Focus

I know children mimic the things they hear you say. I don't think I knew the kinds of things she'd say back to me though.
The Giants happen to be playing very well right about now and I have been following their games closely. The other day there was an important playoff game on and I wanted to watch it. The problem is that in our house the TV is not on very often and when it is, we're sitting down watching it. We don't have it on during meals or as a background. As King of the Household I decided that I wanted to have the game on during dinner. Mariana kept turning it off and telling me "no TV while we eat". Glad she's listening huh? During the meal I kept looking over her head as the TV is behind her seat at the table. She admonished me "Focus Daddy. Focus on eating". You little shit!
Mariana is showing a budding imagination of the hallucinatory bent. She can ramble on, mixing all the characters from her life together. Friends from school, characters from movies and books, neighbors, relatives- you name it, they can all get involved in the adventure. Sometimes she wakes out of a dream and tells us right away about the flying kitty litter box and sometimes it's just a long dinner monologue about Teddy and Farquad and how Seargent Murphy has to take them "into custody"- focus and eat child! It's like all this information is flowing into a well and it just swirls around and blends and keeps filling higher. Some things float to the surface. Some sink- but they're all in there waiting for their turn to surface. Does she have a great imagination? Is she nuts? or is she just 3 1/2 years old?

Smoking

I'm sitting on the plane watching my 3.5 yr old daughter effortlessly navigate her iPod looking for a new video. Technology is pretty amazing. I suppose every generation must think that at some point. There are lots of things she'll grow up with and take for granted as having always been that way. What do you mean there were no cell phones when you grew up? No Facebook? How did you communicate with people? Certain bad things are going away too, like today she asked us what smoking was. No one around us smokes anymore. When people bemoan "the way things are today" I think they neglect to consider how much better certain things are now. In the past, was it better to have a cord attached to every phone? Was it better to get tainted blood transfusions? Was it better to be a minority? Mariana will grow up in a world where woman can do just about anything they want to do. What will she do with it? I guess she'll start by rolling her eyes at me and saying "Yeah, Dad, I know you had to go all the way to the bank when you needed money, blah, blah, blah". Actually, I'm probably more likely to get the question "Dad, what's an ATM card?"