The other morning at 4 a.m., Emma came and awakened us, needing to poop. After she had finished her business, the following little exchange took place:

Me: Emma, put your pants back on.
Emma: OK. 'Dose pants are pink. If dey're orange, do you fink you will like them better?
Me: Pink and orange are both very nice colors. Can you put them on please?
Emma: Dey ARE pink! Das my favrit color. No, my favrit color is purple... ackchilly.
Me (whispering): Do you want to know a secret?
Emma (very interested, urgent whisper): Yesplease!
Me (whispering): Mommy's favorite color is purple too.
Emma (solemnly): Yeah... all day, I give her, purple cookies.
Me: That's nice. Put your pants on.
Emma: OK. (She puts her pants on and we go back to sleep)

When I checked with Michelle the next morning, she was able to confirm my hunch that Emma does not, in fact, spend the entire day supplying her with purple cookies. Still, it was a lovely sentiment.

© Robert Nickel 2009

Last summer, Ian went to Supercamp, where he learned many useful academic and life skills. One of the techniques he learned is the four-part apology. So now, he's been equiped with a more effective alternative to such old teenage stand-bys as, "ALL RIGHT, ALL RIGHT, ALL RIGHT, I'M SORRY, I'M SORRY!! OK!?!? ARE YOU HAPPY NOW???"

Instead, with the four-part apology, you just remember that it's "All About My Relationships"... "AAMR", or "Acknowledge, Apologize, Make it better, Recommit". Here's what it looks like in practice:
Acknowledge: "OK, yes, I threw molten hot chocolate sauce all over the kitchen floor and let the dogs in to lick it up, creating an enormous mess and possibly poisoning them. That was wrong."
Apologize: "I'm sorry"
Make it Right: "Can I do anything to make it better?" (We reply, "Yes, take the dogs to the hospital, pay for their vet bills out of your allowance, and then come home and thoroughly scour all dried, nasty, dog-saliva-mixed-with-chocolate-sauce out the kitchen floor grout." He then agrees to do this and does, in fact, then do it.)
Recommit: "I promise that, in the future, I'll use better judgement about what, and how, I feed the dogs."

Well, we liked this so much, we decided to teach that to Emma right from the get-go as how we apologize. She's actually doing very well with it. Here's an example. Yesterday, I was feeding the dogs (dog food, in the dog room. See, I can learn!) Emma wandered in and, to appease her constant sense of curiousity, opened our spare refrigerator for a look-see. Deciding to take down a carton of cholesterol-free egg substitute for reasons known only to herself and Our Lord, she inadvertantly also knocked down an individual-serving-size can of Dole pineapple juice. Immediately she picked up the pineapple juice and said (to it): "Oh no! I dinnent mean to knock you onto da ground. Can I do anyfing to make it up? (as juice can) Yes, just put me back in da rifriderader! (as Emma) OK, dere you go. I won' do it again!"

What is it that they say? Charity begins at home? I guess now it should really be, "Charity begins in the rifriderader."

© Robert Nickel 2009

Emma is 3 now, which means two things:
- She is taking after her Aunt Linda and becoming abnormally articulate for her age
- She is (knock on wood) pretty much fully potty trained

So, when she needs to go potty now, she can basically do the whole thing by herself, although she does still announce the whole proceeding by shouting "I NEED TO GO POTTY!!!" at the top of her considerable lung capacity as she dashes headlong across the house towards her bathroom. For my part, however, having so recently been indispensible to the process, I still can't help poking my head in on her from time to time, to see how everything is going. Last night during one of these "check ins", she looked up at me and said, "Rrrr!" so of course I said "Rrrr!" back. To which she replied, "No, MMMMM! Das a yummy sound. Mmmm. Mmmm." I said, "Ah, mmmm. I see," and thus encouraged she went on: "Uuuhn! Das' a poop sound. Uuuuhn! Uuuuhn! Ooohn! Ooohn!" and thus were the next few minutes enjoyably passed. Ian, unfortunate enough to walk past during the concerto, was overheard to pose the question, "What is going ON in there??"

Finally finishing, she climbed down, allowed Daddy to do the wiping for old times' sake, and turned to admire her handiwork. By way of preface, please know we've been doing colors lately: blue and red mixed together, you get purple; red and yellow mixed together, you get orange; etc. So, there is Emma, gazing proudly into the potty and summarizing her recent accomplishments: "Look Daddy! I made poo AND pee! Mixed! Poo and pee mixed! (A thoughtful pause.) What do you get when you mix poo and pee?" Now, this was not the first time that Emma had inquired about the result of mixing, shall we say, "non complementary colors". For example, she likes to ask about pink and anything: pink and yellow, pink and blue, pink and green. We usually just say "brown?" but poo is already brown, so that clearly wouldn't do.

One of my favorite stalling tactics when taken aback by my daughter is to simply repeat the question. "Hmm, what do you get when you mix poo and pee together? Umm, sewage?"

The answer satisfied her and she dismissed her output with a flush. However, I hope Michelle reads this soon so she'll know what's going on and be ready the next time Emma asks her for a "sewage" colored crayon.


© Robert Nickel 2009

There has been some confusion, so I thought I'd take an informal pool. Is the man depicted in yesterday's blog post for or against gay marriage?

Comment on the blog with your guesses... the answer next week!

Here's a news story that appeared in the Sacramento Bee yesterday:

• Council says no to placing Prop. 8 resolution on agenda

 
So, put your thinking caps on, boys and girls: let's summarize. "The Sacramento City Council today banned consideration of a ban that would have banned the ban against gay marriage banned, er, approved by voters last fall. City residents vowed they would fight to ban the ban that bans banning of the ban."

If this keeps up, fast forward to 2012... you could be seeing campaign signs like this:


© Robert Nickel 2009

The answer is, when it's a river. You've all heard much about the famous river that forms out in front of our house during rain of any measurable quantity whatsoever. Well, today I thought I'd share a picture and a little story.

See, this afternoon, I needed to go pick up Ian from tutoring. Usually I drive my truck (shout out, Tina!). So I walked out the front door, bound for the spot across the street where I normally park, and I saw this:



 
"Screw that!" I immediately thought, went back up to the house, got the minivan key, and drove that instead, because it was fortuitously parked on the hither bank. And yes, I did climb in through the passenger's side. Thanks for asking!

© Robert Nickel 2009

In a blatent rip-off of my dear friend Sara Rose, here are the bests of the year just gone by:

Best Movie: How the hell should I know? We haven't been to an actual grown-up movie in theaters since I foolishly blogged about how many movies we'd managed to see, way back some time in February. My favorite of the three we'd seen at that time was P.S. I Love You, so let's give it to that, I guess.

Best TV Show: How the hell should I know? We only get local channels on cable, and that's only because switching to local channels was actually cheaper & easier than having cable disconnected altogether. Michelle and I are currently working our way through The West Wing, one NetFlix DVD at a time. (We're currently up to season 3). So, that's right, in Nickelworld, the best TV show of 2008 is one that's been off the air since 2006. Ian's is even worse; his favorite, Friends, has been off since '04.

Best Book: OK, now we're cookin'! We actually did read several books as a family this year, mostly as a way to kill time on extremely long drives. The runaway favorite was Peter Mayle's A Year In Provence, largely because of the France-loving tendancies among certain members who shall remain nameless, and the descriptions-of-delicious-food loving tendancies among the rest of us.

Best Price Collapse: Gas prices. Sorry, housing and stock market... maybe next depression.

Best Vacation: Gotta be our New York trip for Boaz's first birthday in May. Highlights, a la Emma:

• About the stiff wind on the "Broccoli" bridge, across which she was carried snuggling inside my coat: "Iss not cold for me. Iss cold for yoo!"
• About a mid-harbor landmark: (singing and dancing EVERY time) "Iss da Statue ovva Liver-TEEEE!"
• In the Poconos, about a deer we glimpsed after a fortuitous wrong turn, who promptly fled into the forest: (nodding sagely) "He needs to go fin' his mommy."
• About New York in general: "Iss nice. Iss gotta Poconos behin' dere."

Best Neighborhood Calamity: The extremely local flooding on our street is always fun, and we had not just one but two seperate incidents of cars being driven through a wall into a local business establishment, but I'm going to have to give it to the tree in front of our house, which spontaneously collapsed while we watched on Easter morning into the middle of a normally crowded intersection. Thank you, tree, for not collapsing on our house or causing a 10-car pileup.

Best Gift: One of the reasons I am so in love with my wife is that she has that rarest of all abilities— she knows how to get me the gift, not that society tells her she ought to get me, but that I actually want. This year for Valentine's day, it was a real honest-to-God four-drawer steel filing cabinet. I love you, honey!

Best Viral Internet Video: Tina Fey as Sarah Palin... take your pick. (Although my friend Vanessa as Sarah Palin was pretty awesome too.)

© Robert Nickel 2009

Saturday night, Emma came into our bed. Evidently she'd had a lot to drink, because she managed to soak through an overnight pullup, her own pajamas, our sheet, our mattress pad, and a significant section of our pillow-top mattress. (Even at that, she woke up around 5 a.m. saying "I need to go poddy!")

We treated the mattress with Nature's Miracle, but it takes 24 hours to dry, so Sunday night we slept in the guest room. Oh, also on Sunday, I had meant to go refill the jugs for our water dispenser, but didn't get around to it. And so, the stage was set.

Monday morning, wake up. Seems normal. We'd been apprehensive that Emma would go into our room, find the bed dismantled, and decompensate. But needlessly. She smoothly crawled into the guest room bed with us at 5 a.m. as though it were the most normal thing in the world.

Now, we like a little tea in the morning, which normally we make by simply dispensing some hot water. But since I hadn't refilled the water dispenser, we have to fall back on "more primitive technologies": to wit, the stove. We put on some water. Luckily no one stays in the kitchen to watch the water boil, because four minutes later, there's a crash and a shower of hot flying glass fragments.

Both Michelle and I, you see, get a little dislexic when it comes to our stove. It's multi-lingual, meaning the burner controls are labelled only with semi-helpful little diagrams instead of confusing "words" like front and rear. So, instead of the front burner under the teapot, we'd accidentally turned on the rear burner under an ill-placed casserole dish. Here's a fun fact: did you know that casserole dishes shatter explosively under uneven direct heat?

Once we contained the still glowing-hot glass fragments, the first thing I did was to clearly label the burner controls in English with Sharpy marker. (Ian, ever the wise acre, then decided to be helpful and label some other things, such as the door to the back yard, which he labelled "door".)

My next priority was to slam shut the barn door after the now-departed horse, so I shot out on a quick trip to refill the water jugs. Our regular machine was out of order. In the end, the "quick trip" took me over an hour. Finally returning home, I was greeted with the joyous sight of water streaming from under our garage door and down our driveway. Turns out the washing machine, in ailing health for some time, had given up the ghost and was gushing water from every orifice. The laundry room was flooded. The storage room was flooded. Part of the guest room was flooded. I dropped an "F-bomb" right in front of Emma. In my initial effort to address the flooding, I inadvertantly let the dogs out. Ian recaptured them and replaced them in the back yard. Thinking quickly, I immediately nearly let them out again.

There was more mayhem of various sorts, but those were the highlights. With significant effort throughout the day, mostly by Ian and Michelle, this morning life is nearly back to normal. There are a lot of wet towels still hanging in various places. We're having Emma's friend Thomas over this afternoon, to thank his mom for keeping Emma a good chunk of yesterday including her first waking potty accident in several months. And at some point before our Home Depot delivery on Saturday, we'll need to find a charity that will accept a slightly-the-worse-for-wear washer/dryer.

By the way, in case you ever have a similar day, here's a tip: the blower for a child's bouncy house makes a swell carpet dryer.

© Robert Nickel 2008

Emma and her cousin Casey got the opportunity, last week, to spend an entire weekend together at Disneyland. In preparation for this cross-cultural summit, Casey agreed to watch a little bit of The Wonder Pets (Emma's favorite show), and Emma reciprocated by watching some Mickey Mouse Clubhouse.

The result? Even since returning, the story Emma wants to hear, over and over is, "The Wonder Pets Save Figaro, Minnie's Kitten, Who Has Fled To Into A Tall Tree In Fear Of Donald's Stuffed Lion, Sparky", complete with the Wonder Pets calling "Ohh TOOOOOODLES!" for the ladder they need to consumate their rescue effort.

In other news, last night I wanted some barbeque sauce, but the bottle was nearly empty, and made a certain flatulent noise while grudgingly dispensing the last of its contents. Mommy made the predicatable joke about Daddy's having generated said noise, which Emma thought was uproarious and told over and over, complete with the admission at the end that, no, it hadn't really been Daddy but the barbeque sauce bottle that was to blame. Finally tiring of the joke, she decided to address the problem in all seriousness. Speaking directly to the bottle, she cried out, "HEY YOO STINNKEY GUY! YOO TOOTED!!" The bottle was too embarrassed to respond.

© Robert Nickel 2008

It's nice when all our various bits of techno-junk are friends. Once we were visiting my friend Jesse, who works at Apple, so natch everyone in his family has an iPhone, and we were oohing and aahing, and Michelle said, "And is it good friends with your Macintosh?" To which Jesse replied with obvious pride of workmanship: "It's very good friends with your Macintosh."

Alas, no such harmony exists between our Tivo and our Dish Network receiver. Could it be because Dish Network has spent all of the last half-decade trying to rip off Tivo's technology, being decisively worsted in a whole series of multi-million dollar lawsuits as a result? Whatever the reason, its heart or its shoes, Dish is definitely not friends with Tivo. Dish is more like Major Strasser to Tivo's Victor Laszlo.

One of Dish's little rules is, Tivo must record something every day between 2 and 5 a.m., or her signal gets cut off. More than once we've scheduled a 7 a.m. recording only to wind up with 60 minutes of "stand by" message. Our solution? Every day at 4 a.m., Tivo grabs us five minutes of whatever is on C-SPAN. Why C-SPAN? Why not? It needs to be good for something, right? (I once heard of a cable network in the Midwest that punished delinquent payments, not by disconnection, but by switching every channel to C-SPAN.)

The net result is, unless we happen to have an early "actual" recording, Tivo will still be watching C-SPAN whenever the TV is first turned on for the day.

And so it was the other day, when Emma had been an extra good girl and we decided to reward her with a little Blues Clues. So, I popped in the tape, but while it was rewinding, there... was C-SPAN. Emma, faced with the machinery of our democracy grinding away in all its stultifying glory, got a cute little horrified look on her face, and began backing away, clawing at the couch cushions. "No no," she forced out, "no no... I... I don' wan' dat... I... I reeelly don' like dat movie!"

So, memo to C-SPAN: in case you're pursuing some sort of initiative to get hipper and attract the younger viewers? It's not working.

© Robert Nickel 2008