.

The post You’d Better Watch Out appeared first on The Ferris Files.

We look at each other and mouth the question — where did she get that? — and our sweet family drive is suddenly tainted by this disoriented feeling. Guilt crossed with confusion, like your cute little three-year-old somehow slipped your grasp when you weren’t watching and smoked cigarettes in an abandoned lot with God knows who, and it’s all you fault, you horrible, horrible negligent excuse for a parent.

“Uhhhh….is that from a song?” Mummy asks carefully.

“Yes,” Dubsie replies.

Silence as the adults do some hard thinking. Dubsie’s most violent song to date had been about an itsy-bitsy spider that made some bad choices involving a water spout, and now she’s hollering about wrecking balls and brains.

“Who taught it to you?” Mummy says sternly.

“Cousin Jane,” Dubsie replies.

Ahhhh. A sigh of relief. Jane is six years old and is no vector of malice. We learned later that “wrecking balls inside my brain” is a line from ‘Fight Song,’ a pop hit that had infected Dubsie’s cousin. It was also the anthem playing when Hillary Clinton walked on to the stage at the Democratic convention to accept her nomination. (Ha ha, doesn’t that seem like a utopia now.)

It is Dubsie’s first pop song, and she’s fallen hard. We can extract just about any concession from her if the reward involves playing ‘Fight Song’ on my iPhone.

The 3 minutes 25 seconds it plays is her sacred time to dance around the living room like a crazy person and sing to herself. Try to join in, or pump your fist in the air during the drum part, and she shuts you down with a “NO, Daddy!”  This is her moment, her diva requiem, the first of many pop songs she will be unable to get out of her brain, and now neither can we.

Might take a wrecking ball.

The post Wrecking Balls Inside My Brain first appeared on The Ferris Files.

The post Wrecking Balls Inside My Brain appeared first on The Ferris Files.

Dubsie holds a sign we found at the site of yesterday’s rally.

I wish this blog post was another meditation my adorable three-year-old daughter and the things she says and does. But I have to turn my attention instead to Donald Trump, who represents a very real danger to Dubsie’s future.

Dubsie is big and boisterous and smart — she just wrote her name for the first time — and I want to spend every spare moment soaking in her instead of in politics. She’s growing so fast that when I carry her up the stairs now, she can rest her feet comfortably on my thighs, like we’re two gym rats doing Stairmasters in tandem. Growing so fast that, this morning when she slept between me and my wife, her foot poked out and I mistook it for her mother’s.

You see, the problem I’m dealing with is that Dubsie’s skin is brown, or caramel anyway. Her mother is of Indian descent. We are card-carrying, flag-flying members the multicultural brigade. We celebrate Christmas alongside Diwali, and I speak exclusively Spanish to Dubsie, even though it’s not my native language, because language is a window into another world, and I want her to experience a diversity of worlds.

Yesterday president-elect Trump made his very first senior-level appointments and it became clear that diversity is not among his values. He has appointed Steve Bannon as his chief strategist and senior counselor. Bannon was the executive chairman of Breitbart, a right-wing news site that during the election fanned the flames of Trump more than anybody. Breitbart tells Black Lives Matter protesters that they should sit down and shut up, and says that if women don’t like being harassed online, they should just log off.

Yesterday we attended Dubsie’s first protest rally.

We live near Cal Anderson Park, right in the middle of Capitol Hill in Seattle, and on a wet and cloudy Sunday afternoon a lot of people had gathered there. The park was crowded but a strangely silent. Some were carrying signs but there was no cheering, no one yelling into a microphone, no one chanting. The central pond has been drained for maintenance, and in and around it stood about a thousand people. They were black and white and brown, gay and straight, men and women, some holding signs and some talking in small groups. A thousand people had taken time out of their busy Sunday afternoons to stand in a park in the rain.

The rally was leaderless. Occasionally someone would try to lead a song. A few people mumbled along with ‘We Shall Overcome’ and  ‘This Land is Your Land’  but it was clear that this is a generation that isn’t used to raising its voice. One lead singer, an older guy in horn-rimmed glasses and a scarf, stumbled through a verse of ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’ before singing and I don’t know the words… which made everyone laugh.

After going home we caught Trump’s interview on 60 Minutes, which was his first real sit-down since the election. It teased some clarity from his usual muddle of contradictory statements. He really does intend to round up and deport 2 to 3 million illegal immigrants from Latin America, and he actually intends to build a wall with Mexico. Turns out he wasn’t kidding; he wasn’t saying some outrageous thing in order to curry votes. He has made it clear that his top priority is building a giant, multibillion-dollar wall to keep brown people out. Dubsie and her mother aren’t Mexican, but it’s nonetheless feeling like a dangerous time to be brown.

Dubsie and I will be attending  protest rallies in the coming weeks, and I hope you will be as well. I created this blog to document Dubie’s life so when she’s older she can look back at these posts and know her childhood. Right now it’s most important that we ensure that the United States of America remains a country where she feels welcome.

The post Dangerous Times first appeared on The Ferris Files.

The post Dangerous Times appeared first on The Ferris Files.

Dubsie was not going to let bygones be bygones. “There,” she told me for days thereafter, stabbing her finger at a corner of the preschool playroom like a victim replaying the crime for the sergeant. “There. That’s where Newman pullded my earring. Right there.”

I tried to like Newman. I made a point of talking to him when I visited during the Photography module (each week has a theme at this new school, like Water or Camping or Things that Are Gooey, and one week was Photography, or as Dubsie calls it, FER…TOG…GER…FEE). Dubsie came home with the notion that there are only three conceivable objects of fer-tog-ger-fee: Nature, Animals and People.

I asked a classmate, Gabby, what she would take pictures of on their upcoming field trip.

“Flowers!” she said.

What would Hazel take pictures of?

“People!” Hazel cried.

How about you, Newman?

“POOP!” he yelled.

Dubsie reports that Newman acts out in class, in ways that are not ‘propriate, as she says. He is always getting in trouble. He calls Dubsie “Stupid Dubsie.” One day I dropped Dubsie with a card she’d received from a friend that she wanted to show to her classmates. Before she could, Newman ran to his cubby to get a card of his own.”My card is more beautifuller,” he said, again and again, as if he were channeling a certain presidential candidate.

So we try to be good parents. We teach Dubsie the value of forbearance, even if she can’t pronounce “forbearance” yet, and prepare her for the inevitability that Newman is just the first of a long line of bullies and creeps and chowderheads who will make life difficult. We counsel her her to be kind, and forgiving, and nice, and to ignore Daddy when he grits his teeth and clenches his fist and yells “Newman!” and chuckles to himself.

The post My First Nemesis first appeared on The Ferris Files.

The post My First Nemesis appeared first on The Ferris Files.

At night when it’s time for dental hygiene, I float a toothbrush in her direction and get the same thing as always: a closed mouth. She purses her lips and for good measure claps a palm over them. I ponder whether forced toothbrushing leaves scars on the gums, or the psyche. I take a breath and necessity is the mother of invention I adopt a high and feminine voice. I become a toothbrush ventriloquist. This is a girl toothbrush, apparently, and it speaks Spanish. (As do I, badly.)

¡Hola Dubsie! ¿Como estas? ¿Te puedo cepillar los dientes?  (“Hi Dubsie, how are you? May I brush your teeth?”)

Dubsie’s keeps her hand clamped over her jaws, but she eyes the toothbrush curiously. The toothbrush calls her name again. Dubsie. I cock the head of the toothbrush to one side like an adorable Disney character. Dubsie? I touch its bristles ever so gently against the back of her hand and make a loud kissing sound. Dubsie’s hand drops. She opens her mouth and asks a question.

“What is your name?” she demands of the toothbrush.

Uhhhh…

¡Cepillo! says the toothbrush. (That is the word for ‘brush’ in Spanish.)

Dubsie opens her mouth and lets Cepillo in for a few strokes, which makes Cepillo practically swoon with excitement, which persuades Dubsie to allow a few more strokes, at which point we’re done, at which point Cepillo, in her lilting voice, thanks Dubsie profusely for the privilege of brushing her teeth, and says she can’t wait to see her again tomorrow.

The next day it is Cepillo, not Daddy, who starts the toothbrushing in her chipmunk Spanish, and Cepillo — not looking for an actual answer, just hoping for an open mouth — asks Dubsie what she did at school that day.

“Cepillo!” Dubsie says, seizing the toothbrush with both hands and looking it right in the bristles. “Today I played with Gabby and with Hazel. We played with MagnaTiles!”

¿De veras? ¡Dime mas! (“Really? Tell me more!”)

“And then we goed out on the playground and we played with jump ropes!”

¡Wow! Cepillo replied.

So this is how toothbrushing goes now. Dubsie and her Cepillo are confidantes. It takes only a few strokes for Dubsie to grab the toothbrush from my hand and say “Cepillo!” and then sigh because she doesn’t even know how to start, there’s so much to tell about her day. We’ve traded one problem for another; now a simple bedtime ritual can take all night.

The post The Toothbrush Confessions first appeared on The Ferris Files.

The post The Toothbrush Confessions appeared first on The Ferris Files.

When pressed for details (by Mummy, object of all affection) she divulges that Daddy is in her bad graces because he makes scary faces. Mummy is in her good graces because she makes funny faces.

She is old enough to know that Daddy is a boy and Mummy is a girl. Dubsie is a girl, and that makes her like a little Mummy. Mummy is married to Daddy. Mummy and Daddy love each other, but sometimes they fight and they don’t seem to like each other. It’s all very confusing, the liking and the loving.

After informing me how little I am liked (and if we happen to be lying down), Dubsie buries her head in my neck and inserts her palm under my shoulder, which is her current favored form of cuddling. (That and squeezing my earlobe and yelling “pinchy pinchy!”) I am happy to be part of her exploration of loving versus liking, but do nothing to aid the distinction by telling her that I love her and I like her very much.

The post I love you, but I don’t like you first appeared on The Ferris Files.

The post I love you, but I don’t like you appeared first on The Ferris Files.

You want to be the parent who sends your kid to school with Valentines and at the same time you are thinking Oh Lord here’s another frigging thing. It is late in the week and we have exactly one more night to fulfill our Valentine’s obligation, and Mummy says OK here’s what we’ll do. Goldfish crackers.

Goldfish crackers on Valentine’s Day? I said.

Goldfish crackers. We’ll put them in little bags with a heart on it with Dubsie’s name.

So fine. Like I have a better idea. This morning I wake up at 5:45 a.m. to make a digital document of 20 little heart shapes with “From Dubsie” in the middle. No time for decorating; that we outsource to Dubsie and her nanny. But we’re still don’t have twist ties to close the bags, or the goldfish.

Near the end of the workday and I am still empty-handed. Where to find goldfish and twist ties in my neighborhood is not exactly straightforward. Does Office Depot carry twist ties? No. But it turns out the Cash & Carry (a restaurant supply store across the street) does. One down.

The only viable outlet for goldfish crackers is Trader Joe’s, which is chock full of reasonably priced and delightful foodstuffs but might or might not have the exact thing you’re looking for. And they don’t have goldfish crackers. They have a wide assortment of candies, but the email (which I hadn’t read) apparently said that you can’t bring those. They have crackers in the shape of rockets. That’s sort of like a goldfish cracker, in that it is orange and bland and has nothing whatsoever to do with Valentine’s Day. But they also don’t look very much like rockets. So I take tour through the flavored popcorn, like cheddar and cracker jacks, but the labels says This Product Was Made in a Factory Where a Lineworker Once Thought About A Nut.

We had learned the hard way about nuts in school when we sent an entire Kringle (a Swedish pastry that resembles a Danish but is the size of a dinner plate) to school for the children to enjoy and maybe learn about Sweden. But because it was garnished with some sliced almonds, and because one kid had a nut allergy, they couldn’t feed it to anybody. We heard it wound up in the teacher’s lounge.

So finally I buy a bag of cheese puffs, because who doesn’t like cheese puffs, and assume that everything is cool until Mummy gets home and surveys my purchases and informs me that YOU NEVER PAY ATTENTION TO ANYTHING. What, one bag of fake Cheetos? To feed twenty children?

It’s a snack, I argue. A notion. A gesture of fondness for a gaggle of children whose names Dubsie can’t recall no many how times we ask her. So we are short on Cheetos but more than make up for it in twist ties, because when you buy twist ties from a restaurant supply store you get a lot of them. We drop perhaps nine Cheetos into every bag and then tie the bag with one of our roughly six thousand twist ties.

Which holds some important lesson about love and life. Because Cheetos are fleeting (especially when you only have nine of them), and love may be fleeting, but these damn twist ties, we’ll never get rid of them.

The post Rhymes with Cupid first appeared on The Ferris Files.

The post Rhymes with Cupid appeared first on The Ferris Files.

Oh, wait, that was last week. This week she didn’t rush out to be found. She crouched motionless and silent. Something has changed. She has grasped the principle of stealth. The web of deceit has begun to spin. A bit of intelligence got lodged within her when I wasn’t looking, and she has a new stratagem.

She’ll get hold of contraband, say an extra-long roll of  wrapping paper, and wave it around like a light saber the way her cousin showed her over Christmas. To manage this annoyance I do what has always worked with her — reach out and snatch it from her befuddled hand.

But before I can grasp it she’s on the run.

She runs as fast as she can, holding her cardboard sword precariously aloft, from kitchen to living room to dining room, the diaper lines on her rump twitching back and forth with every tiny step. She starts to giggle as I close in. You gotted me! she says when I snatch her up and and tickle her belly. You gotted meeeeeee….

You gotted me. A few weeks ago Dubsie figured out that she can talk about what happened by adding an -ed. Another fragment of reason snaps into place.

Mummy kisted me and her teacher saided something funny and she takeded her pet monkey to bed after the Christmas presents were giveded. Bananas are not peeled but peelded; milk is not drunk but drinkded. It’s an adorable mistake we wouldn’t imagine correcting, like when she tries to say cannot but instead manages cannit, in our bed in the dead of night when she won’t stop talking:

Mummy: Dubsie, will you shut up?
Dubsie: I cannit.

The post New Stratagems first appeared on The Ferris Files.

The post New Stratagems appeared first on The Ferris Files.

We parked in the lot and followed the stream of children and parents entering into the nursery. To the left past the thickets of Christmas trees for sale was the reindeer pen, strewn with hay. The duo of reindeer had matching red bridles, and a sign outside that said their names were Dasher and Blitzen. This morning they appeared to be neither dashing nor prancing, but rather sulking, on the extreme far end of their pen away from the children.

We arrived just in time for the orientation talk from a Swansons employee, a cheerful blonde a red beret cap, who told the children some surprising facts about reindeer, such as that their horns fall off at the end of every year. She let the kids stroke the reindeer pelt that draped her podium. It fell to her to break the bad news that there would be no feeding of the reindeer today. Dasher and Blitzen had been fed by a few too many children in the last few days, she said, and too much food had made them grumpy. And that’s why, she added, the reindeers’ poops had been prodigious and spectacular of late.

As a consolation prize, she said, today’s visitors could feed the Curley, the Christmas camel. I had been so excited at the sight of the reindeer that I hadn’t noticed the enormous beast loitering in the next manger. Our blonde master of ceremonies grabbed a loaf of bread and the children lined up to feed Curley.

I let the other kids have their go at Curley and carried Dubsie over to have a closer look at the reindeer. Just as I plonked Dubsie down on the ground, one of them broke from the huddle on the far side of the pen and cruised right by us. Dubsie shrieked and ran into my arms.

Now, to be fair, reindeer are a little strange looking. Their horns are long and baroque, bristling with sharp tips like a thorn bush, and their eyes have a wild staring quality. Dasher, or maybe it was Blitzen, cocked his head and ogled Dubsie from the far corner of his eye, with the white showing, which made him look over-caffeinated or maybe terrified, which perhaps he was, being obliged to snatch food from so many small grubby hands. Or perhaps pulling an overburdened sleigh piloted by a hollering old fat man carries a psychological toll about which carols are not written.

So my daughter is terrified of reindeer. Merry Christmas. Maybe she’ll do better with the camel. Camels, as it happens, make excellent feeding-zoo creatures, because they have extremely long lips that can pluck bread crust out of a child’s hand with great gentleness and dexterity.

The children had all fed their strips of bread to the camel. Now it was Dubsie’s turn. The woman handed the bread to Dubsie, who looked for a long moment at the gentle beast above her, and determined there was a wiser course of action. She politely handed the bread back to the professional camel-handler, who gave it to the camel on Dubsie’s behalf.

The post A Miniature Girl and Two Anxious Reindeer first appeared on The Ferris Files.

The post A Miniature Girl and Two Anxious Reindeer appeared first on The Ferris Files.

The princess in her many states of repose.

The first thing she does upon entering a room is to scope out the best spot to park her ample buttocks. Usually it’s the couch. She attacks it frontally, flinging her arms and tummy onto the cushions for traction and then swinging a leg up. Having expended all that gymnastic effort, it’s time to take a load off. She finds a spot, not by the arm rest or quite in the middle, but just off to the side, usually in the most plump part of a cushion, and settles in, with posture erect and her legs crossed at the ankles.

But the task is only half-done. Her next job is to find you a place to sit. “Sit!” she’ll say. “You sit right there,” and points to another piece of furniture, a rocker or a comfortable settee perhaps, so you two can relax and catch up. If you comply, she rewards you with a satisfied grin.

A sure way to annoy her is to mess with the assigned seating. Once we had a group of eight people over for brunch and Dubsie presided from her high chair at the foot of the table. When the eating was done, people got up to drop off their plates and came back to mingle with people not their seat mates. Dubsie found this intolerable. “No, Guha, sit!” she barked at her 10-year-old cousin, and pointed to his old seat across the table. But then her grandfather, Thatha — her own grandfather! — plopped himself down in Guha’s chair, and that got her really flummoxed. “No, Thatha! You sit there!” she yelled, pointing to Thatha’s old seat.

Once we realized how annoyed she was by musical chairs, we switched seats at random, just to see her get worked up.

Dubsie’s favorite station at the playground is the swing, where she can chill out and be pushed all the live long day. She won’t climb the stairs if she can instead situate her royal rumpness in the crook of Daddy’s arm. One would call it laziness if it weren’t accompanied by such delight.

I would prefer she be more active, but who am I to say? Since she is already getting so much practice at it, maybe one day she’ll be telling a jury to please be seated.

The post Her Royal Rumpness  first appeared on The Ferris Files.

The post Her Royal Rumpness  appeared first on The Ferris Files.

If the straw wandered anywhere near her mouth, it was sucked upon until forcefully withdrawn. I also fed her French fries and the breaded crust of a corn dog. This was a wild departure from her usual healthy regimen of oatmeal, veggies, and sensible low-fat meats like chicken and turkey. “My stomach feels so yummy!” she yelled as we hurried toward the Ferris wheel.

Yes, the Ferris wheel. “Your namesake!” I told Dubsie. (Though no genealogical research has yet linked us to George Washington Ferris, the man who invented the Ferris wheel for the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago. Since it was a fair, however, we can be sure there was junk food.) Dubsie had been reading a book from the library called Mr. Ferris and His Wheel, so when I pointed at the steel circle looming overhead and told her what it was, she was thrilled.

She and I were the first people to board, so we got to spend the most time in the air, jolting higher, higher, a little higher, after every subsequent car boarded. Dubsie grasped the back of her bench and stared at the lights of the mechanical octopus and of the roller coaster and at the barns where earlier in the day she had met her first piglet, her first downy yellow chicks and her first Angora rabbit.

The post Circles in the Air first appeared on The Ferris Files.

The post Circles in the Air appeared first on The Ferris Files.

One day we had Dubsie lead us on a hike. The Heart O’ the Forest Trail takes off from the Heart O’ the Hills campground (we coached Dubsie how to say “Heart O’ the Hills!’ like a leprechaun). The Heart O’ the Forest is full of trees that are so tall and thick that I took them for vagabond California redwoods, until a ranger informed me they were western red spruce and Douglas fir, specimens that had been reaching toward the gray sky for a thousand years or more, untroubled by the whack of axes.

Dubsie picked her way through root banks, and stayed upright on damp wooden bridges that crossed swamps of broadleaves. She meandered like a creek, touching every stone and root. We plucked branchlets off the ferns. We watched beetles scuttle under leaves and spiderwebs shimmering in a late afternoon glow.

In a few hours I’d say she walked a mile, which is a far piece for someone who’s two. On the way back she got hungry and weepy, so I carried her.

Mummy made dinner while I coaxed some damp kindling into a fire. Dubsie was fascinated by the smoke. “I’m making a campfire, my love,” I told her. “We will make lots of these, you and me.”

Night fell and the fire crackled. Dubsie sat her her chair and stared into the flames. Whether exhausted by the walk or entranced by fire, I don’t know, but she sat perfectly still and didn’t say a word. Mummy asked if she wanted to be held, and she answered with a peep.

Mummy cradled her as if she were still a little baby. Dubsie’s head fell back into the crook of her mother’s arm and she was instantly asleep.

The post A Long Walk first appeared on The Ferris Files.

The post A Long Walk appeared first on The Ferris Files.