Category Archives: lennie

The Death Star Strikes Back

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Lennie turns out to be a Star Wars fan. A couple of months ago, we somehow got on the topic of Star Wars, and she had many questions. We answered what we could and then deflected to various aunts and uncles once we were over it. She’s persisted in wanting to watch the movies. This is the girl who had previously not been able to watch Ratatouille because it was too scary. Yes, the animated children’s movie by Disney or Pixar or whoever.

We had told her, after much pestering, that she could watch Star Wars after she turned five. Two or three weeks ago, we were at the movie store, and she brought the movie up again. So we got the first one (technically the fourth one, but the first one that was made), and she loved it. She wasn’t outwardly afraid of Darth Vader or even the shooting, though she was curious about all the shooting. She had plenty of questions (less irritating to field when you’re not answering for a person with no context whatsoever) but seems to have mostly gotten it.

She’s been wanting ever since to see the next movie, and we got it this weekend. She’s having trouble getting what the Empire is, I think (“a group of people, sort of like a state or country, and the Emperor is like the king of these people”), and today she called the movie The Death Star Strikes Back at one point. I didn’t get to watch the movie with her today (decided to paint a room on the spur of the moment and had to finish the job), but she mostly stuck with it and I think wasn’t too afraid. She told me at one point today that she was a lot like Obi Wan because she was very brave and so probably wouldn’t be afraid of it. I told her that I thought she’d change her tune once the Emperor came out and started throwing lightning at people (thougy maybe that happens in the next movie?). She came to join me in the room I was painting once when Darth Vader and Luke were fighting. She wasn’t too keen on watching that. I think it had less to do with the actual physical violence than with Luke’s dilemma, since she told me that what bugged her was that Darth Vader was trying to make Luke be naughty. My daughter the moral philosopher!

Little Bo Cheeses

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Although I am an atheist, there’s a whole lot of religious music I really really like, from holy music to old time spirituals to the Statler Brothers (select songs) to Christmas songs. I don’t think I sing a whole lot normally, but get a soaring rendition of O Holy Night going and I find it really hard not to ruin it with my own caterwauling. Lennie got a little kid’s karaoke machine type thing from her granddaddy for our early Christmas gathering, and in anticipation of this, Mleeka had been practicing Christmas songs with her in the week or two preceding our visit. On the drive to Dad’s, we had the music going, and everybody was enjoying it (Finn even does a pretty good Deck the Halls Fa la la la la). At a break after Away in a Manger, Lennie piped up and asked who Little Bo Cheeses was. It was really hard not to laugh (in a “that’s so precious” way), but it also kind of hit me in the face with the fact that she’s getting old enough to begin to be exposed to this whole side of our culture — a very dominant part of it, no less — that we haven’t introduced her to overtly before. We’re not interested in teaching her that the stories in the Bible (and particularly the ones that we take to be supernatural) are all true, but it would be a real disservice to her not to provide at least a fair history and culture lesson.

This turns out to be tricky when you’re trying to do the following things:

  • Provide an unbiased report of what most people in our culture believe to be true
  • Not do too good a sales job when telling her about it (she can figure out what she really thinks when she’s a bit older)
  • Explain why we don’t believe this stuff when, for example, her granddaddy does, without being patronizing or painting Granddaddy in anything but a positive light
  • Accomplish all of this using language and concepts that a four-year-old can understand

So, who’s this Little Bo Cheeses guy and why are people always singing about him? Here’s more or less how we handled it (given in something resembling a monologue).

The name is actually Jesus, and he was this baby that a lot of people believe was very special. Well, not just special, because all babies are kind of special, but it’s almost like he was a magical baby. (Here I get a little uncomfortable because this could very well be construed by an adult as our making sort of a mockery of what people believe about Jesus, when we’re really honestly just trying to find a way to explain it that a little kid can grok.) And so people think this baby is so cool and special and almost magical (really, we didn’t want Lennie to show up at her granddaddy’s asking what’s up with this magical Bo Cheeses because that could really come off as if we’ve been denigrating the belief, and that’s no good way to kick off your Christmas gathering), so they think about him a lot and even write songs about him. Now, we don’t believe the baby Jesus was magical or anything. We think he was just a regular baby, special like all the others. But we grew up with the stories and songs, and the songs are very pretty, so we like to sing them. It’s sort of like the stories we read. Do you think Liza Lou (a story from Mleeka’s childhood that we still read from time to time) is 100% true? But we still enjoy reading it, right?

At some point, I think Lennie asked why Granddaddy believed the stories when we didn’t, and I think we said that it was just the way he’d grown up and that we simply developed different opinions as we got older.

She seemed to sort of understand it, and I think and hope we were pretty sensitive all around (to friends and relatives who are religious, to our own desire not to indoctrinate our kid into religion, to our desire to maintain Lennie’s innocence and openness).

When we got to Dad’s, she pretty quickly found a nativity scene and announced that the baby was Little Bo Cheeses. Over the course of the evening, Mleeka taught her the names of the other figures, and it wasn’t at all traumatic for anybody. She hasn’t recounted the tale to me yet, but I understand she knows the basics of the whole Christmas story now.

It’s kind of a hard line to walk. I do want her to understand the culture she’s rooted in. I don’t want her to get saved or whatever at a young friend’s church before she can really understand what it means. And I’m in fact very iffy on the notion of letting her go to any church while she’s young. But on the other hand, I don’t want to stunt her intellectual and social growth by refusing to expose her to the stories even at a young, impressionable age.

I think for the moment we’ve done well.  I understand that people I value whose beliefs are at odds with mine may recoil at some of what I’ve said here and will think we’ve done anything but well, surely having consigned our daughter to the fires of Hell. Within my own context (which I know those folk would say is irrelevant, for the only context is God’s; which I call out here not in order to argue against or anything but merely to acknowledge that I understand the schism between worldviews and that providing my own context isn’t useful to all), I’ve done what I wanted: I was fair to a belief system I don’t buy; I exposed my daughter to something of a pillar of our culture; I didn’t compromise my own beliefs in any way; and I believe I explained things in a way that was sensitive to the fact that most people around Lennie do believe the Bible to be at least largely true and often literal.

Marshmallow Basagna

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basagna.jpgSometimes your kid says something so cute that even though it’s incorrect in a couple of ways, you can’t bear to correct her. Lennie is a big big fan of sweet potato casserole. I knew she would be the moment I saw her cramming marshmallows into her mouth when helping to layer them in on top of the sweet potato puree. This seemed to her rather lasagna-like, and she has for a long time called lasagna basagna. It’s not that she can’t make the ell sound. It’s simply that this is how she heard it at some point, and it’s how it stuck. On its own, it’s kind of cute and harmless, but when said with glee and repetitively and with “marshmallow” as a prefix, it’s just the best. When she’s 30 and learns that this stuff isn’t actually called marshmallow basagna, I guess she’ll hate me, but it’s a risk that for now I’m willing to take.

Bobby

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It’s my impression that by the time Lennie was Finn’s age, she was already speaking a ton of words, mostly the names of animals from an animal book we’ve also shared with Finn (though probably less often — having two kids is harder than having one, and you wind up short-changing both in lots of ways that make you feel really bad). Finn is turning out to be a little more sluggish with words (it’s pretty common for boys, I believe), but he’s finally started to show an interest in words and other linguistic feats. For example, he’s pretty good for saying “dog” now. He routinely says “mama,” but he tends to use it in a pretty general sense, usually barking it whenever he wants something. After some work with the animal book, he’ll volunteer “neeee” if you ask him what a horse says, and with a little prompting, he’ll do a chicken sound. The most impressive thing at the moment is that he’s picked up “bite, please,” which is what we croon at him when he’s insisting “maMA” and reaching for food. He’s not terribly consistent about it yet, but it’s not uncommon for him to say “bite, please” when he wants food or drink, though it comes out more like “Bobby” with a big pause in the middle.

Not to be outdone by her little brother, Lennie has started reading and writing on a limited basis. She’s been increasingly curious about letters, and we’ve been helping her learn their sounds and doing the old “duh, ahh, guh” drill to show her how to string them together to make words. The other morning, she had written “cat,” and neither of us had explicitly drilled her on that one. When we asked her how she had come up with it, she said that she had just worked it out based on the sounds. I’m not entirely sure I believe her, but it’s certainly not beyond the realm of what’s possible.

She continues to be a good little artist as well, picking up things like perspective without any prompting. The other day, she drew one fish at sort of an angle and some other fish from the side; the sideways ones had only one eye (they were not flounder). This sounds lame and obvious if you don’t have small children, but it’s a pretty neat thing to watch happen.

Money does not have mouths or eyes

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A brief conversation I had with Lennie while going to the drive-through ATM today:

Lennie: Daddy, the bank is sort of like our house.

Me: How’s that?

Lennie: Well, it has bricks like our house.

Me: Do you think it has beds like our house?

Lennie: Yes, probably so.

Me: Do you think the money sleeps in the beds?

Lennie: No, money does not have mouths or eyes, so it does not sleep in beds.

A Hump like a Snow-hill

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Moby Dick has long been one of my favorite books. It’s part adventure story, part whaling encyclopedia, and it’s just good prose, dramatic, poetic stuff. It’s something of a precursor to things we see today like the fascinating and entertaining show The Deadliest Catch, which details the mechanics and the drama of fishing for crab on the Bering sea. If you like the latter, it may be a misstep to dismiss the former.

When Lennie was still in utero and we were trying to think of ways to let her hear my voice, I thought of reading Moby Dick to her. It doesn’t matter what words you’re saying, but matters only that the child can hear you. Also, though it’s one of my favorite books, it’s one that Mleeka never read and has never had any interest in reading. Our effort fizzled thanks to a lack of enthusiasm on her part (as I recall it; it’s possible the book just put her to sleep).

This past Christmas, I got a radically condensed, cartoon version of the book (not to be confused with the comic book version I got for my birthday), the idea being that it was something I might share with Lennie. To be honest, the book isn’t that great. The drawings are pretty crude, and though the book hits the high points of the plot, it’s just not the best sort of thing to read with a kid because of the way it’s laid out. But a few weeks ago, Lennie developed on her own a very keen interest in having it read to her. Probably a dozen times or so now, we’ve glossed it at bedtime. I don’t bother reading the words so much as pointing to pictures and telling Lennie the names of the people and explaining that the whale and Ahab are grumpy. Now she tells me these things. She can identify on her own the characters Ishmael, Captain Ahab, and Queequeg (volunteering the names of the former two). And of course, she knows the white whale’s name and that the sailors wield harpoons on their hunt for him. She can also tell the difference between the pictured right (or baleen) whale, and she’s close to being able to volunteer that the right whale has no teeth but has baleen instead. She’s very interested in the ouchies that appear on Moby Dick’s flank (bright red ribbons of blood trailing behind), and she understands that Ahab (who she knows has a peg-leg) is grumpy because Moby Dick bit his leg off.

And finally, as of this weekend, when we get to the page on which Moby Dick is first sighted from the crow’s nest, she’ll say in a theatrical voice that I may be responsible for having helped her develop for the purpose, “Thar she blows! A hump like a snow-hill!”

Mleeka refuses still to read even the abridged book with Lennie, and I consider it my duty to raise a little fanatic to exact revenge, which is, after all, one of the book’s core themes.