feldman

The infant previously known as CMonkey will be seven in August, and having outgrown the name, I have yet to think of a suitable replacement nom de guerre. For now, let's just use Kiddo. Like Beatrix Kiddo at the end of Kill Bill, I am constantly, charmingly, devastatingly put on my back foot with this person who is my daughter. How did she happen? Unlike Beatrix, I was there the whole time, and I still have no idea how this miracle on two legs occurred.

On Monday alone we ordered her first pair of glasses, replaced her tiny two-wheeler with a regular kid-sized bike, and played tooth fairy for her second top incisor. The glasses are just enough to need for seeing the blackboard or having a movie be really crisp, but if she spends a lot of time outside playing without them, she may grow out of needing anything at all. Considering she's the child of a few generations of mole-people and astigmatics, I kind of feel a bit like Steve Roger's mother--holy shit, she could have *normal vision*?! Hell, I wear my glasses in the shower.

I told her last month that I used to hold her hand because I wanted to keep her safe, but now I hold her hand just because I really like to, and I know one day she won't want to hold my hand when we're out and about. She assured me that she'll always want to hold my hand.

I know this isn't true, but it makes me happy that it's still too far away for her to imagine.

In the first full week of summer vacation we've done three of the experiments in her Glow in the Dark Chemistry Set, and even written up the results of one after we discussed what probably went wrong and what we could do: "June 30th Hard Rock Candy didn't work very well. Because it was humid. Try again in fall. Heray!"

Last week she had to crawl out of a bathroom stall because the lock jammed, and an hour later she turned to me and said, "I'm angry. I can't think of any reason why, but I'm really angry." Then a few minutes later, "Maybe I'm angry about that lock not working. That could be it. I was scared then, but now I'm just angry."

She writes and draws comics, like the two part story of The Teeny Tiny Man ("Find out more on the next book, the teeny tiny man and the voise!")

The other day she spent ten minutes explaining to me her theory that rain is as invisible as it can be, though it can't be entirely invisible, because it exists. For example, if you fill your mouth with air and tighten your cheeks, you can tell that air exists even though you can't see it. And things can be really close to invisible without getting there; in the same way that numbers also keep going, but at the other end.

Here's something they don't teach you in driver's ed: how to keep your eyes on the road as your not-yet-second-grader tries to describe the concept of asymptotic functions. And that if transparent gas occupies space, then everything that exists does, and so nothing can be completely invisible even if we can't see it with our eyes.

Right now we're watching Spongebob Squarepants. She contains multitudes.