face time

The bambini love calling family members via FaceTime on our gadgets that support the application.  It's a bit like The Muppet Show while we are waiting for the call to connect, with much jostling and jockeying for that front and center spot, as well as some last minute reminders hissed by the director (that'd be me) to "modulate your voices" (as Grannie would say) so that the people on the receiving end can hear what we're saying. 

Being able to connect with our loved ones by seeing their faces and hearing their voices in real time is an amazing boon, one of the biggest advantages of our present-day technology.  When we can't be in the same room with our friends and loved ones, we can still see and hear them.  It's not quite the same as being able to reach out and hug them, but we'll take it!

In this world with so many ways of communicating, there is still no substitute for time spent together face to face.  Phone calls keep voices fresh in our minds; and letters, e-mail, texting, and social media are better than nothing, but each of these media have their limitations.  We can only infer the intentions with which people write to us; we can't hear their tone of voice or see their facial expressions.  As the messages get shorter, such as in texting, there is ample room for misunderstandings to arise from such short snippets and exchanges.  While they are useful for a variety of things, they certainly can't be the primary means of communication between two people, and there are many situations for which these modes of communication are simply inappropriate.

Then there is the time factor.  It's difficult to have meaningful conversations when time is limited, conditions are noisy, or gadgets are involved.  When there is only time for exchanging pleasantries, how can any real relationship be cultivated or maintained?

While the tools at our disposal continue to evolve in capability, they cannot intuit the meaning of a human heart and convey that to another.   Only we can do that for ourselves, and the best way to accomplish that is face to face.  Until we can visit in person, we'll make use of the array of technological tools made to keep us in touch, always preferring actual face time to its virtual counterpart.

mama girl

Remember old school the first generation of Camcorders?  We had one like this when I was a wee lass.  My dad video-ed everything from a trip to Epcot to the annual family Fourth of July trip to Grannie's lake house.  He was a master of the "action shot" as well as a skilled editor, knitting the footage into a true "home movie" complete with synchronized soundtrack.

He also filmed "Bonnie's Sleepytime Stories Club," featuring a girl missing a few teeth dressed in her jammies reading The Berenstain Bears And Too Much TV (note the irony), then pretty much hot off the presses, reading a bedtime story to an imaginary audience and making sure they could see the pictures (like someone else we know).

Many years after its filming, the short video has been transferred to DVD, and found its way into the player this afternoon for a two-year-old lass who likes to read herself.

"Who that girl, Mama?" she wanted to know.

 "That's me when I was a little girl,"  I told her.  This was a surprise. 

When one of the brothers wandered into the room and noticed the young girl with the bangs and incredulous expressions, he knew who it was.  The lass still told him.

"Mama girl," she said.
That's me.

movie night

We don't watch a lot of movies around here, but we have begun having "movie night" with the bambini on occasion.  I make some popcorn (on the stove, of course), and they all snuggle up together for the show.

Family movie night favorites include the 2008 feature Horton Hears A Who!, the Curious George movie from 2006 and the sequel from 2009, Mary Poppins, and the 2003 TV remake of The Music Man with Matthew Broderick.

Tonight's feature presentation will be Cars, a perennial family favorite that always takes me back to when the lads were about as little as the lasses are now.  They were enthralled by all the action and we enjoyed all the witty banter.  The concession stand will be serving my new favorite pancake recipe.  I'm sure the lass will be all about "helping," as she is quite the little kitchen maven these days.

Often enough to be a fledgling family tradition but not so often such that the novelty has worn off, movie night makes for good snuggling and fun times together.

signs of the times

I talk with my hands.  It's just me.  Not quite conductor-like, but still ... illustrative.  I also love to study languages and etymology, so when we were expecting the elder lad and I was doing all manner of reading about baby care and development, the idea of learning sign language as a way of communicating with the babe resonated with me as something I could reasonably take on.  I'd had friends who'd taken sign language classes as part of their baby preparations, so I looked into them around town.  I was anxious to get crackin' before the baby was born, but the organizers of the classes recommended I wait until the baby was six or so months old until I enrolled.  By then they weren't offering the classes anymore. 

(I did eventually find a class for us after we had already built up a decent vocabulary of signs.  The teacher and I struck up a friendship that continues today.)

Enter the book Baby Signs and the Signing Time DVD series.  I pored over the book and learned some basic signs that my beloved and I started using every time we'd use the corresponding spoken word -- signs for book, diaper, nurse, car, various food and animals, and so forth.  The Signing Time  DVD series was one of the few shows that held the elder lad's interest as a toddler, and I suspect it might have something to do with the rapid development of his vocabulary.  Now the videos are high on the list of requests from the younger lad and two-year-old lass.

With each addition to our family, we've gotten out the Signing Time videos and brushed up on our signs.   The older siblings seem to relish teaching the younger siblings new signs.  Having a way for the pre-verbal set to communicate their thoughts to us has been an invaluable aid to us in caring for them.  As toddlers, the bambini used signs along with spoken words, signing as they spoke (which is what we did, too -- it was just habit).

Using signs in lieu of words comes in handy in many settings, such as in quiet places, as we're waving good-bye and "I love you" to my beloved and the elder lad on a school morning, or when we're trying to practice alternatives to shouting.

The younger lass is reaching the age now where she is obviously understanding many concepts and making connections between words and objects or people.  It's the perfect time to get back in the habit of signing as we speak to her.  With any luck we'll soon know what's on her mind, and see what she has to say...

my Peanuts gang

We checked out A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving from the library again this year.  Beyond the lovable absurdity of a Thanksgiving dinner consisting of popcorn, toast, and jelly beans, the lads are loving the personality quirks that define each of the Peanuts kids.  The younger lad gets to giggling each time Marcie calls Peppermint Patty "sir."  The elder lad likes how Peppermint Patty addresses Charlie Brown as "Chuck."  Hearing the bambini's laughter has been my favorite part of watching this classic animated TV show.

I've long been a fan of the Peanuts gang -- Schroeder being my favorite (with his ever-present piano, of course).  Sometimes I like to match up the fictional characters with my real life cast of characters.  No one is an exact match -- except maybe for me.

Who am I?  The teacher, of course.  The abstruse sound of her voice was (according to this) created by a trombone with a plunger as a mute.  I can relate.  O the sheer glee the lads would express during attempts to recreate her mellifluous sounds in the comfort of our own home...

stormy weather

Stormy weather is a fact of life in our part of the country this time of year.  In the past week or so we've had some "wicked weather" around us, but -- thankfully -- we have been spared any damage.  Last night we had some excitement with tornado sirens and severe thunderstorms just as we were readying the bambini for bed.  Stories were ready in the bathroom rather than the bedroom until we were able to ascertain that it was safe to come out of our "safe place."

Being on heightened alert for severe weather gets everyone's adrenaline going for sure, especially when we leave the continuous TV coverage going.  For this reason, we don't leave it on.  We listen to the radio and check the radar online, and watch only limited TV coverage as necessary. 

Trying to assuage the bambini's fears (and manage our own) in the face of potential tornadoes can be very difficult, as we don't want to gloss over the seriousness of the situation, but neither do we want to cause undue alarm and stress over something we can't control.  This can be especially frightening for the bambini, and we try to temper it by being truthful about the need to take reasonable precautions but the relative unlikelihood that something terrible will happen to us.  We pray and snuggle and try to maintain our routine as best we can.

Thankfully, the storms subsided in time for regular bedtime, and everyone got a decent night's sleep.  The lads were up early this morning, and a little out of sorts, but that might be owing to the busy week we're having with a school field trip yesterday, preschool graduation today, and lots of stormy (but not severe) weather all week.

We pray for those who've been injured or even killed in the recent storms, and give thanks for the shelter and safety with which we've been blessed.  Whether the storms are literal or figurative, our trust is in the same Source of strength...

media savvy (selectively)

Bedtime rolls around and the lads are getting testy with each other.  The elder one makes a menacing move toward the younger one.  Seeing this, my beloved says, "Be kind.  Rewind."

And then he and I have a good laugh about that one, as these bambini have no idea what that means.  Our VCR is stashed upstairs somewhere.  They did unearth a box of VHS tapes recently, but they didn't know what the funny objects were.   We used to tape episodes of Curious George on PBS as recently as two years ago on our VCR, but the elder lad wasn't even three then and wasn't hip to the medium used to record his favorite show.

This whole business of rewinding a rented movie before returning it is so entirely foreign to our bambini.   We used to have an online movie-rental subscription but let it lapse when the one movie we'd have checked out would sit for weeks upon weeks awaiting viewing, only to finally be sent back unwatched. And even those movies were on DVD, not VHS tapes (we won't even get into Beta tapes, which I remember vividly from my childhood).

These days both lads can operate the DVD player with ease -- at least selecting which one they want to watch from among a small list of approved fare (most with the words Curious George or Mighty Machines in the title) and loading or unloading the player as necessary. The elder lad knows to press "play", though with our set-up there is usually some fiddling of settings to be done which allows for parental intervention and squelches unauthorized viewing.  We're not "no TV", but it's not on all that much, and when it is, we are rarely watching it live and can thus skip commercials.

The relevance of a phrase like "be kind -- rewind."  in the media sense might be lost on these bambini, but it's actually full of virtue -- those of self-control and respect for others.  Its succinct delivery might just get through to them.  Mama can only hope, anyway...