Seasons of Love

Recently, Lily has started making wishes on little puffballs. Anyways, she's generalized this to wishing on dandelions. She'll pick one up and say her wish out loud and blow. For a while, she was all about wishing for more wishes, but now she's hoping to influence real world behavior. Eric and Gavin were at our house past her bedtime on that day that they visited. They were getting ready to walk back, but I told Lily that we could walk to the corner with them, but no further. She immediately seeks out a dandelion, picks it up and blows on it, saying "I wish I could walk all the way to Gavin's house!" My usual explanation is to cite The Princess and the Frog movie, the moral of which is that wishing isn't enough for your dreams to come true; you have to work at them too. Unfortunately, that wouldn't work in this situation, because she would have been quite content to make her dream come true by walking halfway there, and then asking daddy to carry her the rest of the way. I think the problem is that she didn't stock up on enough wishes. She should have wished for more wishes, then wished to walk all the way with them and that would have worked.

The other day she made a wish that mommy and daddy would never get mad at her. And I told her that's a wish we can work on together. Mommy and daddy can be more patient, and she can think about what she does that makes us mad and do it less.

She's been very cute. We were playing Candyland, and she was very careful about assigning us each the proper color for our game piece. "Mommy, you get red because flowers are red and you like flowers, daddy gets green because he likes green and mine is purple!"

Jen and I saw a performance of Rent at a local playhouse. I wanted it to be a surprise, but I was having difficulty reserving the tickets, so I mentioned it Jen, who was happy that she had the chance to anticipate the show. We got to Belvidere early and got some Chinese food and wandered around town for a bit. It was nice to get dressed up and have a real grown up date.

and I wasn't sure how I'd take to a stage performance, because I associate the characters so strongly with the actors who played them in the theatrical release, but I got over that pretty quickly. The actress who played Maureen reminded me of Kimya Dawson. Everyone was really excellent, and it's a pretty demanding play, with lots of singing and climbing.

Rent always makes me think of the one story in the Wake, the final book of Neil Gaiman's Sandman (which itself reminds me of Roger Zelazny, as the Wake based directly on his memorial service in 1995. I can connect anything to Zelazny in six degrees or less!) Anyways, Hob Gadling's girlfriend said to him something like "When I first met, you, I thought you were gay" and Hob says, "Why, because I'm English?" and she says, "No, because you have so many friends who are dead."

And on that subject, When we were at Eric's house, I complimented him on his blue shirt. Specifically, I said it brings out his eyes. I took a little flak for that and sure, it sounds a little gay when you take it out of context like that, but can't one guy tell his buddy that he has eyes like two limpid pools of azure without having it misinterpreted?

Jen was telling us that she was trying to get home early, but got delayed by a train crossing in front of her, so she told us that she started singing "Hello, Goodbye by the Beatles". Lily thought about this and asked, "Mommy can you sing the Hello, Goodbye song by the bugs?"

We watched Charlotte's Web. I still remember the first time I saw it. My parents were still together so I couldn't have been that much older than Lily. We were moving some furniture around and the big couch was in the middle of the room. I always liked it. The name Charlotte A. Cavatica reminds me of Vecna's skull fortress Citadel Cavitius but probably just a meaningless coincidence. Charlotte was the perfect friend to Wilbur. I think she may have been the first cartoon character whose intelligence was presented as an asset. Also, I happen to like spiders. Plus, she's Princess Leia's mom! It's a sad story and it's all about dying, but I was pleasantly surprised that Lily watched it all the way through without a freakout.