andy pandy

so, this is one of those times when larry is working nonstop. as in, some days i see him for about 5 minutes 3 times per day when he emerges to find food. instead of getting snappy at each other (which is sometimes the case under such circumstances), this time we've been quite cheery and supportive of each other (nonstop work mode creates very different but real challenges for each of us :). that said, this has been going on for about a month, and a month is about how long either of us can stand it. so, things may or may not start to get a bit precarious around here. (eva loves using that word, though she thinks it's "precurious" which is, frankly, just plain adorable).

that preamble is mostly to provide context for eva's recent obsession: andy pandy. for those of you who wonder (as i would have) why you haven't yet heard of this preschooler trend... that would be because apparently eva is the only child in america who cares about this show.

andy pandy was originally a 1950s british children's television show, (think howdy doody), but in 2002, it was revived -- in color! and claymation! eva doesn't watch a ton of kid tv -- mostly sesame street, and last fall, many many viewings of "how the grinch stole christmas" -- but i am not above just rolling with tv requests when necessary for family sanity (and nonstop work mode is one of those necessary times). so, in between viewings of "ace of cakes", we stumbled across three -- yes, just three -- episodes of andy pandy on bbc kids on demand.

"mama, can i watch andy pandy? the one with the picnic?" with just three 20 minute episodes, we came to know well the adventures of andy pandy and looby loo (yes, this character is the source of the song "here we go looby loo... all on a saturday night"). "mama, now can i watch the one with the man from the moon? please, just one more andy pandy?" the best thing about this show is that there are no squeeky fake kid voices (think elmo, etc) -- only a decidedly grown-up sounding british narrator. but a mama can only hear about, oh, say... how teddy painted looby loo's flowers blue with sailor bilbo's blue paint so many times before she looks for options. as in, where's the dvd?

after much google searching, it seems more andy pandy is not to be found. no dvds, no streaming video from bbc online, nothing on youtube, very little on ebay (when last i checked, a single region 4 dvd and some $35 collectible vhs tapes). so, as i said, sadly for eva, no children in america seem to share her obsession.

well, today -- after an unprecedented three day break from andy pandy -- i pulled up the preschool on demand channel on the cable box to find... no andy pandy. sure, the programming rotates, but since this long-off-the-air show had been present for many months before we ever started watching it, i presumed it would outlast her love for it. sadly, it did not.

i actually paused, probably with my mouth hanging open, before breaking the news, not relishing the thought of crushing her little world.

"oh, eva... there isn't any more andy pandy. they're not here anymore. i'm so sorry."

i can't remember when i last saw her so sad. her eyes instantly brimmed with tears, her jaw quivered.

"you mean all of the andy pandy's are gone? even the picnic one?" at which point she collapsed into sobs.

i held her, i told her i knew how sad she must be. after a minute, i suggested we go up and tell papa about it. he repeated all the google searching i had done several weeks ago, and i hoped he would have better results. we found a 5 minute clip in italian, which seemed to make her feel a tiny bit better, but no solid leads.

"mama? maybe we can just make a cd of andy pandy instead?" she's a surprisingly smart consumer of technology (grasping the difference between dvr recordings and live tv, and between flickr videos and skype), so i think this was maybe in part the "bargaining" stage of grief and part preschooler misunderstanding.

poor kid. for whatever reason, she just really connected with this show. in a world of super-duper-attention-grabbing kid shows that are too hectic or scary for her tastes (meaning, pretty much every kid show), andy pandy was just her speed. i think she mostly gets that it's gone forever, and (since she has already torn through the first several stages of grief) i think she'll get over it pretty quickly. but it was still just... sad.

i guess to avoid potential disappointment (not to mention future lack of cultural knowledge), she should just go with disney?

nah... she'll recover. but, if anyone has a lead on an andy pandy dvd, do let me know...

UPDATE 08/2009: it came back. hooray! i guess i freaked out too soon, because it reappeared on the on demand channel, a different set of three episodes. it has since rotated a few times, offering different episodes every few months. though, by now, she can take it or leave it. ("uh, yeah, mom, that was so, like, 1/8th of my life ago." heh.) she asked to watch andy pandy yesterday, though, when she was feeling sick. so i think it still brings her comfort.

immortal charlie

stone, girl, originally uploaded by kelanew.

"mama, you know what? every time charlie dies, he just comes back to life again! he comes back to life every time. charlie's special; he's the only one who can do that. and so guess what? someday a long time from now when all the people in the whole world are dead, charlie will still be alive. he'll be the last person alive in the whole world. and that's what makes him special."

so, maybe everyone has conversations like that with their three year old about her imaginary friend who dies many times per week. maybe, as it has been suggested, it is just the normal thing at this age to start discussing life and death with that combination of matter-of-factness and awe that only a preschooler can manage. and, maybe other people know exactly how to respond all the time... but despite feeling like i've got a pretty good handle on how to guide her through the great mysteries of life, every so often i'm just completely speechless.

so not only are you telling me charlie is immortal, but that you've thought it through regarding how this will play out at the end of days? really? i'm pretty sure i have no response to that.

---

she of course experienced significant loss at what turned out to be a key time -- when she was old enough to "get" what was going on, but young enough that it has been part of her life for as long as she can really remember. consequence or coincidence, she does talk about death often. not in a morose way, but just as a topic of unending inquiry. all kids do process this eventually, but i suspect it might be a little sooner than normal in her case -- whether because of our experiences of the past year and a half, or because she is simply more curious about working out every little detail than is the average kid, i can't say. i guess i'm not overly concerned, but sometimes i am struck by it all.

but man, do i love charlie. charlie helps eva figure things out, and his (or her!) form changes to suit the needs of the day. sometimes he's in school, sometimes he's a teenager (the holy grail to a three year old!), sometimes he's a teacher. sometimes he lives in new york city, or has moved to guatamala. sometimes he has sixteen dogs, or is a big sister, or has a baby sister who is too loud in the car. and in this way, based on who he is that day and what he's going through, i get an extra glimpse of eva's view of the world, and know how she's processing the joys and challenges involved in growing up.

but charlie sure is a moving target; you never know what you're going to get. sometimes, from the beginning of the conversation to the end, i'll discover he has shifted -- to protect her from the appearance of having made a mistake or contradiction in her narrative. (she has a strong aversion to ever being wrong, which is a story for another day...)

--

"so, charlie will live forever and ever?"
"uh huh."
"hmm. i curious what he thinks about that."
"oh, he won't be lonely or anything."
"no?"
"silly mama! he's just a robot!"
(aha, i forgot. every since maker faire, charlie is periodically a robot.)
"uh huh, and that's why he'll be the only one left when the dinosaurs come back."

the shift

so in a two week period right around christmas, hazel: got her first tooth, learned to sign, started crawling for real (not just the army crawl thing), began pulling up, ate her first food. and grew some hair.

the shift. she used to be a baby baby, and now we've transitioned and she's a kid baby. as in, a baby who explores, has opinions, looks for people if they leave the room, and laughs at her sister's jokes. it's really fun, but man, were we caught off guard. we returned home from our christmas visit in ND to a home that was not at all ready for a baby that moves around. we also launched directly into several weeks of larry working round the clock for a big deadline, so it was a bit of a rough time there for a while. (he's still working enough to make himself loopy, but things have settled back in a bit.)

hazel, here are some details and thoughts on your fast flurry of milestones (sorry my love, if you wanted a doting write-up on each one like your sister got, you should have spread them out a little! think ahead next time.): your first food was... cheerios. not too exciting, but it was on christmas, so that's fancy, right? after all but begging for food since you were four months old, we were all a bit amused to see your less-than-enthusiastic reaction to this new taste and texture. your famously expressive eyebrows were working overtime in trying to sort out what exactly was going on. but you quickly warmed up to the idea, and soon you were munching away happily on carrots, broccoli, pasta and more.

it's been so fun watching you learn so much in such a short time. you figured out that you could pull up, and suddenly your realm of movement expanded from the three inch layer directly above the carpet to a so much more. it doesn't seem like it would be a big difference, but it was like a whole new world for you. you could go wherever you wanted to go, stand up when you got there (assuming a suitable vertical surface was nearby of course), and sit back up if you managed to fall over. at first, we all noticed that we could find baby contraband on the floor just by plotting your trajectory -- whenever you got that look of focused determination, you were clearly heading slowly but surely toward something you didn't usually get to have. well, those days are already long gone... you're always heading somewhere, and you're fast enough that by the time we notice, the baby contraband is already being gummed to death.

so, for the record (since i've not yet managed to write anything in a baby book for you, and as you can tell even this blog is proving difficult to keep up with):
first tooth 12/18 lower left-middle 6.5 mo
second tooth 1/10 lower right-middle 7.5 mo
first food 12/25 7 mo
crawling 6 mo (speedy by 7 mo)
pulling up at 7 mo -- love this photo set, look how excited your papa was!
signing at 6.5-7 mo. first sign: dog, followed by light and fan

and now you're awake and making some very loud grunts, so i think that's it for today.

signs! and a tooth!

quickly, because she's impatient today...

hazel signs! i can hardly believe it, already. we noticed some pronounced mimicking about two weeks ago, so we started signing a few signs to her (bird, dog, milk, fan, light... all the important things :), but hadn't really yet gotten into the habit of doing it consistently.

on tuesday night, when i was in and out of sleep due to a 102 fever, i saw her watch the dog jump off the couch, then stick tongue in and out, then look at me for understanding. i responded, then she did it again and looked at the dog. wow... but i'm borderline delirious, did that really happen? despite my state, she was absolutely clear.

so two days later, after just having arrived in ND for christmas, as she was lying in my lap i noticed her eyes had locked onto something. she stuck her arm up and swiveled her wrist around, and sure enough, i looked up to see we were right below the fan. since then, she's repeatedly signed for dog, fan, and now light, too. (of course, milk is the one i really want her to learn so i know when she's hungry, but in order for her to learn that, i actually have to remember to show her the sign as we're nursing... i keep forgetting.) anyway, i'm sort of in disbelief that she's already old enough to be signing, and half-crawling, and clapping... time is flying by.

she's so cute, she claps (in this funny splayed-finger tapping sort of way) to inspire interaction. she claps, we can't help but clap back, and on it goes, and she gets the biggest grin when we "get" her clapping or signing. i'm sure she's thinking "finally! you people finally understand what i've been trying to tell you..."

due to a canceled flight, we killed 8 hrs at minneapolis airport on thursday (gotta love that playscape across from gate C12! the tram and moving sidewalks are also very popular). while eating a snack with eva and allowing sleepless papa to rest a bit, i noticed... hazel has a tooth! the lower left tooth was just *barely* poking through, and already now two days later it's much more pronounced. and, she already bit me (in her sleep, so it surprised both of us).

today it is -13 degrees F (-39 with wind chill... and that's not the low, that's just the mid-afternoon temp). eva spent the morning making a gingerbread house, and had a grand old time, and got the hang of piping the icing herself. christmas prep continues, as everyone works on projects in assorted groups whenever the recipient is out of view (though, not much of that has really happened yet... difficult when no one can leave the house.) larry contemplated driving to bismarck to get the supplies santa will need to make eva's gift (i think santa needs some help sometimes, right? the elves must get exhausted) but was deterred by the crazy wind chill. i mean, not that he's any stranger to this.. the first time he ever visited me here (my first year of college) it was -60 and we finally left the house to walk 5 blocks to my friend's house... only our eyes were showing, but i was still pretty sure we were going to die before we made it back home. luckily, we made it, and lived on to produce two pretty entertaining and cute kids. good thing.

catching up

i'm bummed out that i haven't posted in so long, it makes me feel like time slips away unaccounted for or something. but guess what? it seems that having two kids (combined with it being the holiday/travel time of year) means i haven't had as much time as i'd like. shocking, i know...

mostly it makes me a bit sad because there has been so much cuteness and so many fun things happening that i want to share all of it, but the snippets and sentences i think of while nursing a baby to sleep stay in my head, because i can't type enough with one hand.

at the moment, eva is snuggled on the couch to my right watching sesame street. last night she vomited all over me at a restaurant, and larry and i handled it like seasoned pros. i don't even think anyone else knew what had happened, even counting the fact that both eva and i had to basically strip in the parking lot. i think we get parenting bonus points (merit badge, maybe?) for that one. hazel is sleeping on the couch to my left, zonked out probably because she hasn't been sleeping much, particulary at night, resulting in a tired mama who refuses to just give up and go to bed at 7 like i should, because i have too much to do.

we're enjoying the holiday season (despite any side-effects of the list making and checking and such). eva has become obsessed with christmas songs, and in about two weeks, she's learned so many songs. (did anyone know there's a humorous second verse to jingle bells, by the way? fun. oh, and not the batmobile one. it's about a guy being passed over by a sleigh-driver after falling in the snow.) rudolph is her favorite and she sings it beginning to end over and over. frosty and jingle bells and "we wish you a merry christmas" and silent night are all runners-up. we've been doing our advent calendar (which became a hit in the craft blog world and is showing up all over the place (google "recycle advent calendar" and i'm the top three hits, crazy!). eva enjoys finding a new tiny ornament to hang on our (rosemary) christmas "tree". she's been sewing felt ornaments for her friends. sweetest of all is that larry has been reciting (from memory :) "twas the night before christmas" to her to fall asleep to many nights.

i'll have to catch up with news from maker faire, our month in ND, hazel's new tricks at 6 months, news of eva's growh from her endocrinologist appointment, etc. but all that must wait. i can smell that hazel to my left needs a diaper, and i was waiting until she woke up. she has now pushed herself up to semi-sitting and is happily watching TV along with her sister. oops.

in case i never catch up on all that, though, what i really want to record about this time is the sweetness, the goofy playfulness that inserts itself into our days together, the inquisitive learning and leaps of thought from eva that astound us, and the overall joy. this is a great time. tired and busy, but so happy. i would freeze time right here for a while if i could.