Light and Momentary

Lemonade Renegades

This last week it was just Pete and Stella and me. Pete asked me every day, sometimes umpty-eleven times a day, if I'd help him make a lemonade stand. Later, I said. Wait until Joe gets back home. I can't stay with you at a lemonade stand because Stella takes too much chasing. There's not enough traffic at our house and around the corner there's too much traffic for you to be alone. Later.

Thirty minutes later: "Mama, when can I make a lemonade stand?"

I emailed my pal Jenny who lives around the corner and asked if her kids, lemonade stand veterans, could help us out. Sure, she said. How about Friday?

On Friday they lugged their stuff out to the corner and started setting up. The lady from the house at the corner came zooming out. You kids get off my lawn, she said. The last time you were here you left a big mess.

It wasn't us, the kids asserted. It was Michael, from down the block. We don't leave a mess.

They started packing up anyway, until their dad came out and asked them why. He said, "You're not on her lawn. The sidewalk is not her property. You kids can stay here with your lemonade stand."

Shortly afterward -- brace yourselves -- the cops showed up. They stepped out of the squad car and sauntered over to the lemonade stand. Pete (this part breaks my heart) started to cry: he thought the cops had come to arrest them all and take them away. Jenny's boy Jack, who is Pete's friend even though they are almost five years apart, tried to comfort him.

Mercifully, Jenny's husband was still there. The cops said, "We've had a complaint that these kids have been leaving styrofoam cups all over the place." Inadvertently, the neighbor had given the kids some ammunition. "Styrofoam!" they exclaimed. "We NEVER use styrofoam cups. We haven't used styrofoam cups in FOUR YEARS of lemonade stands."

They waved their recyclable plastic cups around. They offered the cops a free sample. The cops declined, pleasantly, and grumbled briefly about having been called out to deal with a perfectly legal lemonade stand run by polite responsible kids.

Pete stopped crying. Jenny's kids told him he could keep all the proceeds. He came home with the money clenched in his little fist, feeling proud and  a little bit braver. We had a chat about the limits of police power, and the reality that 6-year-old boys don't generally have to worry about being arrested and taken away.

I am still thinking, DANG! Who calls the cops on a lemonade stand?

Seven Quick Takes: Cute Toddler Edition

1. Last night the boys and Elwood were walking downtown to see a movie and Stella thought we should tag along. She was disappointed when they got ahead of us, until I asked if she'd like to go for ice cream. "Ox weem!" she exclaimed. "I wuff ox weem."


2. I could eat her up with a spoon sometimes.


3. On the way home we played Scary Dinosaur. She would growl and shout "Somp! Somp!" while stamping her little feet in their flowered sandals. This was my cue to wave my hands and shriek "Oh no! It's a terrible dinosaur." I would run down the bike trail ahead of her until she stopped growling and said "Eek!" "Eek" means it's time to switch places so she can be the scare-ee.


4. Sometimes she wakes in the night crying and tells me she's sad about a scary monster. I wonder where that comes from? I'm not sure where she's been seeing scary monsters.


5. She is like a lot of toddlers in her eagerness to assert possession. She'll routinely let us know that something is hers. Instead of saying "mine!" she shouts "mine's!" It makes sense, if you're hearing "yours" and "hers" and "ours," to give "mines" a whirl. It makes me smile, though, to hear that improvised double possessive -- like it's not just hers, it's reallyreallyreally hers.


6. A few days ago I was reading some old posts and came across this one where I wrote about Joe. He's my explorer, I said, and described his spontaneous visit to the neighbors at just-barely-three. Stella has an explorer streak herself. Yesterday I sent the two of them outside together, thinking they'd play ball in the yard for a few minutes. When I sent Alex out to relieve Joe, they were nowhere in sight. She had led him down to the school playground, half a mile away. I am having a little adrenaline surge remembering it. (The three of us had a talk about the capital-I Importance of telling mama before you leave the block. I love it that our kids feel comfortable navigating the neighborhood on foot, but yikes.)


7. I took Stella with me to campus today because I thought she'd be happier that way, playing at the house where she stayed on Fridays during the school year instead of staying home with a fairly new babysitter. She had forgotten, though, that it takes an hour to get to Theresa's house. About two-thirds of the way there she asked to nurse. "Siddamidda," she said emphatically. "Siddamidda?" I echoed, baffled. "Yes!" she answered, pleased that I'd understood so quickly. "Sid-a-mid-a," I repeated slowly, and then the light dawned: sit in the middle. "Darling," I said, "who will drive the car if I sit in the middle?"
   
   She was indignant. "Come on, Mom," I could see her thinking, "why are you bothering me with details? Make it so!" That's one of my favorite things about toddlers, that certainty that mom can make the magic happen. Having a teenager at the same time makes it clear that it's an evanescent certainty. I'll enjoy it while it lasts.

More quick takes here.

Copious grace in speaking

Guest lecture tomorrow morning for the associate chair of the department in town where I'd love to work someday. Prayers appreciated.

Voices

I took my oldest son to the doctor last month for his Scout physical. He's 5'9" now, three inches taller than me. The growth that keeps taking me by surprise is invisible, though: his larynx is bigger than mine.

Your larynx sits right on top of your trachea. Its primary purpose is to protect your airway, but as a lovely bonus God designed the system so we can also use it to talk and laugh and sing and yodel. (Well, maybe God didn't intend that last one. Was there yodeling before the Fall? I am skeptical, personally.)

When you want to say something you bring your vocal folds together and push air through them. They pulse rapidly, creating a buzzing tone that you shape with your throat and tongue and teeth and lips. (And velum. The velum is the most unappreciated articulator, even though it is largely responsible for keeping you from sounding whiny and nasal.)

The size of your larynx plays a key role in the pitch of your voice, because more mass in the vocal folds = fewer pulses per second. An average man's vocal folds might vibrate 120 times per second, meaning his voice will fall about an octave below middle C. An average woman's vocal folds will vibrate about twice that fast, giving her a voice roughly an octave higher. My voice is pitched a smidge higher than usual, at about the E above middle C. (You can hear me talking at the beginning of the video embedded here if you're curious. I don't walk around talking like Glinda the Good or anything.)

So I am used to my son's big pre-man feet, and I accept that he's taller than me forevermore. But his voice keeps throwing me for a loop. I keep turning around and thinking, "Who's that MAN in my house? Why is there a MAN in here?" And then I think, "...whoa, that's my son with that big manly voice."

Tonight in the van I was trying to estimate his fundamental frequency (I bet you wish your mom was a speech pathologist too!), humming along as he spoke. I'd put it at about the G below middle C -- not so terribly low, but unmistakably different from his brothers' voices.

I know it will just keep dropping as he matures, since one of the effects of androgens is to enlarge the larynx. You can measure growth with pencil marks on the wall, sure, but you can also measure it with a descending scale on the piano.

Tonight I was imagining a future in which all of my boys will go tripping down that scale, and it left me a little wistful. I'm going to hold onto my memories of our drive tonight -- of my firstborn and my baby talking together, her chirping soprano interweaving with his beginner baritone.

All Work and Not Much Play

I have been a busy bee lately, my friends. It's been the busiest six weeks or so of the 9+ months that I've had this job. My revised article was due last month, and I've been analyzing data for a conference presentation this weekend, and I'm trying to get my dissertation manuscript submitted by June 24. Next week I'm guest-lecturing for the associate head of the department in town where I hope to get a job someday, so I'd love to knock it out of the park.

I'm not complaining -- it's all stuff I've chosen to do, projects I'm excited about. Still, I'll be glad when the 24th rolls around and life quiets down again. I have a half-dozen partially written posts kicking around in my head, and I know that sometimes the best way to get blogging again is to toss off a hasty post.

This is a picture that's been puzzling me: it shows kids' use of perfect aspect (log-transformed density values on the x axis, proportion of the sample on the y axis). What it's saying is that kids either like perfect or they hate it -- either they sprinkle their language samples with "I'd been wondering" and "she's been grumpy lately" or else they never use those structures at all. I've been trying to figure out why. Perfect aspect is more common in books than in spoken language, so I've been poking around in the database to get a fix on family reading culture -- nothing there. I've been looking at parental education, which is weakly predictive but not significantly so. And I've been looking separately at the kids with language troubles, thinking they might prefer simpler forms. Even there, the distribution is bimodal: they use fewer perfect forms, but some of them have a few and some have zero. I'm scratching my head, but it's a fun kind of puzzle. Any ideas?

Department of First World Problems

Each week we have a box of organic produce and two dozen local free-range eggs delivered to our door. It makes me happy. The business is run by a good friend of ours, and it's a more affordable way to obtain organic produce than paying grocery store prices. But a couple of weeks ago I noticed something weird about the eggs. I called him and said, "For about half of them, it's like they've been hit briefly with an inside-the-eggshell scrambler. I'm wondering if they're fertile eggs that are starting to develop or something." He said, "Yeah, these small farmers aren't candling their eggs."

Now I don't mind eating an occasional fertile egg. But this morning I cracked an egg into a little dish instead of directly into the skillet, so I could get a good look at it. Alas, it looked back. There was a little embryo in my dish, apparently about 4 days along. It had a tiny beak.

I don't want any beaks in my breakfast, thanks.

I like supporting small local farmers, and I've mostly been delighted with the quality of their products. When we do occasionally buy mass-produced eggs, the difference is clear. But something has gone wrong with their quality control in the past few weeks, and I am feeling very squeamish. If the embryos are incubating for four days before the eggs are collected, what about the bacteria on the shell?

Part of the issue is food safety-- one reason I've been willing to pay the price for these eggs is that I thought they were less likely to be contaminated with salmonella and other nasties. Now I'm not so sure. Part of the issue, though, is first-world detachment from the reality of food production. Guess what, Jamie? Eggs come out of chicken butts. (You can call it a cloaca if you want, but we all know it's really a butt.) The chicken you eat so blithely and so often originated in an egg, with a tiny beak and an outsized eye just like the ones that put in an unwelcome appearance this morning.

When I was 15 I met a Native American man who commented on our unwillingness to see the story behind meat. "In my culture," he said, "at the table we say 'Pass the dead cow, please.' It's our way of acknowledging that the cow gave its life for us to have food." It made me so uncomfortable that I burst out laughing. I thought I'd grown up a bit since then, but maybe not.

We might have tofu for dinner. With some nice oat milk on the side.