Soccer Animals

That's two views of Vivian. The other day for a moment she showed the Hulk side.

We had walked/biked/scootered to Ramsey Park. I noticed that Lee and a couple of others were playing a pick-up game of soccer. I jumped into their game. There were these two boys about Vivian's age and five adults playing. The boys were pretty good and they knew that, though the adults were giving them a wider berth than I would. We played till Jo and the kids finished doing their thing in the park and circled back towards where we were. Lee asked Vivian and Evan to join the game and just then we declared "last goal". The two boys were on my team. Vivian and Evan were on the other. We started. Evan got the ball somehow. He passed it to Vivian accidentally. Vivian took off. She broke away with the two boys in hot pursuit and controlled the ball somehow and ran faster than them and score a goal in one of those tiny folding goals. I am still surprised.

Everyone shook hands and the game ended and we started making our way back home. I said "Vivian - that was pretty good". And that's when she said that when she and Evan joined the game, she overheard the two boys talking shit. One told the other "This will be easy. One's a girl. The other one's little".

"So I had to score a goal and show them"

I'm glad Vivian isn't taking this sexism stuff nicely.

Evan added "I heard him too. I said I'm going to kick the ball to your head and cannon-ball it into the goal off your head".

Jo asked "Did you say that to him?"
Evan: "No - I said it to him in my head."

Next time, Evan. Though, for now everyone thinks that Vivian and Evan know how to play soccer. And I know that Vivian isn't going to take any of this sexism shit.

Turning Five

Monday was Evan's birthday. From the moment he got out of bed he was all hopped up. He grabbed some tissue paper sheets from his birthday gifts and held them to his rear end and ran up and down the hallway in a blur pretending to be a rocket and roaring accordingly.

That afternoon Jo got some popsicles that would meet school snack code (nothing tasty allowed). It was my job to deliver them to Evan's classroom where the lad made himself comfortable on Ms. Marisol's lap with a goofy crown upon his head while his mates sang happy birthday in many languages. Then we stepped outside and I handed out popsicles.

This is G halfway through her popsicle. She is not an outlier. Probably the smartest thing I did this week was to take wipes with me. Otherwise Evan's birthday would have been received quite differently by his classmates' parents.

The kids ran around with melted popsicle stuck to their faces and Ms. Marisol, Evan's teacher, had a story for me.

"We are talking about feelings in class"
"Yes - Evan told me"
"So I asked everyone to talk about a feeling they are familiar with. Evan said 'Annoying'. Then he said 'My sister always says I'm annoying'"

True.

When we came home Ava and Evan made pizza. That's what he wanted for his birthday dinner. Then we put 'em in the oven and Vivian came back from gymnastics and the kids played outside while the pizzas baked. During that time Vivian found a squirrel in the yard. He was just sitting and shaking slightly and wouldn't run away. When Jo went over there, they were petting the poor thing. A shoe box was procured and the squirrel was squirreled into it, mostly to keep Crazy and other members of her species from devouring the poor thing.

While we ate some pretty good pizza, the squirrel recovered and gnawed itself out of the shoebox and escaped. And then we made our way through some copious amounts of ice cream that Jo and Evan had bought earlier.

We ended the evening with a walk around the hood.On the way back we saw the first fire flies of the season. Jo cupped one in her hands and we put it in a jar back home. After about 5 seconds the kids felt sorry for the thing and decided to release it into the backyard. It glowed fiercely and circled once around Evan's head as he said "Bye bye fire fly" and then it floated away into the night.

It was a good day to turn five.

Open Carry

Everything is bigger in Texas. Even our brains. Till the recent House Bill proved us wrong by trying to make open carry legal. To carry a concealed weapon you need classroom training and proficiency and a background check.

According to the new bill you don't need to conceal the weapon and a police officer will not be able to ask you for a license for your openly carried "concealed" weapon. Oxymoron? Nope - just morons.

At a traffic stop:
"Sir you were speeding in a school zone?"
"Oh - sorry, I didn't notice"
"That was dangerous. Can I see your driver's license?"
"Sure"
"Is that an Uzi you are carrying?"
"Fuck off - you can't ask me about that"

Or what about if your last name was Tsarnaev and you were loitering around with an open carry at the start of the Austin 10K? Would you be granted the same rights as a open-carry patriot? Thankfully Ruben Bolling explains.

Birthday Cake

A brief history of Evan's birthday cakes. Number One was a home made cake that he just demolished. A snow cone substituted for cake for Number Two. For Number Three, our friend Paloma made a very professional castle with a dragon. Last year was the Star Wars and Lego affair.

For Number Five, we couldn't find anyone that knew enough about Wild Kratts to make a cake. So we ordered a Costco sheet cake and stuck Wild Kratts action figures in it. Bingo.

Evan's classmate Ezri was the one that got the ball rolling. The kids were still deeply engrossed in their creature power suits when she came up to me and asked "Evan's dad - don't you think it's time for cake?" And from then till the cake was served she never left Evan's side - even though she seemed rather busy with a plate of potato chips. She's figured it out. Stay close to the birthday boy and you'll be close to the cake.

Evan's friends sang Happy Birthday in Spanish. Then he took care of the business with the candles. And quickly got hold of the action figures that were stuck in the cake and sucked the icing off them. I caught him double dipping back into the cake before it was whisked off to be sliced and diced and served.

A few minutes later I caught up with Evan again as he was destroying the cake and eating like a barbarian. The girl sitting beside him studied him like he was an animal from the petting zoo as she delicately picked at her cake with her fork. 

"Enjoying your cake?" I asked her. 

"Oh no - I hate cake. I'm only eating the frosting".

And then Evan made a gurgling sound and shoved a very large piece of cake down his throat.

It never did rain during Evan's party. Later that evening, it hailed like crazy for about 10 minutes and rained hard for a while. I'd say we got very lucky. Because by then I was singing "All About That Bass" with four ladies at a karaoke party. Others thought my singing was to blame for the hail.

Bubble Party

Bubbles are like crack. Give any collection of humans something to make bubbles with and they will entertain themselves for some time. Evan and his friends at his birthday party were no exception. They blew bubbles. They danced with them. They caught their bubbles. They destroyed their bubbles with bamboo sticks. They threw soccer balls at bubbles. They used the bubble solution containers as swords.

Then Jo broke out the creature power suits and they were a hit. We restricted them to the five year olds (because Jo had made 25 of the shirts and then given up - with fingers bruised and calloused from cutting fabric). It went well - the older kids took this to be a smaller kid thing and didn't mind at all. The little ones went crazy with the interchangeable creature power discs that they could velcro to the front of their suits. Amazing stuff.

Petting Zoo

Saturday morning arrived with a light misting rain. I started wiping off the deck furniture and realized the futility of the task. But by 10ish it had stopped and was actually looking like we may be able to have the party outdoors.

Jo put up signs on every entry into the house to "Please Take Off Your Shoes" and we cleared up the garage for the petting zoo. I put the food on the outside tables and the first guests came in. Then the petting zoo people set up. Evan got to sit inside and have the first shot at petting all the animals like royalty while the rest of us milled outside the fences. Then they let the throngs in.

The kids were quite enthralled. They were extremely gentle and chilled and deeply engrossed in their animals and there was no chaos. The handlers knew how to handle human children well.

Getting Ready

Today is Wednesday. Evan's birthday party is on Saturday.

Jo says about 70 people are coming - most of whom we hardly know but their children are Evan's classmates. Evan has asked for the party to be "Wild Kratts" themed, a second tier PBS show from Canada.

So Jo has been driving to big box stores around Austin to buy plain black t-shirts for 5 year olds. She buys up their entire stock of three or five shirts and brings them back home and turns them into "creature power" suits by cutting off the sleeves and glueing bits of blue and green fabric on to them. And then she make a run to the next Target.

Meanwhile birthday party shit is piling up. Jo needs to mow the yard and clear out the garage and order the cake and decide on food and drink. That woman.

She says she can get it all done on Thursday and Friday.

On Thursday morning Jo took Crazy to the vet because her meow changed (it happened over Spring Break). Then our decorator came in to take professional photographs of the living room while Jo walked around with Baby Z in the back yard.  

At lunch time I picked both kids and took them to the dentist. Vivian will get braces in summer. Evan wanted chocolate flavored cleaning paste. Then Jo took Evan to his swim class and Vivian and I went to meet her friends for a play date. The moms drank topo chico and discussed nail polish and I was the only dad around. Then I dropped Vivian back home and went to my play date - uh - happy hour. Thursday gone.

On Friday morning I went to Vivian's school and stood around at a mini science fair while the kids ran amok like orangutans in a banana plantation. Then Jo and I went to Costco and Central Market and got food and drinks for the party. And we checked and rechecked the weather and it still said 80% chance of thundershowers and hailstorms for tomorrow during the party.

On Friday evening, confident that we were totally unprepared for the party, we had Jen and Travis over for a long slow dinner and while I was on a business call that took for ever, Jo and Travis moved some of the furniture from the living room into our bedroom to decrease the chances of muddy five year old footprints on the white couch the next day.

At about 10 o'clock at night towards the end of the second bottle of wine, Robbe, our neighbor dropped by with tiny bunny shaped cakes that she had baked for Evan. And Jo and I called it a night and went to bed with no firm plans of how or where to entertain a bunch of people at our home the next morning.

More Jai Ho

Thanks to Mariam, I have some photos of Vivian and her friends from the talent show at Magellan's International Festival. This was how they started - with their backs to the audience.

And then ended with each one holding a specific pose - with huge grins on their faces. Vivian came up with this ending because she didn't think it right for them to just end the dance and walk off the stage.

Jo helped the girls find suitable clothes from Vivian's collection of Indian dresses given to her by the Choudary's and Shah's over the years. And Jo also facilitated between parents so that the girls could practice twice after school. Otherwise it was all them. Vivian took her music to school and they practiced during recess. They worked out who does what and where and who to include and how to say no when it got too big.

I'm not a fan of Bollywood movies. But this dance, which Vivian learned during her pre-school in India at Kangaroo Kids has sure come in handy. Ironically Slumdog Millionaire (which I haven't watched) from which this song comes, isn't a Bollywood movie any more than The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is a Hollywood film. 

Talent Saturday

On Saturday afternoon, soon after we got to the International Festival at Magellan, I rounded up eight little girls and one boy and got them changed into their colorful Indian clothes - mostly Vivian's. Then Sayuri and some teachers seated and fed Vivian and "her troupe" strawberries and cupcakes and waited on them and called them "la princesa" and I walked around and stuck color-coordinated bejeweled bindis on the little foreheads and got them off towards the stage when it was five minutes to show time.

Waiting beside the stage they were so excited that they wiggled and jumped and spun around till it was time to walk onstage. Carol, Grace, Cade and Evan were seated in the second row and Nicolle popped her head into Magellan just in the nick of time to hear Ms. Marisa announce "Vivian Chatterjee and her troupe will start things off. They are performing Jai Ho - a Indian song". And suddenly the girls went all calm and professional and cool. And they took up their positions and started in perfect time with the music.

By the time they finished and walked off the stage two and a half minutes later to some serious applause it was a 2nd grade girl fest that rolled like a tsunami over everyone. They hugged and kissed and high-fived and hugged again and then did it in groups and then with more friends and teachers and mothers and siblings. Somewhere in the middle I managed to get an after photo.

I asked Carol what she thought. "It was great. Vivian did very well". Then an after thought "She isn't shy". With what Vivian was wearing, you could say that again.

Later that afternoon Evan and Vivian got to go chill with the full contingent of their Grace Garden friends at a playdate at the Riley's. Their mothers have a rough time coordinating all the kids to be at one place at the same time, but with the mothers somewhere off "camping" the dads had no such trouble.

At some point I took Vivian to yet another engagement - a near-spontaneous sleep over at Sage's (she had asked Vivian this same morning). And then much later Evan and I drove back home and ate the remaining Upper Crust cinnamon rolls and watched "How To Train A Dragon 2" till we both fell asleep on the couch and I carried him to bed.

We need to pick up the house and bathe and clean up and do some laundry and homework before Jo gets back. Perhaps tomorrow.

Tall Stories

Good pictures on Evan are notoriously hard to come by. So here's one all the way back from last July that hadn't made it to the blog. We were in Iceland playing in the lava flows behind the house we had rented outside Reykjavik.

Last week one morning we were getting ready to drop Evan off at school. His friend Elle came up behind us. While we chatted briefly with Elle's dad, the two kids took each other's hand and strolled off into the school. When Jo and I looked at them, they were standing in the hall still holding hands. Elle's other hand was at her head as was Evan's at his. Elle is very clearly a few inches taller than Evan.

Later, when we went to pick him up, I asked "Hey - what were Elle and you doing this morning?"

"We were checking to see who is taller"
"And...?"
"Oh. I'm taller than Elle. I think."

Show Business

This is a still from a video I recorded of Vivian practicing the other day. She and two classmates are pitching a fun trip to Venus as a part of their unit on Space. Watch out Elon and Sir Branson.

Other teams in her class are variously pitching similar trips to other places including to a black hole - all in Spanish naturally. Their assignment is to create tourist videos for different places in space.

Vivian has enjoyed the Space unit of enquiry. But lately she's busy with another endeavor - the upcoming talent show. On a whim she told Jo to sign her up to perform her perennial favorite, Jai Ho. Then she said she would practice during recess at school and took her music and player with her late last week. By Monday we estimated that six other girls had decided to join her on stage. Today the number stands at a total of nine including a lad. Jo has emphatically told Vivian that she needs to regretfully turn down any more prospects. The performance is on Saturday. These kids have practiced and decided on who does what and pretty much organized it all by themselves. Today Jo took clothes for some of the other girls and tomorrow she is going to buy them bejeweled bindis to wear at the talent show. Some parents asked Jo if she came up with the dance movements. There goes my PIO-card toting Bollywood choreographer wife.

This is what Vivian looked like almost exactly three years ago in our flat in India, practicing before the big school show.

"Aaja Aaja Jind Shamiyane Ke Tale
Aaja Jariwale Nile Aasman Ke Tale"

Easter Sunday

On Sunday we woke up and hurried to the Easter service at Slumber Falls. Pastor Scott (easy to identify due to the somewhat unique combination of his race and gender in our crowd) gave an almost new agey non-sermon with silences written into it for us to admire nature. And Evan fortunately kept his mouth shut about Easter and the discussion that he and Vivian and I had on Thursday on the way to school. Then we ate breakfast and the kids went off to hunt eggs in the light misting rain while Quinn and Kai and I threw a couple of basketballs.

Back at the ranch we finished cooking and ate a nice dinner and then Jo and the kids dealt with the Easter candy which I unsuccessfully tried to stay away from.

The kids watched Monster House again. I napped and almost missed the ending again. And then it took us a couple of hours to pack from our three day trip and another couple of hours to make it home (due to a wreck on the interstate). Evan slept the whole way and was clearly ready to party when we got home. Both Vivian and Evan were several hours sleep deficient due to excessive partying all weekend, and so with dire warnings that they would feel like crap if they didn't immediately close their eyes and go to sleep we got them to bed at a half decent time. 

Easter Bluebonnets

One fall several years ago Nicolle tossed a tinny bag of seeds on a patch of dirt at Lariat Ridge and now Carol has a nice good crop of bluebonnets. Good thing they are pretty because they grow like weeds. 

After Easter service at Slumber Falls we got the kids to get out there in the hope of getting a couple of good photos though it was a misting morning without much sun. As you can see Evan didn't cooperate. Finally he got sent off with a threat of spanking and "think about this when you're older and wonder why there aren't any decent pictures of you growing up". But he looked quite dashing in his gold bowtie and navy shirt. Vivian opted for a dress Alu and Michelle had sent her last year or the year before (she grows slowly) and a new hat.