Children...children...future...future...

I had one of those moments yesterday. Unfortunately, nobody though to bring me a beer (except for myself).

Piano/guitar recitals yesterday. #1 has been playing the piano for six months now. She was amazing. She played Tarantula.

The rest of the recital was just like Children...children...future...future...I was not able to sit through it to  the end. But let's back up to the beginning. (If anybody has a link to the Simpson's clip in English, I'd put it right up.)

Knowing what a mess the show would be, I called ahead to Verkiai Restaurant to confirm the sale of beer. When I get there, they say no, the kitchen's closed. I'm ordering beer here, not food, and two hours ago on the phone you told me no problem. Turns out there is a problem, they don't have a cash register (What?), so they can't take orders separate from the single event renting the premises/ordering some snacks and punch at the end of the ordeal. So, to get a beer they have to include it's price in the main order and charge the piano teacher, to whom I then have to give six lits in coins. Awesome.

And then they tap a new keg to pour me the one beer, which takes them about 25 minutes. Awesomer.

#1's performance was definitely the best. That doesn't mean she was the best pianist, but she did choose her song most wisely. The kids who are better than she chose songs that were too hard, or maybe their parents made them, but so they made mistakes. Some of my favorites, like Joplin's Ragtime, were destroyed. Each time I heard a song come on that I like I cringed, feeling the music march itself up to the gallows.

Looking around me, I knew that I was not alone. The rest of the parents shared my fate. There were four types of faces in the audience: yawning, eyes-shut, shit-eating-grin, and video camera. The last was one that each parent took his turn at when his kid went up. I took my turns at the first and third, doing my best not to let my face betray the horror I was feeling. I was even intent on sitting through it, golden rule and all. But after about 20 songs I volunteered to take #2 for a walk, because "she" was getting antsy.

And I thought to myself, after I'd escaped from musical hell, golden rule? Perhaps, in this bizarro world of disharmony, the golden rule is different. Maybe it's Every Man For Himself. So we'll see if I get over it before next year's concert (Oh God, please don't let them be more often than annual), but I think the best plan of action might be to bribe the teacher to let my kid (the talented one!) go first, and quietly take our leave immediately thereafter.

Note to parents: #2 was dramatically displeased not to receive any flowers, despite my insistence that she "did do anything to deserve flowers."

Monopoly

We played Monopoly with #1 for the first time ever. Here are my properties after the first time around the board. As usual, I won. And as always, somebody cried. 

Although the box says 8+, I think you need to be a pretty patient 8 year old with an understanding of value to enjoy it through to the end. 

Bilingual Barrier Blasted to Bits

Until last week I had only instructed my youngun to speak English: when she spoke to me in Lithuanian, I would say, "speak English." I didn't see any functional difference between this and another method often used by parents rearing bilingual children, which replaces the instruction with mock misunderstanding/deafness: "I can't understand/hear you."

Boy was I wrong. Apparently, with a daughter as stubborn as mine, instruction will only take you so far (not very far).  She is happy indeed to disregard my instructions. But she is not happy to be ignored, oh hells no. I don't believe that she doesn't realize I do understand her completely all the time, but she's willing to play along with "I can't hear you." And after a week of this routine she's finally chiming in in English without being reminded.

So after three years of little progress, I've finally broken through. It was really frustrating after such lingual success with #1.

Christmas miracle? Thanks Jesus!

Radio Ga Ga

One of #2's favorite songs is Radio Ga Ga--she asks for it by name. I suspect that because it's the closest thing my YouTube playlist comes to Lady Gaga, who she has heard of. Lucky opportunity to learn her some classic rock.

Cribbage

Taught #1 to play cribbage last night (she's in 2nd grade now). She was winning for a while, after ridiculous beginners luck--she pegged a run on her first hand during the play ending with 31, when she didn't even know how to play. She had a run of four, A-2-3-4, and a ten was cut yielding an 8 point show for her.

I did throw away a pair into her crib once to allow me to keep a flush, so I could show her what a flush looks like. But there weren't many point I gave her like that, she was really winning. Until I got my double double run, 4-4-5-6-6, for 24.

I ended up one point short of skunking her, 120 to 91.

She kept saying "this game is like math," and I think Tetukas' advice was very good, that it will teach her to add faster, at least up to 31.

A Stiff Drink

When you ask your kid to pour you a drink, make sure you specify how much...otherwise you may get a zealous glass of whiskey spilling over the sides.

Kooshonite

I found out my baby daughter's kryptonite, it's koosh balls. We got this big koosh ball that she'll pull on the little strings or whatever they're called, but she's afraid of actually holding the whole thing. I realize that's the perfect way to keep her away from my computer tower. And if you roll the koosh ball at her she scrambles away hilariously!

Ramaroddi

Last night I took my womenfolk out to the Ramazzotti Concert (kids under 7 free, otherwise there's no way in the whole wide world I would have taken them). I'm not really into his music, by my special lady is gaga for it, and I'm happy to expose the children, because most of it is quality music, not pop shit.

My special lady was thrilled to exhaustion, and the baby jumped herself into exhaustion too, passing out half way through the show. I was left with the child, and kept he behaved enough that the woman sitting in front of her only had to turn around twice. She like the show, but who has the patience for two hours of it? There were two major additions to the activities. One was watching me play backgammon on my phone...I mean, playing team backgammon against my phone. Then she requested we play normal backgammon rather than team backgammon, so I said we can play pretend backgammon: I feigned a roll of the dice and told her I got a six and a one; then she did the same, but she got double sixes!

The other addition was saying one of the following ("do like this" = indicating tickle me around my neck):

"Tete, now I gonna stand up and you do like this!"

"Tete, now I gonna sit down and you do like this!"

Quarantine?

For some reason Lithuanians call school being canceled due to an outbreak "quarantine." They told me they don't have to go to school because their school has a quarantine. I asked them if all the sick kids are being isolated in the school, but they said no. They even thought that sounded bizarre. Well, I'm not the not who said the school was being quarantined!

Apparently the deal in Lithuania is that if 40% of students are sick then schools is canceled.

In similar news the absentee rate at my daughter's kindergarten has reached 85%. Once it got up to 80% I said to the wife, screw this, let's take her out before she gets sick instead of after!

Softening Curse Words

God Fuckin Damn It = Godfried Daniel*
Son of a Bitch = Son of a Bee Sting
Piece of Shit = Piece of Shiz
Asshole = Asinine
Blet = Blast†

Fuckface = ________?
Bastard = _______?

*Godfried Daniel is a curse word taken from the ridiculous Fire Sign Theater, the Beatles of Comedy.
† If you feel, after saying Blast, that you're not done swearing yet, you can extend it to Blast from the Past

Fools

I didn't fool too many people, but I had some fun.

Work:
One colleague left the office and when she came back I told her that someone had called for her. I gave her my special wife's phone number and told her it was Violeta (my wife's office mate). I fooled my colleague into calling, but my wife wasn't fooled into passing the call on to Violeta by default because she was out sick. Default sucks.

I told another colleague the boss was looking for her, and so she went and foolishly interrupted the boss to ask what she wanted.

Home:
Did one of you tell my daughter it was April Fool's Day? Because on the way home from kindergarten she cried out "Where's my hat?!" When my special wife turned around to check the hat status, the perfectly well-hatted child started laughing at her!

When I came home and put my keys in the door I heard the kid run to the door and start shouting Tete Tete Tete. I didn't unlock the door and stood there silently until she didn't think I was there anymore. Then I unlocked the door and pounced inside in a flurry and yelled.

My special wife, whom I love very much and I still find sexually attrative, asked me for some lemonade. So I brought her some with a bit of vinigar mixed it. She got very mad. It totally wasn't bad though, I finished off the remaining 400 ml of it myself. Daughter even said it was tasty.

GET LOST!

There's this one girl in my special baby's kindergarten group that is a bad seed, a rotten apple if you will. If my girl brings a toy to kindergarten, the bad one breaks it. If my girl come home minus a barrette or something, the bad one borrowed it. If she comes home and says a bad word, guess who she picked it up from. Telling my girl not to play with her only resulted in her not mentioning it anymore. So I tried something more active than avoidance. I told my girl to tell the bad one to "get lost." Actually it's "eik švilpt," which means go whistle, but it's the same thing, a polite version of piss off. I told her this on Friday, and totally forgot about it.

On Tuesday we went to kindergarten after the long weekend, and as my girl sat down to change the bad one sat down next to her. Immediately my girl lashed out at her in an impressively angry tone, "eik švilpt!" Their teacher was right there and, though shocked by the terminology, was impressed that my girl would tell her friend "not to bother her while she's busy changing." That's how she put it to me, thinking I might not have understood the slang.

I'll have to ask the teacher when I pick up my girl if she repeat it hundreds of times through the day, ala when she got a watch. She said to whoever was around, approximately once a minute for the whole day, while shoving the watch in his face, "let's see what time it is!"

Lazy Kid's Coloring Book

Coloring.com is a website where you can "color" picutres, but not by precise hand movements with a crayon or even a mouse, but rather by using a function akin to the paint bucket in MacPaint: click to fill a space with a color you choose.

I found this site to be really good for my special baby to spend time on with me at work. She's on summer vacation: you might think she'd spend that with her mother who's also on summer vacation, but alas, her mother has relaxing and shopping to do, so she spends much of her days on my colleague's computer. Luckily my colleagues on vacation too.

The reason it's so good is its simplicity. She's never used a computer independently before, and we had some anxiety yesterday trying to get the handle of games as simple as Grab It, which uses only the left and right arrow keys. It was too frustrating for her to learn at three years old and me to explain over and over again at 27: frustrating because she understood the concept of the game completely, just couldn't master the use of the arrow keys. The only problem she has now is getting even lazier and painting everything the same color. I like it enough that I signed her up for an account so that she can save her pictures.