Today Sope tried to put on her mom’s shoes. Again. But unlike the other
times, after a whole three minutes she started crying because it
wouldn’t work. She also has a series of ‘cozy corners’ that she has made
throughout the house, where she will let herself fall and rest with her
legs spread out. On occasion she will run at either me or her mom and
briefly rest her head on whatever limb she reaches first; it’s a tender
move meant to show her love, I think.
Her grandparents gave her a Maggie Simpson doll along with a classy
stroller to play with; this afternoon she took the doll out and hugged
it the way we hug her. She’s slowly becoming a girl.
Cute stuff
March 19th, 2009
Little thief
March 11th, 2009Sofia stole a cookie from me today. I offered her a bite, and she just
took the whole thing and ran away screaming and smiling. By ‘ran away’
I mean she ran in circles through the living room… her tiny body
bouncing from side to side.
It took me a minute or two to pry it back out of her chubby little hands.
An update
March 10th, 2009Lately Sope has been very attached to her daddy, me. When she sleeps she turns my way and slaps my face as if to test whether I’m really there; then she pulls her feet towards my legs and forms a tilted L. This way she can pull and push at the same time, and she can know instantly when I move.
She’s also very clever, and knows how to use the phone. In fact, she’ll grab the cell-phone, flip it open, put it to her ear, and then impersonate a grown-up with varying tones of ‘Dah, dah dah dah, DAH?! DAH!!!’. I believe she’s mocking us.
The Glitter
January 7th, 2009The bus-stops in Hamburg consist mostly of metal benches shielded from the elements by large sheets of see-through acrylic. There is a long tradition of scratching obscene signs, offensive language, cryptic death warnings and initialed love notes in said panes; every time one of them is replaced, an ethnographer somewhere dies.
The panes are ugly to start with, but with the odd and markedly un-artistic etchings kindly tattooed by young idle men, too drunk to spell properly and too young to know any better, they become utterly disgusting. There isn’t even the hidden beauty of chaos behind the intersecting parallel lines of an I WANT TO F*** and a K YOU WHORE.
This morning we were basking in a nice -12C, and through the cloudless sky a brilliant sun shone through, striking the ice crystals on the acrylic sheets, it’s rays scattering in a myriad colors. The ice, having formed first on the scratches and then grown into the rest of the panes, turned the dreadful scars of society into a most beautiful window. I marveled as station after station was turned into a cathedral, and every distracted bystander was enveloped in a painting that nature had masterminded.
Automating a journal
December 28th, 2008I like the idea of keeping a journal, but I find it impossible to practice in real life. I’ve devised a different way to keep a diary that works for me.
The idea of keeping this blog was in part to keep track of what I do so I can take a look at my activities in retrospect and share them with other people and my children as it becomes necessary. It’s been a half success. What’s even more, I have found that rather than a journal a blog is a platform to broadcast opinions… you have to be careful with what you write. What has worked the best for me so far is a system through which I get an email every day and I just reply to it. So far it just keeps the email in an inbox, but when I have the time I’ll write a method for compiling the replies into a text document, removing any forward or reply signs (>), and analyzing the text to follow up on topics in future emails (imagine your journal asking you how it went in the trip you said you were going to take!).
A lot of talking about nothing
November 16th, 2008Sofia
October 30th, 2008Sofia sat up on her own for the first time today. She promptly fell
backwards from her own inertia.
A few details about Sofia
October 24th, 2008When Sofia is really enjoying something her hands open and close as if she were scratching someone’s back. She curls her little fingers into a tiny fist and then lets go again. When we give her something that absorbs all her attention, her face goes super serious; she frowns, inspects the object in question, and purses her baby lips a little. Every now and then she does half a fish face by sucking the edges of her lower lip in.
When she wants attention she moves her legs at a fast pace; and when she wants to be picked up she rests on her belly and wiggles her limbs. When you shake her, she vocalizes a long AAAAAAAAAAAH! to hear its pitch bounce up and down with the shaking. Sometimes she sticks her fist or a toy in her mouth and moves it repeatedly to produce a B sound (Buabuabuabuabua she says).
She can chuckle, and she laughs at the strangest things. Today she played with her mom’s belly button and cracked up several times. She takes whatever is within reach that is made out of paper and rips it into two pieces. Then she discards the largest one and rips the smaller one again, and continues doing so until there is nothing left.
Zombies again
September 12th, 2008Last night I dreamed about zombies again; this time I was barricaded in a house with a bunch of survivors, leading an OK life and shooting a zombie here and there when they came too close, every few days. I talked to a man who was in a different location–someone who was leading an army… he told me he had men ‘on the surface’. “Up there?” I asked; “Yes, scattered in the white areas” he replied. The surface was crawling with zombies, all moving like a dense trail of ants, rivers and rivers of zombies coming together to a central location. The fords that they went around were areas where the grass was white at the top instead of green, and in those areas there were soldiers. The were scattered, one or two of them per white area, sitting with their legs in front and their arms around their knees. They all dressed in black and wore black motorcycle helmets; they all faced the same direction, slightly to the left of where the zombies were coming to a confluence. I told the man on the phone to send his men to the mountains, where they would find ‘justice’; he obliged, and his men stood up in unison and carefully picked their way from white are to white area until they reached the chasm I had mentioned.
Testing IMified
September 12th, 2008I am testing IMified; I think the idea is great.
