Thankfulness via poetic license

Buster likes to break up the monotony of family life by sharing his vast knowledge with me.

Some of his wisdom I assume he picked up in Kindergarten: “Five plus five is 10.”

Some I hope he hasn’t: “I know two bad words. Wanna hear ‘em?”

The other day he explained a hierarchy to me out of the blue: “It goes like this: baby, kid, big boy, daddy, grampa.”

“So, what will I be when you’re a daddy?” I asked.

Without hesitation: “You’ll probably die.”

Well, that’s that then, isn’t it?

Maybe not.

Since it’s Thanksgiving time, I decided I’m going to spin this episode toward Thankfulness.

You may wonder, “How exactly do you expect to manage that?”

I’m gonna tackle this blogger style – by linking to an old post. That’s how.

In this post from five years ago, Big Brother told his friend I was already dead. So you see, this new development is quite a reprieve for me. I am very thankful to have had these five years on Earth, and maybe several more, depending upon the length of Buster’s “big boy” phase.

In fact, I’m downright optimistic now. Having gained years of life between Big Brother and Buster, I expect by the time Big Man is heard I’ll be ready to live forever.

It appears I have a long life ahead of me, albeit among rotten children who anticipate my demise (joke’s on them when they see their legacies), and that, on balance, is something to be thankful for.

Amen.

The family gives thanks for Daddy’s longevity despite its predictions to the contrary.

That time we ate Big Bird’s cousin

When we eat restaurant food, we usually end up with pizza, burgers, or chicken strips. My wife and I don’t prefer these choices, but we don’t whine about having to eat pizza, burgers, or chicken strips as much as the boys whine about having to eat something that’s not pizza, burgers, or chicken strips. It’s easier to just choke down another burger in peace.

Occasionally, the parents set their hearts on Chinese food. This is a problem on two fronts. First, we don’t know how to get good Chinese in our town. Every place we once liked has gone downhill. My wife’s standing explanation for this is that the owners retired and their children took over, and, as we all know, children have a knack for ruining things.

The second front is our own children. Big Brother will tell us he doesn’t want Chinese food at least 14 times, though he ends up eating the part that looks most like a chicken strip. Buster will eat rice, if he cannot detect anything resembling a bean sprout, bit of egg, crispy noodle, meat or vegetable touching it. It’s quite a chore removing the shrimp and the fried from shrimp fried rice.

Big Man might eat all the dishes or none of them. Unless there’s crab rangoon. He likes crab rangoon.

The last time we got Chinese food, I ordered sesame chicken. Buster helped me eat the rice. Somehow I slipped a little sauce past his inspection and he decided he liked that too. But chicken, in that same sauce, was out of the question.

At last, I got him to taste one cubic millimeter of chicken. He made a face and spit it into the garbage. This was for show, to save face. A minute later, he asked for another bite of chicken. Soon, he and Big Brother were eating all my food.

When they were done, I explained to Buster: “Next time we’re ordering food, and you tell me you want that one kind of chicken, you know, that kind we had one time, the one you like, and I don’t know which kind of chicken you mean because there are lots of kinds of chicken, and you keep saying ‘That one kind, the kind I like,’ and get angry at me because I’m supposed to know what that means, remember, this is called sesame chicken.”

Big bird is a very popular and special character. His cousin is a very popular chef’s special.

“What chicken?”

“Sesame. Like Sesame Street, only it’s chicken.”

“Big Bird is a Sesame Street chicken. Did we just eat him?”

“It was a different sesame chicken. Probably just a cousin.”

I didn’t know if my advice would take; Buster has an artistic heart and he likes to keep his requests vague.

The next time we were deciding what to eat, he chimed in, “Chicken!”

Preparing to return to the status quo, I asked. “Nuggets or strips?”

“Sesame chicken!” loud and clear.

That’s progress. Now all he has to do is find a restaurant that hasn’t been ruined by the children.

 

Kindergarten artwork – middle child edition

By the initial Fourth Grade teacher conference you mostly know what you’ve got. In our case, it’s a good student who could be a very good student if he developed discipline or a work ethic. But we who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones, and since I don’t want to break my own windows or menace our good student with rocks, I’ll let Big Brother skate until I can show him a better example, or learn to revel in my own hypocrisy. Either way would work.

Kindergarten teacher conferences are harder to predict. The little diamonds are still in the rough. It’s too early to know what type of diamond/quartz/shiny shard of glass Buster will turn out to be, but that doesn’t mean it’s too early to critique his Kindergarten artwork.

Let’s not name names.

This piece took my breath away. The sentiment was so sweet. The tear I was about to shed was choked by a revelation. He doesn’t know what “thankful for” means. He thinks it’s an alternate way to say “mad at.” I shook off this terrible notion. Of course he knows what it means. They would have talked about it in class. All the other kids are thankful for appropriate things; so is he. He’s truly thankful for his brother. What a charming boy!

Now there’s only one minor difficulty.

He has two brothers.

Did he mean to make it plural? Probably not. It’s strain enough being thankful for one brother. Being thankful for both is a bridge too far. No child should be held to that standard.

So which one?

We could show it to his brothers separately, like we do when we privately tell each of them, “You’re our favorite. Don’t tell your brothers.”

No. These kids are the worst at keeping secrets when you’re trying to divide and conquer them.

We’ll just pencil in an s at the end of brother before anybody sees it. That way, the only people who will have to wonder are his parents. We won’t puzzle over the mystery of the exalted brother too long. If we had a dog, neither sibling would have made the cut. I’m not sure how they’d fare against a hamster.

Portrait of the artist as a trick-or-treater.

Self-portraits always give good insight into the Kindergartener’s mind. I know this is a self-portrait because the subject is carrying Buster’s Halloween bag. The scabs on the knees offer secondary evidence. The letters may indicate he is covering his knee wounds with International Olympic Committee Toilet Paper and he plans to shav[e] his legs. More likely he is following in the footsteps of Michelangelo, who, as every schoolboy knows, liked to practice making his letters on the peripheries of his paintings.

I wish the top weren’t stuck behind the wall bracket. I like to see how kids depict their own hair. That’s disappointing, but it doesn’t detract from the significance of this masterpiece: whatever this kid’s strengths and weaknesses may turn out to be, he draws a killer jack-o-lantern.

We’ll always have that.

Click here for a flashback to the critique of Big Brother’s Kindergarten artwork.

To infinity and beyond

Buster is developing a curiosity about infinite loops. The other day he asked me, “If two people were saying goodbye and one said ‘Have a nice day,’ and the next one said ‘Okay, have a nice day,’ and the first one said ‘Okay, have a nice day,’ again, and they kept saying ‘Okay, have a nice day,’ to each other, what would happen?”

“No one would have nice day,” I answered.

It wasn’t what he was looking for, but I’m not good with infinity. I can find the ends of it to wrap my brain around, and that’s disturbing.

Buster thinks these type of thoughts a lot. I don’t know if this means he’s destined to become a great philosopher, an accomplished astronomer, or the next Rain Man. It’s good to indulge in deep thought once in a while, but I’m not sure forever thinking about infinity will end well, or at all.

Buster would rather conduct his own thought experiments than accomplish the usual academic goals like learning to read. Two months in, he’s still not sold on Kindergarten, because, in his words, “They make me do things I don’t like to do.”

I can identify with that. It happens to me all the time at work. Still, he has to go to school and I have to go to work so we don’t both end up in an infinite loop of poverty.

They make you build things out of dominoes in Kindergarten? I had no idea it was that horrible.

The thing to know about these deep thinking philosophers who don’t always want to go to Kindergarten is they can be moody. The moodiness strikes hardest in the morning when it’s time to get ready for school. This morning, the disgruntled whimpering started early.

Sometimes when I ask him what’s bothering him, I get a whiny grunt that means, “If you were the kind of parent who loved his children, you’d know what’s wrong without having to ask.” Today I actually got an answer: “I wanted to sleep in the bed with you and Mommy. And I want you to make a fire.”

I explained that everybody had to get up and asked him if he were cold.

He shrugged. “A little.”

Mommy put on his jacket and we sent him to school.

The desire to climb into bed with us, I understand. It’s his favorite Saturday morning ritual. Making a fire is another story. We haven’t thought about our fireplace since last March and we’ve never built a fire before school.

It’s a good thing he told me the problem instead of giving me the “If you loved me, you’d know,” grunt. My love for him is infinite, but maybe that proves there’s a limit to infinity, because I still would not have loved him enough to know I was supposed to build a cozy fire on a random weekday before school.

It looks like I may have to crank the love up beyond infinity to understand him. I hope infinity + 1 is enough, because that’s the largest number I know.