Ted, Ted, Ted

We almost never go out for dinner these days, and when we do it’s usually when Laura is on a sleepover with a friend. Lillian comes along, of course, but she pretty much sleeps through it. So going out on the town with kids is not something we’re used to. That may change this year. Last Friday my old friend Omar invited us to this dinner-and-music place run by some Bolivian friends of his, and he invited our other friends Cathy and Breck and Elena. Cathy is Bolivian by birth herself and I guess she’s been going to this place for some time, to charge up her batteries with that old-time Andean music and some salteñas. The salteñas, which are very much like the empanadas that we used to have when we were kids in Peru, turned out to be as good as Cathy said, or a little better. We also had a couple of hybrid Bolivian-Californian chicken dishes that rocked, as long as you’re tolerating me being a restaurant critic. (I’m the guy, you will remember, who wanted to move to London for the cuisine.)

Lillian slept through the first hour or so, but it was getting pretty noisy around 11 and she woke up to see what was going on. I picked her up so she could look around, and then one of the musicians came dancing out from the kitchen in a gigantic circular feather headdress. It had to be six feet across at the top; it was a miracle that he could go anywhere with it in that tiny space. He danced around the room playing his sikus pipes for about five minutes, and Lillian did not take her eyes off him for a second. This was the high point of the night for me, and possibly for Lillian. Laura and Elena ended up having a blast, late hours be damned. Laura had been to the swimming pool and the zoo and a play date with a school friend that day, so we wouldn’t have been surprised if exhaustion had caught up with her, but she danced as merrily as anyone and didn’t drop off until after 11. Later on Omar and I sat in with one of the house musicians and played some of the old stuff we used to do in college. The whole thing was just good for the spirits. I think we’re going to do some more of that.

Lillian’s very favorite thing to do is grab your two forefingers and let herself be pulled to her feet from a sitting position. Once upright, she will stand there gripping your fingers, wobbling from her middle and occasionally trying to jump up off your lap. She can do this for quite a while. She has also been connecting sounds with meaning, a little. She likes to hear me whistle, I’ve noticed. It almost always gets a smile. Sometimes she reaches toward my face as if to try to grab the sound and feel it. This Tuesday she and I were sitting in the back yard watching Laura and her friend Elena play in the hammock. There was an explosion of noise from what must have been a dozen or so birds in a tall bushy tree in the neighbors’ yard, and Lillian jumped to her feet, breathing quickly, looking around for the source, wide-eyed and grinning. Then she forgot all about it and went back to biting my knuckle.

Laura is pretty sure she is going to be a paleontologist. A couple of months ago her teachers buried some bones in the sandbox at school and had the kids dig them up. Laura claims she knew they were cow bones all along, but still the experiment seems to have grabbed her imagination. She knows the names of a frightening number of dinosaur species and is willing to talk about them for an hour at a time. (I keep remembering the time we were at the Natural History Museum in London, two summers ago. Laura spent a half hour glaring at the life-size animatronic roaring Tyrannosaurus Rex from as close as the guards would let her get, and shouting, “I’m not afraid of you!”)

The other night she and I were looking around on the web for new dinosaur pictures and found out, surprise, that there were a bunch. (They say the web has gone mainstream in the last couple of years, but it’s still pretty geeky out there. If you could count up all the JPGs on the web, I’d bet dinosaur pictures would come in third, after space pictures and pornography.) My own favorite was the site with all the ocean dinosaurs. There’s something about those plesiosaurs that always gets me. We got a lot of black-and-white pictures for coloring from this very scholarly site, and we liked this slightly whimsical but exhaustive site too. We printed some of them them out and when Mary came home we pretended that we’d been out with our camera and taken our own pictures. It seemed like she was buying it, for a minute there.

OK, here are some pictures to look at. There are lots of pictures coming into our house lately — I think that’s our main expense line item after mortgage, groceries and the diaper service. Every few weeks, after Mary and Laura and Lillian are asleep, I sit down for an extended session with the scanner. (Maybe soon we will catch up with the 90s and start getting our film shot onto CDs.) But somehow I haven’t been getting around to putting the results up where anyone besides me can see them. I’m working on it. Laura has been enraptured with the Yellow Submarine movie for some weeks. Paul is her favorite Beatle, of course. (In time she will come to recognize the supremacy of Ringo, but why rush it.) I remember seeing this movie on one of those old 16mm rolls we used to pay $1.50 to see in college. It was all scratched up and faded to dull reds and browns, and the treble was all gone from the soundtrack. I think I only saw it the once, which amounted to a pretty bad thumbs down in the days when if we liked a movie we saw it at least 15 or 20 times. On DVD, however, it’s a whole other story. There is, surprisingly, a lot there. It stands up to repeated viewings (if perhaps not the 80 or 100 that Laura has administered), particularly in light of the amateurish crap that’s getting released these days in the animation-for-kids market.

Lillian arrived with a minimum of fuss on December 9, at 7:45 in the morning. Laura was awake instantly when I put her in the car at about 1:30 am, and she didn’t go to sleep until 1:30 that afternoon when the whole thing was in the bag. Judy Tinkelenberg, RN, MAM (Most Awesome Midwife) was waiting for us at her birth center with the lights low and the water heated up. Rachel was there too. She is the mom of Laura’s school friend Jerry and she had volunteered to hang out with Laura while the rest of us were occupied. Laura and Rachel made bead necklaces and read books while I helped Mary get in and out of the hot tub and various other laboring arrangements, and then when it was time for the final push they came and sat on the bed right by us to watch. Laura ran out of the room right at one of the most intense parts, and we thought she had had enough, but she just wanted to bring three of her stuffed animals in so they wouldn’t miss the show. She lined them up on the bed and they saw everything.

We sat around all morning recovering and marveling, and then we went home and Mary, Laura and Lillian had a long nap. I don’t remember what I did. I think I just sort of stood around being dazed and waiting for them to wake up. Lillian turned out to be a serious napper, like Mary (but not like Laura or me). That hasn’t lasted. Five months into it, she has settled into a micro-nap pattern, 10 to 15 minutes at a time about four times a day, which makes it pretty hard for Mary to get anything grownup done. She makes up for it at night, though; sleeps soundly for three hours at a time, wakes up for a feed and then goes right back under.