So, been a while. I'm going to blame that on something that feels a little weird to blame it on: my desire to tell a complete story and the changing nature of this space. Let me explain before I get into today's tale (which will surely end up being more of a ramble).
Originally, as I'm sure you'll recall, this space was just somewhere I could go to document my struggles with cancer and treatment. Long-term, the idea of having a running journal of my thoughts and experiences appealed to me; short-term, it was a way to keep people from bothering me for constant updates regarding, "how I was doing" (hint: most days, pretty crappy, because, y'know, cancer). Once that was done, it became a sort of post-treatment diary because, much to my surprise, what came after treatment was just as hard, and in some ways harder, than treatment itself. And then, of course, came the Girl, and then the Boy, and it became a way for me to capture memories of their antics.
Over the years, the frequency of my posts slowed. Whereas it started off as daily musings, it became every-other-day thoughts, then weekly updates, and now I'm lucky to get something up here once a month. In part that's because I feel like I have less to say (the amount of "interesting" stuff that happens in one's life is pretty limited), but also because I started, more and more, to tell little stories here. Over time my posts became tiny writing exercises, sometimes witty, sometimes sentimental, and once in a while even entertaining, and that was satisfying to me. I liked it that way. It made me feel witty, like the kind of person Dorothy Parker or Oscar Wilde would take friendly jibes at, and if that's not a metric you have in your life, you might be doing it wrong.
So, knowing that to be my mindset, I must beg your tolerance as I tell you an incomplete story: it does not yet have an ending. But that end is taking far too long to develop, and I feel guilty waiting so long for it.
As happens quite often with the Wife and I, we spent a long time kinda-sorta talking about a momentous decision that lays before us, dancing around it in a way that keeps it in our respective minds but avoids actually doing anything about it, until, one day quite unexpectedly, we found ourselves in agreement over a course of action and in full motion. In this case, the decision is what to do about the fact that we live in a smallish, two-bedroom house with two growing kids of the opposite sex forced to share one room. Out of nowhere, we found ourselves having breakfast with our real estate agent and listing the things that we would need to do to our place in order to sell it, as well as prioritizing what we would need in a new house. The next day, or nearly so, workmen were at our place working on the list.
The process of selling one's house is terrible, let me say that up front, but in ways that I did not expect. For example, the cleverest way to go about it is to "stage" the home, which is to say move all your crap out (because, let's be honest, when you've lived in a place for 15 years, you've accumulated a lot of clutter, and that's not appealing) and move in new crap that better fits the space. As such, our job was to pack up everything we could possibly live without for a while and get it ready for storage (in this case, into our garage).
This is much more difficult than it sounds, especially when one is busy living one's life. The process was not quick, but it needed to be, because we had quite foolishly decided to undertake this adventure a few weeks before Thanksgiving and the clock was very much against us. So our agent (who is great) helped us. This meant that while we had people coming and going in and around our home, we also had people going through our stuff, putting it in boxes and tucking it away. Everything was happening at once, and of course what at first was estimated to take days took weeks, because any time you start doing a thing of any magnitude, you discover that it's even bigger than you first thought.
This was all deeply unnerving. Everything was changing around us, people were coming and going constantly, and I was more than a little surprised to learn just how much my psyche relied on having a sanctuary, a place I could retreat to at the end of the day that was, if not always peaceful, at least predictable, which is a kind of comfortable. Losing that for such an extended period of time really started to freak me out. Thankfully, just as I was close to the breaking point, it was over, everything was packed away, the repairs were all done, and the house was ready for market.
I should also mention that during this time, we were shopping around for a new home because, if all went according to plan, we would otherwise soon find ourselves without a place to live, and we found a place that was even better than we'd set out to find, put in an offer that was accepted, and got more than a little excited about the way this story was scripted to end. All we had to do was sell our place for our asking price, which we set a bit lower than we felt it was truly worth in order to attract as many buyers as possible as well as ensure a quick sale.
That, I'm sure you have guessed (because you are very clever) did not happen. Inexplicably, we attracted a reasonable amount of attention to the place and got generally good reaction, but no bids. We lowered the price, because that's what you do, and got more attention and more positive reaction, and one bid. For less than we were asking.
This whole process took a month and the whole time, we got more and more defensive about the house. "What's wrong with these people?" we'd say. "This place is great, how can nobody want to buy it?" Maybe it was the timing (I've never sold a house before, but it's reasonable that doing it during the holidays ups the difficulty level), maybe it's the market softening thanks to uncertainty over the political climate and/or interest rates, maybe it's just that we have rose-colored glasses. Maybe it's a combination of all these things and more, I don't know. All I know is we're still in our house (which is, admittedly, nicer now than when we began), that we're not actively marketing it, choosing to wait until the new year to try again, and that everything is still up in the air.
I had wanted to tell this story with a different ending, of course. In fact, I've been sitting on it, waiting for that ending to emerge, but it's been a couple months now and I'm starting to lose the flavor of this ordeal. I know that I'm not accurately conveying just how maddening it was getting the place ready for market (toward the end, I was teetering on the edge of a full-blown depression, and that hasn't happened to me in a long time) and I haven't even gotten into the strangeness of living in a staged house (in certain ways, you can never relax, you're always conscious of the fact that most of the furniture isn't yours and you have to keep the place in a show-ready state because somebody could ask to come look at it on any given day), but this has already gone on long enough.
At this point, I feel like I should wrap up with something pithy, like how this is a bit like life, event followed by event, with no appreciable structure but that which we give it for no other reason than that we desire structure, but I don't have anything. The best I can do is that this story is "to be continued" because it's not over yet. Hey, also like life.
The kids are five years apart and while that age is a good spread to keep them from killing each other (the Girl, thankfully, is a decent human and doesn't punch down, even when the Boy is annoying her, and the Boy worships her), it's problematic when it comes to planning family outings. Historically, their interests have had few points of intersection, and those few times when they did, it didn't last long.
Let's take Legoland as an example. It served us very well while the Girl was growing up, well enough that we laid out for annual passes for many years. In the beginning, her interest was in the "kiddie" rides and, as she grew up, she started to gravitate to the more thrilling rides. It was during that transition that the Boy came along and, once he was old enough to go on rides, his interest started with the "kiddie" rides as well. We had maybe a good year where both kids were satisfied with Legoland as a family destination, and even if there were few rides they wanted to go on together, there was enough there for each of them to be entertained for the better part of a day.
Then the Girl basically aged out of Legoland. There are maybe two or three things there she wouldn't mind doing, but if we told her that we were going to spend a day there, her enthusiasm meter would be near zero. The Boy would be into it, though.
The solution? "Graduate" to an "older" theme park that has an area devoted to entertaining smaller kids (in our case, Knott's Berry Farm). It's a bit like a non-political version of the Overton window only for entertainment instead of discourse; as the Girl's interests age, it moves the window and we have to find something new that both kids like.
Thankfully, the Boy's interests age as well, and in many ways more quickly than the Girl's, at least right now. That might be natural, the acceleration through the first part of that curve might be greater than it is further along, or it might be normal for younger kids in a family who idolize their older siblings and want to be like them. In a lot of ways, I think we might be in a bit of a sweet spot of the window. For example, our family outing to celebrate the Boy's sixth birthday.
I was originally going to chat a bit about the difficulty of being a kid starting school and having your birthday come early in the year. The Boy expected a birthday party, naturally, but who were we going to invite? He hardly knew any of the kids in his kindergarten class and most of his friends from last year in TK ended up at different schools. We could have just issued a blanket invitation to every kid in his class and done something, but frankly that sounded awful. It would have been somewhere like that pizza place with a certain mouse mascot* that would have served only to check the "Have Birthday Party" box. In the end, the Boy would have just played games on his own in the vicinity of kids from his class doing the same and the rest of us would have come away with headaches and gastric distress.
Instead of that, we took the Boy to his grandparents' where he could open presents, get cake and ice cream, and then we took him and his sister to a Boomers and let them have the run of the place. They played mini-golf, raced go-carts (well, the Girl did; the Boy wasn't old enough to drive his own, but had a blast as my passenger as we chased his sister all over the track), shot each other with water guns on bumper boats, and tore through the arcade for as long as I was willing to keep pumping credit onto their game cards. They were perfectly positioned on either side of the window that each could enjoy every inch of the place and it worked out to be a near-perfect day.
The time will come, surely sooner than I want, that the Girl will outgrow such things. While there's no actual evidence that she's destined to be one of those preening tweenies fathers around the world fear their daughters will become, I'd be a fool to not at least acknowledge the possibility. So it's beholden on the Wife and I to take as much advantage of this time as we can, when both of them will cheerfully go bowling or to an arcade or Knott's or mini-golf and maybe, in the not-so-distant future when either or both of them no longer want to do something so odious as hang out with their family, the Wife and I can look back and say to each other, "Remember when?" And then we'll just go to Knott's by ourselves, because just because they get too old for it doesn't mean we have to.
*Speaking Charles Entertainment "Chuck E" Cheese (and yeah, that's technically his full name; I'm not even sure it's ironic, but if somebody was going to do a satire of a corporate-designed mascot for a place like that, they couldn't top that), the Boy's school recently held a fund-raiser there and we begrudgingly went, figuring we probably owed him at least one trip there in the calendar year and it...wasn't bad. I hate to say it, but it might actually also be in the kids' Overton window of entertainment and it's not impossible that we will one day take them there for no other reason than to do something they'll both enjoy. Dear God, what have we become?
So, no sooner did I publicly complain about not being able to reach the Boy and how nothing I said seemed to sink in, he decides to throw me a curve, because of course he did.
The other day, after picking the Boy up from his after-school program, he asked me if I was happy that he wasn't jumping up in my face.
It was such a strange question that it took me a second to figure out what he was saying. "Did you think about doing that?" I asked.
"Yes."
"And did you think about it before you did it and decide to not do it?"
"Uh huh."
"That's what I'm proud of," I told him.
Heaven help me, I hope that one made it through.
(Narrator voice: It didn't.)
Kids often have odd relationships with words. It's only natural: as an adult, when I'm introduced to a new word I look it up in a dictionary, examine some examples of its use, and generally get a feel for how it works in speech before I start flinging it around in casual conversation. Kids seem to hear a word once, think, "That sounds pretty neat," and then start tossing it around willy nilly until the hone in on correct use.
Of the two, the kids' way tends to be more amusing.
The Boy is currently all in on the word "original." I have no idea how it got into his head, not that it matters--I'm sure that we've all used it around him at least once--but I'd love to know the context in which he heard it, because he does not appear to know what it means at all.
I'll give an example. On the walk to school today (aside: one day I'm going to look back on these posts and wonder if the only time I ever saw my children was for ten minutes at a time on walks to school, since that seems to be all I talk about) we heard a bird in a tree an he asked if it was a parrot (this is not as absurd a question at it might seem). I told him that it didn't sound like one, to which he replied, "Yeah, I think it's probably an original crow."
What does "original crow" mean? Can't help you there. Lately, he's been peppering his language with "original," but it's clear that he's not sure what it means. He seems to be vaguely in the ballpark, sometimes using it in a way that makes me think he means "authentic" or "first" and other times...well, I just can't begin to guess.
I'm not the only one who's noticed it. The other day at dinner the Girl told him bluntly, "You use that word too much and you don't know what it means." I chided her gently, suggesting that she could have been nicer, but it got me thinking about how children learn and what we, as their teachers, can and should do to help them get things right.
And you thought this was all just about a kid who doesn't know what "original" means. Shame on you.
I've tried asking the Boy what he means when he uses that word and I've tried urging him to say it again in a different way; both only seem to embarrass him. I try very hard to not seem like I'm calling him out or telling him he's wrong, but that's how he takes it. In his own way, he's as much a perfectionist as his sister; he hates to be wrong. So how far do I push it? Over time, his trial-and-error approach to using that word will work and he'll figure out what it means (or he'll just change what it means to the rest of us through repeated use; hello Wittgenstein fans!), but do I owe it to him to hasten the process before he makes a fool of himself (even if just in his own mind) in front of his friends? Which is worse, that I point out his misuse or that somebody else does?
There's another wrinkle when it comes to teaching the Boy: he's unmovably confident that his premises are never actually wrong, merely misapplied. A good example of this is his preoccupation with scaring people. Perhaps twice in his life, he has managed to catch somebody genuinely off-guard and startle them, getting laughs from on-lookers. Endeavoring to repeat this success, he has made hundreds of subsequent attempts. Daily--daily!--the Boy will, while standing right in front of me, suddenly jump straight up, shove his hands in my face, and shout, "Boo!" and be disappointed when it fails to frighten me.
I've tried to explain that's not how it works. I've tried to suggest that it only works when somebody doesn't know he's there, that you can't startle somebody like then when they're looking right at you. I've tried to make him understand that people don't like it when you jump at them and throw your hands in their face anyway, so maybe he should just stop trying. And I've tried just flat out telling him to stop doing it. His response every time? To try it again later, just slightly differently, as if the problem isn't what he's doing, merely how he's doing it. Even telling him straight out that the problem is not how he's doing it, but the fact that he's doing it at all falls on deaf ears. He's amazingly stubborn.
So, how far do I go in an effort to make him understand? It's not like I'm going to smack him the next time he jumps in my face, but just how firm should a parent be when trying to get a message across? If one tactic doesn't work, do you stick with it, hoping it will sink in eventually, or do you ratchet it up to the next level? How firm is too firm? How lax is too lax?
There are no answers, of course. Each case is different, each kid is different. Getting the Boy to understand the meaning of "original" is different from getting him to stop jumping in people's faces and flailing his hands around their eyes. But when you try this and that and the other thing and nothing seems to work and then you can't focus on that anymore because there's something else and something else and something else...well, I start to understand those parents we've all seen who seem beaten into submission and who just let their kids run wild.
I guess what I'm saying is if one day the Boy jumps in your face and tells you that it was just an "original joke," well, I apologize in advance. I'm just tired of telling him to stop.
The kids have been back in school for a week now and what we feared would be a logistical hassle--having two kids in different schools--has turned out to be a non-issue: the Girl starts a bit earlier and the Wife is able to drop her off on the way to work, leaving me to walk the Boy in on pretty much the same schedule as past years.
There are a number of modestly interesting things about this year, like watching the Girl recognize that a new school means a chance to reinvent herself, at least partially (one day I might have to do a bit about her new hairstyle or name preference), but for today I want to mention a favorite topic of mine: walking to school. I know I've gone on and on (and on and on) about this topic in the past, and I'm sure I'll do it again in the future. And I'm gonna do it in the present, too. And they say time is linear. Pfft.
Little did I expect when we bought our house that its proximity to an elementary school was going to be so important to my life, but I suppose that's not uncommon; while we can often guess the big things that will shape our lives, the little ones we usually only recognize in retrospect. Anyway, for years I walked the Girl to school and, in many ways, that experience shaped our relationship. Last year, I was fortunate enough to be able to walk them both to school every day and that was a special time that will never come around again. This year, it's just me and the Boy, and I marvel a bit as I reflect on the differences and similarities between the kids.
He and I play some of the same games the Girl and I used to play (he's fond of rhyming games) and, when the mood takes him, he's just as inquisitive as she ever way, but walks to school tend to become adventures with him: sneaking past the territorial dog at the end of our block, evading the sprinklers around the corner that seem to go off only when we're in range, and frog-hopping weeds growing through the cracks in the sidewalk are all common experiences.
I won't break new ground by observing that boys are different than girls (sorry if this is the first time you're hearing this), but it's fascinating to see them laid bare. It would be easy to say, for example, that the Boy has a more physical relationship with the world and the Girl was more cerebral, but that's a gross oversimplication. For example, the Girl spent months walking on top of a series of walls and jumping off them, needing me to hold her hand for balance at first and growing to the point that she was adding challenges to the exercise. The Boy, conversely, is perfectly capable of posing thoughtful questions out of the blue. But like I said earlier, it's both the similarities and differences that are intriguing to me. She was more chatty, he's more into play, and yet they're both engaging.
I'm going to miss walking with the Girl to school, of course--after all, I did it nearly every day for six years--but I'm looking forward to repeating that adventure with the Boy. I don't expect the journey to be exactly the same, but if I'm very lucky, we will end up at the same destination.
So, the other day the Wife took the Boy and Girl to a local botanical garden. Both of them. By herself. I know, I agree.
The rule either of us follow when we are left alone with both kids is simple: focus your efforts on keeping the Boy alive. It's a rule born of cold logic; on the one hand, we have a perfectly level-headed, competent tweenie, and on the other we have an oblivious young boy unwittingly bent on self-destruction. You marshal your resources where they are most needed is what I'm saying.
99 times out of 100 this works perfectly well. This story, of course, is about the 100th. You see, at the exact moment that the Girl was distracted by something, the Boy took off in a random direction, no doubt toward something that was both interesting and pointy. The Wife pursued the Boy, not know the Girl was not paying attention, and so the next moment when she looked around, the Girl found herself alone.
Fortunately, this is a scenario we've covered with both the kids. I don't say that because I think we should be in the running for Parents of the Century or anything like that. Indeed, I'm pretty sure we only trained them to deal with that situation because one or the other of us read something on the internet and said, "That sounds like a good idea, let's steal it."
Bless her, the Girl stayed calm (after an initial moment of panic) and remembered two things that we'd drilled into her head: the Wife's cell phone number and how to pick out which stranger to ask for help in calling that number (and if you're wondering why our tweenie daughter doesn't have her own cellphone with which to place said call, well, so is she). At first they are supposed to try to find an employee of whatever place we're in, but failing that, they are to find a mom.
Not a woman. Not a woman of "mom" age. Not even a woman in the vicinity of children. A mom. A mom who is there with her kids. A mom in full mom-mode. I don't know what mom the Girl approached, I don't know what she was doing at the time and I don't know her state of mind at that time, but I trusted, when we taught the Girl what to do in that situation, that her maternal instincts would kick in and that she would help a lost child.
I should probably say here that a dad would do just as well, of course. In fact, I've been on the other end of this situation at least three times that immediately come to mind, being the one to find a lost child and help them reunite with their parents. Each time, the child was in a state of near panic, weeping and more or less just flailing around, calling for their mommy. Each time I was able to reassure them that they were safe and that they'd be back with their mothers soon and each time, in those moments, those kids were effectively my own and I was going to take care of them dammit, because paternal instincts can be just as strong as maternal instincts. But, sight-unseen, I'll still put my trust in maternal instincts.
The mom the Girl approached let her borrow her cellphone, which the Girl was able to use to text the Wife (thanks to having memorized the number), and the day was saved. I'm sure it was a simple transaction and a situation that was defused in probably less time than it took you to read this far because, as it turned out, the Wife was not far away at all and if the Girl had simply remembered the first rule of discovering that she was lost--namely, to pause and have a good look around to make sure that she was really lost--it would have been a non-event, but for us it was the perfect execution of a plan we'd hoped would never need to be implemented. Fortunately, when we needed it, the plan worked perfectly.
OK, time for amusing asides. First, the Girl's initial thought was to call the Wife, but she decided against it, knowing that the Wife would probably ignore a call from an unknown number, having been conditioned to do so by spammers. And she was absolutely correct. It wasn't something we discussed because it never occurred to us. The benefits of having a smart kid.
Second, the Girl asked the Wife not to tell me this story (guess how that went). Not because she was embarrassed by how she handled the situation, but because she let herself get into the situation in the first place. And she didn't want me to make fun of her for having done it. Which is fair. Knowing me, I would have done that.
To this day, the Girl doesn't actually know that I know about this event (she might suspect, but I haven't let on), which makes me a little sad. I mean, of course in part because I'm missing out on some good mocking, but mostly because I'm immensely proud of her and I haven't been able to tell her yet. Most parents know they can't childproof the world and, instead, they must worldproof their children. It's our duty to prepare them for what might come, to give them the tools to deal with life, and in this instance we did and she did and in a weird way, it was one of our greatest moments as parents.
A week and a bit ago, the kids' school year ended. It marked the end of the Girl's tenure in elementary school and the end of the Boy's first year there. It was also the last time, given the differences in their ages, the two of them were likely to ever attend the same school at the same time. As "lasts" go, it was poignant.
I've babbled on about lasts before and how they compare to firsts, particularly in respect to them being recognizable in the moment. It is easy to know when you are seeing your child's first step, but it's only in retrospect that you see that you've transitioned from "Daddy" to "Dad." So when you can see a last coming, especially one with multiple levels to it, it's a bit easy to oversell it to yourself.
I was guilty of this for the reasons mentioned above, but there was another aspect to it as well. Since I work near home and the Wife has an L.A. commute to deal with, getting the kids to school in the morning falls to me, and whether they know it or not, it has always been my intention to use that time mindfully. Some things I've done have been basic Dad math (responsibilities > leisure, so get your morning chores done before you turn on the TV), but others have been for the purpose of forging memories. Case in point: the walk to school.
We live about half of a mile from the school and we always walk, weather permitting. It would be faster and simpler to drive, of course, but then we would have missed out on any number of little interactions that made those walks wonderful. Interactions that, if I'm very lucky, will form the basis of some sense of nostalgia they one day feel about their childhoods.
As parents, we can't actually know what memories are going to stick (not the little ones, anyway; the big ones are usually obvious and hopefully not too regrettable), and I think the proof of that is our own memories of childhood. If you're like me (and I know I am*), your early memories are a handful of big events and many, many random snippets that can only have been preserved by accident, and when one pops up it's like coming across a trinket in an old shoe box that you know belongs to you, but you can't fathom why you would have ever decided to keep it.
*Hey, I think that's the 100th time I've used that joke. Where do I claim my prize?
Whether or not it's truly accidental that those things made an impression is a question for philosophers and psychologists, but it seems certain that there was no way to know in the moment that they'd be the ones to stay with you. It's something I've struggled with as the kids have grown, fear that the next time I lose my temper or behave badly will be the thing that sticks, and that's OK because it keeps me honest and constantly striving to be better. It also makes me look for opportunities to seed their paths with things that could make good memories, so while I never knew what would happen on any given walk to school, I knew that we would interact with one another more than we would in the car, and any of those interactions could be one of those things that they find in the old shoe box of memory (to really strain that metaphor).
And even if the kids never remember those daily walks to school, I always will, and that's not nothing.
So, anyway, that's a long way to go to explain that those walks to school were significant, at least to me if to nobody else, and unlike most lasts, I knew when the last of them was coming, which made them special to me. I had planned to cherise each one, those walks on that last week of school, to make an effort to sear every second in my brain and keep them forever.
Naturally, it rained that last week (and only in the morning, as if to rub it in) and we drove into school instead of walked. If you want to make God laugh, right?
This weekend was an interesting look into the Boy's psyche. I'd love to say that by the end I will dazzle you with some kind of insight, but fair warning: I'm not. I'm still not sure I understand it all myself.
The story is best told backward. On Sunday, we took the kids out to the Renaissance Faire. The Wife and I went to many of them in the "before times," but apart from taking the Girl to one when she was two or three, haven't been back. It turns out, however, that the Girl's best friend's family go every year, so this year we made a long-awaited return. The Girl was excited, not only to spend the day with her friend, but also to experience this new thing. The Boy was...let's say intrigued by the idea, but it was a vague thing. There was too much unknown involved, and the Boy is not a fan of the unknown.
We arrived a few minutes before the gates opened, so there was a small crowd gathered out front. Not too much, maybe a couple hundred people, half of them in costume. It was an impressive display of tunics and peasant dresses and armor and hats. The Boy was almost immediately overwhelmed, wanting nothing to do with any of that nonsense. For the first half-hour that we were there, I had to carry him around while he bawled.
By the end of the day, however, we practically had to drag him out of there. Once he'd adjusted to the atmosphere he loved it. As an example, the very first person we encountered upon entering was a man recruiting kids to go on an adventure (basically, for $5 they would recieve a map of the grounds that would lead them on a scavenger hunt) and the Boy hid behind me while the poor guy tried to coax him into joining the fun. Then, a mere few hours later, a pair of pikemen wandered by and suggested that he might be just the sort of young man they were looking for to join the Queen's "Children's Militia" where he could learn all about using a pike and be part of the pre-ceremony of the big joust and he was so excited by the prospect that, when he later learned that he was too young for it after all, he was devestated.
Contrast that with Saturday, when we took the kids to a Spartan run, essentially a mile-long obstacle course winding through the concourse around Dodger Stadium. It was a larger crowd, many of them arguably in costume as several groups came dressed in matching outfits, at times in even more cramped quarters, and even more frenetic, yet he was all about it from the jump. He never seemed apprehensive in the least; in fact, one of us had to keep a hand on him at all times to keep him from charging ahead. As far as I can tell, the only difference between the two events, which were literally one day apart, were the hats.
Hmm, maybe that's it. I mean, he's never been much of a fan of hats.
Through the usual course of being a consumer in a barely constrained capitalist society, we have ended up on our fair share of mailing lists, which is to say that we get a lot of junk mail. The tree hugger in me cries a little every time I walk a stack of unwanted mail, unread, from the mailbox to the recycling bin, but there seems to be precious little that one can do about it.
Of course, it's not all junk flowing through our mailbox. The kids get magazines, for example, which they love, because when you're a kid getting mail is fun, but some time about a month ago a catalog from some mail order company got slipped in with their magazines and the Boy discovered it. And now he has a new obsession.
At first, it was cute and even served a purpose. The Boy, discovering that the catalog contained things that people could buy, decided that he would go through it and identify things that he would like to buy, or more precisely to have bought for him. Crass consumerism, yes, but he also started to make lists of stuff he wanted for his birthday or for Christmas or whatever, and the Wife and I thought, "Hey, he's practicing his writing, how bad can it be?"
You'd think I'd know better than to ask questions like that.
Over the next few weeks he gathered an impressive collection of the things (I honestly had no idea we go so many, I just threw them all away without a second thought) and spends a considerable amount of time every day looking at them. They're all dog-eared by now, even the ones that feature stuff he's not even very interested in. He flips through them while watching cartoons. He takes them into the bathroom with him. He "read" one as his bedtime story last night.
In a way, it's got a kind of throwback charm: in an Amazon age, who's doing mail order? And, in a weird way, he's learning a kind of self-discipline. We've told him that, as fun as it might be to make lists of things that he would like to have someday, he should know that he simply can't have everything. His sister summed it up in perfect kid-speak: "You won't get everything, so better ask for just the best stuff." And I've watched him carefully weigh his options before committing something to one of his many lists, so that notion seemed to have penetrated to his brain (which is abnormally resistant to new information)(which is a nice way of saying he's pig-headed).
It's a funny thing, as a father I expected to need to teach my kids a variety of things, but I didn't really think much about needing to teach them how to be responsible consumers, yet maybe I should have. It doesn't have the panache of duty or honor or that kind of stuff, but most of the everyday sorts of skills don't. Or maybe he'll just go full materialist, it could go either way at this point.
Kids start developing a sense of humor very early on and every parent delights at making their young'uns laugh, and let's face it, baby laughter is one of life's purest pleasures. But equally interesting, to me at least, is when they turn it around and start trying to make us laugh.
The Boy has recently started telling knock-knock jokes (or, as I've been describing it, "working on his stand-up material") and they're exactly as awful as you'd expect. I suspect most kids start with knock-knock jokes, the white bread of comedy, because they have such a simple structure, but they don't really understand them because, even at their worst, the humor stems from punnery, which requires a certain level of linguistic sophistication your average five-year-old lacks.
So, what do you get when a kid tries to make up his own knock-knock joke? Well, here's an example:
"Knock knock."
"Who's there?"
"Horse."
"Horse who?"
"Horse walks into the bathroom and says "What are you doing in here?"" Laughter.
It's been several weeks of that, with the Boy essentially just throwing anything he can think of at the wall to see if something sticks. Let's go ahead and call this approach to comedy "experimental" though more in a "fumbling around in the dark" sense of the word.
Now, this creates a bit of conundrum for me. On the one hand, I don't want to stifle his creativity nor discourage his journey toward discovering humor, but on the other hand, and related to the latter, I don't want him to think that's his stream-of-consciousness babbling is an actual joke. It's not that I don't want him to feel that his efforts have value, but if he's going to try to be funny, his jokes had better land. Self-worth is nice and all, but comedy is important dammit!
So my solution? I smile gently at him and he invariably asks, "Was that funny?" and I'll tell him, "Well, I'm not sure I got it, but I'm glad it made you laugh." And I hope that's good enough for now. But more than that, I hope that he learns to tell a decent joke soon.
The Girl started playing basketball in her after-school program. The Boy is losing his first teeth. The Girl was recognized as "Student of the Month." The Boy is ramping up his efforts to push our patience to the breaking point. Let's jump right in!
OK, normally any of the four topics teased above would get their own entries, but with a major release pending at work, I'm up to my neck in deadlines, so after a full day at the computer even when I get home and actually have the energy to jot down something witty (or, let's be honest, something that takes a weak stab at being witty), I can't bring myself to turn on my laptop and do it. And that's how we end up with rushed garbage like this, but what the heck, it's arguably better than nothing. So I present this "lightnig round" update of stuff that's been happening lately:
Basketball: Both the kids go to an after-school program and it has an inter-program basketball league which the Girl has joined. I'm not sure whether or not this is down to an interest in basketball specifically or in playing a sport in general (and taking what's available), but OK, I'm a dad and my kid's playing a sport: I'm onboard. I played a few sports when I was her age, including a team sport (baseball) and I think they have the potential to teach a great deal. For example, how to lose.
You see, initially her program wasn't going to field a team because they couldn't find a coach. So the season started last week and they were left out, but then they wrangled up a volunteer coach and, with much excitement, the kids went to play their first game two days later. They'd had nearly no time to practice and they were playing kids who'd been getting ready for weeks and who'd already played at least one game. Her team got destroyed. They didn't score a single point. She cried afterward. But once that was over, she remained determined to press on, to work at it and get better and try again. So yeah, lessons.
Teeth: I knew the Boy hadn't lost any of his teeth yet, of course, but even so, when he announced that one of them hurt a little and proceeded to wiggle it a bit, it took me a moment to understand why he was perplexed by it. It's a common theme in his life and one I struggle with all the time: I keep forgetting how young he really is. It's not just that he's big for his age, it's his intellect, too. Case in point: a few weeks ago, we were watching "Wheel of Fortune" and, like everybody else who watches the show, we were trying to solve the puzzle before the answer was revealed. Imagine our surprise when the Boy chimes in with the solution to one before everybody else. Not bad for a five-year-old. Of course, before I could get too excited about my little budding genius the same kid got himself stuck in a Chinese finger trap a couple days later, so I'm not ready to rule out the possibility that it was a one-off yet.
Student of the Month: This makes it a clean sweep through elementary school, one Student of the Month award every year for the Girl. This one came at the latest point in the year of any of them and I think it was the first year she actually made an effort to get it, which is very much a good thing. There's a danger in a bright kid achieving things without trying too hard; that's where the ones who "had so much potential" come from. So while it might seem a weird thing to say, sometimes it's good to see her struggle.
Patience: The Boy is frequently more challenging than we remember the Girl being at the same age, though I question the accuracy of that perception, and even if it is true, I don't think it's terribly relevant. For one thing, I think it's a trap to use the same measuring stick, especially when they're young (I'm inclined to agree with the school of thinking that suggests that this leads to treating boys like defective girls), and for another, when the Girl was age she had our undivided attention, whereas the Boy has always had to share us (and that's not even bringing up the fact that we're older and tired-er now, even if "tired-er" isn't really a word, but I'm too tired to think of another one). Even so, the Wife and I were commiserating the other day about how frequently we run out of patience with him and I likened patience to water in a bucket: you lose some water with every event that tries your patience and when your bucket is empty, you blow your stack. The problem is, our buckets don't refill quickly enough (or, from the other perspective, there are too many trying events). And, incredibly, that banal analogy has actually helped me; when I feel like I'm about to snap, I think about my bucket. Sometimes really stupid things are actually helpful. Insert your own joke here.
Fortunately, there's light at the end of the tunnel. A frequent source of aggravation, for example, is getting ready for school. One thing or another will cause a problem: one morning he doesn't want to put on his shoes, the next he doesn't want to brush his teeth, etc. And, every so often, he doesn't want to do any of it. But once a blue moon, everything goes off without a hitch, and the frequency of those days seems to be increasing. One can only hope, for the sake of our sanity if nothing else.