Samang has become quite the little clean machine. Yesterday when she was at my house, she spilled juice down her front by accident, then went over to the tea towels hanging off the front of the oven, pulled one off, and mopped herself up! And when I jokingly said “What about your mouth?” she wiped her face with it as well. And then she started on the floor. If she is this much of a neat freak at 14 months, I’m figuring we can really put her to work by 2 1/2. I look forward to a time when we can just let her get her clean on and occasionally ask her to bring us beer from the fridge. That’s why people have kids, isn’t it? 
Category: The Girls
When the girls were at my house last weekend, I introduced them to Wii Fit. Now, if you have Wii Fit you know that as soon as you start, it checks your BMI, your balance, your age, and from all that information comes up with your “Wii Fit Age.” Depending on the time of day and how much alcohol I’ve consumed, my Wii Fit Age has been anywhere from 24 to 45. Saturday night, my Wii Fit Age was a respectable 27, three years younger than I actually am.
The Youngest, who is almost 13 got on the Wii Fit next. She is always seen as “the athletic one” in the family because she’s always involved in several sports and is likely to get up and do something active in her spare time because she can’t stand to sit still. By contrast, The Oldest and I would rather sit and read or knit or whatever, not run. So The Youngest gets on the balance board and doesn’t complete one of the tests and doesn’t do great on the second one. The cheeky Wii Fit asks her if she trips a lot when she walks, and then presents her with a Wii Fit Age of 22, a full ten years older than she actually is. The Oldest and I howl, and The Youngest pouts.
The Oldest takes the balance board, completes the tests, and is announced to have a Wii Fit Age of 15, which is her actual age. She and I high-five, as we, the non-athletic ones, have finally beaten the Youngest at something, even if it was an exercise video game. “At least my Wii Fit Age isn’t ten years older than me” is going to go down in family history as a comeback to anything.
I just went out on my lunch hour and bought my godchild fun plastic toys for her birthday, which is this weekend. Little People farm and pirates (in my head, sometimes the pirates decide they want to come to the farm to mess with the animals), and a VTech baby guitar so she can play guitar like Uncle Rick. The guitar was an afterthought, mostly because I am not sure I will be done with her sweater by this weekend (it’s supposed to be 90*, so I’m sure she won’t care, but still), but also because I was walking through the aisles at Target and couldn’t resist something that when you hit the baby whammy bar, said “Sheep! Sing it! Baaaa!!” “Ducks! Sing it! Quack!!”
Jordana and Thabiso should just be glad that I didn’t decide to buy Samang the Radio Flyer ride-on-rocketship. That thing didn’t have an off button, the guitar does.
Oldest: One day, I’m going to get a pimped out camera. Maybe for my 18th birthday.
Julie: I didn’t get one ’till I turned 30.
Oldest: Yeah, but times are changing.
The Oldest was born when I was a sophomore in high school. Today is her first day as a sophomore in high school.
The Youngest starts seventh grade on Monday. When her father and I started dating, she was just going into second grade.
Samang turns three months old on Saturday. The entire summer has gone by in the blink of an eye.
Man, nothing makes you feel the passage of time like kids.
- Rise and clean. Make Kim and Aggie proud by cleaning the grease off of the stove top.
- Photograph stuff gotten in a yarn swap. Photograph yarn you bought last week. Don’t upload, just photograph.
- Take shower.
- Take subway in to East Village.
- Get Oldest’s cartilage pierced at Andromeda, which is sort of sketchy, but clean, and besides, it’s where you got your bellybutton pierced 6 years ago.
- Celebrate the fact that she is the first of her friends to get her cartilage pierced and that it looks “badass” by taking her out for Indian food for a late lunch.
- Take her back to her (still under construction) new apartment and get the grand tour, which involves borrowing Season One of House. In French. (I am told there is an English option, despite the fact that she bought it in France. I am hopeful.)
- Come home and collapse in front of the computer while boyfriend watches golf. Feh. Golf.
- Find alcohol.
Jordana and Samang came over to my place last night, which means that the cats got to see their first baby. They were fascinated, Freddie especially. He looked her over, startled at the noises she made, and did not seem to understand that she was in fact a human. To be fair, he’s never seen a human the same size as he is, so I can understand the confusion. He seemed to like the way she smelled, though, and in the end tried to get her to pet him by headbutting her hand. He also licked her, perhaps to find out if she was edible. The best part of the night was when we had put her down on the bed for a nap, and Freddie (forgettting she was around because she was quiet) jumped up on the bed to get to his window perch, saw the baby kick and jumped a foot into the air. Because “Holy shit what the hell is that!!! Why is it on the bed??? Oh, wait. It’s that thing. The thing that makes noises and doesn’t pet me.”
Joe, in typical Joe fashion, took longer to warm up to her. (I think he’s also seen a baby or two in his long life, so he knew to be wary.) Late in the evening though, when the baby was still napping, I put him up on the bed to see her. She had gotten an arm out of her swaddle by this time, and when he got close to sniff her she whacked him upside the head. He looked at me to verify that I had seen this abuse, and then lay down at her feet to keep guard over her and protect her from that other miscreant, Freddie. Or maybe he just reasoned that the feet were still swaddled and less likely to make contact with him. But when I asked him if he liked the baby, he meowed. I take that as a good sign.
Baby-2, cats-0.
We took Samang to the beach on Friday, and except for a brief period when she screamed to let us know that she hates sunscreen being applied to her wiggly little body, we had a kickass time. And then some self-righteous prick from the Parks Department came over to tell us that we couldn’t have a tent on the beach. The tent in question was this, which at least three lifeguards and two other Parks Department flunkies had walked past and ignored prior to Officer Prick. It’s not a tent, dude, it’s a baby shelter. No adults can sleep in it, we were obviously using it to keep the baby out of the sun while she napped. So we packed up early, made a stop at my house and a stop at Jordana’s house so all the adults could shower and get the sand off our bodies, and then headed down to Coney Island for the fireworks.
And then we made a miraculous discovery. Samang likes fireworks. We had put a lightweight blanket over her ears to protect her hearing from the explosions, and that part she didn’t like. She had just screwed up her face to start crying when the first firework went off. She opened her eyes to see what it was and was spellbound for the next twenty minutes. I spent more time watching her than I did the fireworks display because it was just so much fun to see her enjoying them. We may have to take her back this week to see them again.
Rick’s birthday was a couple of weeks ago, during that time I spent off-blog in Pittsfield eagerly anticipating the new Harry Potter movie with the Oldest. The Oldest and I got a lot of quality time in that half week, but my favorite moment of it was when she found a picture of Rick and Samang. After a while she asked if it was Samang and I said it was, and then she admitted “I thought it was Dad and me at first, but I couldn’t figure out why he looked so old.”
I looked her dead in the eye and said “And Dad’s age is what tipped you off, huh? You didn’t look at the picture and wonder why you were black?”
“Actually, no.”
Her father didn’t find this nearly as funny as we did when we told him.