I wasn’t feeling patriotic yesterday until I dialed my radio to NPR and listened to their Independence Day coverage. Then I reacted like an angry WASP.
The Blue Devils are performing at the Rose Bowl. Next up? Fireworks!
There’s a DCI expo before the Rose Bowl program. These bands are good.
Phew… almost midnight. Made it safely through another Ides of March.
Oh, the Ides of March. The one day of the year when your best friend has society’s permission to stab you to death.
Joy and I were playing with her blocks next to the Christmas tree. Actually, they’re spotless dominoes and some big wooden pieces. After we toppled some lines and built some simple towers, I decided to move on to the big one. In the domino collection, there are several T-braces made from a dowel and a flat platform, which are useful somehow for making extravagant domino lines. I re-purposed these for my balancing act. Because of her tendency to flail her arms about when she’s excited, Joy pretty much sat this one out, but she does enjoy being a “big help” by handing me dominoes in specific colors. Her handiwork is evident in the matching dominoes at each joint.
Yelling to Patrick to tell him to run and fetch his camera, I managed to keep Joy away from the tower until I could snap a photo. I let her knock the tower down, hoping to capture the fall with the flash, but the batteries were too low and the flash had yet to charge. I was tired of playing blocks, but I decided against having her pick them up from the floor because I wanted to avoid twenty minutes of Joy methodically putting away the pieces one by one. Her attentiveness to color and shape is one of her more endearing quirks. When she puts away her blocks into their sack, she stows the blue pieces first, then the red, then the green, and lastly the yellow and colorless ones. If we try to put the wrong color away, she snatches it back out. The same applies to picking up the shapes in her tangram box. The squares are collected, then the diamonds, and so on and so forth. A pox on you if you put away the triangles before the squares.
Her attention to detail shows in her drawing style as well. Instead of scribbling with pencils and pens, Joy makes tiny little lines one after another, like pickets in a fence without crosspieces. I think she’s imitating our handwriting, since printed letters do stand closely alongside one another but rarely touch. When she does doodle, the pictures are usually less than an inch square, and sometimes they are even smaller. In her hands, crayons are a pointillism tool, and long lines are reserved for emphasis. I think it may be too soon to tell if these quirks will develop into a passion for art or engineering. Until she grows into her abilities, I am content to enjoy watching Joy put on her serious face and pick up dominoes one by one by one.
