Erin and Albert…

Learning what it means to be pretty and what it means to be beautiful. Curie turned four this month, and received a doll for her birthday, Sleeping Beauty, in fact. Erin is against this type of “hard doll” for the impossible body type impression it can make on a girl, so we re-gifted it. Curie was only okay with it because Aurora is a princess, and as we have mentioned Curie is working on being a queen or king. Well, Elsa is a queen and Curie is a little fixated on replacing her Aurora with an Elsa “hard doll,” specifically in the “bad Elsa dress ( the blue one).”

So we are at the Disney store where Curie has an Elsa hard doll clasped in her arms asking to buy it. While Erin takes Elia to the restroom to be changed, Albert has a long conversation with Curie that paraphrased, goes something like this: “we want you to understand that no  one looks like cartoon characters and to be pretty and to be beautiful are not about what you look like. If you smile you are pretty, it doesn’t matter what you look like, do you understand?” She of course says yes, because she wants the doll. “Let’s go around the store and you tell me who is pretty.” Amazingly there are very few people smiling in a Disney store. Eventually we find someone who is smiling and we say together that that person is pretty.

So Albert asks her, “what does it mean to be pretty?” Curie points at her mouth and smiles, “That’s right, Albert says and then presses on, “Do you know what it means to be beautiful?” Curie shakes her head. “To be beautiful comes from your heart, when you are kind, when you are considerate, when you take care of others, you are beautiful. So tell me what does it mean to be beautiful?” Curie shrugs her shoulders, “I don’t know.” So Albert repeats it to her. When he asks again she says “it comes from the heart.” He pushes, what does that mean? After a few more repeats she says, “you have to be nice to people, and take care of them.” Again, she can say the words, but does she mean them? “Curie, what if we said we are not going to buy the doll today and we will see if you learn what it means to be pretty and beautiful.” “But I want it!” “What if you saw a little girl who was crying because her parents couldn’t afford a doll? Did you know if you had one and gave it to her, I would buy you another one? Because that would be beautiful.” Albert recounts for Curie when she gave away her sand shovel selflessly as a beautiful act.

“Okay, what does it mean to be pretty?” It is something like the tenth time, Curie answers correctly. “What does it mean to be beautiful?” Curie answers correctly. “Our friends are waiting for us for dinner, and we are late, what should we do?” Curie says:

“Let’s go find them, we can always come back some other time.”

From “but I want it,” to “we can always come back,” in thirty minutes. Albert tells her that is very considerate and very beautiful. She says “let’s go tell Mommy!” Erin picks the ball right up and tells her how beautiful that act was. As parents we are proud, but it is just one data point – one day. Albert reinforces as we walk through the mall going so far as to extol what Curie has done to a stranger. The man smiles and says he is proud of her. “See, he thinks you are beautiful. And did you see his smile? He was so pretty.” Coming out the mall, a person is holding the door open for us, Albert asks Curie, “what is the beautiful thing to do?” Curie holds the door for the people in back of us – ironically a gaggle of girls with American Girl dolls, and in the garage Curie says “let’s wait for Mama and Elia,” which Albert says loudly in a stage voice so the American Girls can hear “see, that is a being considerate, it’s a beautiful thing you are doing,” and Curie beams with pride and says “let’s tell Mama!” Albert says t0 her, “see your smile? That makes you so pretty.”

We are probably going to buy the doll soon, but haven’t yet. When she forgets to be nice or whines, we now say, that wasn’t very beautiful, and she quickly smiles and says “oh, sorry!” When she gives up her candy to share with Elia, we tell her she is being beautiful and slowly we reinforce the lesson. Who knows if it will stick, but when you tell her she has done something beautiful, she smiles this giant, very pretty smile.

Other things happened this month of course. After Curie stopped sucking her thumb, her teeth are starting to relax by themselves and straighten out. She loves to help cook and spends a lot of time preparing things in the kitchen. She wants gloves and tools to help rake and garden in the back yard. She raided all of her play-doh from her birthday and toys to try to make a giant play-doh egg like she sees in videos. Our family is regularly the subject of her drawings. On the way to her four-year check up she said that she wants to be a doctor and had Albert bring her “shot” and stethoscope to the appointment; upon seeing the doctor sling the stethoscope around her neck sideways, Curie mimicked her in the examination room and has begun doing the same at home. For Halloween she wants to be Elsa as a doctor. Queen Elsa, M.D.

She holds us to promises, has a memory like a steel trap. She loves, loves, loves Elia, going so far to be protective. On our New Orleans trip, Bernard joked that Elia could become part of their family and Curie said, “Elia is MY sister, she is part of OUR family, right Mama?” Curie loves her cousins as well, hugging Eleanor a lot and wanting to hold either twin’s hand during the trip. She is a lot younger than her cousins, so it is hard for her especially when her cousins are distracted to older things. One thing they all did together though, was beignet dancing. We recounted when we were last in New Orleans and had beignets which with the sugar caused Curie to dance around Cafe du Monde. So after each beignet this trip, they all danced around Cafe du Monde.

During the New Orleans trip she said a number of funny and fantastic things. She legitimately called security, “surgery” “I have to take my luggage to surgery.” When we were separated at security and reunited, she proclaimed “we’re a family again!” When things happen she likes to say “check!” As if checking things off on her list. And when our phone batteries had died after dinner and she couldn’t watch anything, she thought for a moment on how to entertain herself and said, “I know, I’ll use my brain!” Eliciting smiles from all of us; she doesn’t know she is being sweet and adorable. After dinner the twins were drawing and Albert gave Curie his pen to draw. She said to them, “my Dad gave me this pen, he always has what I need.”

It is not all cute and adorable though. We play crazy games in the car as we have mentioned, like “What Color is That Sound?” The new one is to make up new songs. Curie engaged us in a rigmarole song ten minutes long about a sad boy with no shoes in a swimming pool building french fry houses, eating them and then getting sick, that had us in stitches; her comedic sense of timing has only gotten better. Finally, we encourage her to have scientific observations and praise her when she notices something particular (Erin is particularly good at encouraging this). We end this post with a matter-of-fact observation that Curie told Albert out of the blue in the airport. “Daddy?” She says as they walk toward the restrooms. “Pee always comes before poo.” “What?” Albert asks. “Pee comes before poo.” she repeats. Albert gives it a thought – “you are right, that is a good observation.” Curie beams with pride and you can almost see her say “check!” In her head, at another truism checked off. And with that satisfied smile, it really does make her such a pretty little girl.

1. A smile makes you pretty regardless of what you look like.
2. Beauty comes from your heart and from what you do.
3. You can use your brain to entertain yourself.
4. Pee comes before poo.

Recently, Albert told Curie that the first song he ever sang to her the day she was born was “You’re the Inspiration” by Chicago and she wanted to dance with him (they apparently have been learning to formally dance at school). Albert danced on his knees and Curie rested her head on his chest. Albert unshaven, without hair product, in an undershirt and shorts and still magical. Then, later in the night, right before bedtime, she wanted to do it again.

There are days Curie asks us to pick her up, and though there are days that she feels too heavy, we also have friends whose children are becoming teenagers or going to college, and we are pressed to think, how many more times will we be able to pick her up and hold her?

She is growing up, she will tell us matter-of-factly, and taking responsibility, “it’s my fault” after accidentally hitting Elia. She recognized that certain foods did not hurt her mouth when she had hand foot mouth disease, and later when her four-year molars started coming in. It was because she was cognizant of that, that she cried so much, disappointed that even the ice cream and cookies she was banking on still hurt her mouth. The one benefit of hand-foot-mouth, is that Curie stopped sucking her thumb finally.

There are a lot of influences at school bearing on her too. One night she said “books are boring,” which shocked us. “Who told you this?” She mentioned that a girl at school told her. Not wanting this to be a core memory (a la Inside Out), Albert read books that she liked and taught her how to respond if the girl said it again: “you just haven’t read the right book,” which she uses if we ask her if books are boring. The book she loves the most right now is an old one called Show Me. In it you learn where your nose is etc… Albert, however, has turned it into an irritating game where in cahoots the two of them and Elia go and find the parts on Mommy including all the nuzzling and tickling. Erin is a good sport about it, and it made Curie love books again. “Where is your nose? Is that where it grows? Let me nuzzle your nose.” Fortunately it ends with a big hug, so it is all right.

Along the same lines, some of her best friends made up an arbitrary rule that only the girl with the longest dress can be Elsa from Frozen. At first Curie was just asking for big dresses, which we couldn’t figure out after all the Superman shirts. Then when she told us, we taught her to tell the girl that all of them could be Elsa, it took some doing, but it worked and now she can be Elsa whenever she wants. The other girl has also decided to stand up and be Elsa as well. Curie wants to be “bad Elsa,” the one with the magic powers.

With her birthday coming up, we experimented with a number of things to see if she would like them. We went ice skating (she pushed a Home Depot bucket around to keep standing and balanced), and loved it, but we realized that not all parents would be able to ice skate and keep an eye on their kids, so we picked bowling (Curie calls it “balling”) and took the kids to try it out. The first time Curie had just woken from a nap and didn’t want to play (though she did want to play video games). Elia loved it (see her blog for her reaction, it is priceless). The second time Curie loved it so much she played four games straight. And as for the video games, we pulled out our Wii and have started playing Mario Kart again. Erin was happy.

As we posted earlier, Erin’s parents took us to Thomas Land, which was magical for the kids. While there she told Erin’s mom that she had made the scrambled eggs wrong because “my Daddy doesn’t make them like that,” and wouldn’t eat them (we stopped putting milk in scrambled eggs after reading a cooking blog, they do taste better that way). Curie has also started baking boxed cakes and brownies. She and Elia love mixing.

Our daily life is pretty busy and we feel run down all the time, but it is still amazing and heart-filling. The Chen Engineering company keeps making huge track layouts, Curie makes up names and words for things: pho and egg rolls are noodle-doodles with egamaroles, supersoup, and meatballmaballs. She calls tofu, “toh-food,” and most magnificently has named her Uncle Steve, “Weird Beard,” because of his beard. She only wants showers with Albert now and her bath toys have not been played with for some time – she likes showers because she doesn’t get water in her face when washing her hair (unlike Elia, who would put her face in the water as the first thing). Curie and Erin are the same in the no-water-in-the-face respect.

Albert has allowed Elsa because she is a queen and not a princess and works with Curie not to need to be saved as a princess, but recently having seen Frozen and Frozen Fever, we have introduced Mulan and Pocahontas whom she identified tremendously with because “we have the same hair!” So as a result we also introduced Lilo and Stitch, which we saw in its entirety.

Yes. Curie is growing up and almost four. Soon she will be out of pre-school and in kindergarten and we get emotional thinking about how proud we are that she is growing and emotional at how fast it is going. It means we need to relish and embrace every moment: the night of the Perseid meteor shower, Erin, Curie, and I lay on the front stoop while Elia was asleep upstairs and stared at the stars. And recently, Curie scratched her leg at school and pointed out her injury. Then she got her First Baby book (which we never filled out) and brought it to us. “Remember?” She asked. Albert was perplexed until Erin explained it to him: Albert had explained to Curie that the First Baby book was a scrapbook, but she had not understood and thought he had said “scratchbook” and had been wanting to catalog every scratch she had received. How wonderful is that? Now we have to get her a scratchbook so that she can do just that!