The Lantern Festival

A couple weeks ago was the daycare's annual lantern festival, which is an Austrian tradition that celebrates St. Martin. I really don't know what lanterns have to do with Martin, but let me google that for you. The group that the Noodle and the Nugget are in hosted their celebration at 4.30 pm on a Wednesday, because apparently no one's parents work, and, in a rare change of events, the teachers decided that it would be too cold to let the kids parade outside, so it was hosted in a darkened classroom. 

Indeed it was so dark that all of our photos came out plain black. This means you'll have to rely on the evocative power of the written word. I hear that people can't do that any more, especially millennials, but the readership of this blog is very, very exclusive (hi, mom and dad!). What you do is read the words and just imagine stuff. I believe in you. 

So what is supposed to happen at the lantern festival was that the parents sit on teeny weeny chairs in a big circle, the lights go out, the kids (ages 1 - 3.5) parade in holding paper lanterns (with real candles for everyone aged 2 and up!) singing the Lantern Song. This is followed by the performance of five or six songs and poems. Then punch and a brioche roll for everyone. Hooray! 

What happened instead was like the bar scene from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Time stopped, nothing made sense, we weren't sure if this was hilarious or frightening. 

Only half of the children actually came in singing, of which only one of them audibly (bless her!). The rest were evenly divided between running to their parents, crying, falling over, or staring stupidly into space. The teachers (bless them!) sang loudly and looked at the children encouragingly, but toddlers have a mulish recalcitrance to perform on command. These ones, in particular, could not have given less of a f***.  

The Nugget, who can't walk very well yet, came and sat on my lap. She did a great job dancing in place and hurling her lamp around, though. 

The Noodle, by contrast, is one of the four "big kids" in the class (>3 years) and was therefore supposed to join in the recitation of a poem (calm down, it had like 12 words) and also play a lead role in a little play that they put down. 

She was not having it. 

"No," she said when her turn came. "Meh. Meh meh mmph," she said, turning her head to the wall.  

"PLEASE," begged the teacher's assistant. "You practiced! You did so well! You can do it."

At these moments it's not clear what the best parenting approach is. I tend to freeze like a deer in headlights. On one hand, she's three. On the other hand, I'm half Chinese. I wasn't sure what the appropriate mix of flexible, supportive, cajoling or threatening (I mean 'ambitious') would be, so I just shuffled through all of them in the space of about 30 seconds.

"That's okay babe, if you're feeling shy you don't have to go. You can stay right here with me. We can sing from here together... But don't you want to go? It looks so fun. I really think you should go. I bet you'd do a great job! Look, your teacher wants you to go. Get up. Go. GO! Come on, just go. Please go? I'd be so happy if you'd go. I'll be so sad if you don't go. Go? No? Okay that's fine, stay right here. Don't even worry about it. You can tell us the poem later. Are you sure you don't want to go?" 

I'm pretty sure this is actually some form of emotional abuse, but never mind. In the end she stayed right next to us all the way until the end of the performance and didn't even really sing along once. My only comforts were the boy (also one of the big kids - YES!) who basically napped next to his mom, and the little girl who zipped around like a caffeinated wasp the whole time, landing on various people's laps. I felt tremendous solidarity with their parents. 

And I remembered the mantra: "Do I really care?" 

Well actually yeah kind of. But whatever. 

By the end of the evening (i.e. 20 minutes after it started), the chairs were no longer in a circle and children were scattered in diverse states of disarray and undress. The parents had lowered their expectations from "I shall take sweet Christmas-y pictures of little Mary and Bobby singing like wee angels" to "I shall keep Mary and Bobby in a holding pattern with their pants on until we can go home". 

Most of the candles in the lanterns had gone out, everyone was talking, and only the two teachers (bless them!) were still trying to hold the whole thing down through the powers of positivity and bloody-minded singing. May they both win the lottery one day, really. Whatever they earn it is not enough.  

And then we all had punch and got the hell out of there as quick as we could. 

Which isn't to say that we aren't totally excited for next year's Lantern Festival. Maybe one day my kids will even participate. I'll light a candle for that. 

The Nugget is One

Two weeks ago our littlest roommate turned one, and happy we are that she is ours. It's hard to believe that it has already been twelve months since this tiny, mewling handful that could barely lift her head slipped into the world*. 

Suuuper excited about turning 1! (Candle man-handled into the cake courtesy of her big sister)

Today she can whisper a few words (Daddy, cats, t'anks, das (this), Mommy, Nara (Nava)). She can gallop on all fours like a tiny bison, hobble along with the aid of a finger and even take a few steps unaided when her hands are full and she forgets that she can't. Who will she be when she grows up? Time will tell, but here are a few early contenders: 

1. The Researcher. The Nugget is serious about understanding everything. She points at objects and names them ("Das, das, das, das, Katze, das, das"). She takes everything apart, empties every drawer, attempts to scale every height, squash herself into every nook, and generally get as many perspectives as possible. The physical world is a wonder that she finally has the wherewithal to explore. 

What happens when I stir Mommy's coffee with a blue marker?  What does it look like if you drop a bowl full of spaghetti from great height? How much toothpaste (fluoride free!) can I eat before someone stops me? What does the toilet brush taste like today? Can I jam my whole shoe in my mouth? Okay but how about now? And now? Yeah but how about...The answer to all these questions, my friend, is "DAS". 

When critical research is interrupted for so-called "safety reasons"

2. The Cat Lady. This child loves our damn cats to death. They, to their eternal credit, haven't mauled her yet. She follows them around like a terrifying floor drone, eats their food, pulls out handfuls of hair, and yanks their tails. 

"No, Nugget, cats are not for hitting. You can pet them nicely, like THIS," we say over and over and to no absolutely avail. She slaps these b****es across the mouth like she's auditioning for a role in The Godfather. It's all love though. 

This face, teaching cats hard lessons since approx. May 2016.

3. The Nerd in a Good Way. You know how in every class, conference or church gathering there's that one dude in the back who finds every shitty PowerPoint joke actually funny, so while everyone else is doing the polite titter he's carrying on like a contested man goose? That's the Nugget. She'll crack up and wave a wee arm in the general direction of whatever's good lately, pointing it out in case you failed to notice. Because water from the faucet...get it? Blocks falling down? Hilarious. The Noodle doing anything? PRICELESS. Nugget's face splits open to reveal four teeth in a sea of gums, she honks away, and the whole world lights up around her. Our little Christmas tree.  

Tricycles are hilarious.

4. The Vacuum Cleaner.  Her big sister, the Noodle, had a babyhood full of vitamins and minerals, steamed vegetables pureed with organic white fish and whole grains. The Nugget, by contrast, gets the baby-friendliest bits of whatever we're having anyway, so basically pizza crusts and the odd lint-covered gummi bear out of her big sister's coat pocket. My husband feels this is justified for the same reason it's cool that we let her fall down a lot: we're making a ninja.  

5. The Enchanted Rainbow Fairy. I guess it's a feature of younger siblings that they are frequently decorated with hair clips, bits of tape, stickers, pieces of Kleenex, neon-colored rubber stamps and other toddler detritus. Plus our apartment has really gone to the dogs since Baby #2 arrived, so there's usually a bunch of lint and fur attached to her, too. The Nugget also loves (*LOVES*) to eat crayons, ideally the washable kind that melt in your mouth and make you look like you have beautiful, enchanted vomit running down your front. She's like a babbling, crawling jack-daw nest. This may sound upsetting,  but you must remember that her father and I looked like this on purpose well into our twenties, and also we are raising a ninja. 

Muffins eating "muffins" (they're cupcakes, Starbucks. Stop lying).

6. The Ninja. This baby will slide down your skylight, pull 85 wetwipes out of the box, unroll three packs of toilet paper, eat all the raisins out of your trail mix and ghost before you even look up from that underwhelming diply.com listicle you shouldn't have been reading anyway ("15 things the Internet crapped out today", e.g). Okay, she's not quite one of those YouTube babies that comes out of the womb bouldering and doing kick flips, but for a one year-old she's pretty good. Anything the Noodle can do, the Nugget will try and achieve, and really it's amazing how rarely she actually gets hurt. For example, instead of just, like, getting down off the couch, she usually chooses to fling herself over the (way taller) armrest and drop to the floor like a wayward teen hopping the swimming pool fence late at night. She makes kind of the same face, too ("Hur hur").  

She doesn't sleep, she strategizes.

7. Whatever She Wants To Be. This exuberant little munchkin pumpkin becomes more and more her own every day in the way she moves, communicates, thinks and feels. What I hope for her this year and for all the rest of her years is that she learns to be always kind, has the insight to figure out what she (really) loves to do -- whether that's art, accounting or (*gulp*) astrology -- and finds the courage to do that with all of her heart. 

Thanks for being around, little Nugget. Our lives would be less without you. 

LOVE

___________________________________________________________________

* And by "slipped into the world" I mean she was born in a fight, because it turned out the lease on her home was running out -- the way it contracted, it was death or the loophole, and mighty small that was too. The poor thing was shoved out like a seed through the tail end of a bird, dropped into the cold. Humans all have to start like this though because otherwise it wouldn't be fair that we have airconditioners and baked goods.