Daddy is One Person

Mommy was away socializing tonight.

So Daddy put Sophie to bed.

Usually her mother and I take turns either reading the stories or giving the bath (and playing the music after story time). Tonight I did both.

This suddenly struck Sophie when we left the bathroom and headed for her room.

"Daddy!" she said, "You can't read story and do music! You just one persons!"

Narrative Tension

I was happily reading "The Cat in the Hat" to Sophie this evening when I noticed that she was leaning forward, staring at the pages, breathing quickly, and wringing her hands.

The story is just that gripping.

I stopped and asked her if it was scary. I asked if I should stop.

She told me that yes, it was scary, and no I shouldn't stop.

I asked her what was scary.

To my surprise, the scary bit was not the actual Cat in the Hat, himself, but rather Thing One and Thing Two. Also scary was the fact that Mother was coming up to the door and she was about to come in and discover the mess and be angry. The fish was also scary. Or maybe the fish's distress was scary.

(This makes a lot of sense once you realize that the book is actually a Freudian allegory. This is a new book for us, and I've been thinking about this since Christmas. Originally I thought that the Cat in the Hat was the Id, but once Sophie told me how scary Thing One and Thing Two were I immediately recognized that I had been wrong. It is Thing One and Thing Two who are the Id: shut up in their box, animalistic, uncontrollable, fun and yet frightening, and subverting the conventions of rational expectation in their very multiplicity. Also compelling: the German original of the Latinized "Id" is "das Es" [="the It"]. The fish is clearly a representative of the superego. The Cat in the Hat, then, is the childish personality: as yet undeveloped, clearly narcissistic in his grandiosity, a stand-in, or Doppelgänger for the children's unlawful desires. Considered as a dream-space, as the expression of one psyche, the book illustrates the acting out of illicit, but [thanks to the projection of the Cat in the Hat] disavowable desire. This is a therapeutic process in which the immature psyche can work out the distinctions and roles necessary for adult life. The book as a whole functions as an exploded view of one psyche, whose narrative arc first releases and then gathers up again the ill-defined and explosive desire that chafes against the strain of being "good". The final deus-ex-machina of the Cat's machine returns us to the tidy and contained condition from which the book starts. [Why Sally and her brother? Proto-gender roles that are, as yet, still fluid. Remember there exist Things One and Two—one for each "sibling" perhaps].)

S - O

These are the letters Sophie knows.

She also knows that they are in her name. She will tell us this excitedly every time she recognizes them.

"Dis 'S'! Dis in my NAME!"

For instance, she told us to stop at the stop sign tonight ('cause, first things first, right?) and then told us that there was an 'S' and an 'O' and that these letters also were in her name.

(She calls the stop sign an octagon, by the way. But then she calls every polygon she sees an octagon. Especially if it is red.)

christmas artwork

Sophie's artwork is starting to take on recognizable forms. Granted, these were stickers, but she got them mostly in the right order. She identified the earmuffs as a rainbow.

Parade

We attended a Christmas parade a few weeks ago. I think that officially it was a Winter Holidays Parade, but the actual participants seemed eager to let us all know that they were all about the Santa and/or the Christ.

There were an awful lot of church floats, offering dueling interpretations of mobile, living creches. We got invitations to attend church. And candy. There was also a lot of boy scouts, cub scouts, girl scouts, and brownies, looking all cute and cold. They were less overtly religious. They still had candy though. There were some folk in old cars (though not as many as in Michigan parades), who threw candy. The people on horseback threw candy. The marching band did not throw candy, they played instruments instead. They had people walking alongside them who handed out candy. Then came the fire trucks, ambulances, police cars, and motorcycles. They didn't have much candy. Last of all came Santa on the back of a cherry-picker. He "ho-ho-ho'ed" at us and whipped a candy cane at our heads.

Sometime in the past, oh, twenty five years or so, parades have developed a candy-throwing aspect that didn't exist when I was a boy.

Sophie had a delightful, if slightly cold time. She also had two lollipops and part of a candy cane. There was no way she wasn't gonna be eating her some candy at that parade.

She still lets us know, every single time that we pass the street corner on which we stood, that there was once a parade there.

"One time they marching band here! And, and, and, they gives me candy!"

December

It's not that she hasn't been doing anything interesting, it's just that December has been so busy.

For instance:

• She is a real American girl: she gives high fives competently and freely.
• She has learned how to lie. She does so freely, but not too competently.
  Me: "Did you wash your hands?"
  She: "Yes!
  Me: "Why aren't your hands wet?"
  She: "I di-i-i-i-i-i-id! ... [mumbling] washedmyhandsed"
• She has learned the five second rule. "I got dis real fast, Daddy!" she tells me as she picks something up off the floor and pops it in her mouth. "You got dat real fast?" she'll ask me as I do the same.
• She still wants to know why. She still wants her way immediately. But lately she's been skipping her nap with distressing frequency (distressing for us—she thinks she's being exceptionally clever. She smirks). This means that she melts down quickly in the evenings now. She'll express a wish, you won't immediately signal your assent because you haven't quite deciphered the request, and -BOOM- the girl has hit the floor.
• She's stopped viewing time-outs as a treat.
• Snow! Snow! Snow is fun! It's cold! And you can throw it! And slide on it! And it makes snow castles and snowmen! Which you can then kick over!!!!
• OMG Santa!!!!!!!!!!!!! Have you heard about this guy? He is so, so cool. Sophie kind of has him mixed up with the Tooth Fairy a bit (an older girl she knows has lost a tooth, and anything this older girl does is mega-cool and worth emulating), but she's got a fairly firm grasp on the fundamentals and will tell you about them at great length when given an opening. He comes down the chimney. We met him at the mall and at the apartment complex clubhouse. And he will fill the stockings with care. And then he will leave you a present under the tree (or maybe your pillow). And he eats cookies and milk and possibly ice cream.

A week or so ago, at dinner, we were talking about Christmas and Santa Claus. I cued up "Jingle Bells" on my portable MP3 music player and this meant that—jing! jing! jing! jing! jing!—we heard jingle bells for about five seconds before the song started on this particular track.

Sophie's eyes got very very wide, and she was down off of her chair and into the living room to check out the fireplace, lickety-split.

Christmas Day, she woke up early. Not because of Santa, but because of the snow plow slowly plowing outside her window at 6 a.m.

So she got a white Christmas and all.

Last Christmas she wasn't too sure about the procedure of unwrapping presents. This year she ripped away with abandon, and seemed a little miffed that her mother and I reserved some of the presents for ourselves.

Later she got a bit worried. We had put out the requisite cookies, which had a bite taken out of each one. But we had forgotten the milk. "We no give-ed Santa milkie!" I assured her that he had probably helped himself to a glass from the kitchen.

On the twenty-sixth, I walked into her bedroom in the morning when she woke up.

"Hello Daddy!" she said, "Santa come again?"

x-mas gifts Sophie wanted from Santa

Here are some thing Sophie asked for for Christmas:

A Mommy, Daddy and Baby Elmo

A Mommy, Daddy and Baby Dinosaur

A Mommy, Daddy and Baby Baby

Do you see a trend?

Oh, and Legos.