toby of the day, what's so wrong with a little green space?

In the outer sunset, it seems that the most popular landscaping style, aside from painting the concrete in front of the house green, is to surround indigenous shrubs and small plants with rocks. While I applaud this approach for its simplicity and water saving potential, it means that the 2 block walk from the train to the new daycare is like a trek through a minefield, except that instead of trying to avoid the mines, toby is collecting as many of them as he can press against his little chest and still walk. My newest strategy is to throw a rock ahead of us and convince him to race me to it. This usually works for at least a block or so to keep him on the sidewalk, and holding only a minimal quantity of rocks that he will add to our own growing rock garden at the entrance to our apartment. Then I can just carry him, albeit kicking and screaming, that last block. I guess this is why people use strollers, if nothing else it means you can transport larger rocks.

toby of the day, boys: don't cry, like trucks

The next day we continued to avoid contaminating people we know with hoof and horn disease and instead went to the beach. Ahh, what a lovely way to spend a spring afternoon you might say, probably as you imagine people in swimming trunks, warming themselves under the sun and romping in the surf. But that is not our beach. I would like to suggest that our beach is more like how you might imagine a beach in, say, Denmark. Except that I have been to a beach in Denmark, and it was hot and full of very athletic and scantily clad beach volleyball players. And again, that is not our beach. Our beach is one where I didn’t want to take off my shoes because my feet were already cold. Our beach is one where I was pretty sure the wind was going to blow off my wool hat. Sure sometimes it can be warm enough for the wearing of, say, a light sweater, when you make it there in the few hours after the sun has heated up the sand but before the fog arrives. But this was most certainly not one of those days. Consequently, Toby seemed somewhat nonplussed by our beachcombing, and was even becoming a little irritable about the wind burn on his face. That is, until we rounded a bend and snuck up on a digging truck. It turns out that Toby is boy and therefore in love with a wide range of construction vehicles, most of which he refers to as digging trucks. In this case it was a bulldozer and it was parked on one of the paths through the dunes leading off the beach. Toby tried to convince us to drive away in it, but we thought better of that suggestion, mostly because we figured it would not maneuver well in a high-speed chase. That, and we needed to get to the park chalet for a beer, and there isn’t much parking over there, especially not for a stolen bulldozer.

toby of the day, a cow says

A couple months ago we transitioned toby into his new daycare. As a special welcome, one of the children contracted hand, foot, and mouth disease which the interweb was quick to point out is in no way related to hoof and mouth disease, although we’ve had a difficult time not referring to it as that. In any case, hand foot and mouth is a pretty contagious virus similar to the chicken pox that results in small blisters on, yes you guessed it, the hands and feet, and inside the mouth of the kids that get it. The first case at the daycare was discovered on a Saturday and by midweek the following week kids were dropping like flies. Little blistered, feverish flies. Toby lasted most of the week, but by Friday, he too had a couple of blisters. Fortunately, his version never really amounted to much. Still, we tried to least avoid contaminating people that we know, so we spent Saturday morning busily infecting strangers at the farmers market. We had a close call when we ran into toby’s friend jonah and his family and I imagined having to explain myself as I slapped away jonah’s hand as he went to give toby a high five or something. But luckily toby decided to act shy, preferring to nuzzle his face into my chest, rather than run over and hug, drool on, or otherwise shower jonah with infection. Which meant we managed to escape after some brief chit-chat and quickly wandered away to wipe our hands on some heirloom lettuce.

toby of the day, that's not a lion

toby likes fruits. sure, he likes other foods too, he eats a reasonably balanced diet, full of meat, starch, tofu and the occasional vegetable. but he really likes fruits. really likes them. here we tried to capture what we mean by that. of course, as demonstration of the heisenberg uncertainty principle*, as soon as we pull out the camera, we destroy his momentum, turning him into a tame and principled fruit eater. However, by the second video, he's back on track, managing to stuff almost and entire mango into his little mouth. and just so we're clear, the place mat that he's naming animals on has been washed so many times it resembles the walls of a romanesque church in some unheard of spanish town, the kind where the murals on the wall could be paintings of saint christopher, or they could be paintings of a kangaroo wearing a tutu and a man about town hat, which admittedly has always been my preferred interpretation of those murals. in any case, it makes it all the more fun to watch toby try to decipher what's in the picture. Enjoy!

*I will point out that wikipedia tells me I should really call it the "observer effect", but that sounds lame and lacks the ironic grandiosity which I'm trying to convey, so I'm sticking with heisenberg, wikipedia be damned.

toby of the day, let's pretz!

Apparently it is traditional in japan to celebrate hanami or the arrival of spring, and the associated blooming of cherry trees, by drinking sake under those flowering trees until your necktie ends up around your head. This year we had our own hanami celebration, replete with blooming trees, sake, revelers, and even a necktie. The tie belonged to Jon and while it did not end up around his head, I believe that is only because at the end of the day he wasn’t really in any shape to figure out how to tie a tie around his head. So basically our hanami was a success. And as you can see by the video, toby also enjoyed the welcoming of spring, in particular the part where you can just stand around dancing while eating japanese snacks.

toby of the day, teacher, mother, secret lover

Toby has discovered television. ok, I guess technically that’s not entirely true because we don’t actually have a TV. and some would even argue that the TV we used to have, the one Jon brought from Japan, circa 1981 that finally emitted the last electrons from its cathode ray tube in January, didn't really count as a TV. In any case, we do watch things on our laptop, and now toby likes to do the same. He started with an online cartoon called making fiends, or “MEANDS!” as he calls it. And then we introduced him to the movie Totoro, in particular a few 5 minutes chunks introducing the totoros and the nekobus. For a while he would ask me to sing him to sleep with strange songs about concrete shoes or by mumbling through Japanese Totoro lyrics. All was good. But, while I am weirdly capable of watching the same 2 minute video clip over and over and over (and over and over and over) again, Jon is not, and in some respects, neither is Toby. So after going to youtube one day to show toby the totoro movie trailer, there was no turning back for either of them. Toby soon moved on to demanding to see a video of a girl singing the song from the new Miyazaki movie “Ponyo”. He could watch her do her little choreographed arm movements for hours. Then came the discovery that a search merging his love of robots and his love of balls results in a number of videos of knee high Japanese robots competing in some sort of robot world cup and for a couple of weeks, robot soccer was all he could talk about. Until the past few days, when the main topic of conversation became bouncy balls after jon stumbled on a sony bravia commercial from a couple years ago. As a consequence of all this, he has almost no interest in television. I'm not even sure he knows what a television is, since when he sees pictures of cassette players in his books he points to them and says “TV?” And even if we come across an enormous television, while it is playing the sony bravia commercial, he will turn to Jon, point to the laptop, and say "bouncy balls?" then wait patiently until Jon can pull it up on the screen. I’m not really sure what any of this means, except that I must admit I'm kind of happy about it, at least until he learns to type “elmo”.

toby of the day, how do you even spell borscht?

We recently had to find a new daycare. Mostly because our current daycaretaker is weak and hateful and seems to think it’s acceptable behavior not only to have a second child, but to use that procreation as an excuse to stop being our daycaretaker. Of course, she’s really not weak and hateful, because if she were it would be incredibly easy to find a new daycare. No, instead it is the fact that she is so very very awesome that makes the task of searching for a replacement, well, terrifying. So we started looking at daycares and preschools only to discover they were all either full or frightening. Panicked that one or both of us would have to stay home until a preschool spot opened up in September, we briefly considered finding a nanny to share with another family. This plan was very short lived. I cannot convey to you how entirely out of our league we were in this enterprise. It was as though after managing to make 3 of 5 shots into the toy box from the other side of our living room, I joined an NBA basketball team. And just so you know, I almost never make 3 of 5 shots into the toy basket. We quickly realized that finding our own nanny and a family to share her with would take the better part of 2009, and then after a couple of meetings with existing nanny share families, we even more quickly we discovered that we are not, and may never be, the kind of people that have a nanny. For example, the first mother we met works at home, and yet not only was she not dressed in pajamas when we stopped by to meet her, she was wearing make-up and had her hair styled. On the other hand, during our ride over on the bus, I had remarked to jon about how pleased I was that my pants had only a small quantity of food on them, and that the color of his t-shirt made the thumb sized hole in his sweater almost unnoticeable. I most certainly was not wearing makeup. This same woman explained to Jon that she stored all her daughters toys in a leather ottoman in the living room so as not to disrupt the rooms decor. That living room was also outfitted with a cream colored sofa and two glass lamps that I was pretty sure toby could shatter just by looking at them too long. Jon smiled and looked understanding, even though in our living room we keep toys in a bookcase (laid on it’s side for safety reasons of course) that we found on the street. At the second home, the family seemed a little more down to earth. But the nanny, well, let’s just say that given the look in her eyes when she snatched a telephone from Toby’s chubby little fingers, I was pretty sure he would end up in some gulag labor camp before the end of his second week with her.
But through a combination of luck and, well, luck, a spot opened up at the one daycare that we actually liked. It’s no denise, but at the same time there are a lot of equally important things that it is not. For example, it does not smell like a dreadful mix of borscht and poop, it is not the sort of place where infants get pushed around in strollers all day while inside the house, the owner did not spend much of her time staring wistfully and tearfully at a wall of photos of former attendees trying to convey to us how much she loves her kids, and I’m pretty sure that it is not the sort of place that will look down on me when I show up with food in my hair. In all, the owner, kids, and teachers all seem nice. And it was recommended to us by a woman I work with, a woman who is perhaps the most cautious and, dare I say, overprotective mother I’ve ever met, a woman whose standards could not be higher. She sent her daughter there, and still raves about it. I think it will be good. We’ll keep you posted.