Category: Danielle

We had one of those totally gorgeous Saturdays. About 80, sunny, no humidity, nice breeze. Perfect. So I took Danielle to check out the new pool in our neighborhood.

New York is a funny city in that its waterfront property isn’t optimized for recreation. The city was built on commerce and much of the waterfront property is for shipping, etc. But that has really started to change lately. The entire west side of Manhattan is now a bike path with park areas.

The latest effort is to create a big park in Brooklyn near the Brooklyn Bridge (our neighborhood). When it gets finished it will be awesome. As an experiment, the city floated in a barge with a pool on it. It’s The Floating Pool.

It’s free, but they control the amount of people who can go in. You get a wristband for an hour slot in the pool. If you have to wait, they have built a big beach there. There are concessions stands and it’s very nice.

When it’s your turn, everyone lines up and heads in. It’s very nice. The whole thing is brand new (the barge isn’t, but the contents are). There’s a big Olympic size pool. They have two lanes reserved for lap swim and the rest is for recreation. The whole pool is 4 feet deep. There are nice locker rooms, showers, etc. You have views of the lower Manhattan skyline, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Statue of Liberty. It isn’t very crowded. It’s pretty nice.

We’ll be back…

It’s very interesting trying to demonstrate past tense to a four year old. Time in general is an interesting concept for a four year old (four days from now and twenty days from now are pretty much the same). Sometime you use a verb in the past tense and our daughter will say, “what does x mean?”. Explaining it just doesn’t work. So you just keep using the words correctly, assuming that eventually it will wear off. Let’s face it, most people don’t know grammar rules well, they generally say things correctly because it sounds right.

Tonight I had the best example. We were talking about what she wore this morning. So she asks what “wore” is. So I try to say that “wore” is the same as “wear” but when it already happened.

Danielle immediately says, “no, wore means when a doll wears one of your socks. My friend Jesse told me so”.

How can you argue with that?. After all, Jesse is five…

Today was the final visit in our daughter’s dentist saga. All I can say is make sure you get your kids to real kids dentists when they are 2 years old. Because this just wasn’t any fun.

Danielle had already been to the dentist a couple of times for minor cavities. She can actually handle it, but as a four year old she’s reached the point where she knows what’s coming and doesn’t want it. This is the hard part about young kids and dentists. Reasoning doesn’t work that well. And the whole concept of delayed gratification (or even more abstract, delayed lack of pain) just doesn’t work with a four year old’s sense of time.

So the final cavity (the worst one) was a struggle. She just didn’t want to sit still. The whole “if you don’t sit still it will take longer and hurt more” argument just doesn’t work. So I basically spent an hour sitting with her on the dentist chair, holding her hands and leaning over her legs so she couldn’t kick anyone. It was torture.

There’s that plastic thing that they put around the tooth that they are working on these days (they didn’t do that when I was a kid). I think it helps keep the tongue out of the way. Danielle completely knocked it out. You want to get mad at her because she’s causing more problems, but then you remember that she’s just four. The whole thing could have been over in 20 minutes if she just sat still, but that just wasn’t happening.

At the end, they usually give the kid stickers, a balloon, whatever. This time the dentist gave me a medal for holding her down. The dentist told me I deserved a double martini (I’m more of a beer guy, but I appreciated the thought).

Our daughter has one very annoying trait. When she eats, she can hold the food in her mouth for a ridiculous amount of time. It’s almost as though she forgets the food is there. Some of this is our fault because my wife and I both work, so our schedules are crazy and we don’t have regular sit down family meals. We are often feeding Danielle by herself and so we often let her do something else while she’s eating.

But honestly, it just seems gross to be holding food in your mouth that long. Meals are the primary source of stress between me and my daughter, simply because I spend most of the time saying “Danielle, chew your food” or “swallow, please”. It’s just crazy.

This has just been an annoyance for the most part. Every child has some crazy trait so we just figured this was Danielle’s. She is, for the most part, a fun, sweet, wonderful child.

Unfortunately we’ve recently discovered that her eating habits have dental implications. She doesn’t do many sweets and she’s good about brushing. But ultimately she’s holding food in her mouth for a couple hours a day. Not good for the teeth.

So she has a couple of cavities. At four. That’s just wrong. And we’re bad parents because we didn’t get her to a children’s dentist early enough. She saw my dentist at 2 and at 3 but he’s an adult dentist and really didn’t ask the right questions.

So today I took her to have a cavity filled. No fun. She was pretty much a trooper all things considered. She did cry during the Novocain injection (they don’t like laughing gas at 4 because kids that young tend to knock the mask off – so the gas ends up in the air and you end up with a loopy dentist). And she was nervous and had to hold both my hands during the whole procedure (think about getting a filling from a four year old perspective – it’s quite terrifying).

The part where she was the least nervous was actually the drilling part. She didn’t know what was happening (children’s dentists are good at hiding the equipment) and the sound was actually interesting to her. And it clearly didn’t hurt. And the part where they bake on the filling was fascinating (the thing puts out a blue light and the dentist gave Danielle a mirror to watch it). And she got stickers at the end so that was a big plus (I don’t recall stickers being such a big deal when I was a kid – to Danielle they are awesome).

The whole being numb part afterwards was also strange. The dentist warned us that four year olds have no concept of being numb and sure enough an hour later she was complaining that her lips and tongue “hurt”. They didn’t really hurt but they felt so weird that she had no other way of explaining it (and she didn’t like it).

Overall it went as well as could be expected. They only do one cavity at a time at this age so we have to go back for the other one next week. At least she’ll have a clue what to expect this time.

My last post talked about a very enjoyable trip to the circus. I left out the end of the story.

Following the circus we came home and fed Danielle a late lunch. She then had her gymnastics class. We took our nanny and her daughter with us to the circus, so she took Danielle to gymnastics. This allowed my wife and I to have a rare adult dinner. OK, it was at 4:30 in the afternoon, but you take what you can get.

We have a drink and our appetizers in a remarkably empty restaurant (just finding a place that’s open at 4:30 is a challenge). And then the phone rings. Danielle fell in gymnastics and hasn’t stopped crying.

The emergency room was a short sprint from the restaurant. Unfortunately it was mobbed so we had to wait a very long time. Danielle fell asleep on my lap for a while. We waited some more. Finally they saw Danielle. A mild fracture in her right arm, just above the elbow. But they wanted an orthopedic specialist to see her. Unfortunately he had just gone into surgery. So we waited some more. And some more.

About 11:00, we finally see the specialist. He puts her in a plaster splint and a sling. At this point it’s about 3 1/2 hours past Danielle’s bedtime. Remarkably she’s still hanging in there (the nap must have helped).

At this point it seems like about a week ago that we were sitting in a restaurant having an adult meal. Oh well, it’s part of growing up, right?

Danielle has been a trooper with her cast and sling. Here she is in her PJs (no sling at night).

After one week she got upgraded to a full cast (it’s blue) and she doesn’t have to wear the sling. Young bones heal fast so she only needs to wear it for two more weeks. Bathing is an adventure but otherwise she’s doing great.

We recently took Danielle to see Ringling Bros. Barnum and Bailey Circus. It was her first time seeing the circus and the first time I’d been to the circus since I worked for Ringling Bros.

For those who don’t know me well, I was a professional trumpet player prior to CS STARS and I worked for Ringling Bros. for about 9 months. Seeing the circus did give me flashbacks, particularly during the tiger act. I hated the tiger act as a trumpet player. Not that there’s anything wrong with tiger acts, but the next time you are at the circus, listen to what the band is doing during the animal acts.

The band simply loops through whatever music they happen to be playing for the act. Over and over. Endlessly. Because, obviously, you don’t know exactly when the animal will do the trick. Tigers are especially unpredictable (i.e. slow). The bandleader is watching the tiger, the band is watching the bandleader. When the stupid animal graceful creature finally does the trick the bandleader cues the band to do a “ta-da”. And then back to the endless loop for the next trick. Tigers can make a trumpet players lips fall off. The circus is a particularly grueling gig for brass players. We typically iced our lips after the show.

I was with the circus during a tour of Japan. That was very interesting. The ringmaster did not speak Japanese. He opened the show in the traditional manner, which I can still quote:

Ladies and Gentlemen, children of all ages,

Kenneth Feld is proud to present the international edition of Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey Circus,

THE GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH!

I think this sticks in my brain because it was the only thing in English. The ringmaster was taught the rest of the show phonetically in Japanese. We would later meet actual Japanese people who went to the show. They couldn’t understand a word he said.

But this was all about Danielle and the circus, not me. You get to go down to where the show will be prior to the show and see clowns and some smaller acts.

Ringling Bros., ever the marketing geniuses, sells cotton candy with a special hat included. How else could you charge $12? At the end of the first act a bunch of confetti was shot out and landed near/on us. Danielle felt obligated to collect as much as possible:

But of course the cotton candy was more important than the hat:

All in all, a very good time was had by all.

Our vacation started and ended poorly at Kennedy airport, but Jamaica was great. The beginning was the problem that I feared, the storm. We boarded the plane and thought we were in good shape, only to get an announcement that the weather was too bad to take off and that we had to wait on the plane at the gate. So we did. For two hours. Then they had us deplane, but asked us to stay close in case they got an open window to take off.

I had enough time to leave security, hit McDonald’s, come back in and feed Danielle before we boarded again. Add another hour on the plane waiting to be de-iced, and we finally took off, about 6 hours late. But at least we made it.

The place was great and the weather was as well. We frankly didn’t do much (nothing wrong with that). The pool and the beach were our primary destinations. I was hoping that this would be the time that Danielle would finally learn to swim (with a life vest) on her own. She loves the water, but has always been very clingy if she’s in water over her head, even with a vest. So I was hoping that six days would do it.

It finally happened on day four. She met a new friend, Griffin, who was 3 1/2. He could swim with a vest so she finally gave it a shot. First just going a few feet. But by the next day, she was all over the pool. Here is the formerly clingy girl (in the center of the picture – that’s me way to the left):

She pretty much did nothing but swim after that. Of course, all that swimming is tiring work, so this is what she typically looked like around mid-afternoon:

And of course there was other fun. She learned to catch a Frisbee (ok, one out of about 20 times):

And of course there was dancing…

The resort was great, though it got a bit crowded towards the end. So many kids are on vacation for President’s day week that the place was totally jammed. But overall it was an excellent pool, beach, and relaxing vacation. There was plenty of jerk chicken and Red Stripe beer (the local beer – frankly just average, but you want a lighter beer when it’s that hot).

The trip ended poorly at Kennedy airport as one of our bags didn’t make the trip with us. They are still looking for it at this point. That was no fun, waiting around the airport late at night with a very sleepy four year old.

But overall a very successful and relaxing vacation.

It was inevitable that I would post a video of my daughter. As I mentioned on the Christmas blog, the MP3 player was her favorite present. She listens to the Wiggles constantly and sings and dances.

So here is a not-so-great video of this. Danielle is eating her dinner (when she walks out of view she’s getting another bite) while she sings and dances to the Wiggles. This is even funnier if you know the Wiggles song “Wiggly Party”, because that’s what she is singing. (what? not everyone knows that song?).

For the more attentive folks, the random rattling noises in the background belong to our nanny’s 9 month old. And you’ll notice the occasional high kicks from Danielle. Those are because we saw that Rockettes.

Enjoy: