We made a little sandbox for Lennie. It’s just a big shallow rubbermade container filled with 50 pounds of sand. Now it’s filled with more like 49 pounds, as Lennie has dumped a bit out. She’s got a little shovel and rake and a bucket and some yogurt containers that she uses to move the sand around. The night we set it up, I was sitting in one of our foldy chairs nearby watching her play, and she came up to me and said “Share play, Daddy.” She’s asked Mleeka to share play a few times as well. What a wonderful synthesis of concepts this is. She knows sharing, and she knows playing, but she doesn’t know how to say “play with me” (which makes sense, because the connective tissue of that sentence is the abstract and almost meaningless “with”). So she combines two verbs she does know to communicate what she wants. It’s a great little innovation that I’m very proud of.

In other news, we’re thinking we’re going to try to lay off meat for a little while. More and more lately, meat has just grossed me out. Because good grilling weather is approaching again, I’ll feel like grabbing some nice big steaks, but when I go to the meat aisle and look at the glistening cold red slabs of flesh, I’m completely turned off by the idea. (The fact that the meat industry in America is terrible — that, for example, we have lower standards for domestic meat than countries we export to do, that we’ll feed our own people meat of a much lower grade than other countries will buy from us — doesn’t help.) Chicken hasn’t been bothering me as much, and we’ve eaten a fair amount of fish lately.

Partially in response to my being a little grossed out by meat and partially to get out of the food rut I’m in wherein I don’t feel like learning new recipes but am also tired of eating the same old things all the time, I sort of wanted to force a change on myself. I’m a slave to routine and the familiar, so making myself mix things up from time to time is good for me and will probably eventually keep me from turning into a recluse with ridiculously long fingernails who roams around the house with tissue boxes on his feet. So the other night, I made myself look up and decide to prepare some new recipes. Last night, I tried some black bean and artichoke burritos that were pretty good. I also picked up some tofu and am going to see if I can learn to like it (it’s never been my favorite). This is sort of an experiment, and I may decide I can’t live without meat and wind up going back to being an omnivore. For the moment, though, we’re going to try to avoid meat, and red meat in particular.

I should note that this isn’t part of some liberal hand-wringing for the poor animals or anything. It’s not a moral or an ethical issue. We’ve got teeth that are designed for tearing meat, for crying out loud (ugh, I’m teetering on the brink of the naturalistic fallacy there, I know). That said, I have thought for years that it was sort of bizarre that we decided at some point to chase small animals around to eat. I picture Og and Oog sitting by a fire. Suddenly, a rabbit darts out of the brush, and Og scratches his prodigious jutting forehead says to Oog, “see that cute little bunny? If you were to catch it, we could put it on this here fire and eat it.” To which Oog replies, “WTF? Last week it was ‘hey, jam this bone through your septum.’ Now this?” Maybe it didn’t play out quite like that, but the decision that it might be a good idea to chase around and consume other animals does seem a little bizarre to me.

My motivation for giving meat a rest is mostly just the gross-out factor, though. There’ve been times in my life during which I’ve gotten much of my nutrition from cold Chef Boy Ardee. During each of these phases, I’ve eventually grown sick and tired of the orange gelatinous tube of food and have laid off for a while. Now it’s meat’s turn.

Note: I’m cross-posting this from my Flock blog. We sometimes call our staff and users flockers. I post here for the obvious relevance to Lennie, and I offer this explanatory note because I refer to her in more distanced than usual terms like “my daughter.” Without further ado…

Huh? My daughter woke up at 4:30 this morning, and I was treated to very early morning TV. We often tune in to a station called Noggin that’s got some really great shows (take that, Barney). I like PBS and all, but it doesn’t hold half a candle to Noggin. I usually get my daughter up around 8:00 or 8:30, and we’ll tune in to Max and Ruby or Little Bear (I like Noggin, but both of these shows annoy me) while we eat some breakfast, take our Flintstones vitamins together, etc.  Noggin only runs from 6:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m., so we had to entertain ourselves for the first hour-and-a-half this morning (during which time mostly I lay in a daze on the couch while my daughter piled toys on me). When the cartoons started rolling, I was treated to a new (to me) show called Tiny Planets (review). The basic premise is that two fluffy white aliens fly around on their fluffy white couch to various planets in their area. One is the planet of light and color; another is a music planet; another is a nature planet; I think there are six in all. As they catapult around (literally — their couch is slung from their home base by a huge catapult attached to a cord by which they’re ultimately reeled back in) to the various planets, they experience various adventures and misadventures that afford them ample opportunity to try to use critical thinking skills to get out of the jams they find themselves in. It’s a neat little show, a CGI cartoon that’s wacky and strange, but fun.

A couple of times, as they were sling-shotting through space, they passed an asteroid on which three creatures were running around (that is, they were running in place with the asteroid spinning under their feet). The first time the narrator pointed them out, I wasn’t sure what she called them. The next time, I thought it sounded vaguely like “flockers.” And then a third time, in reference to similar creatures on one of the planets, I was pretty sure that’s what they were called. And sure enough, when I looked it up, I learned that these critters are called flockers. They’re described in an epinions review of the show as “a bird-like alien whose intelligence can best be described as ‘dim.’” Luckily, our own flockers far outpace these guys.

So, there’s not much of real relevance to Flock here, but this was a fun little discovery. If you’ve got kids and are fed up with Barney and the other usual suspects, check out the Noggin web site and consider queuing Tiny Planets up in your TiVo if you’re not game for an early morning with your little ones.

A couple of weeks ago, Lennie started resisting her car seat very strenuously. As in it was sometimes very hard to force her into it if both of us weren’t involved, and even then, we were very sincerely worried that we were hurting her a little as we forced her into it. Naturally, we had tried various enticements and briberies in an effort to seat her more peacefully. Finally, Mleeka hit on just the thing. Lennie loves Just Peas, and they’ve turned out to be the precise enticement we needed. As we approach the car now, we begin playing up the pea seat (or pea chair), which, from the way we sell it, is just about the most exciting thing one could possibly plant her butt in. More often than not, especially as we’re leaving the house, Lennie will agree to sit down in her seat without a struggle in exchange for a little cup of peas, which we usually wind up replenishing several times during whatever trip we’re on.

It’s hard to write about music when you don’t know much about music. I played trombone from the sixth through the twelfth grade and was a decent player, but I’ve done nothing with music since, and I know nothing worth mentioning about music theory or official music appreciation. I can never remember the difference between light and heavy classical, for example, if those are even the proper terms (I think they are). I can read simple music (bass clef, though I could probably pick up treble pretty easily if held at gunpoint) and I can pick out melodies on a piano without much trouble, but that’s as far as it goes. I can’t name a sung pitch, and I’d be hard pressed to tap out any rhythm with any sort of dot in the notation accompanying anything of lesser value than a quarter note. And I sure can’t talk intelligently about why certain combinations of notes or rhythms provoke particular responses in us. In spite of all my deficiencies on this front, I wanted to tell you about some near-transcendental music I’ve been turned on to for a couple of years now.

It’s not often, I think, that the non-musical among us take time to sit and listen to music for its own sake. It’s something to dance to with our daughters, or something to play as background noise while we work, something to distract us from maddening traffic or, on longer trips, to help keep us awake. It’s very seldom that I, in any case, have the opportunity or inclination to listen to music as an end in itself. Mleeka had a rough night with the baby the other night (woke up at 4:00 unable to sleep) and so went to bed early the following night. Lennie crashed prematurely as well. So I had a surplus of time. I could have caught up on some work, or I could have read from one of my pile of pending books, or I could have worked on writing the great American novel, but I’ve been wanting to write about this near-transcendental music, and writing about it necessitated listening to it. And it’s long music — the piece I had particularly in mind is 26+ minutes.

For almost a half hour that night, I sat still in my big comfy chair with the iPod churning, white ear buds plugged into my head, rain and wind roaring outside the open window, my head often cradled in my hands, fingers pressing my tired eyes. The song is Tabula Rasa, by Estonian composer Arvo Part. He was born in 1935 and wrote experimental music through the 1960s. Then he went on a little hiatus and came back writing in a style he called tintinnabulation (which means the sound of ringing bells). Of this style, he said the following: “I have discovered that it is enough when a single note is beautifully played. This one note, or a silent beat, or a moment of silence, comforts me.” I don’t have a firm handle on what the style means or how it can be described from a music theory vantage, but I can say that Tabula Rasa is characterized by tones that either sweep back and forth on top of the melody or that subsist dully behind the melody, and I think these are probably the bells in his songs.

Here are some things I wrote down during my first listening of Tabula Rasa the other night:

first movement: tension and resolution, as of something being unraveled and frantically wound back up; mental picture of many things falling, an image out of Panic Room of stolen money bursting out of a bag into the air and falling down around the man ruined by the crime of necessity that led him to steal it. It is a movement of cascades.

second movement: long tones with shorter smooth tones oscillating between high and low pitches underneath. clarity; whereas there’s a sort of call and response in the first movement, this one is one of solitary contemplation; as the pitches ascend, it is the sound of someone coming to peace with something; it may be the sound of grace or forgiveness, then of regret, and then of peace and resolution again. It’s ethereal, conjuring images of white flowing figures, in comparison to the very earthy, tangible feel of the first movement.

Did I mention already how hard it is to write about music when you don’t know much about music? Some of the things I wrote down seemed fitting at the time and still do, but they sound pretentious or just silly after the fact. And I’m not trying to sound pretentious or silly, and in fact, I’m disclaiming any knowledge of the field, and I’m telling you honestly that I’m not capable of communicating very well about the music. But I want to tell you about it anyway because it is beautiful music, the most beautiful and stirring I know of.

I listen to Part’s music often when I’m on trips out to San Francisco. When I can, I’ll walk down to the strip at Stanford and look at the shops and the people. These walks make me feel alone (because I am alone) and nostalgic for school life and a little sad, but they’re also very peaceful and reflective and good for me. I feel very clear headed on these walks. Part’s music, and Tabula Rasa in particular, has for me a clarity and a reflectiveness that captures this mood for me. It’s more resonant than cathartic in the old Aristotelian sense. It doesn’t make me weep or emote in any direct or especially meaningful way, but it latches onto something in me and fills me with a sort of awe.

I don’t know what the music critics and theorists would have to say about his music, but it seems to me to be (at least on this album) simultaneously profoundly peaceful and sad. It makes me think of loss but it somehow redeems that sense of loss with its own crushing beauty. Even though I’m not usually a music-for-music’s sake kind of guy, and even though I can’t appreciate music from any technical vantage, I have to say that Part’s music is one of my favorite things.

It turns out that Lennie’s a big fan of the great outdoors. We’ve had her out plenty, but this Spring, she’s aware enough of her surroundings to really enjoy it. She and Mleeka planted 40 daffodil bulbs a few weeks ago and have made a habit of going out to count the ones that have come up (32 made it). Today, they went out to weed our little (mostly herb) garden in preparation for the coming seasons, and she had great fun. Judging from the dirt smudges around her mouth, we have a little pica baby. I watched for a few minutes as she played with a spade, transferring dirt from a pot to the ground. Later, when I was done with work and was able to come out and really play with her some, she grabbed our garden gnome (yes, I know, dorky) and ran around the yard with him. She identified him pretty clearly as Santa without being prompted, which is especially weird because I don’t remember playing up Santa very much over the holidays. We sit out together on the swing on our back patio (during the first three or four months of her life, I was able sometimes to rock her to sleep swinging out there), and she climbs around on the swing and then hops down and putters around the yard, perking up when she hears birds calling. She’s such a little cherub, and it’s such a nice, pastoral little scene.

Lennie Lou. It’s a silly name, we know. It started out as a joke, really, but it’s a cute nick for her occasionally, and she wrings all the hillbilly out of it. Her friend Lowen, with whom we have several videos of her walking great long distances holding hands, has taken to calling her Lennie Lou, but he doesn’t have those initial ells yet, so it comes out Ninny New.

We almost feel safe having Lennie around stairs now. Ella has been negotiating her stairs for months now with no problem, and Dave and Karen could take their gates down but that we’re over there so frequently with our daredevil toddler. This weekend, she did much better on the stairs, bumping down them on her butt rather than leaning her big toddler noggin out at a 45-degree angle in front of her and trying to take them standing up. I don’t mind so much if she takes a little fall now and then (her recent exploits outside have resulted in a few scratches here and there, and I’m pretty stoic about it all, though Mleeka’s a little worse for the wear), but I really don’t relish the thought of her tumbling all the way down a flight of stairs. I think we’re not too far from the time when that won’t be so much of a worry, when we can turn Lennie and Ella loose without fear of a bad fall and without spending half the evening camped out on the stairs to cushion whatever fall may (but never does) happen.

We think Lennie’s going to grow up to be a pleasant mixture of girly girl and tomboy. She likes to play in the dirt (a few months ago, she was very prissy about getting her hands dirty) and was enthusiastic about poking at some sort of larval bug we found and about holding a toad (which Mleeka didn’t let her hold for fear of a squeezy Of Mice and Men moment). She’s also quite the little athlete, with a pretty good arm and abdominal strength that, proportionally, puts most people to shame. One of her latest tricks is to climb up onto an end table and dart across the length of the couch, dismounting onto the other end table and stepping at full height onto the arm of my big chair, where she stands and grins at her horrified parents, who’re afraid to move lest the lightest stirring of the air knock her to the floor or provoke her to leap floorward to certain and serious injury. So she’s rough and tumble, in other words. But at the same time, she’s the little girl who tucks her stuffed animals and babies into bed with kisses and (a recent development) nurses her baby dolls. She’s the little niblet who’ll point to the tiniest scratch or bump and tell you about the ouchy. She’s the powder puff who asks constantly for lotion to rub on her legs or hands or her stuffed duck (not a great outcome that). So she’s rough and tumble, but she’s also delicate and girly, and we think it’ll be a fun combination. She defies the old nursery rhyme, composed as she must be of snakes and snails and sugar and spice.

Lennie has discovered the shower. I’ve bathed her in there with me a few times over the last year or so, usually because Mleeka had already bathed or just wanted a rare bath by herself, and it’s never been a big deal. I’ve always held her in my arms to bathe her. She’s lately demonstrated a more pronounced interest in the shower. When Ella’s over for a visit, the two of them will run into the (non-showering) shower, and Mleeka will sometimes lift the curtain up so that they can run in and out unimpeded.

The other day, Lennie seemed to want to stand up on her own in the shower, and I let her, and it was fine. I gave her some soap and let her wash her belly, and then I put some soap on my leg and asked her to help wash my leg since she was down there anyway. I picked her up to do the finishing touches and take care of her hair, but it was by all accounts mostly a normal shower for her.

Last night, it wasn’t my intention to shower with her (she had already had a bath), but she was hovering around the shower as I prepared to hop in, and since she was between outfits and wearing only a diaper anyway, I stripped her down and let her run in there. She was startled when I turned the water on, but she stuck it out and just sort of played in the shower while I bathed. She’d cry out “Daddy Shower, Yay!” (who knew I was that dirty?) and sort of stomp her feet or crouch over the drain. Later, after I was long done with my shower and she was still standing there dripping wet, she peed in the drain to much praise from Mleeka and me. Hey, diapers aren’t cheap. Next, I think I’ll see how she manages with an old jelly jar.

I’m sort of manic after a poor night’s sleep (3.5 hours tops). Woke up a little after 4:00 this morning, read some stuff online, wrote a couple of emails, and decided it’d be a good day to reinstate my gym habit. I haven’t gotten any noteworthy exercise in over a month. I was in California at the beginning of February, and I did get on the treadmill at my hotel that week, but in the airport on my way home in anticipation of a long flight, I was stretching my legs pretty vigorously and managed to strain a muscle. That bothered me for a couple of weeks, during which interval I got pretty well used to sleeping in until 8:30 or 9:00 (and sometimes later). So the last couple of weeks, I’ve just been too lazy to drag myself out of bed at 6:00 in the morning. Today was a good opportunity to get back in the swing of things.

Remarkably enough, in spite of having guzzled lots of empty soft drink calories and eaten lots of cheesy and otherwise fatty foods, paying less attention to portion size than previously, I’m down to my lowest weight in a solid 10 years. I was surprised the Friday before last to weigh in at 188 at my doctor’s office (which usually, probably thanks to clothing, puts me at 2 pounds heavier than the gym scale) and even more surprised to register 180 this morning. That’s a cumulative loss in the last six months of 60 pounds with really very little effort.

I mention it not because I think anybody who reads this is particularly interested but because the blog is not only my occasional mouthpiece (to all three of you) but also a chronicle for my future reference of how my life’s been going. Sorry to have bothered you with this (if you happen not to be me reading back in a few years to try to remember how I lost all that weight).

Via Erik: Down with Dildos! In short, in Tennessee senate bill 3794, it’s proposed that anyone who “sells, publishes, advertises, or exhibits”  “any three-dimensional device designed or marketed as useful primarily for the stimulation of human genital organs” can be charged with a misdemeanor. Notable exceptions include the display of such items in libraries (public or school).

Question: If I exhibit my penis to my wife, can I be charged?

The article’s author notes that in spite of the recent overturning of portions of a similar law in Georgia, the tweedle-dee and tweedle-dum responsible for the legislation “went ahead and introduced their bill last Thursday, and on Monday, it passed a perfunctory first reading. In other Monday developments, Tennesseans died from a lack of health care, remained poorly educated and were among the most obese state populations in the nation.”

The speakeasy-type abortion clinic I’ve previously blogged about as a harrowing possible scenario in South Dakota shouldn’t scare only South Dakotans. As progressive and rational as the citizens of Tennessee are renowned for being (ahem, Scopes trial), our government is also seeking to pass legislation that would erode women’s privacy and quite probably force some women into such dire straits. The offending bill is SJR127, and, procedural “WHEREAS” type stuff aside, it reads as follows: “Nothing in this constitution secures or protects the right to an abortion or requires the funding of an abortion.”

According to an alert published by the Tennessee ACLU, here’s why this is a much more dangerous bill than it appears on the surface:

The introduction of this amendment is the result of the ACLU/Planned Parenthood victory in the Tennessee Supreme Court. We successfully challenged several restrictive provisions in the Tennessee Abortion Statute. In September 2000, the Tennessee Supreme Court ruled that several provisions were unconstitutional and that the Tennessee Constitution afforded women a right to privacy regarding their right to seek an abortion. The decision is momentous because it reaffirms the right to privacy found in the Tennessee Constitution.

In short, the idea in South Dakota, Tennessee, and other states is to slowly introduce legislation that erodes women’s privacy so that when Alito and Roberts overturn Roe v. Wade, women in these states will have no rights to an abortion within their states. To pass these laws is effectively to hand state sovereignity on this issue to the federal government.

This matter is of very little consequence to the daughters of the sorts of privileged people who pass such legislation. Their rich white daddies will fly them secretly to the progressive state of their choosing for an abortion should one ever prove necessary. Meanwhile, the welfare mom raped on her way home from her second job will have no choice but to bear an unwanted child she can’t support or rely on an unsafe alternative for an abortion.

If you have an opinion on this issue, please consider contacting the relevant politicians. Tennesseans can find contact information pretty easily using the following links:

• Senators
• Districts by voting precinct (if you don’t know your district)

Lennie’s had seven or eight wooden puzzles for months and months now. A couple of them she can probably boast to have had for well over a year, and it’s been long enough since we bought her one that I can’t remember when we did so. She never really mastered the art of the puzzle. She got to where she would get a piece in the right place but couldn’t get it rotated around so that it would drop into its recess in the puzzle board. Eventually, she lost interest, and we shifted the puzzles out of the rotation of the toys we keep out in plain view. Yesterday, Mleeka got them back out, and Lennie took right to them. Her puzzle-working skills flourished during the puzzles’ hibernation, and she now works them almost instantaneously and with no trouble. This morning, we were lying around having family morning time, and she slid out of bed, went into the den to get a puzzle, brought it back, went back into the den to grab a few of the pieces, and had us bring the puzzle up into bed so she could play with it. Tonight, I dumped the pieces to two of her animal puzzles on the floor in a promiscuous heap, and she put both of them back together in short order simultaneously. Somehow, she seemed to know intuitively which pieces went to which puzzle. The two we were working are of slightly different thicknesses (I’m talking milimeters) but are otherwise similar, save that one is mostly of barnyard animals and the other is of savannah animals. She’d pick up one piece and, without giving the other puzzle board a glance, move it toward the right puzzle before she can realistically have had a chance to see which board the piece belongs to. I figure she must either be anticipating which piece to grab from the pile after having seen what spots are empty on the board (this strikes me as being a rather complex bit of thinking for a 20-month-old) or she’s got some sort of intuition about the pieces. The former seems more likely if also — ahem — brilliant. In any case, here’s one more bullet point for her baby résumé.

Lennie and I read a lot of books tonight. We identified pictures (she learned “gnome” and “troll,” though I don’t know that she’ll keep them), and then she did some reading aloud of her own. She did this a lot when she was much younger, holding a book open and babbling in a tone very much like what we use to read aloud to her (which differs, of course, from the phone voice, which differs from the normal talking voice, which differs from the talking to the baby voice). I hadn’t noticed her doing this very much lately, but she revived it tonight, but with a new twist. Amid the babbling, she’ll say words she knows that correspond to things in pictures on the pages. So it’ll be “Duh dn duh poo bah spoon duh fnnruh bear duh dnduh.” At one point, she was saying something that sounded very much as if she was saying “I know how to read.” I can’t imagine that’s what she was actually saying (though it was pretty clear), but I certainly reinforced it and encouraged her to keep saying it.

I’ve been Lennie’s porter this evening. On the way home from an evening session of a singing and dancing thing she goes to pretty regularly, we stopped to get her a smoothie, and when we got home, she was very intent on my holding it for her. Mleeka had gotten a puzzle out and was holding it for her while they did a puzzle on the bed, but when I came into the room, Lennie insisted that I hold it for her: “Daddy hold it.” A couple of other times this evening, she insisted that I hold things for her, a sock once, I think, and then a cloth she had been using as a baby wipe for her doll.

Lennie has quite a music collection. The songs I’ve been listening to most frequently with her of late are as follows:

• Victor Vito (who eats spaghetti with Freddy Vasco)
• I Know a Chicken (Lennie dances like crazy to this one and sometimes shakes an egg noisemaker)
• Monster Boogie (nuff said)
• Elvira (by the Oak Ridge Boys; it’s campy and awful and great, and I had it on a 45 when I was a kid, so I got it mostly for my own nostalgia’s sake, though what made me think about it in the first place was hearing it on one of those kitschy music compilation TV ads, upon which hearing Lennie did cut a rug otherwise unprompted)
• Gold Digger (yes, the Kanye West song. I know, I know, we’re bad parents for exposing our child to such lyrics, but it’s a darned catchy tune.)

That’s it for this edition.