Tag: Lydia

My Favorite Years QUESTION

Note that we DIDN’T pick 2004, the year Lydia was born.


Possibly around the time I was writing about nostalgia, the Wife and I were talking about the favorite years in our lives.

I picked 1969, the year I turned 16, and my parents let me have a huge party. I had a girlfriend, I got elected president of the student government, which made me an irritant to the new principal, and I was figuring out who I was politically, especially compared to the transitional 1968. Music was great that year, too.

Then there was 1978, the year I worked at the Schenectady Arts Council, got a girlfriend, and finally stopped my nomadic existence.

1984 was the year after Mitch Cohn was fired from FantaCo and Raoul Vezina died. This made Tom Skulan more dependent on me to deal with the day-to-day stuff, while he worked on publications and the “big picture” stuff. Yes, affairs of the heart played here too.

Carol and I both picked 1998, the year before we got married, for different reasons. Her reasons are her own (she can start her own blog – unlikely). For me, it was going to Detroit (visit friend, Motown museum, Ford museums, Tigers game), Cleveland (Rock and Roll Hall of Fame), Washington, DC (visit friend, take JEOPARDY! test), and Boston (appear on JEOPARDY!) Interesting that neither of us picked 1999, the year we actually GOT married because that first year in that half a house she owned was tricky; buying OUR house in 2000 was definitely a vast improvement.

And we both picked 2003, which was the year Lydia was finally conceived. Carol and I went to Poland Spring, Maine after that. Note that we DIDN’T pick 2004, the year Lydia was born; that took some getting used to.

So what are some of your favorite years, and why?
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My Favorite Year with Peter O’Toole – Final scenes

The Lydster, Part 78: Dilly-Dally

Her great motivator is competition.


Ah, bad daddy, with no current picture; this one’s three years old.

One of my primary functions on the weekday is to get Lydia to school on time. Despite, or possibly because of, living virtually across the street, it is a challenge to get her there without feeling rushed. Sometimes, it’s her need to go to the loo one last time. But mostly, it’s that she gets distracted, by a book, or something she wants to draw, or by dancing to the music that is quite evident in her head.

Conversely, when it’s something else that SHE wants to go to, and we’re taking longer than the daughter expects, she complains. Lately, she’s taken to say, “Don’t dilly-dally!” This is not a phrase in the front part of my vocabulary, and my wife uses it only rarely, so I don’t know WHERE she got this phrase.

One of the things she does to procrastinate is to play this annoying game of “Throw the clothes past daddy,” which involves her taking the clothes she has picked to wear that day and tossing them out of her room without me catching them; lately, she’s been wrapping them around her stuffed animals for better ballast.

Her great motivator is competition. If it’s time for pajamas, I’ll say, “I’m going to beat you upstairs,” and invariably she’ll run up the stairs. Or if she’s lollygagging to the car when we need to go somewhere, I’ll race her to get the seat belt fastened first. About 96% of the time, she legitimately wins these contests, and the other 4% of the time, I think she’s just letting me win. One sure sign of her overtiredness is when she declines the competition.

30-Day Challenge: Day 28-A Drawing

I can’t help but notice that The Daughter is more externally patriotic than I am.


My daughter is drawing all of the time. This is a piece she did several months ago, which is the one that currently hangs in my cubicle at work. While red, white, and blue, please notice the green G, for Green. She did a similar one for my wife, and since she’s seen mine in my office, she now insists that Carol likewise take hers to HER office.

She does SO many drawings, and she wants to get rid of exactly zero percent of them right now. This winter, during the school break, the sorting will recommence. It won’t be pretty.

I can’t help but notice that she is more externally patriotic than I am. She saw this newspaper full-page piece that says, “I AM PROUD TO BE AN AMERICAN”, with the U.S. flag in the middle. It’s been hanging in her bedroom since at least July 4.

The Lydster, Part 79: Lost & Found; and Just in Time

My job on weekday mornings is to get Lydia to school on time.


My daughter has an innate capacity to find things that I have misplaced. There was a key, the TV remote, all sorts of things. She’s less skilled finding things SHE loses, such as the DVD remote, which she actually DID come across, after four weeks; it was in her art supply box, and I know I didn’t put it there. She also thought it would be fun to hide the mailbox key that hung on a hook near the front door, but doesn’t know where she left it; now I can’t get the mail until the Wife gets home with the only other key.

Note to Wife: PLEASE get another key made, as it’s been three months now and the key is unlikely at this point just to “turn up.”

One of the things I really hate is being late when there are real consequences. For instance, I hate rushing to an airport, train station, or bus depot to try to get on transportation at the last minute. My job on weekday mornings is to get Lydia to school on time, which is 8:03. Now we live a stone’s throw from the school; this is not cliche, this is the fact that I could stand on my front porch with a stone, toss it, and hit the school building. Well, maybe, I haven’t actually tried it. An MLB baseball outfielder or an NFL football quarterback could surely strike it. But it still takes some time to get the coat on, get the backpack on, lock the door, walk a couple of houses, cross the street and walk most of the length of the building to the entrance.

So when we left the house at 7:59 twice last week, it is cutting it way too close for my tastes. To be fair, the second time was Friday, and she had homework to finish, plus her mom forgot to give her some medicine the night before. But she does tend to procrastinate as well. Sooner or later, when she finally is late, when it takes a little bit too long to cross our busy street, even with the crossing guard there, she’ll figure it out. Meanwhile, it’s only my anxiety, not hers.

Congrats to Darrin & Suzy on the birth of Sylvie Grace; the name Sylvie immediately reminded me of this song. I e-mailed this post to Darrin, and he said, “She’ll be having my dozens of dollars!”

The Lydster, Part 78: Unicorn’s Sister

Looking at 50-year-old women, who are presumably finished having children, 18.3% of them had a single child in 2006, up from 11.4% in 1990.


The daughter is an only child. The daughter has a couple of dozen brothers and sisters. She has a number of stuffed animals and dolls who are in an ever-changing, and to me, an incomprehensible hierarchy of relationships vis a vis her. Some are now dolls of her siblings, for instance; please don’t ask me which are which.

I DO know, however, that her number one sibling is her sister Unicorn. She has three or four other unicorns that have names that aren’t Unicorn; I forget what they are. It was she – Lydia, not Unicorn, at least I think so – who decided that they should wear matching outfits when they played in their band. The keyboards, which I have had for decades, can be programmed to play some tunes, and it has an annoying automatic tune as well.

Sometimes, I feel marginally guilty, for her sake, having just one (human) child, but she seems to have adapted. She has friends at church and school, she LOVES her cousins who live an hour away (and the ones that live further, as well.) In any case, it is what it is, and we’re not going to be changing it.

Here’s an interesting article: A Dose of Sibling Rivalry: For Only Child Families, New Thinking Pushes Kid-Time, Sharing and Squabbling AUGUST 10, 2010 Wall Street Journal.
“Looking at 50-year-old women, who are presumably finished having children, 18.3% of them had a single child in 2006, up from 11.4% in 1990, according to numbers from the National Center for Health Statistics. The growth is being spurred by more later-in-life marriage and child-bearing. Financial concerns are also at play. As the cost of diapers, child-care, and college degrees keep their steady march northward, some parents are deciding it’s just too expensive to have that second kid.”

 

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