Not long ago it was an anti-drug week at Erika's elementary school. Every day of the week the students were supposed to make an anti-drug statement with visual aids, including their clothes. What, you ask, were they told to stop wearing gang attributes to school? Even their hemp-promoting t-shirts? Nooo. They were supposed to wear mismatched socks ( Read more... )

This must be the season when American students learn about the first Thanksgiving, and pilgrims, or the first immigrants. First-graders might not necessarily know the difference between pilgrimage and immigration, because my daughter asked me if I was a pilgrim. Ancient as I might seem to the youngest generation, I'm not that old!


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This isn't a comprehensive update on Erika -- that would be the sum total of my tweets about her, since tweets capture the things that go through her head better than anything. Maybe I should consolidate them into one post and put them up here. Anyway, Erika is now six. She turned six on the day of my parents' arrival (my dad was here too for a ( Read more... )

I posted some of her "pearls" on Facebook and Twitter over the last few months, but here they are in aggregate ( Read more... )

Erika understands quite a bit of Lithuanian, though she speaks very little; since I'm the only one who speaks to her in this language, I have no illusion that she'll ever be motivated to learn to speak it fluently. She's swimming in the sea of English, and has no practical need for other languages ( Read more... )

My little girl turned 5 a week ago. I am amazed how eager she is to read and write. She does both things all the time, spontaneously and with no prompting on my part. She reads all the signs in sight, and scribbles little one-sentence "stories" about princesses, girls, mothers and sisters, as well as her day care friends. She can't yet spell words ( Read more... )

As I already said on Twitter, my not-yet-5-year-old Erika had announced, out of the blue: "God created the world". She uttered this in the car, while I was driving with the radio on. So I had to turn down the volume, and ask her to repeat several times until I understood what she said -- it was so unexpected I couldn't even parse it immediately. By ( Read more... )

Erika has a CD of Christmas songs for children, a gift from Steve's mom. After "Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer", her next favorite is "Rise up, shepherd, and follow", a religious hymn. I was wondering when the day will come when she'll wonder about what the shepherd is supposed to follow, and why. It has come: today Erika told me that the shepherds ( Read more... )

A while ago my 4-year-old Erika asked me about death. She already knows that everybody dies, and that most people die when they are old. She asked me if she was going to die too, when she's very old. "Yes," I said. She got grumpy. "I don't want to die! I don't want to close my eyes!" (Apparently, like most people, she equates death with sleep ( Read more... )

Erika went trick-or-treating for the first time last night, and so did I (I did not grow up with Hallowen traditions). We went with several parents and their children in Cedar Park. We made a trip around a block, and that took us one hour. We only knocked on the doors of the houses that had their porch light on -- that was 1/3rd to one half of the ( Read more... )