I recall you saying, that your main activity with Maya was watching movies on Saturday mornings.
That, of course, does not surprise me. ---In [email protected], <turquoiseb@...> wrote : From: "anartaxius@... [FairfieldLife]" <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Thursday, March 19, 2015 8:12 PM Subject: Re: [FairfieldLife] Barry Wright's nar-ci-fan-ta-stun-ted world Those posts do 'feel' like Jim. Someone who is talking to Barry in a familiar voice, not like someone who has not been here before. So if ak_ak is not Jim, what other poster that has been here could it be? Not too many posters talk incessantly about how badly Barry's life is going. Yeah, as if Barry sounds like he is in the doldrums of hell all the time. I think he is having fun. I think what I would be most curious about is, since she is in the orbit of Barry, how Maya's view of the world is developing, what her understanding of things are at that age. I would think Barry's influence would be a source of rationality, in a nation that seems to value this quality. I had a friend of the family once, an accountant, who had a son; when this kid was very young, he spoke like an adult, because his parents did not incessantly bombard him with baby talk, but with real conversation with substantial words. Good questions all. I would say that, primarily because she has just turned six, my influence on Maya is as variable as her mood. One minute I'm the person she loves the most in the world, and the next I have to tell her to log off and Save and pry herself away from her Minecraft games and go to school and I'm the worst person who has ever lived and she'll never love me again. :-) Yes, I am having fun. Thank you so much for noticing. My life here in the Netherlands -- and especially the parts that have Maya in them -- are pretty much a non-stop source of mirth. You are correct in that when she is really ON, we talk as two adults. Give it ten minutes, and she's a little girl trying to get her own way again and I'm the person standing in her way and sparks fly and I'm the distant and "You'll never understand me" adult. And she's six. Just imagine what I have to look forward to when she's sixteen. :-) At six, Maya is in her second year of school here in the Netherlands. Although she has occasional socialization issues (she likes to get her way, which her teachers sometimes interpret as bossiness), all of said teachers are in awe of her ability to speak, read, and write English, Dutch, and smatterings of both Spanish and French. Her major passion these days is a computer game called Minecraft, in which she constructs whole *cities* filled with castles she designed and built herself. At six, she can read, type, knit, cook, ride a bicycle, and wrap her Uncle Barry around her finger more easily than he'd like to admit. She rocks. If I have any lingering influence on her as an adult, my greatest hope is that it will be that she'll remember me the same way she describes me now -- Uncle Silly.
