And - click - I turn the key
These days I come home from work rather late - that is around 8 to 8:30.
Lola has already had her bath (which was my job when I came home
earlier) and sometimes even dinner. That leaves only one and a half hour
for me to play with her (and one and a half hour for Candy to relax for
the first time after a fulltime Lola-day).
At the moment she wants to play quite often with her wooden train, so we
get out the rails, and she checks if some of the plugs with which you
connect the rails have fallen out:
"Look Dad, it's broken... Listen: You stay here on the rug, and Lola
gets Daddy's glue. OK?" [running off]
[voice from the corridor] "You can get the glue Daddy?" (It's in a
cupboard to high for her to reach, or do you think we are stupid?)
Then concentrated silence while we repair the rails. I think she will
become a mecanic later, she so likes to repair stuff.
Well, one and a half hour is not really long (we made a pause from the
train to feed her puppets, then it was *showtime* with electric piano
music and dancing, the wee-wee besides her potty followed by sweeping
the floor, back to the train, then her monkey was ill and needed a
bandage...) and bedtime approaches (and again too late for her, when
will I start to wear a watch).
Once in bed, the usual reading (Lola gets a book for bedtime reading out
of her cupboard, thanks heaven today it wasn't the holy bible she
brought; I run out of answers to questions like "what does the daddy
with the knife" when Abraham wants to sacrifice his son, or "why has he
bobo", when the guards bless Jesus with their spears while he is nailed
to the cross; quite gore, that book, and thank you for the detailed
illustrations, that's what you call the "children's edition"?).
So today, only "Trolls and their relatives". In english, though. Do I
translate to german or to french? Doing the translation into german, I
do some on the spot modifications of the story (after all, it's an adult
book, mostly vikings dragging half naked women by their hair after them
and chopping heads off), my german is somewhat rusty and gets worse when
changing half of the phrases in midway. Lola suspects something and has
a closer look at the pictures: "Why is there fire?" "Is she flying?"
[no, a troll is throwing her about, but I cannot tell you that]....
Finally she loses interest in the trolls (taking mental note to hide
that book - if I knew only where).
She looks somewhat absent-minded, then suddenly changes her expression,
something between delighted and concentrated, like calling forth a nice
memory.
She looks at me and smiles, then she pulls her ears forward and says "I
close the shutters..."; closes her eye-lids with her fingers, "I close
the windows..."; squeezes her mouth shut with her hands ("I close the
door"); grips her nose tip and turns it around: "and - click - I turn
the key", and drops back onto her pillow: "...and I sleep! chrr-pshhhht,
chrrr-pshhht..."
She looks at me with proud eyes, and I ask, "Lola where do you know that
from? Have you learned it in school?"
And she says: "Yeah." And that's all.
So our little daughter, not even three years old, starts to have her own
little life now, playing games that we don't necessarily know, learning
songs, but not from our singing...
In moments like these she already seems so grown up that it fills me
with a mixture of pride, and a little pinch af fear.
1 Comments:
<< Home
