Author Archives: snoozing on the sofa

Conversations with my wife: Diversity

In the car, my wife tells me about something she read online that has her very excited.

WIFE: There’s this company that will pay you $6,000 to eat just junk food for a month.

ME: Why are they doing that?

WIFE: They want you to eat just junk food and take their herbal supplement and see how you feel after a month. I guess their supplement is supposed to give you all the nutrition you need. I wanna do it!

ME: Is it just chips and candy?

WIFE: I’m sure you can eat fried food and burgers and stuff. It sounds great. We should both do it. Then we’d get $12,000. Just think, $12,000 for eating chicken wings and mozzarella sticks. It’s perfect.

Fire up the deep fryer! It’s greasy time!

ME: I don’t know that I could eat that kind of stuff for a solid month. Besides, I bet they want more diversity in their subjects.

WIFE: What are you taking about? A young, black woman – an old, white man. What could be more diverse than that?

ME: I was thinking more about environmental diversity, but since you put it that way, I guess they’d have to take us.

I hope their supplement doesn’t interact with my senility meds.

 

Two good reasons why your pizza can’t be pepperoni

Buster (1st grade graduate) and Big Man (preschool graduate) were playing a video game together. From what I overheard, the game allows players to create and name their own pizzas to sell to the customers in the game. Big Man was designing the pizzas and Buster was helping him type the names of them into the iPad.

The first pizza was not at all controversial. Big Man decided to name it “Ham” and Buster typed the name. Everybody is happy, presumably even the virtual customers.

The second pizza was more problematic. Here’s what I overheard about this troublesome pie:

BUSTER: Okay, what do you want to name this pizza?

BIG MAN: Pepperoni.

BUSTER: You can’t name it pepperoni.

BIG MAN: Why not?

BUSTER: Two reasons.

BIG MAN: What?

BUSTER: First of all, it’s not pepperoni. And second of all, I don’t know how to spell pepperoni.

Sorry. Wrong pizza. We’ll just take that one back to the kitchen.

I think they ended up naming it “Apples”. I don’t know if it had apples on it, but Buster, after some mental strain, reached deep back into first grade and remembered he knew how to spell that.

For whom the summer vacations

They should stop calling this thing between school years summer vacation. They should call it “Summer intense non-school-related activity period” or something like that.

I swear, when I was a kid, my mom fed me breakfast and sent me into the woods for the day, armed with only my imagination and a hand-me-down BB gun. Some days I even had a few BBs for it. I spent half my time searching for Iroquois artifacts and the other half playing in the creek. I never found any tomahawk heads, but I got good and wet. I’d wander home when I needed the comfort of a peanut butter sandwich.

We don’t have time to play in the woods now. We had baseball games all day Saturday, and every night this week. Before that, Big Brother went to the TV studio to tape two episodes of a local PBS show where kids do science experiments. On top of that, he’s been to basketball camp every morning this week.

Basketball season is only 3 months away.

Things will calm down a bit when baseball ends in July. Then we only have Kids’ College and some other sporadic activities.

It’s a little stressful, getting everybody where they need to be, especially during a period called vacation. It’s no vacation for parents, but I sort of love it anyway. I love that my boys have so many opportunities to experience different things and practice the things they enjoy. I love watching them play sports, and even coaching them when I can. I’ll rest later, and maybe dream of stomping in the creek.

Big Man doesn’t have as many activities as his older brothers, so he’s spending his summer bantering with his babysitters. Our latest babysitter is around my age. They got on the subject of daddies yesterday.

BIG MAN: “Why don’t you live with your daddy?”

BABYSITTER: “Because he’s really very old.”

BIG MAN: “Well, my daddy is really very old, too. And I still live with him . . .”

I guess summer vacation is the time when Big Man takes a break from shutting down his parents’ flawed logic and starts shutting down babysitters.

For all the racing around I do, getting kids to their numerous vacation activities, I think I look pretty good.

 

 

Portraits of the artist as a 1st grader

As of noon yesterday, the school year is officially over. Truth be told, we’ve been phoning it in for a couple weeks now. Even though this June has been cool and wet, the sun still stays up late, and that’s enough to make it feel like summer vacation.

Besides, with all the field trips and special events that end the year, it’s hard for anybody to concentrate on homework or any straggling, late-year tests. The birds in the trees say it’s summer, and who should know these things better than them?

The boys have spent the last week cleaning out their lockers and desks. Our house looks like a paper recycling plant with a year’s worth of schoolwork dumped from their backpacks in daily doses. Most of this rubble of their educations is going straight to the real recycling plant, but there are a few gems that merit saving.

Big Brother is old enough to realize that if he throws it out at school, he doesn’t have to carry it home, so most of the reams of school-year detritus are supplied by Buster. In 1st grade, you dutifully bring it all home, hand it to your parents, and it becomes their problem what to do with it. Your problems are over until fall.

Of all the things Buster brought home in the final cleanout frenzy, this is my favorite.

Nothing quite captures the melancholy passage of time and turns it into a model prisoner like regular self-portraits from elementary school. Here are a few highlights:

He came into 1st grade with the maniacal smile of a comic book villain. He was also suffering from a lack of sleep, or maybe pink eye. The colored pencils had not been distributed yet, so it’s hard to tell.

By December he’d gotten his color back. A few months of solid rest made him bright-eyed, and even perhaps a little dilated. In preparation for a cold winter, he’d grown a nice pair of warm eyebrows.

Now, at year’s end, he looks like such a nice boy. He might be a little dizzy, but the end of a long year will do that to you. He’s been crowned and earned a star, which are both great confidence builders for a six-year-old. I struggled to figure out what “6 set” meant for a while before I realized it was his disordered spelling of “best”.  He is the best 1st grade graduate. I wasn’t expecting this, but I’m extremely proud to learn he earned that honor. I’m sorry to all the other 1st grade graduates that they did not win this award, but 2nd grade, and another chance, is right around the corner.

But for now, enjoy the summer, and maybe help Mom and Dad bundle up papers for a trip to the recycling center.