Katie’s favorite pastimes are still playing with kids and books. Puzzles rank a close third and often trump books if she’s really grumpy: there’s something about concentrating on which piece goes where that takes her mind off other troubles. Recently, we’ve had a lot of tea parties, although not your average china-and-pink-frilly-dress affairs. Our new favorite restaurant in Swakopmund is Napolitana, which we’ve been frequenting about once a week on our arrival from Windhoek to the coast (now that class is over, our flexible research schedule has returned). Katie stands on a wooden shelf and watches pizzas in construction: Roll the dough flat, cut it with a metal circle, sprinkle with flour and store in a pile. When a pizza order comes in, place the crust on a second counter, use a device a bit like a rolling meat tenderizer or massager to put tiny divets in the crust, then paint on a thin veneer of tomato sauce. Add toppings all the way to the edge. Katie prefers just plain Margherita (tomato and cheese, but she picks off the tomatoes even though she loves tomatoes and will eat them by the handful. Kids. Go figure.), but options include creamed chicken, spare ribs, springbok and more, stored in two dozen metal containers with lids, their contents precisely memorized by the pizza makers. After a thick layer of grated cheese, the pizza is popped into a cob oven (well, perhaps cob. Here in Namibia there’s the distinct possibility that it’s made of concrete – but it has the right round shape and turns out very tasty pizzas). The best part for Katie is when one of the pizza-makers gives her a ball of dough. First she slides under the table to try to get away with eating it raw. When her parents object, she rolls and pulls and tugs it into various shapes, lets it sit overnight to get its yeasty rising over with and lose a little water. Then we mold the dough into cups, saucers, spoons, sugar bowls, pitchers, and lids. They dry for a day and are ready to paint with finger paint. The result is clearly for pretending – something Katie has just gotten the hang of (“Don’t worry, Mama, I’m just a pretend lion.”). The dishes would droop with any liquid and in fact won’t handle much more than a week of playing (a perfect excuse to go get more dough…).
Katie’s language skills continue to amaze me. When there is too much adult conversation or science going on, she says, “I want someone to pay attention to ME!” (Either that or she yells and screams unintelligibly.) Bad smells such as tanneries along the road or rotting seals on the beach are pronounced “Disgusting!” She will often tell elaborate stories about animals chasing each other – usually the springbok escapes, and I haven’t yet been able to get her to see it from the perspective of the hyena, who goes hungry. Some of her statements really indicate what a sponge she is for language: “Dorothea [her much-loved doll who has 2 broken legs, a cracked head, and a face painted with blue pen to look like a hyena] is sleeping, but I am getting up to do some work.” “You go from the mussel shell to the gerbil hole, while I sit on the jackal bush.” She makes up songs – sometimes with an odd assortment of Mother Goose phrases – and at the end asks, “Was that a nice song?” Her tenses still get mixed up a bit, but it’s English, so no wonder: I goed. I falled. A shining moment was rhyming “pocket” with “chocolate.” Possibly a fluke…!
One of the earliest polysyllabic words Katie learned was “sandboarding.” We have a beautiful card game of Namib desert plants and animals – her fourth favorite thing to do, which we’ve been playing a bit like “Go Fish.” If you have a scorpion card and want to collect all 4 arachnids, you ask another player if they have an arachnid (At this point, with Katie, we put all our cards out on the table for everyone to see, and she usually won’t ask for an arachnid even if it’s obvious in my hand. And she definitely won’t give up a flamingo or ostrich to complete my bird set! Of course, we play by “Katie’s rules.”). If the other person doesn’t have what you want or won’t give it up, you “Go Sandboarding.” Go Fish didn’t seem to make sense, given that the backs of the cards show unending red sand dunes.
On a weekend in early November, we actually did go sandboarding, joining the Lightfoot/Plummers for a morning of adrenaline-rushing, high-speed thrills with Alter Action on the red dunes near Swakopmund. They provided helmets, elbow pads, and gloves (none small enough for Katie, whom we dressed in a way that we hoped would at least protect her from the sun, our worst worry). They also provided rectangular boards of flexible masonite, about 1.2 x0.6 m, which were waxed on their smooth side. We marched up the sand dunes, lay down on our tummies on the rough side, held up the front of the board slightly, and tried to go head-first. Some of the group personally experienced what happens when you let down the front of the board (huge clouds of sand in your eyes, nose, ears and teeth) or spin to go side- or feet-first (the board digs in and flips you over on top of your passenger). These events were somewhat traumatic for the 5-10 year old girls experiencing them, but they made for the best video footage (the video, complete with soundtrack, was included in the price of the trip, along with lunch – not bad for N$200 per adult). Even the girls thought their wipeouts looked pretty exciting on screen – at least, if you’re going to crash your sandboard, it’s better if the photographer is actually around to capture the event! Katie, fortunately, weathered the day without anything worse than a faceplant, self-induced when she ran down a dune so steep and fast that her head got ahead of her feet. The rest of the time, she clung like a baby baboon to mom or dad’s back, smiling (we have it on video!), even occasionally whooping (can’t be heard over the soundtrack), at speeds up to 59 kph (our guides clocked us with a speed gun). Well, she also clung to our backs on the way back up, making the climb an extra good workout for her parents. We were very proud of Katie’s courage, excitement, and willingness to try new things – enabling us to have one of our most exhilarating experiences of Namibia. It’s true. Sandboarding is a blast!!! That day really felt like a vacation.
Showing posts with label Katie. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Katie. Show all posts
Sunday, November 30, 2008
Friday, May 2, 2008
Katie update
Anyone who has tried to talk with Katie over the phone, or who meets her for the first time, would never believe how much she talks with her parents and friends. She tells extended stories about going to the post office, or about the lives of cormorants (catching fish, feeding their babies, going to sleep), or about going to school with Abby and Teddy. Sometimes she tells us about how she can shoot birds, or about how someone shot back at her but she didn’t die: This shooting legacy is either from playing with Fulbright kids who are older boys, or from my training one day at the beach when Alan was giving me a hard time for pretending beach wrack was different family members – what are the options for playing on the beach? Interpersonal relationships among mussel shells and lobster legs, building towers out of rocks, digging holes, or shooting with kelp stipes! Actually, I have to say that learning how to shoot seems incrementally better than learning about barbies, which has been Katie’s experience with older girls: I’ve run interference to encourage barbies to go on sailing trips, instead of repetitively going on dates and getting married.
Katie does finally have her own doll, so she no longer needs to wrap up a hairbrush in a washcloth and rock it to sleep. She selected Abalone from among the hand-made doll options at the large craft shop in Windhoek – Abalone is wonderfully adventurous (although entirely cloth, so doesn’t go to the beach) and hardly ever cries or complains!
Once or twice a day, we get out the lightweight orange ball and play soccer (here football) on a sandy spot near the hatchery. Katie’s ball-handling skills have definitely improved: she can give the ball quite a boot, although only in the direction that she’s running, which means I often have to run it down before it enters the Salt Co canal or goes under the boundary fence. When the wind picks up, soccer is particularly challenging, because the wind drives the ball almost faster than I can run! Katie has also figured out the basics of catching a ball in her arms.
We spend a lot of time at the beach looking for tracks and skeletons. She is learning how to tell jackal from hyena tracks (hyenas have very large front feet; jackals tend to place their back feet exactly in the front tracks) and also tell their kills apart. She knows that a dead cormorant with a hole in its belly was killed by a jackal, whereas hyenas tend to dismember the entire bird. One particularly tragic kill included a cormorant let still tangled in fishing line and wire… and with older bones indicating that this gear had been ghost-fishing for some time. Clearly the extra load weighed down the bird and made it an easy target for the hyena. But, of course, as ecologists, we talk with Katie about how predators need to eat, so it’s sad for the cormorant but necessary for the hyena.
Katie is not a huge fan of hyenas – they are on her “scary animal” list along with lions, crocodiles, and hippos. I think this is because Alan responds to her screaming by telling her she should be quiet or she’ll call the hyenas!
Alan has been through heroics to acquire some basic research equipment that we take for granted in the US, specifically iButtons, which log temperature remotely, and a YSI dissolved oxygen, temperature, and salinity meter. He is still working to acquire material for plankton nets. In retrospect, of course, we could have brought these things with us, but we really had no idea just how large a role anoxia plays in Namibia’s marine environment, nor that we would be working in a reverse estuary – the salt ponds just keep getting saltier! I mention this in the context of Katie because we now have temperature records for a variety of locations around the Salt Co, and the records are dramatic – up to 10C degree swings daily, probably as a response to solar heating of shallow water in the day and black-body radiation to a clear sky at night. Katie happily paddled around in shallow 30C water, just where the canal exits into the oyster pond and the water is warmest in the afternoon – it was just the right depth for her to support her body on her hands, and to enjoy the soft sinking sensation of anoxic sediment on the bottom (Apr 5)!
Katie has just exceeded the 20-freckle threshold – and yes, we are keeping her in sunscreen! She is in the phase of perpetual “Why?” And she has begun to add “eee” on the end of words. Sleep-ie, Bike-ie, Juice-ie. No one around her talks like this, as far as we know, so where does this come from?
On 2 occasions in Windhoek, our time there has overlapped with a lunchtime dance in the parking lot. A group of Oshivambo women occasionally gathers, sometimes with a single drum, but also just with clapping and their voices, in a circle. One by one or in pairs, the women dance into the center. The rhythms have been too complicated for me to pick up yet (let alone the words), but I have learned that the steps they use are very particular for each song, not free-form dance. The style involves flat-footed stomping, skipping, jumping. Katie has been transfixed by the music and dancing, but unwilling to join in, even though the women say that they began learning these songs when they were Katie’s age.
Katie does finally have her own doll, so she no longer needs to wrap up a hairbrush in a washcloth and rock it to sleep. She selected Abalone from among the hand-made doll options at the large craft shop in Windhoek – Abalone is wonderfully adventurous (although entirely cloth, so doesn’t go to the beach) and hardly ever cries or complains!
Once or twice a day, we get out the lightweight orange ball and play soccer (here football) on a sandy spot near the hatchery. Katie’s ball-handling skills have definitely improved: she can give the ball quite a boot, although only in the direction that she’s running, which means I often have to run it down before it enters the Salt Co canal or goes under the boundary fence. When the wind picks up, soccer is particularly challenging, because the wind drives the ball almost faster than I can run! Katie has also figured out the basics of catching a ball in her arms.
We spend a lot of time at the beach looking for tracks and skeletons. She is learning how to tell jackal from hyena tracks (hyenas have very large front feet; jackals tend to place their back feet exactly in the front tracks) and also tell their kills apart. She knows that a dead cormorant with a hole in its belly was killed by a jackal, whereas hyenas tend to dismember the entire bird. One particularly tragic kill included a cormorant let still tangled in fishing line and wire… and with older bones indicating that this gear had been ghost-fishing for some time. Clearly the extra load weighed down the bird and made it an easy target for the hyena. But, of course, as ecologists, we talk with Katie about how predators need to eat, so it’s sad for the cormorant but necessary for the hyena.
Katie is not a huge fan of hyenas – they are on her “scary animal” list along with lions, crocodiles, and hippos. I think this is because Alan responds to her screaming by telling her she should be quiet or she’ll call the hyenas!
Alan has been through heroics to acquire some basic research equipment that we take for granted in the US, specifically iButtons, which log temperature remotely, and a YSI dissolved oxygen, temperature, and salinity meter. He is still working to acquire material for plankton nets. In retrospect, of course, we could have brought these things with us, but we really had no idea just how large a role anoxia plays in Namibia’s marine environment, nor that we would be working in a reverse estuary – the salt ponds just keep getting saltier! I mention this in the context of Katie because we now have temperature records for a variety of locations around the Salt Co, and the records are dramatic – up to 10C degree swings daily, probably as a response to solar heating of shallow water in the day and black-body radiation to a clear sky at night. Katie happily paddled around in shallow 30C water, just where the canal exits into the oyster pond and the water is warmest in the afternoon – it was just the right depth for her to support her body on her hands, and to enjoy the soft sinking sensation of anoxic sediment on the bottom (Apr 5)!
Katie has just exceeded the 20-freckle threshold – and yes, we are keeping her in sunscreen! She is in the phase of perpetual “Why?” And she has begun to add “eee” on the end of words. Sleep-ie, Bike-ie, Juice-ie. No one around her talks like this, as far as we know, so where does this come from?
On 2 occasions in Windhoek, our time there has overlapped with a lunchtime dance in the parking lot. A group of Oshivambo women occasionally gathers, sometimes with a single drum, but also just with clapping and their voices, in a circle. One by one or in pairs, the women dance into the center. The rhythms have been too complicated for me to pick up yet (let alone the words), but I have learned that the steps they use are very particular for each song, not free-form dance. The style involves flat-footed stomping, skipping, jumping. Katie has been transfixed by the music and dancing, but unwilling to join in, even though the women say that they began learning these songs when they were Katie’s age.
Monday, February 4, 2008
Katie news
Almost two and a half – often will answer the question of how old are you by putting up two fingers. Initially shy with new people, but also fascinated by people, especially kids.
Verbal changes: asks a lot of questions – Did you have fun on the boat? Can I sit up there? What does it smell like? Where is my house? Also prone to screaming and crying when thwarted.
Sings songs: Favorites are still ABC and Itsy bitsy spider. Also Where oh where is sweet little Katie? and Dem bones (The Katie bone’s connected to the daddy bone. The daddy bone’s connected to the mommy bone… Her knowledge of vertebrate anatomy still needs some refinement.) Sometimes she gets part of Magalena Hagalena Ookatoka Wokatoka Okamokapoka was her name. Usually more like Oka moka shmoka poka loka… was her name!
Can recognize most letters most of the time (sometimes too busy to bother). “Reads” boo, zoo, moo. Loves to hear stories – we only brought a few books with us, so we have repeatedly gone through the anthology of 13 Dr Seuss stories (Thanks, Brian and Carol!), and, just recently, she’s begun to appreciate Frog and Toad. We purchased a book of stories compiled for primary school students in Namibia, which apparently deal with universal themes, as Katie certainly appreciates them. One day, Katie asked for a sad story, and I realized that the stories were all a little sad initially, but then a problem is overcome – a universal questing theme. For instance: A red ball gets stuck in a tree. A bird pushes it back to the children. Or, another example: Two kids are sent to get water, but the full buckets are heavy. They solve their problem by putting a stick through the handle and carrying each bucket together. In all fairness, we should get her some more local books: after all, her parents just bought 10 field guides! Katie also often asks for “Kaffy’s book,” which means she wants you to hold your hands like a book and make up a story about a little girl named Kathy who has adventures much like Katie. (What does Kathy do before she goes to bed? “Pees! Brushes her teeth!” Often followed by an emphatic, “Don’t have to go pee-pee.”)
Loves the beach. Katie will literally spend hours digging holes, looking for interesting objects cast ashore in the wrack, sticking gull feathers in patterns, or picking up eye-catching orange and white smooth stones (like grandma, like granddaughter). She has discovered that, if she squeezes the dried floats of bluebottles (easier to wrap your tongue around than Portuguese man-of-war) in her fingers, they give a satisfying pop when they burst, sort of like bubble wrap. This trip, she was initially a little frightened of the waves – I asked if she would come jump in them, and she just clung for a little while, watching the water pass underneath. But then she became more excited, standing up to take waves up to her chest, and squealing when I lifted her up to avoid the larger ones. “Go in farther, Mom!”
Most adorable when: chasing butterflies (the plants at the marine station are festooned with at least a half-dozen species); correctly distinguishes between oysters, clams, and mussels; just wakes up – very snuggly.
Favorite foods: apple juice, pasta, pizza, eggs, pancakes, ice cream (especially pink). Today, Katie and Alan went out for second breakfast together, and I heard the report later: “They didn’t have pancakes.” (Oh? What did you eat?) “I had toast. And eggies.”
Favorite games: Matching cards (a memory game of spatial locations where the child can already beat the adult); “You are the ant. I am the anteater.” (chase), calling Abby and Teddy or Grandma and Grandpa on the “telephone” (anything with buttons – usually hopefully not our actual cell phone).
Very minor emergencies: Katie usually has scabs on her knees. She’s reached down to lower steps twice now, falling and cutting her lip. She got terribly bitten by mosquitos on the first night of our most recent stay in Henties Bay. This is outside the malaria zone, but still distressing, so she had to wear long sleeves, long pants, and socks thereafter. Any ill can pretty much be remedied with a bandaid.
Verbal changes: asks a lot of questions – Did you have fun on the boat? Can I sit up there? What does it smell like? Where is my house? Also prone to screaming and crying when thwarted.
Sings songs: Favorites are still ABC and Itsy bitsy spider. Also Where oh where is sweet little Katie? and Dem bones (The Katie bone’s connected to the daddy bone. The daddy bone’s connected to the mommy bone… Her knowledge of vertebrate anatomy still needs some refinement.) Sometimes she gets part of Magalena Hagalena Ookatoka Wokatoka Okamokapoka was her name. Usually more like Oka moka shmoka poka loka… was her name!
Can recognize most letters most of the time (sometimes too busy to bother). “Reads” boo, zoo, moo. Loves to hear stories – we only brought a few books with us, so we have repeatedly gone through the anthology of 13 Dr Seuss stories (Thanks, Brian and Carol!), and, just recently, she’s begun to appreciate Frog and Toad. We purchased a book of stories compiled for primary school students in Namibia, which apparently deal with universal themes, as Katie certainly appreciates them. One day, Katie asked for a sad story, and I realized that the stories were all a little sad initially, but then a problem is overcome – a universal questing theme. For instance: A red ball gets stuck in a tree. A bird pushes it back to the children. Or, another example: Two kids are sent to get water, but the full buckets are heavy. They solve their problem by putting a stick through the handle and carrying each bucket together. In all fairness, we should get her some more local books: after all, her parents just bought 10 field guides! Katie also often asks for “Kaffy’s book,” which means she wants you to hold your hands like a book and make up a story about a little girl named Kathy who has adventures much like Katie. (What does Kathy do before she goes to bed? “Pees! Brushes her teeth!” Often followed by an emphatic, “Don’t have to go pee-pee.”)
Loves the beach. Katie will literally spend hours digging holes, looking for interesting objects cast ashore in the wrack, sticking gull feathers in patterns, or picking up eye-catching orange and white smooth stones (like grandma, like granddaughter). She has discovered that, if she squeezes the dried floats of bluebottles (easier to wrap your tongue around than Portuguese man-of-war) in her fingers, they give a satisfying pop when they burst, sort of like bubble wrap. This trip, she was initially a little frightened of the waves – I asked if she would come jump in them, and she just clung for a little while, watching the water pass underneath. But then she became more excited, standing up to take waves up to her chest, and squealing when I lifted her up to avoid the larger ones. “Go in farther, Mom!”
Most adorable when: chasing butterflies (the plants at the marine station are festooned with at least a half-dozen species); correctly distinguishes between oysters, clams, and mussels; just wakes up – very snuggly.
Favorite foods: apple juice, pasta, pizza, eggs, pancakes, ice cream (especially pink). Today, Katie and Alan went out for second breakfast together, and I heard the report later: “They didn’t have pancakes.” (Oh? What did you eat?) “I had toast. And eggies.”
Favorite games: Matching cards (a memory game of spatial locations where the child can already beat the adult); “You are the ant. I am the anteater.” (chase), calling Abby and Teddy or Grandma and Grandpa on the “telephone” (anything with buttons – usually hopefully not our actual cell phone).
Very minor emergencies: Katie usually has scabs on her knees. She’s reached down to lower steps twice now, falling and cutting her lip. She got terribly bitten by mosquitos on the first night of our most recent stay in Henties Bay. This is outside the malaria zone, but still distressing, so she had to wear long sleeves, long pants, and socks thereafter. Any ill can pretty much be remedied with a bandaid.
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