Category: lil’ chino

A co-worker told me this morning that OCD is an inherited trait.

But I didn’t learn that today.  No, no; I’ve known (via empirical evidence) for a few years now that OCD is an inherited trait.  I’ve seen it firsthand, passed on (passively, at least) lovingly from me down to our daughter.

First, some setup: We’re not talking OCD like those half-hour shows you see on cable at night where the girl washes her hands so many times a day that they are bleeding and raw.Not the kind of OCD like the guy who locks and unlocks the door to his apartment nineteen times when coming and going.  Nah… this is just the kind of OCD like I have, where, when I see a tableful of magazines and papers and remote controls I want to stack them in a neat pile according to size.

So, bad… but not really life-impacting.  More like this stuff, or these things, or maybe a little of this.  Strange; odd; eccentric; but overall nothing more than the the human cruft we all come with.

Now then… here I am to tell you another endearing story, the germ of which is the ongoing joke about my daughter’s inherited OCD.  This story is about Keaton’s somewhat ritualistic morning “goodbye” routine.

Some mornings when I leave for work, Keaton is already awake.  Some mornings, she’s still asleep in bed.  But nearly every morning, regardless of her waking state, she manages to communicate the following to me before I close the garage door, get into the car, and drive away for the day:

Daddy!
Don’t work too hard.
Think about me and how much love that I give you.
Don’t find any crabs or spiders.
Tell anyone I know that I said, “Hi!”

Always those exact words, always those exact phrases, always said in that particular order.  Almost every single day.  Even on days when she’s hard asleep and I make it all the way to the car backing out of the garage she’ll sometimes burst into the garage in her pajamas and wait for me to roll down the window so she can say her little piece.

Most of it makes sense and is expected “goodbye” fodder… all but that bit about “crabs and spiders.”  Who knows… maybe she really doesn’t like crabs and spiders (I’ve always thought they look sort of similar anyway, so maybe they’re equally undesirable to “find” in her mind).  Good advice in the end, though, I suppose…

I really do love that little girl.  Goodnight.

Tomorrow we have to register Keaton for kindergarten.

Yes, I’m amazed too.  Kindergarten?  Already?  I mean, people, it’s only January.  School doesn’t start until August.  What’s worse, registration for elementary school, even something as basic is kindergarten, is completely blown out of proportion in our upper-middle-class whitebread part of suburbia.  Parents get stupid, lining up an hour before the school office opens in order to secure their kids’ spots.  Spots?  In a public school?

Yes, these are uptight yuppies.  Their kid won’t be bussed to another, slightly more dusky on average, district.  No manches; es impossible.  Their kid’s gonna get the early half of the day, or the late half of the day.  Gonna get the new young teacher with a rep for awesome standardized test scores and a kindred hatred of less-than-whole grains and gluten.  Yeah, it’s uptight around these parts… parents seem just a bit worked-up.

Us, we’re clueless.  We had no idea registration was even tomorrow until a coworker of mine mentioned it in passing last week.  We don’t know what time the school opens tomorrow to begin this ritual, we don’t have a copy of Keaton’s birth certificate, we don’t rightly know if we even need one.  At first, all of this made Sharaun mad.  “What are they going to do?!,” she asked incredulously, “Not let my kid in a public school the law says I have to enroll her in?”  It’s a good question… but the uptight parents answered, “No, but they’ll ship her off to a crappy school if she doesn’t get into the one she’s zoned for.”  This incites fear in my wife, and now she feels all guilty and unprepared.  I hear it in her long sighs as she thinks about how unprepared she is to go down there tomorrow morning (we’re guessing 7:30am, but we heard about one guy who lined up at midnight).  What is this, tickets to Zeppelin?

And how would we know?  First time for us.  I remember, back in high school, my friend Mike used to tell me about everything.  “You know that scholarship application period ends next week, right Dave?”  “You gonna sign-up to take the SAT this month?  You’re running out of time.”  I guess I’ve always been the guy who’s not quite paying attention… keeping tabs on just enough traffic to not get run over, but still sometimes crossing when the signal is a red hand.  Sharaun’s the same.  Maybe we’re doomed.  Slated to always miss soccer registration, always forget piano lessons, be the ones who don’t sign the permission slip.

I won’t tell Sharaun I’m concerned/worried about this whole kindergarten registration thing, I don’t want to make her feel worse than she already does.  But I am; worried that is.  I guess tomorrow we’ll see how it all goes.  Maybe it’ll be no big deal and she can swoop downtown and pick up a copy of the birth certificate without risking Keaton’s “spot” in the stinking public school down the road.  Who knows.

Goodnight.

It’s 10pm and I should have been in bed an hour ago.  As soon as I got home from work I started whining about how tired I was.  Carryover tired from yesterday, thanks owed to our our late-night (early morning?) arrival from Florida.  I am not reasonable, however, and did not shoot for a 9pm or maybe even 10pm turn-in.  Nay, I’ll catch-up overnight.

For Christmas Santa brought Keaton a “big girl” bike.  This thing is a clear graduation from the Shiner-sized bicycles she’s had as a toddler.  Her previous bike was quite nice, but in truth she’d outgrown it a year or so ago.  She was still able to peddle around on it, however, and still enjoyed it, so we didn’t have much motivation to upgrade.  Just before the weather started turning rainy and foggy and cooler, though, I noticed her trying to actually use that under-sized thing more and more – and that called my attention to just how much she’d outgrown it.  I told Sharaun: A “big girl” bike from Santa for Christmas.

We ordered it off the web, custom welded by some Chinese kid in an alley (Wal Mart won’t pay for real safety lenses so the kid has cheesecloth tied around his forehead and covering his eyes).  Had it delivered to our dear friend’s house, and before we left for Florida I went over and assembled the thing.  Then, after we’d left, she brought it over to our place, set it out all fancy-like under the tree (or, in front of the tree, more rightly), and took a picture for us which she then sent to my phone.  On Christmas morning in Florida Sharaun asked me, while Keaton opened gifts, “Hey David, can you check my mail for me?”  I pulled out my phone, called-up the picture, and announced that Sharaun had no mail but that Keaton got one from Santa.  We showed her the picture and I “read” Santa’s mail saying he’d brought the bike to California by mistake, but that it’d be there waiting when she returned.

And now I can’t wait to get her on it.  Being that it’s a real big girl bike it didn’t come with training wheels.  I’d initially told Keaton we’d have to wait to try riding it until we could get a pair that fit, but she announced, of her own accord, that she didn’t even need them.  She’s wrong, of course, but I’m going to go ahead try to break her in Navy Seals style and just keep my hands on the bike as we do the first few lessons in the cul-de-sac.  Who knows, maybe she’ll be a natural (I seem to remember me taking off like a boss the first time I rode sans side-wheels, but that could be me remembering wrong) and she’ll take off and pop a hands-free wheelie.  That would be cool.

If the weather cooperates I’ll have Sharaun video the lessons this weekend and maybe have a video up next week.  Should make for good daddy/daughter stuff, and I eat that stuff up.

‘Night.