'Tis a lucky day, Boy

My mom went home Monday. Eli cried all the way back from the train station but was considerably cheered when she got home to revel in the bounty her grandma left behind. The rest of the week is mostly a blur.

Tuesday night we went to the library as a family and came home with a knapsack of books. Lia and the girls usually go to the library without me, and as a lover (one could probably fairly say an inhabitant) of libraries it was a special thrill for me to go with the whole family. Lia, however, was slammed with a small fine for a page Eli ripped out of one book and for the fraudulently-induced lateness of another (who knew that The World of Grains was a new release and therefore due a week earlier than the rest?), and was therefore less in rapture than in dudgeon.

One of the books we checked out was Ramona the Pest, which Julia and I have started reading together during our nightly “reading time.” Having mostly misspent my childhood in a stultifying helix of gaming, sport, and boredom, it is an authentic joy now to read with Julia and Eli in the age of Obama what I should have read myself in the age of Reagan. Earlier this evening, while Lia and Katharine were off buying cosmetics and painting the town, I snuggled with the bigger girls under Julia’s “soft blanket” to read about how Howie furnished Ramona with a two-wheeler bike by deftly removing a wheel from her tricycle. It was a wonderful twenty minutes or so.

Last night Eli was in an especially tempestuous exuberation of ill-temper, and I tried everything in my arsenal to induce her to calm down, to quiet down, and ultimately to sit down. It was bedtime, and I was sitting on the floor waiting to start our nightly reading from Anne of Green Gables (another book I skipped as a child, mostly on the theory that anything Rosalyn liked must be too dull for words). In desperation I said, “Eli, my stomach hurts [this was true enough], will you come sit by me and gently pat my belly so it will feel better?” The question had the virtue of taking Eli aback, by which I mean the virtue of silencing her. After a moment of looking at me with earnest intensity, her face brightened. “I have another idea!” she burbled. “You could have a drink of water!”

Earlier today I took the girls to “The Dollar Tree” so Julia could spend the dollar bill that the great Yifru Hailu gave her on her birthday back in June, but which, being long thereafter in the Euro Area, she had not been able to spend. She chose a Disney Princess math workbook. To preempt a homeward trail of shrieks and howls, I bought Eli a generic princess coloring book (which she had sort of damaged anyway, so buying it was probably the right thing to do as well as the path of peace). On one of the pages in Eli’s book there were several lines on which one was asked to write the things one hoped to do and become before one’s twentieth birthday. Julia filled it out for Eli after conducting something of an interview. From that interview we learned that Eli hopes, inter alia, to climb across the monkey bars (a feat Julia mastered for the first time this afternoon) and to be smart and brave—Julia wrote that Eli wanted to become “a Muskator” (musketeer), which she employed a synonym for bravery.

After we read Ramona Julia asked what we should then do to wile the time till Mommy returned. She had a ready answer to her own question: “We should surprise Mommy and clean the house!” Then Julia took charge and took to tidying. Before long she took me to task for reading the news while she toiled. “Daddy,” she remonstrated, “you are not contributing and I do not appreciate it.” I leapt to my feet and got to work. Even Eli caught the spirit of Julia’s crusade, dancing and flitting from one stray article to another in a waltz of household cleansing that made up in elegance what it lacked in efficiency. In any case, Lia was surprised, and highly pleased.

As I write Lia is on a date with Eva Allen. They’ve gone to a play. After they left Eli precipitated herself headlong into such a fit of weeping that I thought her tears might make of this a second age of Noah. All my efforts to assuage her grief proved vain, and my efforts to reason with her seemed only to call forth further torrents of anguish. So I turned to diverson.

“Eli,” I said softly, “what is your favorite color?”

The weeping stopped. Eli looked at me a bit askance and answered diffidently but resolutely: “Green.”

“Would you rather eat off of a blue plate or a green plate?”

“Green.”

“Would you rather eat off of a pink plate or a green plate?”

“Green!!”

“Which princess do you like better, Belle or Sleeping Beauty?”

A pause. Then a smile. “Belle AND Sleeping Beauty!”

The interview proceeded like this for a time, and by the end Eli was veritably giggling at the happy prospect of so many wondrous, favorite things.
So in the end we get them all to bed—even Katharine, whose pacifier we cannot find and who went down only after an epic round of fiery shouts of protest and defiance. Aber jetzt sie schlafen alle.