MonsterFool

Sam’s first trip to the Jersey shore (that’s New Jersey, USA).

We started with a visit to the Cape May Courthouse Zoo. This is a free zoo. It was nice, although we worried that several of the animals didn’t have enough room (at least as not as much as the animals at Oakland and San Diego have). Sam said that the zebras were her favorite, but she also spent time watching the American Black Bear pace around his cage.

The most thrilling part for me was hearing the male lion roar. For a split second I thought it was an earthquake. The crowd ceased milling as the sound vibrated through us. A man standing near me said, “I felt that in my stomach!” He was not wrong. We must surely be hardwired to flee those rumbling sounds, though there was more of a shriek to it than I expected. Sam had the very sensible response to want to get as far away from the lion as possible. But I held her and moved closer so we could see him. He was stretching his paws up a tree and watching something out of view. We never learned what escaped the king of the jungle’s jaws.

After lions and leopards and cheetahs and bears and wallabies and the cutest little tamarin monkeys I’ve ever seen, we escaped to the beach. When I was a girl we came to Cape May for a week every summer. Back then, Cape May was a sleepy, quaint, undiscovered little Victorian seaside town. But sometime in the last 20 years they expanded the beach and the town became found. They kept the quaint though.

We spent the rest of the afternoon on the beach. Sam was cautious at first about the water but then she learned to love walking into the waves and getting splashed. Her favorite activity was filling a pail with water and then watching her grandfather pour it through a plastic water mill:

There was also sand-castle building. This one has a bit of a volcanic look to it.

After a nice dinner at the Merion Watson Inn (another place I fondly remember from my girlhood) and a brief walk to look at some of the old Victorian ladies (that’s houses), we drove back to PA. Sam fell into bed at about 10:30PM and stayed there until I woke her up at 10AM the next morning!

I need to remember that one secret to a good night’s sleep is a day at the beach.

A week or so before we left CA for PA, Sam found a book on dinosaurs and became interested, especially in some of the long and torturous names. So we’ve been reading a variety of dinosaur books, some serious and some silly. And we did one dinosaur craft shortly before our trip: a sponge-painted stegosaurus with clothespin-spiky plates:

(Thanks to No Time for Flash Cards for the idea.)

Some of the silly dinosaur books we’ve been reading include:
Tyrannosaurus Drip by the fabulous Julia Donaldson

When Dinosaurs Came with Everything

and an old favorite from Sam’s baby days

How Do Dinosaurs Say Goodnight.

We’ve also read a couple of “serious” non-fiction books about dinosaurs for preschoolers too, although my favorite is a fictional-framed story by Vivian French called T. Rex.

During a visit to a natural history museum a boy and his grandfather discuss the dinos. What I appreciate about the treatment is that the story emphasizes 1) that we don’t know much about the dinosaurs, and 2) that much of what we do know is speculation.

And how! We had an illustration of this point just today. I was showing Sam an old dinosaur activity book that was mine, back in the days of my own dino-obsession, oh a good 30 years ago (or more… who’s the dinosaur here?) Sam was particularly taken with one of the games where you have to trace a path to Oviraptor’s preferred food. According to the book, Oviraptor ate eggs. And that’s how he got his name. Egg-robber. Fine. Sounds plausible, right?

So we decide to make our own Oviraptor and eggs.

But while Sam was gluing the eggs to the dinosaur’s habitat, I googled Oviraptor. According to Wikipedia, and a couple of other dino sites I consulted, Oviraptor’s name and character is under much dispute. It may not have been an egg-robber but an egg-protector. The first Ovi skeleton, discovered in 1923, was found among eggs. But was the dinosaur hoarding the eggs as food or brooding them?

I find myself fascinated not so much by what the answer might turn out to be, but by the deeper, epistemological issue underlying the question. Everything we know about the dinosaurs is a best guess, a reconstruction of bones and fossils. And that knowledge keeps shifting and growing as we dig deeper, or as different people dig, and ask different questions, and look at the pieces in a different way.

Isn’t that the way of all knowledge? I think so. Dinosaur study reminds me of the usefulness of scientific skepticism. It reminds me to not draw conclusions too hastily. As the grandfather in T. Rex says, “Maybe yes, or maybe no– it was millions and millions of years ago.”

Meanwhile, the cardboard Oviraptor was finished. Sam had colored it pink. (”Mommy, it looks like a flaminglo!”) I also drew a T. Rex to hunt the Oviraptor, but Sam had other ideas. As soon as I’d cut him out, a conversation took place in which Ovi decided that T. Rex was his daddy. Then the two dinos asked me for a mommy dinosaur. So I drew a Diplodicus and we cut her out. And so the family consisted of a carnivore, a herbivore, and a possible egg-robber. Scientific skepticism, right?

Sam is all for it. She proceeded to feed the dinos, bathe them, and put them to bed under a blanket made of pink construction paper.

How’s that for revisionist natural history?

Sam and I have been at my parents’ house in PA for the past week. And have they been keeping the girl busy!

The program includes…

Tree-climbing

Cookie-baking

Cookie-Dough “Testing”

Strawberry-picking

Hayrides

Batting practice

Mowing the lawn

Dressing up in Mommy’s old clothes

I thought I had a few more years till Sam was borrowing my clothes, but I think I’ll let her keep this one for her own.

One of Sam’s regular questions is: “When do I get to have my OWN laptop?”

I finally broke down. Here it is:

(Thanks again to No Time for Flash Cards for the idea.)

This is a special design. Sam rejected both the QWERTY and DVORAK keyboard layout in favor of ZYKHJT raised to the Q. Also, notice the space bar on the left side of the keyboard. It has its own happy face button, so you don’t have to bother with shift-semi-colon-shift-zero. And there appear to be two O keys. Because…what’s not to love about the letter O?

Here’s an inside look at the creation of the keyboard:

The DVD drive is on the side of the screen:

When I asked her what she was going to watch on her laptop, she replied, “Dirt motorcycle videos.”

Yup. Computers and Motorcycles.

Is there any doubt whose daughter she is?

Some research I was doing on children’s book publishers led me to There’s a Dragon Downstairs by Hilary McKay and Amanda Harvey (2005).

Every night Sophie hears a dragon “rattling through the cat flap, slinking to the living room, growing and growing in the dark.” No one believes her, but Sophie is sure. The story is about the various strategies she adopts to find the dragon and drive it away.

For the past couple of weeks Sam has been obsessed with this book and so we decided to reenact it.

First we had to make her a knight costume, because Sophie’s first tactic is to dress up as a knight to fight the dragon:

Thank goodness Amazon sends us a lot of cardboard boxes. Notice the fancy pink shield! The sword, however, is a bit floppy.

But when Sophie clatters down the stairs, the dragon runs away.

The next night she dresses as a fire fighter with a super soaker squirter. Sophie knows that dragons breathe fire. Sam and I agreed that “pretend” water would be okay for this activity, and we fashioned the super soaker out of a milk jug. Once again, note the fancy pink. The “helmet” is a bit unwieldy, though, since we taped a flash light to the top of it.

When Sophie splashes down the stairs, the dragon runs away.

On the third night she dresses up as a princess and plans to trick the dragon. Here Sam is sporting a crown and wand made by the mother of one of her friends. The costume jewelry she inherited from her great-grandmother, Ruth. I like how it makes her look like a flapper. And wands should definitely be held like baseball bats.

In the book, Sophie trips down the stairs and once again the dragon escapes.

The next night, she decides to creep up on it, as herself. She tiptoes downstairs and discovers that the dragon…

is her kitty cat!

Sorry there’s no picture of me curled up on the couch washing my tail. And I forgot to take one of Sam. You see, we reenacted this about 10 times, and every other time I was Sophie and Sam was the dragon/cat. When it was my turn to the play the beast, I made sure to tap the cat flap in our basement door. That was bittersweet, since I hadn’t heard that sound since before Camus died. And during our first few months in this house, the sound of the cat door flip flip flapping usually meant that baby Sammy was chasing Camus.

Camus would have made an excellent dragon in our play. So I like to think that I was channeling him a wee bit.

Once again I must credit No Time for Flash Cards for this idea: take an empty egg carton, paste or paint a color on the bottom of each individual egg container, and then head outside to find things in nature that match the color.

Sam initially wanted nothing to do with painting the egg carton, since she had her own project in mind. It involved paint, glue, and toothpicks (the medium of choice these days). She told me she was making “a whole world.”

Here it is:

So I painted the cups myself and when the world was complete, Sam got interested and painted some cups on her own. As both a renter and a former landlord, I bless the person or persons who invented washable paints.

When the paint was dry, we headed outside. Sam was very enthusiastic about finding matches for the colors, and she filled green immediately in our front yard.

But, like so much in parenting, the nature walk didn’t go as I expected. (What? You expected it to go according to your idea? The whole world, toothpicks and all, had a good laugh on me). Instead of walking and talking about the names of different flowers, etc. that we picked up, we ended up having to talk a lot about private property. You see, the Bay Area in spring is an explosion of color, so we didn’t lack for that; but most of the color explosions are in other people’s yards. Poor Sam would see a flower that matched our exact shade of blue and rush up to it, only to stop and then ask me, “It’s in someone’s yard. Can we pick it?”

Yeah she knows not to pick things from other people’s yards. Remember that spring happens early in the Bay Area– try January–so we’ve had time to work on that.

But during this color nature walk we had to talk about some things on a case by case basis. A California poppy growing up in the cracks of the sidewalk? Sure, go ahead. Orange. Check. A dandelion on the side of the road? No problem. Yellow. Check. A gorgeous purple flowering thing that was planted on the street side of the sidewalk (where are often weeds)? No. Why not? Well, it was clearly planted by someone and is being tended to. See the fresh mulch?

So color by color we searched for things we could safely pluck.

Rose petals blown off a flower by the breeze, stuck to the sidewalk? Yes. Pink. Check.

Red rocks in a neighbor’s yard? Man. Sam saw these and went running up the hill shouting, “Mommy, I see some red!” Our neighbors at the top of our street have rocks instead of grass in their yard. Red was one of our last colors. Sam looked longingly at the vast crimson pile. Actually it was more like brick red. “But they’re in someone’s yard,” she frowned. Then she yelped, “Mommy, look!” It was a single red rock on the sidewalk that had spilled out over the stone wall that surrounds the house.

Okay, I said. You can claim that. Red. Check. Minus? Clearly the rock belonged to our neighbors. So in allowing Sam to take it I violated the principle I was trying to teach her. Then I started to wonder: how is the rock different from the rose petals that had blown off another neighbor’s rose bush? I didn’t hesitate about the rose petals. Is it because they had separated from the flower? Because left on the sidewalk they would wither and dry up?

Interesting questions to come from a simple activity for preschoolers. Score another one for the whole world.

We returned from our walk with all colors completed except for blue.

A week later and the leaves and flowers have shriveled. Only the brown stick and the red rock retain their luster. I’ll suggest to Sam that we return the rock on our next neighborhood walk.

But doggone it, we’re keeping the brown stick.

Back home in California, Sam has asked to continue the daily arts and crafts tradition we fell in to in the UK. (Thank heavens for craft blogs, because I would have run out of ideas long ago.)

The source for this project is No Time for Flash Cards. A wonderful resource for parents of preschool age children and toddlers.

Sam quickly got the hang of sticking the toothpicks into the marshmallows, but she mostly constructed objects in 2D. First thing she did was a sort of pentagon.

She then constructed something more… interesting. I think she said it was a city. Also, she started to get the idea of building into the third dimension, but the toothpicks didn’t always cooperate.

She later glued this structure to a piece of construction paper and it is now languishing, derelict, on the table in her room, like some lunar probe stranded on the moon. It seems that my next project is to come up with some creative way of managing Sam’s growing art gallery. This blog might be one of them. They say that for kids of this age, art is all about process, not product. Sam is definitely process-oriented, but she doesn’t let go of her oeuvres easily. The other day I picked up a scrap of paper from the floor and tossed it in the bin. Sam shouted, “No, Mommy! That’s not for the recycling bin! That’s a car! For my bears!”

The scrap did indeed have a number of wheels drawn on it. And so it went back onto Sam’s table.

I love the make-believe mind, but I do long for a tidy house. Maybe I can get Sam to make me one out of marshmallows and toothpicks. On second thought, never mind.

We return to the States tomorrow! We’re all quite sad to leave Brighton again. More later, once we’ve survived the long day of travel tomorrow.

In her bath tonight Sam was telling her comb (yes) that we’ll be taking a taxi to the bus station. Then a bus to Heathrow Airport. Then an airplane to S.F. Then BART to our house. Sadly she wasn’t making any of that up.

Our bus tickets are for 6:10AM GMT. We’re due to arrive at S.F.O. at 2:30PM PT. That’s 18.5 hours of travel.

If only that could feel as quick as our four weeks here…

People are often surprised that Sam and I aren’t traveling around the country every day seeing historical sites or spending loads of time in London. One reason for that is that we value spending our time in the U.K. as temporary residents and not as tourists. Another reason is that Sam is three (three and a half, Mom!) and my three-and-a-half year-old needs plenty of time to play and to just hang out at home.

So this is a post about what Sam does in a typical week in Brighton, besides going to Mini Music classes on Fridays and “Salut les petits” French classes on Wednesdays, and eating chips and peas at the pub on Sundays.

Playgrounds

We go to a lot of playgrounds. Last fall I thought we’d been to every one, but thanks to Mini Music in Hove, we’ve discovered one more (Stoneham Park). This time around Sam’s favorite playground is St. Ann’s Well Gardens. Here she is coming down the “big zippy slide:”

And this is her first ever ride on the zip line:

Arts and Crafts

This is our “craft table” in the flat:

We spend time here nearly every day, listening to music and working on some art project that I’ve managed to dream up using available (and cheap or free materials).

Painted Beach Pebbles:

Sam paints “A Girl in the Rain”

We cut out shapes and glued them onto cereal box cardboard to make the various trains from “The Little Engine That Could.” This is Sam’s favorite: the wheazy and greasy one. She made this one pretty much on her own.

And here is Sam executing her own “art project.” I think it was a swing for one of her bears. It involved gluing a cotton ball to a piece of paper and then threading some string through holes she made with her butterfly hole punch:

Finally, there were the shoe lace projects. Hands down this was the cheapest and the most useful craft material I purchased here. 20 pence for a pack of 12 shoe laces from a £ Shop that was going out of business. I figured I’d make Sam a lacing board with some cardboard, and I did. But she then:

1. Declared the laces spaghetti and dumped them in a bowl to feed to Molly Bear.
2. Laid them out to be railroad tracks for our reenactment of “The Little Engine that Could.”
3. Used one to string a painted “ornament” she made with a paper plate. (She is now insisting that we save this for the Christmas tree.)

4. Asked me to tie the laces across two wooden chairs to make an indoor volleyball net (which I did and then we played volleyball with a balloon for an hour).
5. Used them to make alphabet shapes on the floor. Pictured below are B, C, X, Y, H and L:

We have three days left here in Brighton and we’ll probably come up with three more things to do with these laces. Best purchase ever.

If anyone ever asks me what the secret is to living abroad with a three-year old, I’ll say “shoe laces,” and smile enigmatically.

In an episode of Dollhouse I watched just before we left the U.S., Adele Dewitt, the very proper, very British director of the Dollhouse proclaims in a drug-induced rant: “I don’t say hard R’s.”

I’ve been thinking about that phrase a lot over the past couple of weeks. Indeed one of the major differences between British and American pronunciation of English is in the “R.” Final R’s are always soft, sometimes disappearing entirely.

“Dis-app-earr” = American. “Dis-app-eah” = British.

While I enjoy the soft R, it has confounded Sam a bit. One of her treats here in Brighton is that she gets to watch a little bit of telly in the early evening while I make dinner. We don’t have a telly or a t.v. in California, so it is indeed a treat. We also don’t have CBeebies programming. While Sam still loves Charlie and Lola as much as she did last year, this time around her favorite show is Chuggington– a 10-minute cartoon about a group of talking trains. (Much more palatable than poor old Thomas and Friends, in my opinion).

Anyway, the deal is that Sam gets to watch two shows while I make dinner, and then over the meal she tells me about them. This has become an enjoyable routine for both of us, since I like hearing what she’s processed from the programs and she likes embellishing the stories. Usually I can tell when her narration deviates from the storyline into the Sammy imaginary story, but sometimes I can’t.

The other night she was telling me the names of some of the Chuggington trains. “And, Mommy, there’s a train named Dumbo!”

I really doubted that, but I didn’t contradict her. Then a few days later we were talking about Chugginton with my one Mum friend here. She said that her favorite train was the Scottish one– Dunbar.

“Ah, Sammy,” I said. “It’s not Dumbo, it’s Dunbar.”

“NO!” she was pretty emphatic. “His name is Dumbo.”

Then yesterday she got to watch the very beginning of a show called “Sixty-four Zoo Lane” because I was running late with the meal preparation. When I shut the telly off, she cried, “But Mommy I really LIKE “60 Paws Zoo Lane!”

“It’s time for dinner,” I said. “And it’s Sixty-FOUR Zoo Lane.”

“NO!!”

I didn’t argue with a girl who needed her dinner. But I did wonder about her hearing. Then I thought of Ms. Dewitt and her soft R’s.

“Dunbah” the Scottish train might really sound like “Dumbo” to a 3.5 year old American girl. And when I listened to the opening music of “Sixty-four Zoo Lane,” it did sound like “Sixty-faw.”

So I’ll cut her some slack in her auditory processing of the soft R’s. After all, this evening when she was telling me about today’s episode of “In the Night Garden,” she used an English word that I rarely think to use, if ever, and didn’t know that she knew:

“Mommy, the Tombliboos took a ride on the Ninky-Nonk and their trousers fell off!”

Can you guess which word astounded me? It was neither Tombliboos nor Ninky-Nonk, I’m afraid. Just regular old “trousers.” So much more elegant than “pants.” And you know what? Sam pronounced it “trousahs.”

My daughter’s English is being corrupted by the telly.