Lydia Archives - Page 6 of 50 - Ramblin' with Roger

Lydster: trajectory

bus expert

The trajectory of my daughter’s development has always been interesting. When she was in her first year or so, the experts had those milestones that babies should reach. I found them an okay reference but never fretted about them.

She was “cruising” -walking by holding onto furniture, like a sofa or coffee table, by seven months, typically at eight to twelve months. The term, BTW, is one I had never heard until her pediatrician used it.

She started walking when she was about 15 months, when “the book,” said it should be around 12 months. But we weren’t really sweating it.

I was more likely to worry about later issues, which I probably mentioned at the time. I specifically recall her learning to write by sounding out the letters in kindergarten, but she was very distressed that the words were not spelled correctly.

COVID was hard for all of us in the household, especially her. Her lost socialization was particularly difficult to rectify.

So it pleases me that, being home for the summer after her first year in college, she’s getting herself up instead of her father having to awaken her. She’s mastered taking the buses to work and home. Her experiences with co-workers, managers, and customers have been an education she shares most evenings.

BLM

It’s also interesting to see her through other people’s eyes. A medical professional I saw for the first time this month told me they saw my daughter at the Black Lives Matter rallies she helped organize after George Floyd died in 2020. They identified the nearby corner where the rallies occurred and were pleased that such passionate young people took up the future.

I’ll miss her more when she returns to college than when she went there in her first year. She is very engaging, smart, funny, and personable. When I tell her I love her, she’s willing to mutter that she loves me too.

Lydster: Flip Your Wig and other games

Boggle

You might flip your wig about the activities when our daughter was home on spring break.

Her bedroom had a bunk bed for several years. But the beds had become very uncomfortable to sleep in. When she was home at Christmas, she slept on a futon in her mother’s office, my daughter’s bedroom pre-kindergarten.

However, in my wife’s new job with an afterschool program, she needs her office. This means we had to reclaim the room by removing the bunk bed. Easier said than done. The metal joints were stripped, and no wrench in our collection would take it apart. Our contractor came to do the job.

One section was huge and heavy. I slid it down the stairs but asked her to help me carry it from the front porch to the street. She did it by herself, proving she has greater upper arm strength than her old dad.

The games people play

One afternoon, she decided she wanted to play some board games. I beat her in a game of Yahtzee. But she utterly defeated me in our second game of Boggle, getting 50 points in one three-minute round versus my 15. She’s become an outstanding player.

The other thing we played was The Beatles Flip Your Wig board game. It came out in 1964. My wife and daughter bought it for me a few years back. I must admit that the play is pretty lame, but it was a sweet gesture.

The rules are these. You pick a Beatle and go around the board, trying to pick up four cards, a picture of your Beatle, his autograph, his instrument, and a generic hit record. You want to be the first player to collect all four cards.

While I won two out of three games, the game is so dependent on luck that there was no sense of accomplishment. Still, it was a fun afternoon with my daughter.

Lydia the Tattooed Lady

Marx Brothers

Kelly from the Buffalo area wrote:

I hope her birthday was wonderful. Here’s an “Ask Me Anything” question: When she was a kid, did you ever make her listen to “Lydia the Tattooed Lady”?

Of course, her birthday was terrific. She has such wonderful parents.

Before I answer that, I should remind you of a post from ten years ago about naming the child.

No name in the top 10 in the Social Security list of most popular names for the most recent year available.

No naming after any family member, living or dead. I want her to have her own identity.

No unisex names: Terry, Madison, Lynn, e.g., This comes directly from the fact that my father AND my sister were both named Leslie.

It had to have two or more syllables, to balance off the shortness of Green.

It should have a recognizable spelling.

No names beginning and ending with A.

Lots of rules

That post was based on a post I wrote in my first month of blogging in May 2005.

“So, Lydia, it was, named in part after a woman in Acts who was rich even to put up the apostle Paul and his cohorts. Only later, a friend pointed out that the church I attended as a child, Trinity A.M.E. Zion, was on the corner of Lydia and Oak and that I walked down Lydia Street every day on my way to school. Obviously, I knew this to be factually true, but never crossed my consciousness.”

Then I wrote: “The only downside to her name has been those streams of choruses from Marx Brothers’ fans of “Lydia the Tattooed Lady,” a song that had TOTALLY slipped my mind.

“So, even with RULES, tattoos happen. But so do encyclo-pidias.”

When she was days old, my friend Walter observed that song, and I groaned. All my rules and planning, yet that song slipped by me. It’s not that I would have necessarily changed the name, but the information would have factored into the thought process.

To the actual question I asked my daughter since I couldn’t remember. She said that I told her about it. I might have even shown her a video clip, probably in 2013, since someone’s comment prompted that post.

Lydster: On being a dad

The book The Expectant Father

I was rearranging my books, frankly, to make room for more. I came across two books on being a dad. One or both of them were given to me by a dad at my church. He doesn’t attend anymore, so I don’t see him often, even though he and his family are still in town.

One was Thinking Pregnant by Megan V. Steelman (2001). The subtitle was Conceiving Your New Life With A Baby. Chapter 10 is called Dads. One subtitle, Will I Be Any Good at This? And the next one, A Father Has Feelings Too. It talks about jealousy, a feeling I do not recall having. Journaling was recommended, and I believe I’ve been doing that for nearly 18 years. To my knowledge, the tome has not been updated.

The other book was The Expectant Father by Armin A. Brott and Jennifer Ash. My copy from 2001 is the second edition; the fifth edition, which I have not seen, came out in 2021. It was very entertaining as it went through the nine months and how the relationship between the couple might change. A subhead: “Oh my God, I’m going to be a father.”

A new day

The chapter most interesting to me was Fathering Today. The authors note the absence of fathers or dads portrayed negatively. It listed a series of ads that irritated me even before I was a parent. “Kid tested mother approved” (Kix cereal). “Choosy mother choose Jif.” Robitussin cold medicines “recommended by Dr. Mom.”

Armin Brott also talked about how men’s involvement is discouraged. He wrote in a New York Times Magazine piece about catching a girl who was screaming. As she fell from a playground slide, he caught her. The mother, coming on the scene, said to the child, “Didn’t I tell you not to talk to strange men in the park?” I’m sure I wrote about this on these pages.

As he notices he’s the only man in the park, he recognized that he’d become the stereotyped menacing male. Indeed, I was at a party in Albany’s suburbs a couple of decades ago. The guy who gave me the books and I went for a walk and instinctively stayed away from the kids playing close to the road. We did not want to be perceived as THOSE guys.

Being a dad is joyful, stressful, confusing, and rewarding. My daughter is pretty remarkable because of, or possibly despite, me.

Lydster: Learning from my daughter

television

There are always things I’m learning from my daughter.

She has been following online Maxwell Frost, the newly-elected member of Congress from Florida. I knew who he was because I had been getting contribution requests from his campaign.

He was supposed to be sworn in on January 3. So he wrote about that the day before. But as the drama over selecting a Speaker of the House of Representatives dragged on, no one could be sworn in. So Frost reposted that January 2 post, followed by the word “SIKE!”

Quickly, he was scolded by some folks who thought a Member of Congress should know how to spell Psych! But, as my daughter noted, people of her generation have been spelling it as SIKE forever.

Did I mention that Frost is the first Gen Z Congressperson? “At 25, [he] will be the youngest member of Congress. He’s also in debt after maxing out credit cards to win Florida’s 10th Congressional District seat.”

Influencer

My daughter told me that Andrew Tate was arrested. I said, “Who’s that?” “He’s a former kickboxer and TikTok influencer.” I muttered, “I don’t care about some social media influencer.”

But a couple of days later, after I read about him on Reuters and other mainstream sources, I knew WAY more about him than I wanted. He is a brutal misogynist. The Romanian anti-organized crime agency DIICOT alleges he created with his brother and others “an organized crime group in early 2021 ‘with the purpose of recruiting, housing, and exploiting women by forcing them to create pornographic content meant to be seen on specialized websites for a cost.'”

His feud with Greta Thunberg revealed that he was in Romania when a box from Jerry’s Pizza, a Romanian chain, was in his video response to her, which facilitated his arrest.

So my daughter, once again, was ahead of my curve.

Dick Wolf

During her winter break, my daughter watched a bit of television. Two shows were in the Dick Wolf franchise, Chicago Fire and FBI International. She seems to like to watch and dissect them.

In the one episode I watched, Chicago Fire had characters lying for no good reason. For instance, one firefighter tells a pregnant woman married to another firefighter that she’s “fine” seconds before she is rushed to the hospital. In another scene, the woman in a couple avoids telling her Significant Other she’s buying a door with another firefighter, which becomes obvious two scenes later.

The FBI scene involves the officers coming up to a suspect and saying, from ten feet away, “FBI.” The suspect runs away and eludes capture. Now I know what “hate-watching” is because my daughter does it.

I love learning how my daughter’s mind works.

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