The Trixie Update

Trixie has become such a big kid, and communicates so well about so many things that it’s easy to forget that there’s still a vast world of cultural knowledge that rest of us of take for granted, and that she hasn’t experienced once. This showed up a couple of times this past week.

First we got a soda can out of a machine. She’s seen plenty of vending machines but we’ve never used one before. The drink in question was a delicious peach flavored Fresca. I stuck in the money, she pushed the button. When the can dropped — ka-KLUNK! — she jumped back four feet and came awfully close to landing on her ass. After thinking about it some, I bet she expected it to open up like a regular fridge. That would be the more civilized approach to dispensing beverages, but vending machines are not a high society item. Didn’t I mention, we were getting a Fresca?

Next we were rolling coins. You might expect that rolling coins had some sort of relationship to the aforementioned vending experience, but alas, it was just coin rolling day. The coins in question were an overflowing bucket that dates back 5 or 6 years. I figured I could get Trixie to help me with the counting and sorting. In exchange I told her I would share the profits.

She got into the idea of sharing and wanted to go get her piggy bank which is full of coins and a single dollar bill. She came back with the dollar bill ripped in half and declared she was going to share it with me. That caught me off-guard like crazy. Ripping up money. To be fair, Trixie hardly ever sees paper money. We don’t use it. Not at the grocery store, not at restaurants. Sometimes at Thee Dollhouse but Trixie isn’t usually there with us.

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Trixie’s hand is doing much better. But that doesn’t mean she’s letting the incident go. Showing off her almost completely healed digits, she matter-of-factly asked Jennifer, “Remember when you tried to cut my fingers off?”

That’s respect. That’s some serious respect. It’s also an ill gotten spoil that Jennifer didn’t ask for it, but she’d be crazy not to use it as a force of positive change.

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Trixie learned a lot of lessons this week; car doors are dangerous, candles are dangerous, running on hardwood floors when wet is dangerous and dropping stoneware is dangerous.

The week started out with a bang. Unhappy with her mother’s day present, Jennifer slammed the car door on Trixie’s hand Sunday morning. I know it sounds terrible. But you would think Trixie could do a little better than a card and some earrings. She won’t make that mistake next year.

It was a pretty scary moment. The only good thing is that her hand was slammed in the hinge of the back door (where it meets the edge of the front). There’s about a 3/8″ gap when the door is closed. That was enough to prevent her fingers from breaking. It was not enough to prevent a horrific indention in two of her fingers. 30 minutes of ice did wonders, but she’s still sporting band-aids as we hope to avoid infections.

Later that day, for reasons known only to her, Trixie grabbed a candle with her remaining good hand. It took me a good minute to figure out why she was crying because the wax was completely clear. I then grabbed one of the other candles and poured it on my forearm (like the way you check bath water or milk) to see exactly what kind of pain Trixie was experiencing. She was fine.

The next day Trixie jumped out the bath tub and tried to run to her room — across the hardwood floor. We’re thankful it wasn’t a concussion.

Tonight Trixie got out of clearing the table for the next couple of years when she dropped a 23 lb stoneware plate. The interesting part is that the plate did not shatter into a million pieces. Instead it cracked exactly in half. The really interesting part is that it left a small scratch on her toe the size of a paper cut. I have no idea how that happened. If the plate had landed square on her foot, I think it should have smashed her toe into a pulp.

In retrospect it wasn’t that bad a week. Trixie now has a healthy respect for metal, fire, water and dishes. If only I could somehow get my keyboard added to that list.

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Just a head’s up that we may be on a San Diego NPR show today around 10:20 PST. I say may because you never know when you may get bumped. But if it does happen, we’ll be part of a segment about mothers who blog. Yes, they know I’m not a mother.

Update: Well, what do you know? This turned out to be totally real. What a neat surprise. I got to join in on a cool interview that included Heather Armstrong of dooce and Samantha Goldstein.

Schaff up in New York City was nice enough to record and convert the interview to a MP3 audio file. (He also trimmed the tape to where I came in.) Take a listen if you like:

• MP3 file of Ben MacNeill on NPR (9 minutes long, 4.3 MB)

This clip was excerpted from the show These Days on San Diego NPR.

If you are a first time visitor, I have a First Time Here section. I also like to point out a few of my favorite sleep stories:

• Two Nap Minimum
• The only Telemetry that’s still kicking

Thanks for visiting!

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I’m switching up the format here a little. I just can’t pretend that I’m going to write anthropological stories anymore. Those stories were always driven by data. And the data, as far as Trixie is concerned, is just about played out. Anyway, I’m leaving the data collecting up to the new parents. They are the ones who are going to get their 5-month old on an overnight schedule, and work on potty training their toddlers. I’m happy to leave those days behind us.

I’m taking a page from a really well done blog which I don’t think gets enough attention: Jamie Madigan’s jmadigan.net. I don’t read it enough, but he created a great weekly format for his daughter. Weekly summaries make a lot of sense to me so I’m going to give it a try.

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“Oh-my-god-what-is-grabbing-my-foot!!”

We brought a small wooden puzzle on the plane to keep Trixie occupied. It worked great for about 2 minutes and then pieces went everywhere. In retrospect I should have asked the passenger sitting behind us to if she could reach those stray pieces. At the time I thought it would be less obtrusive to just let Trixie crawl under the seat and get them. The lady behind us thought a gremlin was loose in the plane. I glad she didn’t scream any louder.

The rest of the flight was not as entertaining, but it was super easy. I had heard horror stories about traveling with kids. Trixie did great. Matter of fact, I wish I could always travel with a toddler because of the awesome preboarding policy at Southwest. Do you need to transport a toddler across the country? Call me.

This trip marked Trixie’s first flight. And the trip was an unorthodox one — visiting great-grandparents in Florida! We all had a great time visiting with Marvin and Carol (thanks so much for inviting us!). Trixie adapted pretty well for all the traveling involved and the shift in schedule. By adapted well, I mean about a dozen tantrum meltdowns a day, a refusal to nap and a 10pm bedtime. On the plus side she especially enjoyed having a new house to explore and when outside, an infinite number of lizards to chase after.

We hit the beach one day and Trixie got dipped into the Atlantic for the first time this year. She also came within 2 inches of stepping on a giant crab. I yelled for her to jump. She saw the crab. That was the end of the ocean for this trip. The sand was a lot of fun though and we all did some good digging.

This week also brought a lot of “THIS ONE GOES RIGHT HERE???”. That’s what Trixie asks when putting on her shoes. Normally I only hear it a few times in the morning when we get dressed. However, being on vacation, she got to take her flip-flops on and off about 60-70 times an hour. I’ll be so glad when she can tell the left and right shoes apart.

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