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Monday, February 23rd, 2004
Ellen and Sylvia are playing Cinderella -- Ellen is Cinderella, Sylvia is the Fairy Godmother. CINDERELLA: Before I leave, do you have any advice for me?
FAIRY GODMOTHER: Be sure to come home before midnight.
CINDERELLA: And why do I need to do that?
FAIRY GODMOTHER: (thinks about it for a minute) ...I'd appreciate it.
posted afternoon of February 23rd, 2004: Respond
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Saturday, February 21st, 2004
Sylvia, this morning: When I grow up, I want to be a teacher, and study dinosaurs, and a vet, and a people doctor, a-and, that's all. Context is that Ellen was reading to her from Jamal's Busy Day, in which Jamal describes his parents' jobs.
posted morning of February 21st, 2004: Respond
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Saturday, February 14th, 2004
Here are some things Sylvia has been doing lately: A dialog between the cow and the wolf: as scripted by Sylvia WOLF: Why did you run away? COW: I was trying to find my mommy. WOLF: Why did you stop? COW: There was a scary monster, and it was...scary. WOLF: When I was little I ran away from my mom one time and saw a scary monster. That happens sometimes. Acting like dinosaurs Sylvia is way into dinosaurs. Today we were reading a book with pictures and descriptions of various ones -- after each sentence she would repeat the sentence but in the first person, and act out the attributes in question. Apparently all dinosaurs eat Lola (our dog) -- sometimes she is another dinosaur, sometimes she is a plant, sometimes a dinosaur egg or an insect.
posted evening of February 14th, 2004: Respond
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Sunday, December 28th, 2003
A weird montage of images in my head. I was talking to Jim, asking him which Hudson River crossing he thought would be best to use when I drive north tomorrow; he did not have much to say on the subject so I included Carl in the conversation. Carl thought GWB was the way to go before 8 in the morning. We decided to fly over the route in his plane. (This part of the dream memory is extremely vague -- there needs to be some transition to the next image.) Now we are sitting in Carl's plane looking at the freeway system, looks like a very big map. And now somehow, we are eating in a restaurant in NYC, a very expensive restaurant where everything is going wrong. Transition to a restaurant-kitchen setting of a sitcom, where the chef (very fat Andrew, who was in my class at Natural Gourmet) is not able to control the kitchen staff and relies instead on the maitre d'hote, a short, thin black man who is overly fond of liverwurst, to keep things going. The maitre d' is on vacation (in Vienna, looking for the perfect liverwurst) and things are falling apart. Sylvia told me the nature of her dream when she woke up this morning -- "There was a dinosaur movie called, called 'Dinosaur Planet'. It had a scary part and parts that were not scary" -- but would give no more detail.
posted morning of December 28th, 2003: Respond
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Wednesday, November 19th, 2003
Sylvia has mastered (well she is working on it) the art of clicking links. We are over at PBS Kids right now and she is clicking merrily thru the Clifford stories -- and remembering what links do what, too.
posted evening of November 19th, 2003: Respond
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Sunday, November second, 2003
I took Sylvia and Natalie to the playground today, so as to give Ellen and Lorrain (Natailie's mother) both some time off. The first interaction at the park forebode some trouble; a little boy named (as it turned out) Mikhail was tagging along fairly close behind them when Natalie said, "You can't play with us." Sylvia picked up on that and started getting in Mikhail's face, yelling "You can't play with us!" over and over until he started crying, which he did just as the two girls ran off to the next thing. Well after a bit of chasing around I got them both in hand and walked them back over to apologize and say he could play with them -- I couldn't tell whether Natalie actually did apologize but Sylvia did, in a rather breezy way -- Mikhail cheered right up and the three of them had a pretty good time playing together for about half an hour. Later on, on the way back home, they were reading stories to each other. Sylvia was reading from "Polar Bear, Polar Bear, what do you hear?" -- this is a book where the question is asked of lots of zoo animals and each of them responds with the next animal and its characteristic noise -- then they all turn out to be kids imitating zoo animals -- it is by Eric Carle, Mr. Very-Hungry-Caterpillar. When Sylvia got to the hippo, she read "Hippopotamus, hippopotamus, what do you hear? I hear a... T. Rex!" Natalie: "No!... That's not a T. Rex!... That's a zebra!" Back and forth for a minute as to whether it is or is not a T. Rex; at last Sylvia says, "I call it a T. Rex." -- for which she adopts a particular, very cute, dramatic tone of voice.
posted evening of November second, 2003: Respond
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Saturday, October 25th, 2003
And another family picture album entry:
posted evening of October 25th, 2003: Respond
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Wednesday, September 24th, 2003
Added a new page to our family album:
posted evening of September 24th, 2003: Respond
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Sunday, September 21st, 2003
sylvia is helping me write this post -- the first she has helped with; and she typed all the letters of her name in the first word of the post. Today was Sylvia's birthday party, with a Clifford theme. All of her friends from her playgroup came, plus some cousins and other assorted friends. Clifford came to say hi to the kids and take pictures together -- this was Sylvia's birthday present from Ellen's friend Shelley. As I was driving Gary and Suzie to the train station after the party, I reflected that it was about the most ambitious party Ellen and I have ever thrown, at least since our wedding. A good time was had by all and the weather was beautiful. More typing from Sylvia: big reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeedddddddddddddddddddddddddd dddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddooooooooooooooooooooofgg (Sylvia digs the autorepeat feature of the computer's keyboard.)
posted evening of September 21st, 2003: Respond
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Sunday, September 7th, 2003
A very productive weekend... The window seat frame is installed; the seat would be on except I found out home depot does not carry the plywood I am looking for. There is a lumber yard in Union which I will try next Saturday. Mike R. came over Friday to help me with the baseboard and the electrical outlet, which I wanted to move to the front of the seat; but the baseboard proved impossible to remove from the wall. So I left it in place and put the frame in front of it. The molding has changed a lot; rather than a crown molding I have decided to use a window apron molding, which is more natural in the context and will fit in nicely with the window aprons behind the seat. I will be building it out of 6 pieces of wood and it may not be ready immediately. We had a really nice jam session this afternoon, playing about 8 songs which is about double what we normally get to, and they were a lot of fun. With Jim, I came up with a new arrangement of House of the Rising Sun which really sounds like a distinctively new sound for that song, riffing on Dylan's version but quite different. Sylvia came (of her own accord) and stayed for about two hours of jamming -- quite breathtaking to me since we were not changing our jam much at all to accomodate her in it. (Before it started, Greg saw a hawk eating a squirrel in the lower branches of a tree on the property 3 doors down from Bob's place, so we went down there to watch it for 15 minutes.) Afterwards we had a cookout, for which Sylvia came back to join us.
posted evening of September 7th, 2003: Respond
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