Category Archives: Random Toy Box

Posts on the general topic of family.

The Tooth Fairy doesn’t work weekends

The Tooth Fairy is due to make another visit. In fact, he’s overdue. A top-notch Tooth Fairy would have shown up sometime last night. Our Tooth Fairy is middling at best.

Lately, Big Brother has been shedding teeth like a hockey player with scurvy. Perhaps our Tooth Fairy has merely been overworked.

Our Tooth Fairy leaves $1, in the form of a golden Presidential dollar coin, under the pillow for each tooth. Our Tooth Fairy gets these coins from his day job, where he buys them from the big bag of dollar coins nobody knows what to do with. Dollar coins are a novelty in the United States, which makes them great for Tooth Fairies, but troublesome to institutions that are occasionally paid them but don’t have a clue how to bundle them for bank deposit.

Our Tooth Fairy is not completely without an eye to the future. He usually buys two coins at a time, but at the rate Big Brother spits out baby teeth, our Tooth Fairy often needs a day’s notice before he can accumulate the wherewithal to visit the pillow. For these same reasons, he doesn’t work on weekends.

We can afford only two teeth purchases at a time.

We can afford only two teeth purchases at a time.

For the first couple of lost teeth, the loose tooth phase was a big deal, no matter how long it lasted. Two weeks of drama, waiting for the final separation was not unheard of. Now, teeth fall with neither pomp nor circumstance. The only reason I knew there was a loose tooth situation this time was because Big Brother complained it was making it inconvenient to eat his corn on the cob at dinner.

Half an hour after going to bed, Big Brother came downstairs with a tooth in his hand. It was a fine tooth, worth every penny of a dollar, and it took all of 30 minutes of wiggling to extract. I told him to rinse out his mouth and go back to bed. Nobody told him to put the tooth under his pillow.

But he did anyway.

This morning he complained the Tooth Fairy had neglected him. We explained that the Tooth Fairy had already set out on her rounds with a strict itinerary by the time his tooth came out. His teeth must fall out before the Tooth Fairy leaves the office, which is, coincidentally, about the same time Daddy leaves work.

I bought two dollar coins today, which will net me two more baby teeth. I don’t have a use or a want for this commodity but nobody ever told me Tooth Fairying was a profitable business or rewarding hobby.

That’s the way with children. You spend money on stuff you’d rather not have. Teeth are pretty cheap compared to all the other crap. With two more suppliers coming up, I guess we’ll go on buying at this rate.

A smart Tooth Fairy would probably just go ahead and buy out the entire sack of dollar coins in one transaction, but I never said our Tooth Fairy was top-notch.

 

Dad: the unauthorized biography

Second graders today are doing work in school that was unimaginable when I was seven. It’s not only the complexity of some of the things they are asked to learn that is responsible for this, but also the fact that the tools they have to work with were simply beyond our imaginations 40 years ago.

At our most recent parent/teacher conference, we were asked to bring our second grader along with us. This change in protocol had an ominous color to it; we imagined them wanting us all together when they explained why we would be asked to leave the school district. Once we discovered we were not the only parents instructed to bring their child, we felt better about it.

Midway through the conference, our son retrieved a notebook computer from the corner of the classroom, logged onto his account and showed us a PowerPoint presentation he had been working on.  The kids were assigned a biographical presentation. My son chose as his subject a “famous” author. A few of the slides follow.

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Biography’s don’t usually bring me to tears, but I found this one especially touching.

He found all the images on the Internet and incorporated them into his project. He is not bothered by distortion as far as I can tell. Some of the images got a little pixellated in the transition, but the most prominent distortion is the fame of his subject. Yet, we all have to make our own artistic decisions.

Speaking of distortion, some of his facts are a little off. His recollection of why he put a Christmas ornament into my mouth is incorrect: we never run out of cookies.

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Also, though apparently born there, I’m not sure where Mohalkvill is. I’m pretty sure he means the Mohawk Valley, but the New York part is right, so why quibble over details.

On the other hand, the part about having been born in 19 something is absolutely correct. That’s exactly when I was born. The age is correct, and I was relieved to learn that I am still alive, a fact that is sometimes in doubt but I hope he got right.

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He was not finished with the project at this time, so I’m not sure if he meant to remove the book covers from my face or do the more appropriate thing and completely paste over my head. For now, we’ll have to be content that a good portion of the unsightliness lies hidden.

Being the subject of a biography is a sobering responsibility. I have to work hard to prove I was a worthy subject. This will be difficult, as my natural inclination will be to let my new fame go to my head and to begin putting on airs.

 

El Nino goes on Spring Break

El Nino, that little dude who hangs out in the Pacific Ocean and messes with North America’s winter weather, has been doing a fine job of delivering us a mild winter with an unusual lack of snowstorms. We had one good storm in November, but since then I doubt we’ve had a single snowfall of more than four inches.

Then, just when we think we’re going to scoot right into spring unscathed, this happens.

These branches are supposed to go upward rather than sideways like this.

These branches are supposed to go upward rather than sideways like this.

As a cross-country skiing enthusiast, I don’t mind a little snow, if it’s a nice, powdery, slick kind that’s easy to shovel and fun to ski on. This storm was none of that.

Another tree shrub tackled by heavy snow.

Another tree shrub tackled by heavy snow.

This was a heavy, wet snow – the snow that makes one want spring. For those who live in warm places, like California or South Africa, where winter means brings a light jacket, it may be news to you that all snow is not created equal.

Heavy snow falls when the temperature is near the freezing point. It takes twice as long to shovel your driveway, but in my area that’s no big deal because it takes most of the day for a snowplow to come through. Snowplows are a mixed blessing. On the one hand, they clear the streets so you have a chance to drive out of your neighborhood. But you can’t do that until you shovel again to clear the snow bank the snowplow has created at the end of your driveway. Snowplow banks are the hardest snow of all to shovel.

There's some shrubbery under there somewhere.

There’s some shrubbery under there somewhere.

I haven’t skied all year, and this storm will do nothing to change that. This sticky snow is good for building snowmen and making snowballs, but not for gliding over. What’s more, it will be melted by the weekend because that’s what happens to snow when the days get noticeably longer.

But it did close the schools, so at least the teachers are probably enjoying it.

Well, it is kind of pretty.

Well, it is kind of pretty.

snow6

 

Reflections inspired by a German class for second graders

Our eldest is beginning an after school German class today. This is not the sort of news that normally makes one reflective, but here I go anyway.

In a perfect world, I should be the one to teach my kids to speak German. Implicit in that perfection would be my knowing how to speak German. My father spoke German, fluently. In the perfect world I mentioned, he would have taught it to me when I was little. I would have soaked it up, and it would be as natural as English to me.

In the imperfect world that formed me, my father did no such thing. He was a teenager during the Second World War, living in the USA and speaking German as smoothly as his immigrant parents. Not surprisingly, something in that combination convinced him not to speak German to his children.

I took German as a freshman in college. It was either a language or Math, and I felt done with Math. I picked German. Maybe something in my genes would mold it to my tongue more securely than the high school Spanish that had always merely swilled about in my mouth before dribbling down my chin.

German 101 supplied me the worst grades of my academic career, if you discard the high school Geography class I nearly failed because I was too busy protesting the methods of the high school Geography class and the methods of high school in general.

The edition I used didn't have such a lovely cover, which is probably why I wasn't inspired to do better in class.

The edition I used didn’t have such a lovely cover, which is probably why I wasn’t inspired to do better in class.

After freshman year, I transferred to a school that required no more Math or foreign languages out of me, which was good since I was done applying myself mathematically and I had no aptitude for foreign languages.

In fact, I was a pretty lousy student overall.

As the undergraduate years rolled by, it became clear that I was a poor classroom learner. Yet, for the very best of reasons (I couldn’t find a job), I attempted graduate school.

Graduate school taught me only one thing: there is nothing like higher education to suck the life out of a subject matter you love (or thought you loved).

I thought I loved History, until I tried to pursue it as a graduate degree. Apparently, it was something else I loved, an academic Cyrano de Bergerac, hiding in the bushes, feeding enchanting lines to the deceitful mouth of History. History itself is mind-numbingly boring; they taught me that in one semester of graduate school.

Since I’d learned everything I needed to know about History, I determined I didn’t require more than one semester of grad school.

That was the end of my formal education in German or Math or History or anything. Abrupt, but okay for a rotten student.

My son is excited about his German class. I hope that excitement lasts. I hope he’s a good student. I hope he inherited his mother’s love for school.

I hope he goes on to become much more than a grad school dropout who can’t even speak German.