What about the little one?

Well, my girl is no longer as little as she used to be. In fact, she is in the top few percentiles for her age group when it comes to height. I guess that she probably gets that from me – I have never tended towards the short or, indeed, the weedy. She had her second birthday only a couple of months ago but is now impossible to shut up. Some of her texts are classics. For example – “I do not agree with these ideas!” or “I can’t take it anymore!” Yes, she does tend to have a very clear idea of what she wants and is quite capable of expressing it in no uncertain terms. That she gets from her mother, I suspect. She doesn’t say much in English but he does understand everything I say and is starting to distinguish that there are two different languages. So, a few weeks ago when I told her something, her grandmother said that she did not understand and my little one said, “That’s OK, I’ll explain,” and then translated what I had said in English to her.

Sometimes when she starts just repeating adult phrases, her tone serious and insistent, and it makes absolutely no sense I can’t help but feel that the situation can’t be all that different when we use those same phrases – “all sound and fury…”

The question of how she is going to be brought up is becoming more of an issue. A couple of times I have heard her saying things that show that my mother-in-law is teaching her all sorts of religious nonsense while she is at her house. This will only become more important as she gets older so I will have to think about how I want to react to such things and will have to discuss these things with my wife. Of course, my wife does not see why it would be a problem for me, even though she can not help but have noticed by now that it is a problem. My daughter isn’t going to kindergarten yet but last night we went to a kindergarten run by a friend of my wife’s family for my little one to see Santa Claus who had come to hand out presents to the kids there (my daughter got a little bag of goodies but almost lost it in the excitement of all the things that were going on). What freaked me out was seeing a priest there, in among the three- and four-year olds. When we came home my wife and I talked about how I really object to that kind of thing, seeing it as indoctrination of the very young. I tried to explain it to her by giving her analogous examples to think about – such as her turning up at a kindergarten only to find an imam or a communist party representative there to indoctrinate the children.