Nomi-n-Sophia, BFF

Now that we are really about to leave LA, Sophia’s had to say goodbye to her new BFF.

She has been talking seriously about marrying Nomi, which has both sets of parents very excited. It will most likely be a Korean-British themed wedding, which means lots of kimchi followed by fruitcake. And a good selection of teas.

(Elisa and Eric, you had better book your tickets now!)

Logistics might be an issue, as they live 6,000 miles apart. Sophia is talking about going to school in California, to be closer to Nomi. We just have to work out how to pay for healthcare.

Here is the happy couple, photographed by Nomi’s dad, Joseph Cultice, as part of a portrait series he is compiling.

www.josephcultice.com

Halloween in Vancouver

Trick-or-treat
One of Harald’s coups was arranging a Halloween Experience for Sophia (and Lulu). Sophia loves dressing-up nearly as much as her mother does, and had been excited about Halloween for at least a month. Americans get way more excited about Halloween than people of other nations, so we had to take advantage on this trip.
It turns out Canadians are pro-Halloween as well.
When Daniel enquired about Halloween activities by phone the week before we arrived, Harald said there was a place in town where shops offered trick-or-treating for kids.
So down to Yaletown we went, the afternoon of the 31st. It’s a pretty trendy neighborhood, which must have one of the highest hair salons per capita in the world.
The kids were out in droves, accompanied by their parents and even some grandparents. The best costume we saw was a young Michael Jackson, complete with jheri-curl, single white glove and boom-box.
Sophia went as a friendly witch (costume hasily bought from a supermarket in Washington state the day before, I’m ashamed to say. Lulu was a very unscary dragon, in an outfit given to us by Daniel’s sister Emma a few years ago.
Daniel and I, pathetically, went only as enthusiastic parents. Harald, amazingly again, was just as into it – even though his own son was away – and took Sophia into several of the participating stores.
It was a huge success. Sophia collected unimaginable amounts of candy, and best of all, she was allowed to eat it. Well, some of it.

Sophia Day, or how to crash a three-year old’s birthday party

We haven’t been that good at finding kids for Sophia to play with since we set off on September 2nd.
Mainly, this is because most families with young children are at home attending to things like school and work. Thus, we have mainly been meeting full-timer retirees, the occasional weekender and a few others who like to travel off-peak.
Also, we’ve been rushing towards California and away from winter.
So, we decided to celebrate Sophia and her patience with a special event, Sophia Day, which took place on Saturday October 24. In Grass Valley, California.
In honor of this, the whole day was dedicated to her pleasure. Kind of like a birthday, but maybe even better since it came totally out of the blue.

So, she got to choose what to have for breakfast: pancakes, a peanut butter blend, spiced up with fresh pomegranate.
Then, we cut shapes from colored construction paper: triangles, circles and hearts.
Following a quick shower, we ambled over to the duck pond, where we promptly met Two Kids – Hannah and Doug, ages almost 3 and almost 6, who with their parents have recently moved to the Nevada County area from Santa Cruz.
They had a grand old time, feeding a whole box of graham crackers to a pack of about 25 fearless ducks, riding bikes, sharing toys and comparing ages and heights.
Then, it was on to Cornish pasties – yes, Cornish pasties in California. The Cornish were brought here for their hard rock mining skills during the Gold Rush. Daniel, who grew up in Cornwall, said they tasted like the real thing.

On the suggestion of Hannah and Douglas’ mother Tracey, we then stopped by the Condon Park playground. She was right – it was perfect for the 2-5 age group, featuring slides, a mini fire engine, a built-in walkie-talkie like apparatus, swings and the like.
She ran around for ages, with plenty of kids to play with – even some who willingly played round after round of shopkeeper.

What we didn’t expect was to insinuate ourselves into a birthday party.
We think it was a group of firefighter parents, who had gathered with their kids to celebrate someone’s daughter’s third(?) birthday. Anyway, as soon as we saw that Sophia had joined the tug-of-war, we doubted there would be any getting out.
And when the Dora the Explorer piñata came out, there was definitely no escape.
We wondered whether the actual party participants noticed there was a small interloper, the one joining the chorus of “candy, candy, smash it, smash it”. She kept almost getting to the front of the line, as kid after kid took swings at the papier-mâché with a plastic bat.
So, Daniel and I sat innocently on the sidelines, trying to eye each other very, very quietly and suppress any and all giggles, lest anyone ruin Sophia Day.

Finally, we couldn’t take Sophia’s possible rejection any longer. I approached the very athletic lady in charge of blind batting and said something like “Um, we’re totally not supposed to be at this party, but could our daughter please-please-please take a whack at the piñata?” So she eventually did, and then someone managed to break Dora’s neck, and then all the candy came pouring out. The athletic lady gave a gleeful whoop and shook the rest out. All the kids came running and filled up their appointed decorative plastic bags, and all the parents cheered, forgetful for a moment about how bad all that sugar is for one’s teeth.
It was so exciting, almost as good as if it had actually been Sophia’s own birthday party, with her own friends.

Then, we all realized we were at someone else’s party in someone else’s town.

So we went for pizza, lemonade/beer and frozen yoghurt, completing a very successful Sophia Day.

This photo is from Wyoming - it's sunny and warm during the day here - our camera's gone fuzzy, so we have to use stock images.

America, according to Sophia

I want to write a story about our trip on the computer.
I like being on this trip with Daddy, Mommy and Lulu.
So far, my favorite thing on our trip was our time at Grandma Sara and Grandaddy Stephen’s house in New York.
I’ve also liked swimming: in the really huge Lake Michigan with Donovan, in the paddling pool with my American cousins Patrick and Keira, and in the hot pools in Thermopolis, Wyoming.

While we’re driving in the car, I like to play on my Winnie the Pooh computer - spelling words, doing math and singing songs. I also like to play with the paper dolls Grandma Sara gave me and the princess song book. Of course, I also like to play with my little sister Lulu. I hold her hand, check the sun is not shining on her, share my baby doll with her, show her the computer and make sure she has toys to play with.

We also listen to tapes and CDs in the car – Chris sent me a tape with some of my favorite songs and stories. I also like to listen to the Winnie the Pooh stories, songs called playtime and some others called Dream Time.

My new bike is blue, violet, red and white. It’s a bit too big, but I love it. I ride it at campsites.

I think that our Airstream is really cool because it’s shiny and it’s our little house. In it, I help Mommy and Daddy with jobs like sweeping, filling the car with gas, turning the dinette into a bed, hitching up the trailer and making sure Lulu’s OK.

This is some of my favorite food in America: peanuts, hotdogs, lemonade and string cheese.

I’ve learned a lot on this trip – using scissors, how to play the Candy Land board game and how to count on my fingers.

At some of the national parks, I’ve done the Junior Ranger program – answering questions about things I learn and then getting a special badge.

Here I am holding a bearded lizard at Zion National Park.

On marriage and mortality

Since we left New York, Sophia has developed an obsession with a pair of life’s key passages: marriage and mortality.
Probably due in part to her enviable cache of Disney princess gear and Barbies, Sophia is really interested in marriage – what it is, why people do it and what the ceremony entails. We’ve tried to answer those questions as best we can: two people promise to spend the rest of their lives together, because they love each other, and you get to have a fun party and wear a fancy clothes.
Due to her own family circumstances, Sophia thinks all brides have a baby in their tummy.
But she has plans of her own: when she grows up, she will marry Rocco, her first and best friend who lives across the street from us on London’s Columbia Road. She will wear the Snow White dress her godfather Chris gave her, and has not yet finalized Rocco’s outfit – although a Spiderman get-up is currently the frontrunner.
Please see this blog for further details.

Mortality – how do you explain that to your kids? Especially when you yourself are scared stiff of it. So far, Sophia’s encounters with it involve the flies that trespass on our mobile property and the children’s song that goes “Poor Roger was dead and lay under the ground – way-yo, under the ground”. She has a fanciful idea of what happens, but doesn’t yet understand that it’s final.

She is a loving soul who approaches life all cylinders blazing, but wants to kill stuff. I guess it’s a normal rite of passage for humans, once they realize their strength and power. She’s become quite deft at using the fly swatter, which is OK as long as the flies are in our space rather than outside.
More worryingly, she keeps saying she wants a gun. Her gun, though, would be part of a Wild West, Annie Oakley type revue in which she slayed rattlesnakes, protecting her parents and sister from untold harm.
It started the afternoon we visited Legend Rock, a dusty, empty place between Coy and Thermopolis, whose cliff side petroglyphs are tens of thousands of years old.
The four of us were alone in the sagebrush valley, sharing space only with oilrigs some ten miles in the distance. Signs warning of rattlesnakes far outnumbered any information on the petroglyphs. Sophia decided that if a rattlesnake were to appear, she would yell, “stand back!” to Daniel, Lulu and me, then shooting the slithery beast.
We’ve said maybe when she’s 18, and she hasn’t forgotten it.

Sophia’s part-Americanization

My sister Annie and her kids, Patrick and Keira, came over most days to play during our time in New York. Together, the kids sang the alphabet song, splashed around naked in the paddling pool and chased my parents’ cats. From her cousins, Sophia learned the joys of American food like peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, goldfish, Cheerios and hot dogs. The main thing they learned from her was how to misbehave.
Annie, a special education teacher, has taught us how to incentivize good behavior with a chart - circles to be filled with stickers as reward for doing or not doing certain things, with a grand prize of an ice pop or other small treat once the chart is complete.
Perhaps we could all do well with charts.
Sophia's British accent has started to dull a bit – it started with the words “half” and “tomato”, with American intonation gradually creeping in. After spending the day with her little friend Brecken, whose parents are from Michigan, she started pronouncing some words – like “water” and “four” in a way that actually sounds MORE American than how I speak. Crazy.
The funny thing is she seems to know what’s going on, and often gives me a crafty glance when she’s about to give a word the US treatment.
But then, to ingratiate herself with Daniel, she’ll go back the old way of saying things, tossing him a “harf” or a “bin” to keep him sweet.
That said, she is still a London girl at heart, and misses her mates Rocco and Oriel, and her godfather Chris terribly.