Kiwanis Festival and A New Composition

Tigana, who turned 15 a few days after, took four firsts, a second, and a third in the Kiwanis Festival this year, and was selected to represent Lethbridge in the Provincials in May in her category. Here are her singing performances:

Sabben Crudelle

To Lo Sai

I was very pleased with her progress, especially given that she had had to switch music teachers in January. Since starting with her new instructor, Janet Youngdahl, she has made incredible progress both in her performances and in her understanding of theory.

She also did very well in recitation. Unfortunately, the video for my favorite piece didn't come out: the opening lines got cut off. In this one she missed a couple of words, though I like that she was sufficiently smooth that the two missing words were not immediately noticeable:

Emily Carr's "Doctor" from The Book of Small

Coincidentally, the same week, Kasia (age 9) composed a song, which I then pestered her into performing for your viewing pleasure:

My Best Enemy

Of Cannibals and Mice

My 14 yr old daughter has a test tomorrow over which she is slightly freaking out. As I understand it, the issue is that there is a small risk she might only get, say, 95% on the test unless she stays up for the next two hours studying, as opposed to the 98% which is her stated goal for the average in this course. I give my usual "it's not about the marks" speech, and order her to bed so she will be well rested for the test, but she is still freaking out. Half-way through my second "work/life balance" speech (it's remotely possible that I have a tendency to address my children in professorial lecture mode), she confesses that the proximate cause of her attack of nerves is that a fellow student has shown her a viral YouTube cartoon featuring cannibalism and it is now freaking her out (though she had not thought anything of it at the time).

"You're not seriously telling me you're afraid that cannibals are going to break into your room and eat you, are you?"

She holds up her thumb and index finger separated by a hair. "Little bit."

She allows that the fear is irrational, but that there is nevertheless no chance of her getting to sleep tonight.

I recognize that the cannibalism motif is simply the lightening rod for a generalized existential panic brought on by ridiculous amounts of homework (she is in the pre-IB program) and too much extra curricular activity (three hours of rehearsals every evening, including weekends), and the social challenges of adolescence and high school. So I sit down on the edge of her bed and start to talk her down by taking her fears seriously, and pointing out that (a) we have a good alarm system that will alert security if any cannibals attempt unauthorized entry into our house; (b) we have a large black dog that would likely eat any such cannibals first, and that (c) I will be sleeping right upstairs.

She allows how this is all true and reassuring and starts to show signs of thinking about calming down and going to sleep.

At which point the aforementioned large black dog bursts into the room, smashes into the wall, and begins tearing the shelves apart. She puts her forepaws through a wicker basket, plunges her head inside, and generally goes psycho-killer on Tigana's doll collection.

This, I think, may not be entirely helpful in improving the tone of the evening.

A moment later, a tiny jet-black mouse makes a break for it and sprints across the floor and out the door, while the dog gives murderous chase. From behind me, standing on the bed, I hear my daughter shrieking, "I knew there was something alive in here!"

"Well, it's gone now," I begin, in what I know is likely to be ineffectual damage control, but before I have even finished the sentence, the dog is back, ripping open the wicker basket once again. I pick the basket up and make to move it outside, chiding the dog that the mouse has now gone and what she is smelling is just traces of the departed mou-- But of course, I only make it two feet before I see another (this time grey) mouse racing frantically round the basket as I inadvertently tip it, and I--hero protector that I am--shriek loudly and drop the basket. The dog plunges her head back in and proceeds to smash the remnants of the basket to kindling in an attempt to get the creature. She suddenly snaps her jaws shut, and as Tigana shouts from behind me, "Don't let her kill it! It did nothing wrong!", the dog trots out of the room with the deliberate gait of an executioner. As I mumble something about mouse trespass and the death penalty to Tigana, I follow the action outside the bedroom in time to watch a bullet-fast mouse (I am unclear if this is a third individual or one of the previous two somehow escaped from the jaws of death) scuttle under the sitting room piano -- and my 60lb dog kamikaze into same nanoseconds after. As I call the dog back from battering the piano pedals, I'm thinking my little night-time pep talk could definitely have gone better...

Normally, this is where I call in Mom to take charge of hysterical children, but she's away, so the best I could do as move the kids upstairs while the dog and I slept downstairs in their (apparently mouse-infested) bedrooms. It was restful for no one that the dog persisted in patrolling the floor against further incursions for most of the night, though I suppose it did manage to draw attention away from the cannibal threat.

This is not, I am sorry to confess, the first problematic encounter with mice in the house. About a month ago I had set a few traps to catch suspected intruders in the kitchen, with reassurances to the children that it was a 'catch and release' program. This worked relatively effectively, with my actually setting a few mice loose in the coulees, until I noticed that one trap had inexplicably disappeared. Assuming I had just misremembered where I had placed it, or that the dog had nosed it away somewhere, I forgot about it. A couple of days later I'm playing with my 9 year old in her room, when she reaches behind her into her stack of stuffies to pull out--you guessed it--a dead mouse. Why the mouse dragged itself and the trap all the way across the house to my daughter's bedroom and buried itself in her stuffy collection, I will never know, but Kasia's reaction was predictably 'upset'. It hadn't helped that we actually have three stuffed mice included in her collection and that we both sat there starring at the dead mouse for 10 seconds before realizing that this one was real. (Well the trap attached should have been a give away.) On that occasion I was able to hand my daughter off to spend the night with mom, but it took a couple of days to convince Kasia her room was now mouse free.

Still, could have been worse. Could have been cannibals.

Beware the Wrath of Kasia

Yesterday being the first day after the end of school, I took Kasia to the park. She chose to go to her school playground, having outgrown the baby swings at our local park and presumably missing the school playground already. Unfortunately, when we arrived, this is what we found:

Kasia was not amused. She couldn't believe the vandalism she was seeing, even though she known for sometime that the old playground had been slated for demolition and replacement with a more modern one. To her, the existing wooden playground was a magical place, not only for her and her grade 1 peers, but for her older sister, Tigana, who had spent 5 years at this school ahead of her.

So Kasia started complaining bitterly, while I tried to calm and reassure her that there would soon be a brand new playground in its place. But Kasia was having none of that and started screaming, "I hate them, I hate them!"

I tried to suggest that what she meant was she hated the necessity of tearing down her old and familiar playground, but that 'hate' was a very strong word that should only be directed against people one something bad to happen to.
Kasia's face turned red, and she exploded at me: "No, Dad! I literally hate them!" and I could feel Kasia's anger projecting out and forming this metaphoric black cloud above our heads.

It was kind of freaky seeing the intensity of Kasia's emotion, the blast of pure malevolence aimed at the hapless demolition workers. And a Harlan Ellison short story -- wherein the protagonist gets so obsessively pissed that the negative karma focused on the target effectively curses the object of his hatred -- flashed across my mind.

And as I am thinking Kasia's hate looks very much like that kind of elemental force, I hear a crash from behind me, and turn to see that the rear window of the Caterpillar tractor working on the demolition has been smashed in. The driver stops, gets out to survey the damage, and then grabs a two by four from the park wreckage to smash out the remaining shards -- dangerous, scary pieces of glass waiting to stab the operator in the back, where he not to finish the job of destroying the window.

You can just make out the top half of 'Caterpillar" brand name on the rear of the tractor, the bottom half having been written on the now missing glass.

When I turned around again, Kasia had calmed down considerably; she was now merely muttering about the waste of lumber and her annoyance that they weren't even recycling the wood to make another park somewhere else...her usual green rant. But um....bolt of psychic energy, definitely dissipated.



The next day, they had posted the plans for the new playground (above), but I have to agree with Kasia that I don't immediately see how the new one is an improvement. The old one was wood, which is kind of nifto in and of itself, and had lots of places to hide and to contest the high ground, and so on, whereas the new one seems to be entirely see-through. But perhaps that's the point from a playground supervision/safety pov. Anyway, we'll see what Kasia thinks when the new one is completed in late August (just in time for start of the new school year).

But forget about the playground. When I got home, I took Tigana aside and said, "Word to the wise: don't ever really, I mean really, piss off your little sister, okay?"

Father's Day 2011

Kasia's portrait of me for Father's day. Not sure if the lack of beard reflects her forgetting I had one or just that beards are hard to draw. Line across my forehead represents glasses, and two extra eyes are ears. Careful examination reveals my bald spot.

Portrait of Her Mom

Kasia's (age 7) portrait of her mom for Mother's Day.

New Ambassador Appointed to Babylon 5

Centauri ambassadors recalled, new younger ambassador appointed:




Okay, that probably doesn't really work since hair is pointing in the wrong direction, but Kasia was having a really bad hair day, so when I said the words, "Centauri ambassador" to Mary, she bent over laughing -- which left poor innocent Kasia hopelessly confused....

Home Movies

One problem with going on retreat is that my daughter's music teacher (Joanne Collier) scheduled Tigana's concert for the weekend I was away, after all my travel plans had been made (and largely paid for), so I ended up missing her concert. Using her pocket camcorder, however, Mary was able to make a crude recording of Tigana singing so I could have some idea of what I had missed.

So here is Tigana singing "Think of Me" (from Phantom of the Opera)and "The Christmas Song" (i.e., "Chestnuts roasting over an open fire...")



Tigana had a killer cold, but the show must go on. Still, gives a fair approximation of what Tigana is capable of. If this is her at 12, can't imagine where she'll be at 16. Canadian Idol?



(The first voice you hear on The Christmas Song video is Tigana's sister, Kasia, encouraging her as she approaches the stage.)

As long as I'm sharing home movies, here's some footage of Kasia's riding lessons, her number 1 obsession.



The compilation starts with her getting on the horse her first lesson, going from being led on the horse to trotting all in that one lesson; and then getting off the horse (ouch -- the horse is so much taller than Kasia!); riding a couple of different horses for different lessons; and finally going to get a horse from the paddock. The lessons include not just riding, but getting the horse, brushing it down, tacking it up, riding, untacking (right term?) brushing it down again, and returning it to its right paddock. Note near the end of the video as Kasia is putting halter on a unicorn-white horse, her intense wishing makes a pink horse suddenly appear!

Kasia School Picture

Kasia's school picture; she turns 7 in November.

Kasia started Grade 1 this year, and is suddenly showing interest in reading — formerly a highly suspect activity because it is what her sister was always doing rather than playing with her, Kasia. Of course, Kasia always loved being read to, and now that I have reassured her I will continue reading to her whenever she wants, even if she learns to read herself, she seems open to the possibility of trying it for herself.

For Zane

Kasia's friend Zane is in Japan for this semester, so they have been exchanging emails; so we thought it would be a good thing to post some recent pictures of Kasia for Zane here:

Here Kasia is dancing in Lethbridge's Bon Odori Japanese Dance Festival, July 17, 2010.

Below, Kasia's true passion: horses and riding.

Now that winter is coming, Kasia's riding lessons have switched to an indoor facility.

Kasia Manual

This being the start of school, and Kasia's first week in Grade 1, we were asked to write a letter to her teacher to help her place Kasia in context. This is an abridgement of what my wife wrote:

If Kasia came with an instruction manual, the on-switch would be a picture of a horse. She is obsessed with horses and mythical horse-like creatures, such as Pegasus’s and unicorns. The off-switch would be a picture of a raw carrot—unless she got to feed it to a horse!

Kasia is a really cool kid. Sometimes she is shy, but once she gets comfortable in a setting, she tends to dominate a room and ‘take charge’. For this reason, she is particularly excited when she gets to be an assistant to her teacher and really enjoys helping out when there are kids who are new or struggle socially.

We have always been impressed by Kasia’s sense of compassion. If a child is hurt or crying, she will seek out the child, ask to help and will connect on a very empathetic level with their emotional state. She feels others’ sufferings very deeply—sometimes too deeply. Although this empathy will be applied to other children, it is most apparent when she sees/hears of the suffering of an animal. For this reason, she is deeply connected to issues of animal cruelty and neglect. She is very interested in wild horse conservation and dog rescue work. We have a dog, Jackie, who was rescued from an environment where she suffered terrible facial/head injuries and lost an eye [her full name is One Eyed Jack(ie)!] If Kasia had her way, we would have a ranch with hundreds of horses and dogs. Just to warn you—if there is a dog being walked through the playground, Kasia will be right there. We have instructed her to always ask permission to pet the dog first and she tends to be quite good about this.

Kasia has a really great sense of humour. She loves puns and practical jokes. She often comes out with witty comments which seem beyond her years. Indeed, we often discover the extent of her vocabulary when she comes out with a witty retort using unexpected words. She might have a future as a standup comedian. She has done improv through drama programs and shines in this area.

Kasia loves to sing. She has a lovely voice and can riff on the harmonica like an old blues singer.

Kasia has been very reluctant to learn to read. Her explanation to us is that ‘reading is what you do when you don’t want to play ponies’. And, there is nothing better in her mind than playing with her toy horses. Her sister, who reads a great deal, uses the excuse/explanation of reading to avoid playing with her sister. Typical teen behavior, but Kasia seems to blame the reading, rather than her sister.

Kasia loves science. She particularly loves doing experiments or studying something (like a leaf) in great depth, memorizing every nuance. She has recently developed a fascination with history and has started requesting history lessons at night instead of bedtime stories.

Kasia wants to be a vet when she grows up. Actually, she wants to own a horse ranch in Hawaii and work with rescued dogs and horses. She is totally obsessed with horses and loves to ride. She takes riding lessons and asks daily for us to buy her a horse of her own. Any writing or reading activity which involves animals will engage her attention.

Kasia Sings

A brief clip showing Kasia's signing.

Galt Museum Saturday Program

Kasia (with help from Dad) and Tigana building 'gopher puppets' at the Galt Museum as part of Napi Tales, one of their Saturday at 1:00 kids programs. Kasia's puppet was a gopher princes (thus the blonde hair); Tigana's is a snake (note forked tongue and the first of the scales being put on). The puppets were designed to pop out of the ground/tin on cue. The Napi story teller was wonderful, and all the kids who made puppets got to be in the show.

Tooth Fairy

Kasia, my six-year-old, turns to me and asks very seriously, "Dad, what happens when the Tooth Fairy loses a tooth?"

San Deigo Zoo Wild Animal Park

So this was pretty cool: the Lorikeet Landing exhibit at the San Diego Zoo's Wild Animal Park.

Tigana reacts to Lorikeet landing on her.

Kasia with Lorikeets



I love how my kids are enthusiastic about things others find less exciting (e.g., man behind Tigana, who is clearly less pleased with the birds mobbing people).

We were in San Diego over Reading Week in Feb.

Tigana Santa and Kasia

Talking to Strangers

Like all parents of five year olds, we’ve had the ‘don’t talk to strangers’ talk with Kasia. This has not been entirely successful.

Kasia, left to herself, would hug everyone that came into range. We have, with some difficulty, managed to convince her that she should at least ask her intended victim whether they wished to be hugged before actually hugging them. Since this was similar to the well-established and understood rule that she must never pet a dog without first checking with the owner (lest said dog bite her) she has started asking permission first. The problem is, few people feel they can turn down the request for a hug from a five year old without appearing completely cold-hearted, so they often say ‘yes’ even though their body language is screaming ‘No!’.

This is particularly problematic with people in the service industries, who may feel they have to indulge the child lest they loose the goodwill of the parents. So we have recently added the rule that Kasia must first ask us, even before asking the intended huggee, so we may judge whether the individual or circumstances appropriate.

The latter criteria is still a bit hard for Kasia to grasp, however: Once given permission to hug a particular person, she believes she has carte blanc to hug them at will, regardless of what they are currently doing. This can be an issue when relatives, for example, are spotted at a job site, or standing on the edge of a panoramic cliff, or otherwise engaged in some demanding activity and not expecting 22 kgs of child to come hurtling at their knees.

So. We are the first aboard our cruise ship and a nice looking woman is manning the reservations desk, so Kasia asks if she may hug the woman. Mary agrees that it would be okay to ask, because for the moment we are the only ones there, and the woman appears approachable. So Kasia asks, the woman agrees, and the hug proceeds to everyone’s apparent satisfaction.

The woman introduces herself as Maya*, and tells us where she will be working later that evening, and expresses the hope that she will see us then and possibly get another hug. All is good until later that day when Kasia, contrary to the rules, rushes over and hugs another woman without checking with us first. Now, this was not a time or place I would have given Kasia the go ahead, because the waitress in question was clearly very busy – if anything, looking a little tired and harassed – and being tackled at the knees is probably the last thing she needed. But in the event, the waitress burst into a huge grin and hugged Kasia enthusiastically right back. And again later, Kasia spontaneously hugged another waitress without checking with us first. I was about to chastise her for this violation of the rules when I saw Kasia’s surprised distress when the assaulted waitress asked, “What’s your name, sweetie?” I realized that faced with three waitresses of the same nationality, with similar hairdos, and wearing identical uniforms, Kasia had confused the women and honestly thought she’d been given prior permission to hug. It wasn’t until she’d talked to them all a bit more that she was able to keep clear who was which.

And talk with her they did. One of the three, Aba*, was so smitten with Kasia and her hugs that the next day she brought over her roommate to meet Kasia so that the roommate could get a hug. On another occasion, Aba saw us in a restaurant she didn’t work in, but nevertheless came in for her hug. Our waitress of the hour, seeing Aba making a fuss over Kasia, asked if she too could get a hug, and pulled out pictures of her seven year-old daughter. Pretty soon, it seemed as if every crewmember on the ship had heard of Kasia and were asking her if they could get a hug.

This was not, I hasten to clarify, about the ship’s crew humoring a spoilt child’s need for attention. On the contrary, it became increasingly clear that many of the crew desperately needed a good hug. The crew generally sign 10-month contracts, and having been away from their own young families for too long, latched onto Kasia as onto a lifeline. Out came baby pictures, cellphone photos and 30-second videos of sons and daughters, and stories of what it was like being away from family for so long. One waiter talked about how he had left when his wife was pregnant and now had an eight month old he had yet to meet; this one had a seven-year-old who followed her compulsively for the two months she was at home, even into the shower; this one had a ten month old who’d be a toddler by the time she got home; and so on. Heart-breaking war stories, familiar enough for those in the armed forces, but these workers don’t even have the satisfaction of knowing they are making the world safe for Democracy.

Other cruisers, we discovered, often made facile comments such as, “I can hardly stand to be away from my children for the week of the cruise, I couldn’t possibly be away from them for 10 months!”, as if these workers had the choice, or that being away for 10 months out of the year, every year, for the child’s entire childhood doesn’t fundamentally change family dynamics in ways that a week’s absence can’t begin to approximate. It must gall these workers that such sacrifices are demanded of them so that they might serve cruiser’s another round of iced drinks.

Not that I don’t have my own middle class guilt here. When Aba came over to the table where Tigana and I were sitting to say hello and asked where Kasia was, I mumbled something about Kasia being off with her mom on ‘an activity’. “Yeah,” Tigana pipes up, “Mom’s taken Kasia to the spa for a mother-daughter massage session.”

“She’s five, and she’s getting a massage?!”

“She loves massages!” Tigana again volunteers, though this is based entirely on the five-minute demo the spa staff performed on Kasia as part of first day orientation on board ship. (Kasia’s cuteness factor gets her a lot of freebies.) But I could see by Aba’s expression that she was trying to comprehend what it must be like to be so rich that one could afford routine massages for one’s five year-old.

In another conversation, Aba said something about our work being hard too, and Mary said, “It’s not bad really, we only work about 6 hours a week.” Now, I’m pretty sure she meant to say “60 hours a week”, which would be pretty typical for a prof, and considerably less than the 90 expected of crew; or maybe she meant to say that this term she only taught 6 hours a week, and could work out of our home for the other 54 hours, which made sense in context of explaining why ‘rich’ folks like us didn’t have a nanny; but either way, Aba’s expression suggested she was picturing a lifestyle where the driveways are paved with gold....

(On the other hand, we had super next to a businessman and his wife who probably had glided his driveway – they mentioned in passing how their new chihuahua had ruined their $40,000 carpet and how he had jetted down to Argentina for some duck hunting the previous weekend...I deeply resented the extravagance of this glad-handing wastrel, but if he was typical of cruisers, I can’t imagine how galling having to wait on this idiot would be – or how I and my family look any different to the crew serving us....)

But I digress. Aba started showing up with little origami pieces for Kasia. First was a crane, then a kangaroo, folded by her fellow crewmember, Percy*. Kasia, with five year old’s lack of manners, asked for a puppy and a horse, next, which Percy quickly produced, along with a host of others: scorpions, crabs, and so on, all quite marvelous.

And then, to my consternation, Aba showed up with an expensive doll for Kasia, which sang a superb rendition of “You can count on me” when hugged. Kasia was instantly crazy about the doll, but I worried that Aba should not be spending her money on my already spoilt children. But Aba told Mary that although the crew see a new shipload of children every week, Kasia had affected Aba far more than any other child she had encountered. Hopefully, we can stay in touch, and Kasia can send Aba’s child something too...

*[Names changed to protect their privacy.]

Lipizzaner Stallions, Magicians, Calgary Dining

Lipizzaner Stallion

Summer vacation started with our taking in Lipizzaner Stallions show in Calgary as a special treat for horse-mad Kasia. In this regard, the show was a bit of a disappointment, as Kasia was clearly bored. Upon reflection, we realized that the finer points of dessage may have been a bit too esoteric for a five year old; or as Mary put it, if you’re of an age where you believe your toy Pegasus can fly and talk, seeing a horse stagger around on it’s hind legs for ten seconds may not seem that impressive.

Lipizzaner Stallion takes a bow

Kasia much preferred the Arabian Nights show we’d seen in Florida the previous summer, in which equally impressive animals were combined with a princess/fairy storyline and a good deal more racing around with acrobats on horseback. So, no reflection on the good work of the Lipizzaner Stallions in keeping alive an important European tradition, but Kasia turned out to be the wrong target audience.


Kasia yawns

The day was by no means a loss, however, as we were staying at the Delta Calgary South, a hotel with one of the finer dinning rooms in Calgary. Enroute to the show, we had enjoyed the lavish Sunday brunch. To give just one example of why I love the place: when I got to the station where the chef carves the roast, he asked how much I wanted, and I jokingly indicated a slice twice the size of my plate. Without so much as a blink, the chef folds it in half, and piles it on my plate. It was if I had ordered the largest prime rib dinner available, even though I’d already piled my plate high with the many other fine offerings from the buffet. This was in such sharp contrast to smorgs in Lethbridge – which either don’t have a carvery station, or else provides slices so thin they’re translucent and so small they get lost under a pickled beet – that I almost felt guilty about the two salmon fillets I had for seconds.
Gluttony aside, I was incredibly impressed with the chef on duty that Sunday. When my eleven year old ordered something at the pasta bar, he treated her like an adult, discussing the finer points of seasoning and taking her odd request completely seriously. When she came back for seconds, he rushed back because he could see the cook who had relieved him at that station had mistaken her intent and was doing her a normal kid’s pasta. That sort of awareness of what is happening throughout the entire buffet line second to second, and attention to detail even when dealing with a very minor customer, wins my undying loyalty.

If that were not enough, the brunch also features Robert Wong, the province’s top magician circulating table to table. I have seen my share of magicians over the years but nobody comes close to this guy, and nothing tops up close and personal for a magic show. My favorite trick is the simple slight of hand of producing a bunch of grapefruit out of a tiny magican's cup in which it could not possibly fit, right in front of our eyes. I have seen him do this trick each time we go, and each time I test my latest theory of how he does it, and he’s still too fast for me. Its so simple yet elegant!

We always end up talking for awhile after, and he was saying how the recession is killing him. He’d originally retained the hotel gig out of sentimentality as it had been his first break years ago, but he’d long since worked his way up to the business conference circuit and was making a good living as a motivational speaker. But come the recession, ‘magician’ is pretty much the first line in the budget you’re going to cut, right? Who needs motivational speakers when the threat of massive layoffs is pretty much sufficient to motivate everyone to want to shine their bosses shoes? My heart really goes out to anyone in the entertainment business, but I have to admire how Robert was able to reposition himself – he’s developed a whole new line of talks for school visits, a lower paying but steadier market. He’s even had some of his routines published in magician journals, and I must say I could see how they could be really effective in motivating students to stay in school and study maths and science.

Thus, the trip started on a fairly high note, built in part around excellent food. Breakfast the next morning, a regular Monday service, was equally gourmet (so much better than other hotels of the same bracket) and the service again beyond anything we’d been expecting. Soooo friendly and efficient, and again taking our kids completely serious as foodies – no crappy kids meals here.

And that became a theme for the trip that followed: this trip became about the food.

Kasia's Play and Stories

While sorting through my mom’s stuff, preparatory to putting her condo on the market, I came across a box of my old matchbox cars. This immediately brought back memories of hours of car chases round the border of the front room carpet. Even after 45 years, I still remembered what each car represented – the crooked racecar driver, the target treasure on the moving truck, the ploy of hiding the getaway car in the blue carrier behind the citron, the detective in the silver shadow Rolls-Royce who always figured out each case in the end, the decoy milk truck – the whole set of complicated plotlines that kept me happily engaged for years. I was surprised to find them, having thought I had passed all my toys on to another family’s youngsters decades before when I’d left home, but this particular set had somehow survived the general purge. So, naturally the shoebox of matchbox toys went into the ‘keepers’ pile.

Where it was shortly discovered by my own 5 year old. She opened the box with a ‘Wow, cars! Can I play with them?” I of course consented, especially since they were clearly already too banged up to be considered any sort of collector’s items. What harm could she do?

Momentarily distracted with other sorting duties, it has half an hour or so before I could return to explain what each vehicle represented, how they drove around the ‘roads’ on the carpet, which flowers in the carpet represented cloverleaf interchanges, all the complicated rules it taken me years to work out. And a good thing too as it turned out.


The carpet I grew up with -- "note highway" border strips with flower "interchanges".

When I got back to Kasia, she had all the cars out of the box and lined up next to each other. “These two are sisters,” she said pointing to the two blue cars, “and this is their Mom.” It was vital, she explained to me, that the cars stay in the right position within the line, that the line move forward in unison, because otherwise the family relationships might be disrupted. In a half hour she had worked out an entire family tree of cars, which had nothing to do with highway chases, conspiracies, or shootouts.

So, is this an age-related developmental stage, or is it a gender thing? For her, every doll and stuffy – and apparently toy car – is about “mommy/baby/older sister” relationships.

Kasia’s favorite pastime is ‘playing ponies’, which consists of extensive role plays with her massive collection of horse, unicorn, and Pegasus stuffies, supplemented with a few dog stuffies, the occasional fairy or mermaid, and visits from various Barbies and Kens intruding in the land of magic from the human world. Initially, when Kasia was three or four, plotlines consisted entirely of one or other horse falling from the bed or couch onto the floor and the frantic attempts by various horse family members to rescue these “I’ve fallen and can’t get up” victims. Invariably, once rescued, these careless individuals would again immediately plummet to the exact same spot. The cycle would be repeated for hours of selfplay. Invited to join Kasia playing ponies, we would have to stick strictly to the script: any attempt by one of our characters to, say, warn horse family members to stay way from the edge of the cliff, would elicit outraged tantrums.

Only slowly over the years has this basic plotline been allowed to evolve into the current version, which is that some bad guy (monster/witch/horse trader) intrudes into the valley of horses/land of magic to steal one or more horses and put them in cages from which they must be rescued. Lately, the bad guys are surprised to discover that the horses are magical and can talk/fly. Sometimes this discovery is what motivates the bad guys to try to capture the magic horses; sometimes it is this discovery that allows the horses to escape (e.g., the horses have invisible wings and turn out to be Pegasuses that can then fly away, after pummeling the would be kidnappers).

Mary and I have resisted, without much long-term success, Kasia’s insistence that there be bad guys. Tigana had had no such need to divide the world into good guys and villains, but Kasia insists on it. Most disturbing is her apparent belief that violence is justified against bad guys simply because they are the bad guys, as defined by the very narrow perspective of her tribe. The suggestion that the bad guys are bad because they are violent, and that being violent back makes you a bad guy seems to be a challenging concept to Kasia.

[I blame the early My Little Pony movies, which featured various stereotypical witches and mean spirited villains; in contrast to more recent My Little Pony offerings (such as Minty’s Christmas) which feature intelligent, engaging adventures sans bad guys. We started horse-crazy Kasia on the current My Little Ponies episodes, which were harmless enough, then hunted down the originals for our addicted daughter, not realizing what a corrupting influence they would turn out to be. I hated those early My Little Pony episodes almost as much as Kasia loved them. Fortunately, she now seems to be outgrowing the franchise...]

So, over the last year or so I have been working on introducing more moral ambiguity into Kasia’s play world. First, some of the dolls started objecting to being cast as the bad guys in various games. This was a hoot, because 4-5 year old Kasia saw nothing unusual in a doll arguing its assigned role, and would enter long debates with various ‘actors’ about their roles, their presumed motivation, and whether they were becoming typecast. The point of the exercise was to break down the ‘beauty=good’, ‘ugly=bad guy’ stereotype – and, frankly, to delay the moment when the next pony would fall off a cliff or get captured.

More recently, I have been working on showing the bad guy’s perspective. For example, I had a long series of bedtime stories / role-plays (story time has a tendency to become scripts for playtime, and playtime ‘rules’ tend to restrict the range of options for story time) in which the princess and her pink pony are the subject of persecution by the Wicked Witch of the West. (Borrowing wholesale for bedtime stories falls under ‘fair use’, right?) It slowly emerges, however, that the Wicked Witch has been the victim of a smear campaign, and that she is in fact the aggrieved party here. Although initially intrigued by the moral ambiguity presented, Kasia was clearly disturbed by the introduction of shades of grey, and has recently asked if we could go back to the original stories where it was just the good princess vs. the Wicked Witch....



Kasia's drawing of a pony

A Quiet Christmas Morning at Home....

Last year, we spent the two weeks leading up to Christmas in Hawaii (partly at a conference, but still!) and have had a number of extra-ordinary trips this year, so we spent much of the last three months telling the girls that this year, we were going to have a nice quiet Christmas morning at home. The tradition in our house is that Christmas eve everyone opens new pajama's, Christmas morning the girls get up and open their Christmas stockings, followed by a special breakfast, and then open presents. It makes for a pleasant morning. Tigana especially was psyched up for this agreeing -- indeed insisting -- that she too wanted nothing more than a quiet Christmas at home this year. (Kasia was less convinced. Ever since we went to Hawaii last year, she has constantly asked at least once a week when we are going back; named her new webkin's pony she got for her Birthday in Nov "Hawaii", and made it clear that if she had a choice she would choose Hawaii over any day at home.) So.

Christmas eve, Mary distributes new pjs; Christmas morning the kids get up early and we open our Christmas stockings; have a big breakfast; then open presents. Mary carefully hands out the gifts in order, so that the last gifts opened are gift certificate from Grandma for surfing lessons for Tigana and Kasia. "For next time we're somewhere where there's surfing."

Tigana says, on cue, "I wish we were in Hawaii right now."

Robert: "Really? But you said you just wanted a quiet Christmas at home this year."

Tigana: "Well yeah. But, you know. Hawaii would be great."

Mary: "Oh good. Because that's your last present. We're going to Hawaii."

Tigana: "We are? When?"

Robert: "Get your coat. The plane leaves in 90 minutes."

Tigana: "AaaaaahhhhhaahahahahahahahahahahahhhhhaaaaaaaWooHoo! Really? Hahahahah! Wow! Really? Aahahahaaaaa!" (And so on for another 10 straight minutes, bounching off walls, jumping up and down and so forth.)

Kasia received the news somewhat more calmly but just as happily. Scheduling has never been one of her strong points, never being entirely clear on whether a particular day is a school day or holiday or whatever, so just allows her parents to shuffle her around more or less at random, secure in the knowledge that if she asks often enough, Hawaii will appear in the rotation there somewhere.

Needless to say, given the chaos in the airline industry over the previous week, Mary (who handles all our planning and logistics) was a nervous wreck Christmas eve waiting to see if all her careful planning was for naught. Booking our flights for Christmas day (when relatively few people are flying compared to the rest of the season) had seemed like a stroke of genious 3 months earlier, but as the airlines were cancelling 90% of flights out of Vancouver the day before, it suddenly didn't seem quite so clever.

However, our flight out of Lethbridge was on time and uneventual. Our trip out of Calgary was delayed about four hours while the airline tried to round up flight crew. (Since the pilot and copilot were already on board the plane, I got about a dozen passengers to agree to take turns serving drinks if we could take off, but the desk clerk didn't seem to take our offer seriously. Union shop, I suppose.) Fortunately, the flight to Maui out of Vancouver was similarly delayed, so we had no trouble making our connection, though we didn't find that out until off the plane in Vancouver, so Mary had been tearing out her hair on the assumption we'd missed our connection. When the flight to Maui finally got in, we had missed our car reservation. Budget rental car was closed, so we had to take a cab (roughly $100.00 US) to our hotel instead. But since we had arrived in the middle of the night, I'm not sure how crazy I would have been driving an unfamiliar route in the dark. But all in all, not TOO bad a way to spend Christmas afternoon and evening, after a nice quiet Christmas morning at home.

Kasia's School Portrait

for 2008.