The Trixie Update

I hate not having the time to jot down the little bits and pieces of the day that are made special by some small action on Trixie’s part. As every parent knows, there are a million things your child does for the first time. These are disposable moments. They light a spark in my mind when they happen; a few weeks later I don’t remember them. I don’t even remember what I’ve forgotten.

Last week we were driving to school with the kitten to share for a pet-themed show-and-tell. Trixie was holding Miss Cutie Pie in the back, playing with her. Then she told me that “Miss Cutie Pie’s eyes are like… little pieces of chocolate”. That stood out because it was the first time I ever heard her use a simile. And — I confirmed it with Jennifer later — she made it up by herself. The cat has cute eyes, but we’ve never compared them to chocolate. I like that. I like see little glimpses of how her brain works, and I didn’t want to forget it.

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Trixie and I (with some help from Papa-T) are building a sandbox right now. It’s taking a while, but we are almost done.

This evening I was inside looking for a circle template so I could figure out what size drill bit I needed to attach the rope handle. Trixie was playing outside.

All of a sudden I heard screaming, “DADDY!! HELP! DADDDDDY!!!!!!! HELP! HELLLLP! There’s a WOLF!”

I ran to see a Trixie blur shoot past the window and dart across the backside of the porch. “DADDDY! HELP! There’s a WOLF after me!!! THERE’S A WOLF AFTER ME!”

When your child is screaming an alarm like that, you don’t hesitate to believe the danger for a second. She could have been hollering about Sleestak or robots and I would have been equally convinced. She bounded up the steps straight into my arms. Only then did I glance at what she was running from.

Lo and behold, over off the side of the yard was the neighbor’s huge, blackish-grey, extremely wolf-like Shepard mix docilely watching us. Even though it’s a big dog, they keep it inside so Trixie had never seen it before. Tonight was one heck of an introduction.

I was very proud of her for getting the hell out of there — she never ran that fast in soccer. After she calmed down a little, she was proud of herself also. “Whenever you see a wolf you are supposed to tell a grown-up,” she informed me. I’m thinking maybe more along the lines of animal control, but a grown-up is a step in the right direction.

You were a brave kid tonight, Trixie. Good job!

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Last night Trixie choose a large Valentine lollipop for dessert. She tore into it and I watched her working on it for a little while before she wandered off. Shortly thereafter she approached me with a bag of sweethearts in hand.

I didn’t want to talk about the sweethearts request because the lollipop was a BIG one, and there was no way she had finished it.

“Where’s the lollipop, Trixie?”
“I don’t know.”

When sticky candy is involved, an answer like that will not go far. After explaining that she’s not getting any more candy until we find the sucker, she backpedals and says it’s in the trash.

I look in the trash and don’t see anything there. She insists it’s there. “But there’s nothing on top, Trixie. It’s not there.”

At that point, much to my dismay, Trixie digs into the full (overflowing) garbage can — through coffee grounds, dinner scraps and wet junk mail — and pulls her lollipop out.

“You hid it in the bottom of the garbage?”
“Yes.”

That’s pretty interesting behavior. I explained that she doesn’t need to hide stuff, not just because Mommy and Daddy will always find out, but because we can talk about anything.

The cool part to me is that Trixie is forming and implementing a mental model of how the world works. In this case she decided that if you get rid of the evidence, you get rid of the problem. Not the best idea, but certainly testable. I also think it puts her on par with many adults, except adults are not usually as forthcoming. Interesting stuff.

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Lately Trixie has been using her imagination to take a word or an expression and contort it into either a nonsense word or an outright substitute. For example, I’ll say, “We’re having dinner guests tonight.” She will declare, “I call dinner guests, Spinner Chips”. I love seeing what she comes up with.

Last night at our regular Monday-night-kid-eats-free venue, Trixie was not using good manners. Jennifer had just refilled her water and we were waiting for a ‘thank you’. Trixie danced around (literally) with a variety of gibberish before she decided on ‘Stegosaurus’ with a wink.

I had finally had enough and told Trixie it was over. She was going to be PUNISHED — no TV. The fallout was immediate, but not entirely predictable. Trixie turned red and started bawling. I picked her up to give her some security, and told her that we love her, but that she should have used good manners. That point was lost on her. “I SAID STEGOSAURUS!!,” she howled, tears pouring down her face. “I SAID STEGOSAURUS…”

At that moment, she believed with all her heart (which was beating a million times a minute) that Stegosaurus was the right thing to say. I relented and gave her another chance, but also a gentle reminder that ‘thank you’ is really better for most situations. She gave Jennifer a hug, a regular, non-nonsensical ‘I’m sorry’, and the rest of the night went ok.

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Trixie likes all arts-n-crafts, but she loves pencils. She likes me to sharpen them and she likes the eraser — or at least the idea of it. I hadn’t really seen her erase anything very well until I came across my barely recognizable shopping list today. Trixie had carefully erased each item, and then for good measure she scribbled all over the rest of the page.

It wasn’t a spectacular list or anything — there were only three items: wipes, coffee filters and brita — but it’s really disturbing to find your work completely vanished.

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Trixie has really been pushing her bedtime recently. It’s not terribly hard to get her to bed, but once she’s there, she stays awake for hours and hours.

One thing she does is take care of her own dolls and put them to bed. She’ll do diapers, feed them, line them up, tuck them in and then do it all over again. She also loves sneaking out of bed and quietly playing with toys. The toy of choice lately is the enormous set of plastic foods — fruits, meats, vegetables, plates, cups — everything you need for a picnic. And a picnic she makes. We’ll find her setting up places for all her babies on a blanket in the middle of the room. We tell her to stay in bed and she’ll leap back where she’s supposed to be.

This past week, I heard some stuff going on and popped my head in. She was in her bed, but then I noticed a picnic setting and some food on the covers.

“Trixie, this doesn’t belong in bed. It goes back on the blanket and you need to go to sleep”

I started moving the food back and discovered more and more pieces buried in the sheets and covers. There were dozens of chicken legs and orange slices, french fries and apple pies. I moved her pillow and it crunched. It was stuffed full of plastic utensils and dairy products.

“Trixie, what in the world is all this food doing in your pillow?”

Very matter-of-factly she declared, “They are under my stuffed animals, too. I was hiding them because I didn’t know if you were peeking in or not.”

What could I do? I was very impressed. She had an entire picnic — like about 150 pieces of plastic — hidden in her bed. I’m going to put her in charge of cleaning up next time company comes over.

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It’s hard to start writing again. After almost nine months off, it’s taking a while for the story juices to start flowing. So the best thing to do is doodle. Just write something until you get where you want to be. Clean it up later, or throw it out. The important thing is just get something down.

Trixie is pretty good at getting something down. Better than I am and most adults I know. This is not a Trixie thing, but something I’ve noticed with all toddlers. In general, they rock at arts and crafts.

I love stuff like that. It’s pretty awesome to watch kids get so absorbed without worrying about the consequences of what they are making. It gets a lot harder once you start learning the rules of art and social pressure starts creeping in. Or even worse if you study art and end up paralyzed because you realize everything has already been done before. Thankfully, 2-year-olds are protected from that kind of knowledge.

Trixie is a machine when it comes to doodle time. I have sometimes just taped down a bunch of sheets of paper to the table and she’ll draw on one, advance, draw some more, advance and so on. Who knows what criteria determine the completion of a sheet? Sometimes she claims she’s drawing something specific, but more often it’s just an exercise to consume resources. The pressing issue for her is not “how does this fit into the social construct of post-modernism”, but rather, “how much glitter glue can be squeezed onto this paper when Daddy is not looking?”

I’m definitely proud of her, and I’ve included two pieces I really like. I forgot to date them, but they were done in the last 2-3 months. (that’s how long I’ve been procrastinating this story). They aren’t necessarily typical pieces. For the handful I’ve kept, literally hundreds (and probably thousands) have been thrown away.

If she saw me dumping them in the trash, I suspect she’d get upset. Otherwise, she doesn’t care a bit what happens after she’s done. We might hang one or two for a while, but it’s not the result that matters. It’s all the process — just being able to zone out and grind a crayon into oblivion for an afternoon.

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How many times have you gotten your foot stuck in the toilet? If you’re like me — a responsible adult — the answer is probably no more than 1-2 times a year. In contrast, Trixie manages to do it about once a week.

This stems from her unbelievable sense of independence. She absolutely refuses to accept any help from either of us for anything, except of course, when she wants to be to picked up. Apparently she still requires our help on that one.

Because of this independent streak, the toilet situation is getting pretty frustrating. She has to pull down the potty seat herself, open the toilet herself, place the seat up herself. You get the picture. Heaven forbid we try to simply turn on the light so she can see what she’s doing — she’ll start screaming,”mNO, mNooooo!!!!!!!” and collapse into a sobbing mess.

She also insists on climbing up on the potty seat herself. The potty seat isn’t a super tight fit, and there’s a lot of shifting. It’s like a cross between a cat trying to drink out of the toilet and a gymnast working on the pommel horse. Usually Trixie can get a 9.1 or 9.2. But when one foot slips in the bowl, you have to deduct points.

The good news? The dismount is a lot easier. She sticks every landing.

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How do you get a toddler to do the things they are supposed to do? I’m happy to report that we have long been able to influence Trixie by not so subtle use of behavior modification techniques.

On the positive reinforcement side we have our 2005 Potty Incentive Program. This is the program that doles out out stickers for good bathroom behavior. It was extremely successful in the beginning, but then stickers begin to lose their appeal. So we had to move up to temporary tattoos, and wow, we got a great response rate. You combine that with 2.9% APR financing, and the potty training sells itself. But like stickers, the tattoos are slowly losing their power. The next step is piercings — but that’s only going to be for extremely impressive potty behavior. Like maybe holding it for a cross-country trip.

On the negative reinforcement side, we have learned that the hand that controls the TV remote, controls the world. In Trixie’s worldview, threatening to turn off Sesame Street is the worst thing that could ever possibly happen. Ever. The best part is that the TV doesn’t have to be on. Matter of fact, we don’t have to be anywhere near a TV; we can simply threaten to not turn it on at some indeterminate point later in her life. This is the most powerful force in Trixie’s universe.

What causes us to resort to this nuclear option of behavior modification? It’s usually simple things that we know Trixie would agree to — if she could only get over the initial hump. Case in point: her favorite food. We’ll set out something that we know she loves, like vanilla yogurt, and she will scream, tears streaming down her face, like it’s the end of world. Fortunately, the end of Sesame Street trumps the end of the world, after one good “Do you want to see Batty Bat?”, she’ll acquiesce and take one bite. The anguish melts away to confusion, and she rediscovers her favorite kind of yogurt. She’ll then eat the rest of the bowl herself without any more outside influence. I don’t get too excited though; so far we’ve had to reintroduce Trixie to vanilla yogurt about 35 times.

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Who knows what “emergency clothes” are? Before daycare I would have assumed a hazmat suit would qualify. Now I know it’s the backup outfit for when your child makes some kind of ungodly mess at daycare. The last time it happened, Trixie had puked all over herself, and I think, maybe one of the teachers. (Are you supposed to send an apology gift for something like that? Just for the record, Hallmark does not make a “I’m sorry my child threw up on you” card.)

Yesterday, I picked Trixie up and she was decked out in orange. Our back-up clothes consist of Target Halloween department-wear that Trixie hasn’t quite grown out of — orange “The Thing” pants and an orange shirt with a kitty cat on it. We did not include the pumpkin. After thinking about it, I wish I had included her cape.

Even more so than being concerned about what had happened, I was embarrassed that I didn’t know in advance of picking her up. I hadn’t been watching the web-cams that morning, which isn’t that unusual. I don’t normally spend a lot of time viewing Trixie on the computer because it’s either insanely addictive or an exercise in total frustration.

The former because it’s like the Sims Toddlin’ Expansion Pack without the little green crystals floating above the avatars. All the tiny characters are either hungry or sleepy or have to go the bathroom. Social relationships form, grow, and break down. Add more toys to make everyone happy. The only difference is that everything is jerky and somewhat fish-eyed, instead of smoothly rendered in axiometric perfection.

If you aren’t lucky enough to find a happening scene, then you can waste a lot of time playing a futile game of search with the dozen plus cameras set up throughout the daycare. The problem is that the cameras don’t provide complete coverage, and since each video stream takes a few seconds to load, it can take a few minutes to search the daycare. By the time you’re done you might have missed an area. Plus, they could be outside, or in the password-restricted nursery area.

To avoid these two extremes, I don’t check in as much as you might expect, although I’m going to do more in the future. And as for what I didn’t see on camera yesterday? There’s a play oven set out on the playground that fills with water when it rains. She dumped it all over herself somehow. It would probably have been pretty refreshing if it weren’t 50 degrees outside.

The good news is that this incident solves a daycare mystery. Jenn and I already knew that Trixie is a little bit of a packrat and she likes to hide things when she discovers a good spot. The play oven is apparently a good spot. Trixie’s sippy cup, missing since last week, has been recovered.

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