We discuss humor and take a walk

We had pasta for dinner tonight--at least Maia and I did--we're the pasta eaters of the group.

Maia had tubes. We were waiting for the sauce to come. Maia put one of the tubes in her mouth and then launched it. It was funny, and we both laughed. She got set up to do it again.



"No, Maia," I said, "Don't. There are things you can't do even if they're funny." But we were both still laughing.

Maia loves to laugh and to trick us. The other morning she told Kristina she had peepeed in the bed. But she was just tricking her.

Maia was still thinking about the tube, but launched one of my spaghetti noodles instead. It stuck to my face, and she collapsed in laughter. I laughed, too. "Maia," I said, "come on."

"That's so funny," she said.



Then she got me to take pics of Kristina because Kristina is camera shy.


She settled down when I said we'd go for a walk if she ate all her dinner. She likes to go on walks.


After dinner, we did take a walk. She was on her bike. We came to a street that sometimes collects children, and there were a half docen or so kids there, including a little boy that she knows and likes. Kahala.

But she wouldn't budge from her observation post.



"Why Maia?"

She pointed to her ear.

"Maia, you can't let that hold you back. There's nothing wrong with your ear. You were just born that way. Besides, I'll beat 'em up if anybody says anything."

This got her interest. "And scold them?"

"Yes."

"If they worry about my shirt or my ear?" She was wearing a "big T-shirt", one of Kristina's.

"Yes."

"Okay," she said. But, in fact, she wouldn't budge.



When we got home, I found the story about her and Aaron in the blog, and showed it to her, but she didn't seem that interested.

John, Monday, October 15, 2007

Maia makes a wish

We went to a Japanese restaurant tonight. It has a carp pond, and people throw coins in it.

On the way to the bathroom to wash hands--the pond is along that path--Maia wanted to throw in a coin.

She said, "I wish for a star and that God told me a song."

She sings a song to Kristina sometimes that makes both of them cry. She wouldn't sing it to me today or tell me what it was about. But when Kristina once asked who had taught her that song, she said, God.

Neither of us is very religious, and we don't read much into what she says about God and songs beyond the fact that she went to a religious preschool. It is arresting, though, that she can sing songs sad enough to make her cry.

John, Sunday, October 14, 2007

A complicated little girl

It turns out that Maia didn't share her ear.

Tuesday was her first day back at school after the break. On Wednesday, Kristina got a call from her teacher. It seems she and her friend, Carmen, had been eating things out of the rubbish can. My guess is that it was attention seeking by two children who are on the border of the peer group--Carmen is repeating kindergarten.

Kristina asked about Maia's having shared her ear. Her teacher said she hadn't done that. It was made up, in other words.

"Did you trick us?" Kristina wanted to know, when we picked her up.

"Yes," she said. She didn't know.

It was a funny kind of misrepresentation. It wasn't really a lie. She wasn't trying to hide anything from us or protect herself by saying what she did. Neither was she trying to please us.

The most I can figure is that she was trying to please herself. Acting as though she had stopped hiding it. She would like to share her ear, I think. To say, this is part of who I am, and it's not such a big deal.

But she isn't there yet.

John, Sunday, October 14, 2007

I have my worst moment as a parent

Well, there's no other way to put it. That's what I did.

The morning began well enough. Maia joined us in bed, and was playful. She wanted me to get up--"Can we wake up, now?"--she will say.

Kristina woke up, but Maia didn't want Kristina to get up. "You stay in bed," she said.


"She wants a c-o-o-k-i-e," Kristina said.

I nodded. Maia has been cajoling a chocolate covered, short bread cookie out of me in the morning, out of a box I got as a present. The cajoling wouldn't work with Kristina.



I went down. I've had problems at work, and I was thinking about those. I could hear that there were issues upstairs, but I didn't think much of it.

Maia came down and joined me. Then Kristina came down and was frustrated with Maia over whatever had happened upstairs. All I could make out was that Maia had insisted that Kristina do things in a certain way, but no way that Kristina did them was the right way. Maia does that sometimes. Insists that you behave in a certain way and whines and becomes insistent when you don't.



I went outside, and Maia followed. I thought that that might help to ratchet things down.

We have signs up just outside the wall around our house that give notice that we have a security system. The two signs from the right side of our frontage were lying on the driveway.



"Maia, why do you keep pulling those out?" I said. Maia saw that I was looking to see whether the last one was still up--on the left side of the frontage--and took off towards it.

"Maia, don't," I said. "Leave it there. Maia, don't."

She looked at me, but just kept working the sign out of the ground.

I was angry with her by this point. I turned away and walked back into the yard. I was looking for a little spot under a guava tree where I've planted a clutch of impaties. It's colorful and sweet, and it relaxes me just to look at it.



Maia appeared in front of me, brandishing the sign in my face and blocking my way. The sign is a pentagon attached to a rod. Kristina told me later that she pretends that the signs are the stop signs that the JPOs at her school use in the morning to control traffic.

"Get out of my way," I said.

When she didn't, I shoved her, and she fell and started to cry. I picked her up and carried her around, trying to console her.

Not my best moment.



Later that morning, I was lying in bed. I had been checking email on my laptop to see whether there was anything new in the situation at work. Maia came in to get something.

"Maia," I said, "I'm very sorry that I pushed you this morning."

"It's okay, Daddy," she said.

But it wasn't.



These pics were from later in the day--dinner tonight at a Chinese restaurant. And then a pic at home. Kristina and Maia were practicing word pattern recognition.

It's school again. She was wonderful last week when she was off. Since she's been back, she's full of rebellion and defiance again. So difficult--she wants to control us, and that frustrating to all of us. Still, no excuse for shoving her.

John, Saturday, October 13, 2007

Maia shares her ear

On Fridays, the children in Maia's kindergarten "share" things.

She hadn't brought anything to school the Friday before last, so Maia shared her ear.

Kristina had told me about it and asked her about it at dinner.

"What did you say about it?" Kristina wanted to know.

"I said that it was born that way."

"Did anyone ask you about it?"

"Yes."

"What did they say?"

"Why are you sharing your ear?

We laughed. "And what did you say?"

"I said, 'I don't know.'"

But we think she did know.

For the last week, Maia was off from school. They're on a year-round schedule and have breaks during the year.

She was an angel during that week. We think it was because she was relieved from the pressures of school.

Last night at dinner, she put her hand over her ear and said, "I hide my ear when I go to school."

"Why, Sweetie," I asked.

"So nobody will see it."

I thought about that for a while. "It's hard to be different, hunh, Sweetie?"

She nodded.

John, Thursday, October 11, 2007

"And then I wasn't shy"

We were on an after dinner walk. Maia was riding her bike, and we had made our way to the street below us, a quiet, level one, good for riding bikes. It's our turnaround.

That Saturday--September 8th, about a month ago now--had been very full. We had taken her bike to Manoa park because she had wanted to practice riding it.

The park is co-located with Manoa Elementary School. The park doesn't usually have many children, and this day was no exception. Perhaps that is what has begun to attract her to that park. She would rather be in an empty park than in one full of stares.

There was a boy there, riding his Razor scooter. Kristina and I had come upon him first. We had gotten ahead of Maia because she had wanted to ride her bike down a fairly long incline into a basketball court, and we had gone down to check it out.

"Come," I motioned to her. She had seen the boy by now.

She shook her head. "Come," I motioned again, but she shook her head. She pointed to her ear.

"She doesn't want him to see it," Kristina said.

Reluctantly, we walked back to her.

"Maia, you can't let your ear hold you back. Maybe he's a nice boy, and you would have fun with him. If you don't try, you'll never know."



But she wasn't interested in a philosophical discussion.

We made our way back through the outdoor hallways of the school towards the climbing structures and monkey bars on the playground. But the boy had seen Maia, now, and was trailing us back there.

Maia kept a wary eye on him. But he was quicker on his scooter than she was on her bike. When she saw that he was about to overtake her, she stopped her bike and put her hand up to cover her ear.



"Maia, what are you trying to do? Hide it?"

"Talking on the telephone," she said. "Hello, my ear, my broken ear!" she said, tickled, now, by her own artifice.



The boy passed her, and Maia took a side path to the playground. Then she saw that he had turned and was headed towards us.


She abandoned her bike and hurried on to the climbing structure. She staked out a spot by the monkey bars, and the boy soon joined us, at the other end of the structure.



Maia has gotten very good at monkey bars and had no trouble making the circuit.


The boy was on a second set of monkey bars.


He couldn't manage it, but he was game and good humored about it.


"I can't do it," he confessed.


"Where's his Mommy?" Maia asked me.

"I don't know, Sweetness. Why don't you ask him?"

And so she did, and so they began to play. His name was Aaron, and he was in third grade.



Aaron soon left to get back on his scooter.



Maia followed, but she was stuck, or so she claimed--the training wheels on her bike were lodged in a seam in the sidewalk. The gallant Aaron came back to give her a push to get her out of it.





After that, they were just a blur of motion. Aaron had figured out a path around the gym, the basketball court and the adjoining school building, and they raced each other around it. Sometimes Aaron came out ahead,





and sometimes Maia did.









They had a great time. When we gathered to say our goodbyes at the end of the morning, Maia and Aaron were very comfortable with each other.







In fact, if a 5 year old can be said to flirt, Maia was flirting for all she was worth.





I was thinking about Aaron that evening when Maia were on our after-dinner walk.

"Maia, there's something I want to tell you," I said. "There's nothing wrong with your ear. It's just different."

That struck a chord with her. They had been talking about differences among people in school.

"Like hair, and eyes, and skin," she said.

"Yes," I agreed. "Just like that."

"Today, I was shy with that boy," she said. "And then I played with him. And then I wasn't shy."

"Yes, Sweetness. You remember that."

John, Sunday, October 7, 2007