Tag Archives: boys

If you keep asking me to lie for you, how are you ever going to learn to do it for yourself?

Buster came home from 4th grade with a job application. This labor shortage must be getting pretty bad, I thought, if they’re recruiting workers in elementary school. On the bright side, if it were an application to work in a restaurant, maybe he’d get a gig as bartender and I could score some free drinks.

It turned out it was only an application for one of the classroom chores listed on the back of the paper. There are classroom tasks for the kids to do, and they must choose which one they’d prefer and apply for it. This strikes me as a creative exercise for the students, but I’m still a little disappointed at the lost dream of free drinks.

Buster was not as appreciative of the exercise as I was. First, he couldn’t decide which job he wanted. He asked me to choose for him, but I refused. I wasn’t going to spend the school year hearing him whine that I had picked out a lousy career for him. Besides, it wasn’t my choice to make.

Take care choosing your 4th grade job; you could be doing it a long time.

At last, he decided to apply to be the class “Substitute.” This is the kid who does the job of any of the more ambitious kids when they call in sick. The choice didn’t exactly scream “initiative” at me, but it was his choice.

Next he had to explain why he wanted this job. This was a huge hurdle for the boy. He fretted and pouted and whined, begging me to answer this for him.

I told him I couldn’t explain his choice. He was the only person who could do that. “Just write down why you chose that job,” I told him.

“I don’t know why,” he whined. “I just picked it randomly.”

“Then write that down,” I replied. I knew he didn’t feel like that was as adequate answer. Also, I had a feeling it wasn’t 100% true.

“I can’t say that!” he protested.

“Is that why you picked it?”

“Kind of.”

“And?”

“And you don’t have to do much.”

Aha! The truth comes out! Imagine a nine-year-old boy wanting to avoid doing chores! Scandalous!

“But I can’t put that down as my reason,” he said. “Can you tell me what to write?”

“No. I can’t. This is where you have to think for yourself. If you don’t want to tell the real reason, you have to think of something else that makes sense.”

“Can you just tell me?” he pleaded.

“No. This is why you go to school. To learn how to think, so you can lie plausibly.”

After more pouting, he settled upon the explanation that he liked to do a variety of jobs, which I thought was as credible as it was disingenuous.

Some people work hard at useful tasks, and some people work hard at excusing themselves from such tasks. Sometimes the excuses end up being more burdensome than the original tasks. I wonder if, in all his application angst, that truth ever occurred to Buster.

Time on their hands

You may wonder what elementary school aged boys, stuck at home with no school to attend, do with the large part of their days in which there is no online learning happening. Very possibly you don’t wonder this, never have, and never will, but I have a post to write, so let’s pretend you’re yearning to know.

The favorite activity is to distract Mom and Dad from their work-at-home worlds. This is a fun and interactive pastime, but it sometimes results in excessive scolding, because, to a child, any amount of scolding is excessive.

When they can’t bother their parents directly, the next best thing is to fight with each other. Specialists in the field sometime refer to this as indirect bothering of parents. Eventually, this will also lead to excessive scolding. 

Too much parent bothering can lead to lockdown within a lockdown, a condition known as double lockdown, wherein the brothers must separate, not only from general society, but also from each other.

During double lockdown the kids must look inward for quiet forms of self-expression. As parents of boys must learn, quiet is not any kind of synonym for non-violent.

One afternoon, I stumbled upon one of Big Man’s quiet, self-expressions.

I found this out of context, so there is no way to know the backstory. We don’t know why Spidey and Ironman needed to be restrained. For all we know, these are not the real Superheroes, but their evil twins instead. Then again, maybe they just distracted their parents from work for one minute too long.

Buster’s masterpiece of quiet self-expression has been growing over time.

I can imagine some childless child psychologist insisting this represents repressed anger. While I would agree that children have plenty to be righteously angry about today, I recall that I also drew war scenes in 3rd grade. So far, I have made it through without ever using a weapon in anger. As long as none of the soldiers getting shot at are labeled “Dad,” I’m not going to worry.

Besides, I think this depiction demonstrates some childish brilliance.

Why would this pilot say “999”?

I’ll give you some hints:

  • Note: the colors of the plane.
  • Note: the back of the plane has burst into flame (terrible news for the pilot).
  • Note: the artist is an eight-year-old English speaker, who knows only one word of a particular foreign language, which he has heard, but never seen in print.

Got it? If you’ve cracked the code, feel free to put your answer in the comments.

I’d hate to risk all this artistic expression, but I still think there should be someplace kids could go, four or five days a week, to be among friends and maybe learn a thing or two. But maybe I’m just a dreamer.

Stale socks and missing presidents

I’m not sure if my boys are getting too wise for me or just have too many wisecracks for me.

This morning I told Buster he had to change socks. “Remember last time, when your socks smelled so bad because of your stinky feet?” I asked. “I don’t want the stinky sock alarm to go off in school. Then everybody will have to evacuate the building because of you.”

He gave me that long, thoughtful, 2nd grade look. “Why does everybody say the alarm goes off, instead of the alarm goes on?”

I gave him that long, thoughtful, grad school dropout look. “I don’t know. It’s just what they say.” I pushed a pair of clean socks into his hand and ran away.

It’s Big Man’s sharing day. This is the modern way of saying he should take something for Show and Tell. In our Kindergarten, sharing is done by letter. The kids bring something to share that begins with the letter they are studying that week.

This week’s letter is L. We had hoped Big Man could take our Abraham Lincoln PEZ dispenser, but Lincoln recently went missing from our PEZ collection. As we sorted through our PEZ dispensers, I loudly asked the universe, “Where’s Mr. Lincoln?”

From the next room, came the universe’s terse reply, wrapped in Buster’s childish voice: “He’s dead.”

Big Man got an idea. “I think I might know where Mr. Lincoln is,” he told me, leading me toward the hall closet. “I think he’s in a blue or green bag. A teal bag.” At first, I didn’t understand his last description, so unready was I to hear a Kindergartner describe a color as teal. He rooted around in the closet and pulled out a bag that was plainly teal, to my limited understanding of blended hues.

Mr. Lincoln was not inside. The teal bag was a dead end.

We ran out of time before we located Mr. Lincoln, and if he’s hitching rides in colorful over-the-shoulder totes, we may never find him. In his place we sent PEZ Andrew Johnson. We rehearsed our story so Big Man could explain why he was bringing a J to L sharing. It boils down to this: “Mr. Johnson is here to announce the sad news that we’ve lost Mr. Lincoln.”

For all we know, he belongs to the ages now.

“I have very sad news about PEZ Lincoln.”

 

Snow day: use it or lose it

Yesterday was our first school snow day of the year. I’m not sure why it was a snow day. There wasn’t a particularly large volume of snow. Maybe the school system needed to use up the days before they were lost to spring weather.

This meant I had to take a vacation day from work to stay home with the boys. I don’t like having to spend my vacation days in this manner. I prefer to save them up to use when everybody is in school and I can stay home alone. So far, I’ve only been able to do this once; it was pure bliss.

After breakfast, and a break for some light roughhousing, we used the morning to catch up on our reading and do some homework. Buster lags a little bit in reading. That’s why it amazed me how willing he was to help his little brother do his homework. Buster helped Big Man sound out words on his list like a professional tutor. He showed more patience than I did when Big Man hit a difficult patch. Maybe he’s supposed to be the teacher instead of the student.

In spite of all the attempted murders, they do care for each other.

After lunch, we went out and played in the snow. By this, I mean I shoveled while the boys frolicked. It was the least amount of snow I’ve know to close a school, so the shoveling wasn’t bad. I didn’t even get sore or feel the need to swear when the snowplow went by later and pushed the street snow back into our driveway. It just wasn’t swearing snow.

Pulling little brother.

The tables turned: Pulling is not a fun as big kids make it look.

In the end, it wasn’t a bad vacation day spent.

Today was worse. School was closed again. This was a mind-boggler to me. There was hardly any new snow, and the roads seemed fine.

Today was fort-building day, which keeps kids from murdering each other, but is kind of messy for a living room.

Fort Living Room. Established to protect the TV from marauding parents.

It helps that none of the garrison of this fort is very tall.

Meanwhile, I worked on our washing machine, which decided not to run at all. I got it to work, but not quite the way it’s supposed to work. I’m not sure how my wife will like my cobbling job. She may press for a new machine. This is going to be a hard battle to lose. It’s one of the those where you know the exact problem, but the machine was manufactured to prevent you from getting to it without breaking more parts.

We’ll see what tomorrow brings. The school still has a few snow days in the bank, so it might turn out to be too sunny for school in the morning.