Leesburg Essay 3

The Dog Days

We took a family trip at the end of July that I've come to think of as the 2006 Farm Animal Tour. Stopping in New Jersey (in both directions in order to visit grandparents and the Korosecs), we drove to New Hampshire to visit with Aunt Marcia and Aunt Jolie and the O'Rourkes. Everyone thoroughly enjoyed the visits, but the highlight for the kids—in addition to lots of attention from relatives that they don't see very often—was access to a variety of domesticated animals they don't see very often. We visited Aunt Marcia's new horse Nike (a Dutch warm blood, for the cognoscenti) at their new horse farm (Ten Broeck Farm) just over the border in Massachusetts. Whenever I see horses I'm struck by the fact that they are Really Big. Their heads are the size of Nora's whole body. We got to see a very accomplished rider from Florida (she was boarding her horses at the farm) going through some dressage practice. The kids got to pet and sit on Nike.

Back at Aunt Marcia's house, Alexander and Nora both made friends with Annie the dog. Alexander has always been quite unsure of dogs, in part I think because the dogs in Berlin were never on leashes and occasionally would tackle him when we walked back to the dog beach in the woods behind the house. Lately, though, he's been bugging me to get a dog. My response is that having a dog is like having a baby, and so he and Nora are going to have to be older and able to do more things for themselves. Luckily, we already have a fenced-in yard so it's sort of perfect for a (smallish) dog—so long as everyone remembers to close the three gates.

Alexander was thrilled to run around for two days with Shane and Ian and both he and Nora loved seeing the chickens, guinea hens, and pigs that Aunt Alex keeps. Nora was especially interested in the pigs, which both fascinated and repelled her. We took a walk across the street to the dairy farm, where the three boys got a kick (naturally) out of watching the cows pee. We even took a fairly good hike with all the kids, and George got his “Maine” lobster dinner prepared outside in the lobster pot by Uncle Tim, thus eliminating the need for a special side trip to the actual State of Maine.

Back in New Jersey we managed to catch up with Cheryl, Hon, and Annaliese, who were up from Florida to close on their house in Ringwood. We met them at a public beach on a lake in Ringwood, where Uncle Hon lead the kids in a bunch of silly games. Alexander and Annaliese bonded in that little kid kind of way—lot of activity, little speech. I find it amusing that Annaliese apparently refers to Alexander as “alligator.”

Aunt Marcia's horse made a big impression on Nora. For a week of so following the trip, she wouldn't respond to any name other than “Nike.” Sensing her new-found interest in equine matters, a neighbor brought out her daughters' collections of My Little Pony toys for Nora, and I was struck once again by the Bizzarro world of children' playthings. My Little Ponies comes with brushes that look more like my hair brush than curry combs, along with, as would be expected, a plastic wedding cake.

On our various drives this summer we've had to contend with the problem of Alexander's car sickness. As there aren't motion sickness medicines for kids under the age of six, I came up with the solution of ginger. On the trip in which I fed him regular doses of straight candied ginger, he didn't throw up. He complained that he hated the ginger, however, and so for the next trip I made him a batch of candied ginger cookies. He hated these as well (the look of horror on his face was something), although again he didn't throw up when he ate them. On our way back from New Hampshire, he finally refused to eat any more and I threw the remainder of a cookie out the window in frustration. Nora has since managed to make us both look like fools by, on random occasions, telling him “Alle-ander eat a ginger cookie or you're going to throw up.” When he says “no,” she says “then throw it out the window.” With or without the ginger, he hasn't thrown up on our last couple of small trips (our next big one is likely to be to the beach with Aunt Felicie and Uncle Greg in September). Maybe the whole ginger thing has terrified him so much his inner ear is trying desperately to correct itself.

Before our trip in June to my parents in Tennessee, I bought Nora a little inflatable travel bed featuring Dora the Explorer. From the minute I brought it home she feared it. Not because of the bed itself, but because it requires inflation with a pump. George said he made the mistake of showing Nora the pump by blowing air unexpectedly in her face, and this made her so agitated that she could no longer be near him when he blew up the bed, and in fact she wanted nothing to do with the bed at all. We had to leave the bed out in the play area for a couple of weeks so that she could crawl around in it and put her toys to bed in it before she would even consider trying to sleep in it herself. In the end, she was fine in the bed and this was quite a relief as she's at an age where it's difficult to find somewhere for her to sleep when we're on the road. At Aunt Marcia's, Alexander managed not to repeat his Christmastime performance, when he fell off his full-sized inflatable bed and rolled under our bed (without waking up), but the second night in the room with Ian and Shane, he came downstairs looking for us, absolutely terrified because the room was pitch black (no streetlights certainly in that neighborhood). He was not comforted by the fact that Shane was sleeping right next to him, and we finally had to plug in his night light.

As the summer ends, Nora is very busy being two: “no” is a good word only if she is the one saying it. She insists on doing everything for herself, and takes great joy in doing the things the her brother is no longer interested in doing for himself, such as washing hands. She frequently goes running into the bathroom and puts soap on her hands, but she can't turn on the water so she comes running out again for me to rinse them off. One thing that makes me kind of sad is that she has given up saying “oss” instead of “off.” It was very endearing to hear her say “I can take it oss!!” At least we still eat “brea-sass” in the morning and her brother is still “Alle-ander” or “Ander” and she still goes down into the “base-ump” to play, but it's just not the same without “oss.”

Because Alexander and Nora have been spending a lot of time together, some particular forms of sibling rivalry have developed. The most ridiculous is when Alexander hits on something that annoys her (such as saying to her “I'm going to change your diaper!!”) and then does it over and over until she gets very upset and lets us know that he' s doing something objectionable. Occasionally they reach a point when she's clearly sure that he's bugging her, but she's not entirely clear on why, and then, with a rising note of hysteria, we get the wonderfully vague “Ander's doing sumping!”

When Alexander was Nora's age he used to refer to music as “mugis.” I'm not sure whether he still says this; I'll have to check. Maybe this is something to try and correct before he goes to school, along with his occasional habit of writing letters upside down and backwards, which reminds me of some horror movie message of doom.

This summer Alexander learned to ride his bike without training wheels, which has been a big thrill for him. But a bigger advance was for him to get over his extreme fear of water. In my parents' pool I was able to spend a chunk of time with him working on the inflated swimming rings and a kick board I discovered by chance at the mall; I wanted him to see that water can be fun. A mere six weeks later, when we started going to our neighborhood pool, he taught himself how to swim underwater a bit. (Now if we can just teach him to say “music” instead of “mugis,” maybe he'll have a future.) Nora, on the other hand, has always been attracted to water. Every once in a while she appears in our house, having managed to put on her plastic swim diaper and her bathing suit over her clothing. Sometimes she accessorizes this outfit, most recently with hiking boots and a necklace or two, telling me she's going hiking and then swimming in the waterfall.

On the subject of photo-worthy ensembles, we took Nora to the emergency room one Saturday morning because we thought she might possibly have a urinary tract infection (she didn't). The nurse put a baggie on where her diaper would normally be to catch some pee and check for infection. I wish I had a picture of her, standing in the examination room in shirt, sneakers, sunglasses (she wore these the entire three hours we were there), hospital bracelets (which she still wears), and baggie.

One thing I've always wondered, and it appears to be universal, is what it is with kids and plastic water bottles. I could be eating an ice cream sundae and it's a toss up whether the kids would notice, but if I surreptitiously try to take a drink from a plastic bottle of Aquafina, they're on me like swarm of gnats. Then they'll proceed to argue over who gets to carry what used to be my drink. The same fascination extends to vending machines. Like George joining clubs in high school because there was a chance of free pizza, I think Alexander would drive halfway across the state, risking death by ginger, to get something from a vending machine. Since he never seems to think twice about the snacks he's gotten out of the vending machine, and I get tired of seeing little ¾ full bags of snacks with rubber bands around them in the cabinet, I told him that from now on he could pretend to insert money and I would in turn drop his dessert onto the table in front of him (yes, we've actually done this).

Education Update

Alexander will be starting kindergarten (mornings) the day after Labor Day. He says that he's interested in learning to read, but really just wants to learn to tie his shoes.

George and I have had more than enough school ourselves, although George would love it if I would support him going back for even more. We have both been fans for a number of years of courses offered through The Teaching Company. The courses are available on CD, DVD, download to an MP3—pretty much anything you want—and they cover a wide variety of subjects. I'm currently listening to a course on poetry and George and I together are watching a course on the history of European art. The art course is taught by this generally mild-mannered guy from the Smithsonian, who will occasionally launch into bizarre mini-tirades on one subject of art world controversy or another. My personal favorite was when he pointed out—without using any actual titles—that anything calling itself “DaVinci this” or “DaVinci that” is meaningless given that Vinci is just the Italian hometown of the artist who those in the know would refer to as “Leonardo.” DaVinci, for all you simpletons out there, simply means “from Vinci.”

Sports Update

I caught a good number of the World Cup matches earlier in the summer. My personal favorite was the match between Portugal and I-don't-remember-the-team that descended into an all out brawl. The commentary after the match was that the Russian referee had lost control of the game and was throwing down yellow cards left and right. They tacked several minutes (stoppage time) on the end of the game and each side was down to about nine players because a couple had accumulated enough cards to be tossed out altogether. The next day, the New York Times columnist George Vecsey wrote of the many players who do an elaborate “dance of the stricken” to get the refs to pay attention to the various slights, insults, and assaults that are thrown around on the field like so much confetti. I thought American football was violent and foul-ridden, and I didn't even see the match where Zenidine Zidane head-butted an opponent for dissing his Mommy.

Meanwhile, American football, apparently the less violent of the two, is about to start up again, which means the return of the football commentary of the Tuesday Morning Quarterback, Gregg Easterbrook. NFL.com carried the column last year, but this year it appears to be on ESPN's website. It's a riot. He's a scientist of some kind and can spout all sorts of statistics about all aspects of the game, with asides about developments in the science world and pop culture. The detailed statistical analysis reminds me a bit of being in graduate school again, minus all those pesky tests and grades.

Media Update

I am currently reading a very long saga called “Kristin Lavransdatter” by Sigrid Undset. My mother recommended it because she said I could learn something about my Norwegian heritage (it's about Norway in the 1300s). I first thought it was going to be kind of like a Harlequin romance novel, but as it turns out, the characters are far more complex and interesting than that. The descriptions of the landscape particularly make clear that Norway is a dark, cold place. When George and I were discussing where we wanted to live overseas, I mentioned maybe Oslo. George immediately started mocking me because I've never been one for cold and dark. Who knows, maybe the Norwegian landscape is infused in my blood and I'm just resisting my true destiny?

I can't say that I actually enjoyed reading “A Woman in Berlin,” which is an anonymous memoir by a woman living in Berlin at the end of WWII, but I'm glad I read it. Much of the story concerns German women fraternizing with the Russians, in hopes that a relationship with one Russian would forestall all sorts of nastiness from others. What got me, however, was her descriptions of walking across the city—which had been reduced to absolute rubble—from her apartment building in the east all the way over to the western section and our old neighborhood. And this in bad shoes and on an empty stomach. By the end of the book, in hopes of rejoining the world of journalism, she was walking every day—again, always hungry—from her apartment in the east to the Charlottenburg district, which is in the northwest. And most Americans can't seem to walk from the parking lot into the mall.

Earlier this summer George and I caught the first season of the TV program “Lost.” The premise is that a group of people are stranded on an island somewhere in the Pacific (they assume) after their plane goes down. It's not quite a “non-reality” version of Survivor, though, as some supernatural things are going on. It's made me wonder what good I would be if we were somehow stranded on an island, and I'm thinking I should develop some sort of actual useful skill other than walking long distances, as useful as that particular skill is for those on the island. A Korean woman in the series established a small garden and can identify and use medicinal herbs. Maybe this could be my angle, although I'd need to start with a book called something like “Survival in the Jungle for Dummies.” (As an aside, my own garden was almost ruined by torrential June rains. While I was in Tennessee with the kids, George reported to me that our backyard actually had a river with its own delta surrounding my new hydrangea and bee balm and seeping into my perennial garden. I started thinking of it as the Windy River, after Nora's imaginary friend called “the Windy,” and then decided that when I began bottling my own wine I might have to call it “Windy River Red”—because of course it would be a red.)

The movie front has not been very inspiring lately. We caught last year's (?) big hits “The 40-Year Old Virgin” and “The Wedding Crashers”; mildly amusing but no “Meet the Parents.” One of the notable movies we saw was “Chinatown” with Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway, which we had both seen before. The movie, for those who have not seen it, concerns water rights in Los Angeles. In addition to my weird affinity for Norwegian landscapes, I also believe that I lived in Los Angeles in a past life, which makes me wonder what I might have done in a past past life to deserve that. We enjoyed “The Constant Gardener” with Ralph Fiennes, although, like “Chinatown,” it's one of those movies where it seems that we're supposed to enjoy the atmosphere and not really worry too much about who actually did what to whom and why. We also caught a very interesting Italian movie called “I'm Not Afraid,” which is about a little boy who discovers something terrible going on in his small Sicilian town, and a German film called “Bella Martha.” These are well worth seeing, especially to cleanse your palate if you've recently seen “Barbershop 6.”

As many of you may know, I've been practicing yoga on a fairly regular basis for a number of years. When we lived in Arlington I attended class at a great studio called “Sun and Moon” that had a wide range of classes from beginner to teacher training. In Berlin, I did not go to class because I feared the extent of my German was not going to allow me to get the finer points of the class or understand any teacher correction coming my way. Instead I used general yoga references and a home practice notebook I'd gotten at the Arlington studio. In Leesburg I haven't yet found a studio in close proximity that offers advanced classes. TiVo, however, has allowed me to explore the world of yoga television.

I've been recording two classes a day: “Namaste” on one of the HD channels and “Wai Lana Yoga” on public television. The difference between them is like night and day. Wai Lana dresses in these elaborate colorful costumes and feathers and such and then does some pretty challenging stuff with a Hawaiian (read: soothing) landscape as a backdrop. “Namaste” employs three fetching young women in bicycle shorts and sports bras backed by a come-hither voiced narrator, switching from one location to another. I prefer the former. George, however, who does not actually do yoga, prefers the latter. Whenever he wants to demonstrate the HD capability of the TV, he “randomly” picks “Namaste.” Grown men pretend nonchalance and comment on the clarity of the picture as they stare at the girls going through their routines.

Social Commentary

In the past few years we have seen much press about the problem of obesity in children (driving in part the emergence of such groups as the ban-junk-food-in-schools group or the recess-revival group). My guess is that this problem will be difficult if not impossible to solve through the normal means of diet and exercise, unless there is a fundamental shift back to more home-cooked meals, people walking places instead of driving, and less time in front of computers or TVs (although it seems to me that MP3s and cell phones represent the perfect opportunity to get kids out and walking). What I wonder is how obesity is changing the nature of childhood. This may be like the chicken and egg in that childhood obesity may be a result of the different nature of children's lives compared to the 1970s, let's say. But it seems to me to be mutually reinforcing. Children, like adults, may be spending much more time in very un-interactive pursuits such as video games or watching television as they get heavier and less capable of (or interested in) moving around. At the time in their lives when they have the greatest natural store of energy, many may be unable to truly take advantage of it. Leaving out the detrimental health aspects and development of a lifetime of bad habits, what does this mean for social and physical development in children?

The press' take on the Hezbollah-Israel conflict has been quite revealing. The most blatant example of bias I saw was when Israel made an incursion into Lebanon after the ceasefire had gone into effect. Of course the UN and Lebanon and the EU and everyone else on the feckless side made some outraged comments about Israel's violation of the ceasefire. The Post ran a quite long article about the subject, relating everyone's statements on the matter and the reaction from Hezbollah, etc. Only one or two lines even noted the fact that the reason Israel had made this incursion was that Syria and Iran were in the process of rearming Hezbollah. The Post seemed unable to acknowledge that this might be a minor security concern to Israel—or a violation of the ceasefire, for that matter. In addition, everyone seems remarkably lacking in outrage about the fact that no one plans to disarm Hezbollah any longer. I'm concerned all this has managed to shift the language to a point where Hezbollah will be considered a legitimate pseudo-state actor with its own legitimate security needs.

And, at last, the “outer” of Valerie Plane has been revealed, but you would hardly know it because—oops—it wasn't Karl Rove. The story that revealed that the actual source was Dick Armitage was buried well into the Post, a take-a-sip-of-coffee-and-you-might-miss-it kind of thing. The downplaying is so blatant that it's worth a laugh. Scrolling along the bottom of the screen on one of the news channels I did see something about Valerie Plame not dropping her lawsuit. I guess she's going to attempt to keep up the outrage, otherwise she might not be on the invite list for this year's Vanity Fair Oscar party.

Ode to a Wellie

Wellie Wellie
Hunter Green (well, really purple)
Keep me dry
when the weather's mean

People mock me;
they're so high
until it rains;
by and by