Recently in Family Category

Ending a dearth of updates, here’s a video of Az and Em playing at one of my childhood haunts…

Nothing much, really. As evidenced in this new video:

Just a quick note to say “Hi!” from California. Azure’s bunkered down in LA with family & I’m up at the Googleplex in Mountain View for a few days.

Emmie was pretty good on the flight over — she slept just long enough for me to sneak in a viewing of ‘Talledaga Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby’, a film which seemed expressly designed for airplane viewing. Her brief kip wasn’t much, though, and Em had gone completely nutty by the time we finally landed. I’ve never seen her so punchy, wobbly and manic as when she toddled her way out of the plane last Saturday.

We’d gate-checked our stroller, and wound up waiting outside the jetway for a good fifteen minutes. There was an old security guard on duty, and you could tell that Em had him just a bit conflicted — she was cute as a button, but every one of her behaviors (an inability to walk a straight line without falling, loud and insistent babbling, the undue interest in pushing the airport wheelchair, and her refusal to surrender her beverage container) matched the classic ‘Problem Passenger’ profile.

This is short, but sweet: Emmie walked up to a small Christmas tree in the Cambridge city centre today, pointed out the lights to me, and made the ASL sign for ‘flower’.

So, a few weeks back, Emelyn pointed vigorously at a full-page picture of Tony Snow (White House press secretary) in Time magazine and said, “Da-da”.

Today, she pulled a five-pound note out of my wallet, stared long and hard at Queen Elizabeth’s portrait, looked up at me and smiled, then pointed carefully again at Her Majesty, and said, “Da-da”. At which point Azure tells me that Emmie did the exact same thing two days ago, when I wasn’t around.

This is a long story.

When I was a boy, I spent quite a few summers in Germany, visiting Oma, my maternal grandmother. Those are all happy memories, though like most childhood recollections, they’re fragmented, now: I can picture Oma’s tiny refrigerator, Opa’s metal-framed recliner, my Polizei Playmobil set, the miniature boiler above the bath, and a million other details. People and faces are harder to recall, although there’s one particular image of Oma at her stove, and a memory of my Opa in his chair (doodling mustaches on faces in a magazine) that still seem clear and right to me.

But the memory that matters for this particular tale is of a book - “Tales From Moominvalley”, by Tove Jansson. Somebody, probably Mom, bought it at Regensburg’s English bookstore. Moomin books are justly famous in their native Finland, and the children’s series eventually migrated throughout the UK and much of Europe (and Japan, as we shall see), but I don’t think it ever made an impact in the States.

I loved the Moomins, though. In particular, I liked Snufkin, who wears a dirty green hat and smokes a pipe.

Who is Snufkin? Hard to say with precision, but he’s a sincere fellow, who occasionally wanders into the Moomin stories to help the small Moomin creatures get their problems sorted. I wanted to be like Snufkin back then, and maybe I still do: he’s incorrigibly itinerant, unfailingly humble, surprisingly attuned to the natural world, and, most of all, thoughtful in how he deals with others. Tove Jansson, who wrote and illustrated the Moomin books, drew him like so:

Good guy.

Now, fast-forward twenty-odd years, and spin the planet to Tokyo, where Azure and I are strolling through quiet backstreets, getting purposely lost. And who should we find fifteen minutes later, but Snufkin, standing at attention on a junk-filled card table outside some ramshackle toyshop. It wasn’t quite Snufkin as Tove Janssen drew him, not quite, but a Japan-ized anime version that was almost more adorable.

That particular Snufkin was a chokinbako, or piggy-bank, and I simply had to have him. And for a fast 1,000 yen, I did.

Now, at those prices, we couldn’t justify buying the whole Moomin set on display, though I’m guessing we both secretly wanted to. The one figure Azure really wanted, but stoically declined to purchase, was Little My.

See, Azure had flipped through my old Moomin books some years earlier, taking an immediate fancy to another character, the aforementioned Little My. Strange, some might say, as Little My is not at all nice. Not mean or wicked, either. Little My is simply selfish and mischievous. She is small and cute and the books say that she fits inside a milk jug, but still, she is trouble:

See?

OK. Speed along for a couple years more. Azure and I are settled, now, and living in Berkeley. And while things might seem happy on the surface, the two of us have become preoccupied with a curious regret. My Snufkin bank seems sad standing on its own, and Azure quietly pines for the Little My that we never bought in Japan. We’ve had an active eBay search for ‘moomin bank’ and keyword variants for months.

Trouble, trouble, trouble.

And then, one fine day, she appears. We bid. We bid fast, we bid high. We bid with a total disregard for sense and sensibility. On eBay, you see, that’s what it takes to win. We won.

This is almost the end of the story.

Snufkin was indeed joined on our mantelpiece by Little My, just as you’d expect. The union of those two plastic piggybanks, for whatever reason, meant a lot to us. (Recognize ‘em, yet? They’ve stood side-by-side on the masthead of jasoncook.com for years.)

Which brings us to the present. Mantelpieces have come and gone, continents swapped out from under our feet, but Snufkin and Little My always stay in arm’s reach, most recently occupying a spot on the banister outside Emmie’s room.

There’s been a change, though, of late. They move. Now you’re more likely to find either (or both) in Emmie’s hands. Little My, of course, is the favorite. Trouble times two.

About a week ago, Azure called me at work. “I can’t find Little My”, she said, which hardly fazed me, since Little My is rarely where you’d expect her - hiding behind the DVD player, perhaps, or lying on the brick floor of the conservatory. Thanks to Emmie, she gets around quite a bit.

But, no, Azure explains, Little My is gone gone, last spotted in Emmie’s arms days ago as she was being pushed in her pram about town.

Watch Emmie with her toys sometime, and suddenly gone gone seems frighteningly plausible - the more Em loves something, it seems, the more likely she is to drop it from her grasp/pram/crib. It’s a phase, maybe?

Anyhow. We were sad. More than I would care to admit, I know, and ditto for Azure.

That’s almost the end of the story. Life moves on, etcetera. But this time, there’s a happy postscript…

Spin the clocks backward a day or two or four, until you see Azure, carrying a basket, and pushing a pram through the narrow aisles of Al-Amin halal market, Cambridge. It’s the closest grocer to home. It’s also the penultimate stop on a Great Retracing Of Steps that Azure’s been doing in the days since Little My went AWOL. Watch Azure asking the owner, now, against all hope, if he’s seen a funny plastic doll, maybe, one with a trouble-making appearance, just lying around?

“This thing?” he asks, pointing an accusatory finger at Little My, who is sitting proudly on top of his cash register, hands clasped in gleeful mischief.

We’re slipping deep into Autumn, over here. As evidenced by this video from last weekend, where you can see the trees starting to turn on The Backs.

Azure taught Emmie a little habit she picked up from her own dad, as a little girl: whenever he finished off a can of Pepsi, Doc would make an exaggerated, telegenic “Ahhh!” noise.

Something like this:

Speaking of media, here’s some unadorned footage of Em being loud, and quiet.

Azure and I may wantonly create media with Emmie in it — next up is likely to be ‘EMTV’, a 24-hour cable network supplementing her podcast, blog and photo albums for family — but we try to be a bit more judicious about what media our daughter herself consumes. That’s a real challenge, since every picture book these days is about a cartoon that’s also a movie that’s also a Happy Meal that’s also a toy that’s then advertised on TV during the cartoon that’s based on the book.

Doesn’t seem right.

‘Course, I grew up with a Greedo action figure in my fist, and Pac-Man cereal in my tummy and I eventually turned out OK, so maybe the multi-channel branding/merchandising ain’t no big thing. Still, I figure if we can shelter Emmie from marketeers for a little bit, well, it wouldn’t hurt.

All of which brings me to this DVD Emmie is allowed to watch while Mom or Dad makes her breakfast. It’s called ‘Here Comes Bod’, and because it’s old, it’s saner and gentler than anything we can find on TV, now.

Emmie loves Bod. She calls the TV ‘Bod’.

Maybe you might like Bod, too. There’s an episode here so you can see.

Autumn is creeping up on Cambridge. It’s dark when we wake, now, and in the morning it’s cold downstairs.

I made a short video from our trip to Adare, here:

Home again, home again, lickety-split! We’re all just back from a too-short trip to Ireland.

‘Twas Ireland, this time, because twenty-odd of my Cambridge classmates held an unofficial reunion at Adare Manor (county Limerick), and secured us some nearly-decent group rates in lodgings whose price is otherwise the opposite, i.e. quite indecent. Sure, Adare Manor is a stately place, and stately never comes cheap, but those folks specialize in surprising, nay, shockingly high prices — such sums as will prompt a man to spray his mouthful of Lapsang Souchong across the table when the bill is presented.

Needless to say, our precious little Boo-Boo was in her element. And I’m only half-kidding. You see, there’s 847 acres onsite, much of it impeccably landscaped, which means that for every perfectly-manicured box hedge, there is a corresponding bank of white river pebbles laid nearby. And Emmie is really, really fond of pebbles, at the moment.

It was, in fact, impossible to cover any middling distance at Adare Manor without Emelyn suddenly going horizontal in your arms, wee arms clawing through the air, trying desperately to reach the stones crunching underfoot.

Digression: our child is a bona fide squirmer, now; at this point she’s simply perfecting her technique (a combination of going rigid and then quickly relaxing her entire body) in an apparent bid to break the world record for ‘extricating oneself from a parental grasp’. Don’t believe me? You try holding her.

To make a long story short, the wily and wriggly Emelyn spent her posh weekend at Adare sitting on the ground, playing happily with the pebbles. Moving them about, mostly - pebbles that were on the ground were moved to the stairs, pebbles on the stairs were moved into the hedge, and so on.

I could’ve sworn she admired the view, once or twice, though she might just have been scanning for more Irish pebbles. Hard to say.

I just did the math and realized I’m approaching trip #300 on the Cambridge-King’s Cross mainline. Which means I’m not too far from 600 hours spent on this train. And that’s roughly a full month. Of life.

(Note to self: be sure to add that one to the ledger next time anybody asks, “Where does the time go?”.)

So. In an effort to make sure these days with Em don’t simply bleed together like so many stations whizzing past, allow me to press pause and name some things that are new, of late:

“Uh-oh”. Emmie loves saying this. Imagine a fast, sharp intake of breath, like Emmie wanted to dive underwater, followed by a too-long pause and a long, exhaled, “ohhhhh”. We hear this one over the baby monitor a lot; at nap time, there’s nothing Emmie likes so much as to throw bunny out of the crib, and then say “Uh!….ohhhhh” over and over again.

Selective media consumption. Emelyn’s old pull-any-random-book-and-flip-through-the-pages routine has been supplanted by a more demanding practice: She now pulls specific picture books from the toypile, and proceeds to toddle your way, waving the book at you. Meaning, she wants to be read to, stat. (Or suffer the consequences.)

Crying. See also ‘suffer the consequences’, above. What can I say? Emmie’s more prone to crying these days, because it’s no longer simply about being hungry or tired or teething or hurt. Instead, Emmie has become sharply aware of the Great Injustices in this world, like ‘No Freedom to Chew on Electronics’, ‘Oppression Against Those Who Would Eat iPods’ and ‘Failure of The State To Provide Fundamental Right To be Carried And Held On Demand, Regardless of Whether The State Really Needs Two Free Hands At Just That Moment’. And so on.

Going Owwwwtside. Emelyn’s internalized the ASL sign for ‘more’ to mean ‘I want’, and now she uses it incessantly, along with pointing. One of her most frequent sign-language demands is [I want] / [points to door]. Additionally, she’ll also will say “Owwwhhhht”, meaning outside. A lot of the time, she’s happy enough to go look at some of the nearby flowers, but increasingly, she wants to visit neighbour Helen’s place across the street, where there is a cat and a chair full of plush toys to visit. (And Helen, of course.)

The Hat. Did you see that bit in the latest video where Emelyn’s cruising around the living room wearing her bicycle helmet? Not our idea. Leave the headgear lying around, and next thing you know, there’s Emmie standing in front of you, clutching the pink helmet and wanting it put on. A fashionista, I guess.

4am wakeup. Dude. Emmie. What is up with this one? Please go back to sleeping through the night… please?

It was a run-of-the-mill weekend here. Fine by me — last week seemed altogether too compressed, and it just felt like we needed this one. (Az and Em had been sick all week, and after Istanbul, I was playing catch-up all week at work.)

Anyhow, the easiest way to describe how we’ve been keeping occupied is to point to the video. Really not much going on, as you can see, but we’re having a good enough time of it:

Not much to tell, save that I’m in Istanbul for a couple nights, while Azure and Emelyn are keeping an eye on things in Cambridge.

I think I’ll have to chalk this up as one of the weirder 48 hours in my life — this is an unapologetically business-y business trip, and as such, I haven’t seen much apart from hyper-modern office buildings and exceptionally nice restaurants.

My room, though, is directly on the Bosphorous, and this morning I ate my breakfast right on the water, watching a panoply of tankers, ferries, and yachts ply the channel. And when I got back to the hotel this evening, I had a tiny bit of time left to wander around Bebek — I’d been hoping to find a suitable gift for Emmie, but the closest thing I could spot was a onesie that read, “My other car seat is in a Porsche”.

Had to pass on that one. (If only for strictly factual reasons.)

Dinner was pleasant enough. I needed to avoid a repeat of last night, where I dined awkwardly alone in a very fancy fish restaurant, Poseidon. So tonight I wound up eating a köfte sandwich, instead, from a snack-hut-thing about a block off the main strip (and maybe 15 yards east of McDonald’s). As far as I could tell, this place had everything going for it — harsh flourescent lighting, a group of old men smoking and sipping tea, Rubbermaid furniture, and a flow of bus drivers who kept darting in and running back out clutching hot dogs.

Like I said… ‘twas pleasant enough. I even topped off the meal with a wee dram of Turkish coffee. Though I made the same mistake as I invariably do at Don and Lorna’s, namely, I got greedy and took one sip too many, and hence wound up with a mouthful of coffee grounds. Cleanses the palate, at least.

Anyhow. Home tomorrow AM, and now it’s the weekend. Whoo-hoo!