fairy
learning to be
Wednesday, May 26, 2004

ice cream



One time at a resto, Sage pulled me down and whispered, "Daddy, ice cream please?"

I was puzzled because the Japanese resto had no ice cream on display whatsoever, until I realized that she had seen an ice cream store on our way in.

"We'll you some later, Sage," I told her.

"No, daddy, no," she protested. "Give me a coin."

"Daddy doesn't have any coins, but here's fifty bucks. Go with Ate Len," I told her.

"Ate Len, come!" she said imperiously, beckoning her nanny to follow as she walked out of the resto and into the mall - all 27 months old.

She came back later with a huge ice cream cone and no change whatsoever (she just had to select the expensive one!), stood next to me and said, "Here you go, daddy!"

"But Sage," I said, "That's for you. That's yours."

"No, daddy, no," she insisted, handing me the swiftly melting treat.

"Sage, you asked for ice cream, you got ice cream. You must eat it."

"No, daddy. Try it."

Gah. This "try it, try it" thing is deadly, I tell you.

And so Ate Len ended up enjoying a lovely scoop of yoghurt ice cream, while Sage looked around for some other thing to try.

Sunday, May 23, 2004

ms. fix-it, part 2

Sage is a big Winnie-the-Pooh fan, so for her 2nd birthday party a few months back, we chose Pooh party hats. She enjoyed these so much that I saved as many as I could get my hands on post-party, for her to play with when it suits her fancy. We now have precious few left, which explains the look of dismay Sage wore the other day when she tore one of the hats by accident. Wide-eyed and drop-jawed, she stared at it for a few seconds... then she looked up at me and said, with an air of determination, "Mommy, I fix." She then marched over to the drawer where I keep my office supplies, wrestled it open, and rummaged around until she finally managed to produce my stapler. Of course, she's not too adept at using a stapler yet, so I had to do the actual repair work; but the solution was all her own. Dean and I were so proud of her!

Of course, we probably shouldn't have been all that amazed, because she's been a problem solver since she was less than a year old, which is when she toddled up to me while I was reading and dumped a package of her diapers in my lap. Sage always has and still likes to bring me things, knowing she will get a "thank you" and a "good girl" in return. Thinking that was all it was, I thanked and praised her accordingly, set the diapers aside, and went back to my reading. To my surprise, she tottered her way around my chair, retrieved the pack of diapers (which was over half her size, by the way), and plunked it in my lap again. She didn't have much of a vocabulary at the time, so she had to go through her routine a couple of more times before the light finally dawned on me. I checked the diaper she was wearing, and discovered that, in her then-nonverbal way, she had been trying to tell me that she was in desperate need of a change. Sometimes I wonder which of the two of us actually has more to learn...
Thursday, May 20, 2004

taste testing

Last night, Sage got to try a strawberry float for the first time, watching her daddy mix strawberry ice cream and Sprite to make her the bubbly pink confection. She loved the sweet treat, of course, repeatedly pushing her cup in her father's direction and politely but pointedly demanding, "More, please!"

She had her first Coke float a couple of months ago, which she also loved, but not without some initial hesitation. So Dean and I chanted our usual mantra: "Try it," until she consented to have a taste. This led directly to the events of yesterday afternoon, when Dean and Sage were nibbling on some bits of pomelo. Now pomelo is one of the many fruits I dislike, so I wasn't having any of it. Sage noticed this, of course, and offered me a piece.

"No thank you," I replied, shaking my head. She pushed the fruit toward my mouth again, and I shook my head once more. "No thank you. Mommy doesn't like it."

"Try it!" she commanded sternly, sending me into a fit of helpless giggles... which turned into outright chortling when she stuffed the whole wedge into her own mouth, and her face contorted into a pained expression of utter dismay. "Is yucky!" she pronounced, with an air of betrayed revelation.

"No, Sage," Dean tried to show her, "it's yummy. Look at Daddy, mmm..."

"Yucky!" she protested, somewhat accusingly. "Yucky, yucky, yucky!" And she sat there on the bed between her snickering mother and snacking father, making faces until the culprit pomelo was finally put away.
Tuesday, May 18, 2004

ms. fix-it

A couple of months ago, I showed Sage how I used a screwdriver to change the batteries in her light-up Mickey Mouse toy. She seemed fascinated by the process, and insisted on 'helping' me close and reopen Mickey several times over. Of course, I couldn't let her play with the screwdriver on her own, so I looked for a toy toolkit in the nearby toy stores. Guess what? Not a decent one to be found, because tools are considered a 'career toy', and boys do not have career toys. Apparently, make-believe for boys is only supposed to encompass robots and cars; and God forbid that girls should go around playing with tools!

So I put the toolkit project on the back burner, and bought her other learning-tools-disguised-as-playthings instead, like her watercolor paint set. But tonight I found out that she hadn't forgotten the screwdriver-- as I was watching her smear paint on Manila paper, she suddenly got up, came over to the chair I was sitting in, inserted the end of her paint brush into one of its screws, and started twirling away. When I asked her what she was doing, she informed me, "I fix chair, Mommy."

Which means: back to the toy stores...
Sunday, May 16, 2004

colorific

We spent most of today teaching Sage to use her new watercolor paint set. She had a blast, smearing colors all over paper and used illustration boards with a variety of tools-- brush, sponge, and, naturally, her hands. There were some initial problems when she tried to put her foot in the bowl of brush-cleaning water, then tried to wash her face with the murky water; but all in all, she picked up the concept pretty quickly.

In fact, she loved it so much that the brand-new set was all but used up by evening. I'd previously thought that orange was her favorite color, because it's the one she always points out to me whenever we're walking around. However, orange turned out to be the last color remaining in the entire palette, so I guess she's not that crazy about it after all. Maybe she just likes the word?
Tuesday, May 11, 2004

passing the zbrt

'Zbrt'-- I'm sure you were wondering-- is the word for that thing you do when you press your mouth against someone's flesh and make a loud, wet raspberry right on their skin. Dean loves zbrting Sage's stomach. It's turned into a little ritual between them, which commences with Dean asking her, "Sage, do you know what time it is?"

Previously, Sage would look at him in complete innocence and say, "What time, Daddy?"

And Dean would crow victoriously, "It's time to kiss Sage's tummy!" Whereupon he would pounce on her and administer a gigantic zbrt on her stomach, resulting in a fit of hysterical giggling on her part.

She's a quick study, though. Lately, she's found a way to redirect her father's attentions. When he starts to say, "It's time to kiss--", she quickly interrupts him with, "Time to kiss Mommy's tummy!"

Whereupon they both pounce on me, and make a huge, slobbery mess of my tummy. Ah, the perils of raising a cunning child...
Sunday, May 09, 2004

shoe fetish

For Mother's Day, Dean got me this beautiful, tiny, silver-and-enamel baby shoe pendant, red with a white flower pattern. He and Sage presented it to me together; but when Sage got a good look at it, she immediately coveted it and gave me her most appealing puppy-eyed look, pleading hopefully, "For Sage?"

"For Mommy," I replied, gently but firmly.

"For Sage," she repeated, looking deliberately wistful.

Fortunately, Dean had bought a similar pendant (in pink) for his mother, who'd called to cancel our family lunch. So he gave it to Sage to wear before things got ugly. She was very happy with it until she realized that Mommy and Sage were now 'the same', but Daddy was left out with no shoe pendant.

"Poor Daddy!" she lamented. "Mommy shoe," she pointed at me. "Sagey shoe," she gestured to herself. Shaking her head: "No shoe Daddy. Poor Daddy!"

And nothing would console her until she and I marched over to her dollhouse, divested one of her toy bunnies of its left shoe, and strung it on a suede thong around her rather chagrined father's neck.
Tuesday, May 04, 2004

erratum

Dean pointed out that Sage must know a good deal more than just 50-plus words. So I did a very disorganized rundown in my head and realized that yes, he's absolutely right. Her vocabulary is actually somewhere in the vicinity of 200 words, which means that (a) I have done my wondrous child a terrible disservice, and (b) Mommy is even worse at tasks mathematical then previously suspected... which takes some doing, lemme tellya...

Sorry, sweetie!

Sage's milestones
When Sage was three months old, I thought that she was already a certified genius because she said the word "Mama", a feat that infants aren't expected to accomplish until they're eight to twelve months old. I was all set to announce the arrival of the next wunderkind to all the world, but it was 11-something at night at the time, so I decided it could wait till morning. Come daylight, she looked at her father and cooed, "mamamamamamama"; and I realized that she was, in fact, simply babbling a random syllable-- still pretty impressive at her age, but perhaps not quite reason to alert the international media.

She did start speaking pretty early, though. Although she only began talking in meaningful sentences several months ago, her first actual word popped up when she was only seven months old. And it wasn't 'Mama' or 'Dada'; here's how it happened. Her grandmother and I were watching a movie on TV while rocking Sage back and forth in her stroller. In the movie, someone suddenly fired a machine-gun, and the sudden noise made Sagey start out of her drowsiness and start crying. So Grandma and I soothed her: "It's okay, Sage, it's only the movie, it's okay." Suddenly, Sagey stopped crying, looked at us with a beautiful smile, and said, "Ah-kee!"

So there. She is a genius.
Monday, May 03, 2004

Sagey's new look

Okay, having received complaints that the old template wasn't working in various settings, I finally junked it (after trying and failing to tweak it accordingly). Theoretically, it should work at whatever setting. I hope. We don't want Auntie Lisa and Auntie Amie to be unhappy!
Sunday, May 02, 2004

Sagey's got a gun

Sage has a new game where she pretends to have a gun, holding out her thumb and forefinger in the classic make-believe gesture. She points it at some hapless innocent like her father, and gleefully shouts, "Bam-bam!" Then, when the supposed shooting victim pretends to fall over, Sage abruptly shifts gears and coos, "Poor Daddy! Let's help him!" At this point, Mommy and any other available onlookers are recruited to haul the victim to his feet, after which the gunshot wound is apparently miraculously healed. "No more owie!" Sage proclaims.

I'm not actually very troubled at this display of violent tendencies, though it does seem somewhat passive-aggressive. But in the first place, I think that girls need a little more physical aggression than is generally encouraged; and in the second place, this is actually mild compared to Sage's previous behavior of smacking anyone who annoyed her in the head with the nearest blunt object.

Of course, being the John Woo-freak that I am, I jokingly told Sage that her next step, of course, was to learn to fire her imaginary gun while jumping sideways in dramatic slow-motion, preferably while wearing a trenchcoat, with doves or pigeons taking flight in the background. She frowned at me for a moment, then attempted to oblige by hopping vertically up and down, thumbs firing round after round of unseen bullets. "Bam-bam! Bam-bam! Bam-bam!"
Saturday, May 01, 2004

new tricks

Last night, Sage's nanny was trying to get Sage to show me how she had learned to 'walk like a model'. Sage, however, was far too busy to engage in such tomfoolery, as she was engrossed in alternately scattering then collecting the tiny faux bubbles from her miniature dollhouse bathtub. So she ignored her well-meaning nanny, who nevertheless persisted in pestering her: "Model, baby, model for Mommy!" Finally, I gently told our much-beloved nanny, "Diovine, hindi naman siya aso. (She's not a dog.) You can't make her do tricks whenever you want." I'd thought Sage was too busy to pay attention, but at my words, she turned around, looked her nanny in the eye, and affirmed: "I'm not aso!" That's my girl.

Sage's milestones
Sage displayed her first non-gas-related smile when she was a little over a month old, on March 23, 2002. It was the first time we realized she had three dimples-- one on each cheek, and one on her pointy little chin (though the chin dimple has all but disappeared now). It almost seemed as if she were living up to her name, because the smile came just in time for her christening on the following day. Could it truly have been some sort of prescience that allowed her the wherewithal to properly acknowledge her guests at her very first public appearance? Sage refuses to confirm or deny.