(While these photos are a little anachronistic -- see February 4 for our Texas snow day of the year -- we had so much fun that we wanted to extend the pictures over the entire week.)
I've been anxious to work with my new type, especially now that I've largely been able to organize and catalog it. I decided to set some of the typefaces which have no printed labels on their cases, to help to identify them in their cabinets. I particularly wanted to print some of the display faces.
After playing with the type and setting the names, I printed an informal specimen of several of the ornate faces, then printed the names of twelve of my best-represented book faces in their numerous sizes (10 to 36 point Goudy text, for example -- or 18 to 80 point Caslon Old Style).
Maybe Jen can offer some context for this one . . . all I know is that I passed Linus and Gwendolyn in conversation, and heard the following declaration:
Linus: "Gwennie, wouldn't it be funny if your name were 'compost bin'?"
When I got back from the University's Meat Science Center with some groceries and a small package of beef 'ticks, Casper shouted, "That's my kind of meat!"
Linus has gotten interested in playing chess (perhaps from listening to Harry Potter's various references to wizard chess), so I pulled out our big set, which Jen and I bought in Russia. Linus was thrilled, and lost badly.
Most days, Gwendolyn can be motivated by the idea of doing something altruistic for others -- giving up a long-loved toy, saving the earth by recycling, and so on. This is a girl who has continued to quote (and believe) a fortune cookie which she saved from a visit to a Chinese restaurant two years ago: "You Will Become a Philanthropist."
But on occasion we catch her at a bad moment. As her mother encouraged her to gather some of the hoard she's accumulated in her bedroom, telling her that we would give it to Goodwill to help others, Gwendolyn asked what she was going to get out of it. When Jen tried to offer the standard explanations, Gwennie responded with some heat, "Well, when I grow up, I'm going to open a store that will pay you for the good things you bring in, and I'm calling it Betterwill!"
Like most parents, as we've struggled to find ways to persuade our children to respond to us, we've tried and abandoned various motivational techniques. One of our most lasting is a nonsense motto that the children find ridiklee-ous enough that it has become a call-and-response: we say "Quickle, Quickle," and they chorus, "Like a pickle," and run off to do their jobs. (Usually something insanely difficult that we've been begging them to do, like grabbing their coats from their closets so that we can leave the house.)
Here's Casper's variant, offered to his Toffee dog, which we overheard at the dinner table:
"Careful, Careful, like a pickle . . . wait [in dawning realization] . . . Pickles aren't careful!"
This is what Linus looked like after he finished rolling around on the trampoline this afternoon. Nothing like static electricity to transform a boy into a porcupine.
Once we showed Linus the picture, he wanted to make it "funny" (what? that isn't enough for you?), so we found a little picture of a hedgehog and inserted him. Fits right in, doesn't he?
Casper has a tendency to devise outlandish excuses to get out of work or other household obligations. Lately, he's been explaining that he can't get up to the table or go to his room for quiet time, because he's scared. The humor of these exchanges lies not only in the routine nature of the things he claims to find terrifying, but in the fact that he elides the "s" at the opening of many words (in a common example, his Winnie the Pooh spoon becomes his "pooh 'poon").
Here's a complaint he made the other day, when he didn't want to get in the shower: "Mama, I'm 'cared! Of the soap! It gets in my eyes and my mouth!"
One thing Gwennie never tires of is dressing her brothers up and leading them in some kind of play. Since Linus is more and more frequently chafing under the unilateral nature of her games (she seldom accepts input when she's the originator), Gwennie is often left with Casper alone. They just finished a bout of "exercise," in which she played a trainer and led Casper through a sequence of poses meant to represent physical activities. We figure that -- like many people who frequent the gym -- the real point was to get in costume and to be seen.
(Note the glowing ears)This week I am thankful for:
Here's a story from some weeks ago we missed telling: During the break, Jennifer decided that we should spend some of our evenings watching Jane Austen adaptations. We had watched a number of versions, including some new to us (such as the recent BBC Emma), and were turning to Sense and Sensibility when Casper got sick. We had some difficulty getting him down, and when he turned up several hours later, claiming that he couldn't sleep, we let him cozy down with us and watch part of the show. This made it more difficult for us the following night. How could we send him back to bed when he arrived, saying that once again he couldn't sleep and that he wanted to "watch Sensibility"? We paid for it the following nights since his schedule was ruined, but the moment was pretty irresistible.
Earlier this week, I dreamed that Linus was all grown up and I was visiting him at his architecture firm. The next day, we went to the children's museum where he amazed me with his building prowess once again. I love than when he sees something he likes, he will immediately try to re-create it with on paper or with blocks or tinker toys or legos. He has the mind of an engineer. Or maybe an architect.
We love Shakespeare around here, as you might expect from people with advanced degrees in English Literature and Theatre, but our cat puts our affection for the bard to shame.
We have some refrigerator magnets/finger puppets featuring the likenesses of Virginia Woolf, Leo Tolstoy, Charles Dickens and, of course, William Shakespeare (doesn't everyone?). Plume will leap up the side of the fridge and pull these magnets off so she can carry them around and play with them. Shakespeare is decidedly her favorite -- she will go for him first every time and even knows how to take his vest off. Yesterday I witnessed her leaping from counter top to refrigerator top to get poor William from the freezer door (where we had placed him for his own safety).
Well, now she's taken her love to a new level and managed to attach Will to her collar (in fact, the magnet on his back connected with her tag) so she can always have him close at hand when she needs him. Now, that's devotion.
This week I am thankful for:
Over the past few weeks, I'd been getting the sense that the kids needed a little alone time with me, so I decided to take each of them out separately -- sort of a riff on Dad's "ten minute game" from my own childhood. They were really eager to spend time with me, and just as excited to be out without their siblings. I think that it was good to be able to concentrate on each of them without any interruptions or rivalries (especially for a middle child who sometimes gets less attention). Perhaps that's why I started with Linus. Early in the day, we drove to the local hardware chain to look at tools and to build a kit. The activity, part of a weekly program, wasn't especially involving -- but nailing together a rudimentary "game box" with the provided tools (and, notably, ending up with his own object) was endlessly thrilling to him. In fact, I was surprised that he wanted to leave the store when we'd finished, after only an additional fifteen minutes of looking at hammers and sawblades. I think he was too excited about showing his box to his siblings to wait any longer.
Gwennie and I decided to go see a movie, and since I'd heard some moderately good things about Disney's Rapunzel film, we opted for that. Actually, I was warned the night before by a colleague that the song lyrics were pretty weak, which should have been a warning -- this friend has a very high tolerance for musical theater. And while she was right, and the movie was pure Disney (in its conventionality and sentimentality), it also had some fun scenes. Better yet, Gwennie was really into it. Maybe I've been spoiled by Pixar and even Dreamworks (a statement I never thought I'd make -- who would have thought it would ever happen? -- and yet How to Train Your Dragon is really great) and independent animation like The Secret of Kells.
Casper and I decided to go exploring. Our goal was to find a playground we'd never seen. We had pretty good results, finding an older play space surrounded by a little track which led to one of those old circuit training areas; playing at the exercise stations may actually have been more entertaining for the boy. He decided that he was the captain of his boat, and was loading and shooting torpedoes at passing joggers. Pretty entertaining, really. After we got tired of the place, we decided to go out for ice cream. Isn't that what you do after you exercise?
Linus has always been a pretty big kid -- tall for his age and broad shouldered. Casper is naturally a little on the shrimpy side. The above (completely unaltered) photo is hilarious to me because Linus looks so gigantic and Casper so incredibly small. (Don't worry, though, it's just a camera trick -- the same kind that was used to create the difference between the wizard and the hobbits in Lord of the Rings. See how far Linus is standing in the foreground?)
Still, the boys don't seem to recognize the size difference -- if Casper is angry about something, he will tackle Linus and pound on him while Linus (who could crush his brother if he thought about it) will cry for help. Thankfully, they get along most of the time.
Tonight, as Todd and I were preparing dinner, we found three spies scurrying around collecting clues and evidence. Decked out in black leotards and yoga pants (or just black legwarmers around their thighs) and hiding in closets and other secret places, they were often hard to spot. Amazingly, we snapped this photo of them!
If you're playing with play-dough and your hands get a little cold, what do you do? Make some gloves, of course.
On New Year's Eve, a plan which I'd been working on for over a year -- a plan so convoluted the Robot Devil would call it "ridiculously circuitous" -- came to fruition. Since last December, when I'd conscripted my father and Ian to help me move an Asbern press I'd bought, I'd been trying to arrange to purchase some type from the same book designer and letterpress printer who had sold us the press. After several months of negotiations and a semester teaching at the University (to raise the money), I finalized the arrangements.
I was fortunate that BJ had very generously agreed to drive with me, to help me load the type cabinet and its contents in a rental van, and to bring it home. After we'd picked up the van and arrived at the print shop where the type was warehoused, I learned that the printer had decided to sell me his entire type collection -- nearly five times as much as I'd anticipated. It was a good thing that we'd arranged for a large truck, because this amounted to around three tons of metal type. With the help of some of the press's workers, BJ and I loaded and secured the type, and eventually made it back home without the contents of the van shifting.
Jen had made some calls to try to find some friends who could help us unload the type. I'm going to be eternally in the debt of Scott Hoose and Michael Johanson, who generously sacrificed their New Year's Eves to come and shift lead. Because I hadn't anticipated bringing so much type back, I struggled to find space for it all, and have temporarily filled every open space in my pressroom and office with the cabinets. And because the cases got scrambled in the course of their various moves, I've been working to identify and organize the cases. Once I have produced a listing of the typefaces and their locations, I'll be ready to work on several projects which I'm excited to start. It's beautiful stuff, just crying out to be used.
We had the pleasure of cousins for new year's this year! Auntie Heather, Uncle BJ, Sophia and Phoebe came to spend the long weekend with us and we had a wonderful time. The cousins played so sweetly (and the weather was perfect all weekend, so they lived on the trampoline) and the adults got in plenty of chatting, game playing and movie watching together. It was a great weekend and I'm so glad we got to enjoy it with loved ones. Unfortunately, we left all the picture-taking duties up to Uncle BJ and his fancy camera, so this is all we got.
After the introduction to adulthood that Gwendolyn had received in our talk about Santa Claus the other night, you might think that we assumed that she had no more innocence to lose and so opted to have "the talk." In fact, we'd been planning the conversation for some time; we had promised Gwendolyn that we'd have a special evening, and had been building up the discussion for the past week at least. Since she's eight, we knew that she would be encountering hints about sex (in the same way that she picked up her uncertainties about Santa), and we simply prefer that she receive the information from us. We hope that having frank conversations about love and sex, now and in the future, will enable her to turn to us when she does have questions.
It probably says something about Gwennie's personality and her current perspective that she was less interested in the revelations about where babies come from than she was in our reminiscences about her own birth and infancy. And far from being an awkward conversation, the discussion -- particularly our recollections about her joining our family -- was emotional, even spiritual. I hope that she'll remember that, if nothing else.
Gwendolyn pictured here modeling some dress-up clothes she got for Christmas. She even left in the middle of unwrapping presents to go and put them on. Only a child would do that, right? 
This is a leftover photo from Christmas morning depicting Gwendolyn's actual reaction when she realized what she was holding in her hands -- a collection of the first six Harry Potter movies on dvd (several of which she may not be allowed to see for another five or ten years).
Since just before Christmas, Gwendolyn had been asking us about Santa -- specifically, whether he actually exists. She explained that one of her friends had been telling her that he was not real (and neither were his comrades in imagination, the Easter Bunny and dragons and fairies). Even though she wanted to believe, she said, she wanted a straight answer. She was no longer willing to accept our evasions.
While we thought that she was a little young for this conversation -- especially since her imagination is so active and so important to her view of the world -- we don't want to put her off when she sincerely and repeatedly asks a question. Jen explained that we would answer her in detail if she really wanted us to, and when she replied that she did, we sat on her bed and started to talk.
We started by chatting a little about fables, the way facts sometimes get expanded over time to carry new and important meanings. A story like that of King Arthur began with a man who lived and achieved great things, but over time his story grew to include new details; even though the story as we tell it may not be exactly as his life occurred, it is important because of the truths it expresses. I briefly told her the story of St. Nicholas, who spent his life helping people, and who loved to give gifts to people in need, especially children. We talked about how different cultures have different versions of St. Nick or Santa Claus who represents the values of generosity and Christlike service, but they all share a common element of selfless giving. The stories are real and important because they are one way which we can understand those truths.
Of course, when we arrived at this point, she asked directly: So, Santa isn't real? Well, sweetie, if you're asking whether a fat man in a red velvet suit uses his ungulate conveyance to travel across continents in one night, slipping into the world's chimneys with candy canes and trampolines -- then, not exactly. But in the spirit of St. Nicholas, there are people who do that same work because they love to give presents, and they give the credit to Santa Claus because he represents the purity of sharing without expecting anything in return. Who are those helpers?, she asked. So we told her about the people who contribute to the story -- the man who came dressed as Santa at the ward party, the parents and grandparents who come together to gather things which she and her brothers could get excited about. If someone asked me whether Santa is real, I told her, I would say yes. He is real because his story has meaning for a vast number of people, who understand something true because of that story. And she seemed to understand and to accept that (admittedly subtle and abstract) idea.
In some respects, I wish that we could have evaded the question a little longer. The look in Gwennie's eyes was heartbreaking -- not that I don't feel that she deserves a more grown-up answer to such questions when she asks them, but I wish that she could have kept that part of childhood a little longer. I think that she felt a part of her birthright passing by, and that she was being inducted into adult mysteries that she might not have needed to grasp so soon. But I also feel that it was important at this moment to be frank with her, and to give a legitimate (if perhaps too-complex) response to a serious query. But ultimately, I think that we should celebrate it. For better and worse, she knows the larger meaning of Santa now.
We had a wonderful Christmas. As is our tradition, we got up early (except for the boys who slept until after 8.30, incredibly) and started making bran muffins to deliver to all our friends and neighbors (something like 16 dozen muffins this year). It was a chilly morning and even though we started delivering around 8 am and tag-teamed baking and delivery duties, we didn't finish up until about 11.30. When some of us aren't bickering over who gets to actually hold the plate of muffins as we walk to the door, we all love this tradition.
When we got home, we dug into stockings and got to see what Santa brought. I wish we could post the hysterics that followed the discovery of a trampoline box in the playroom. Thanks, Santa!
We paused for lunch and then took our time opening presents that afternoon. It was a relaxing afternoon, with everyone so happy and content. We rested and played with all the new toys before Todd went outside to tackle the trampoline assembly. Merry Christmas!
